LEPA @ CES: PSUs, Cases, and Accessories

LEPA is basically an offshoot of Enermax, created by Ecomaster – the US distributor for Enermax PSUs (or at least that’s how I understand it). They were sharing a booth with Enermax, and had some PSUs and cooling devices on display. On the “crazy levels of power” scale, their new MaxPlatinum PM line of power supplies is of course 80 Plus Platinum certified, but more importantly you can get them in 1050W (yawn), 1375W (getting interesting…), and 1700W (now we’re talking!) capacities. What would you need a 1700W power supply for? Other than five GPUs hashing Litecoins or extreme overclocking, I couldn’t tell you, and I don’t know the expected price either other than “more than I want to pay”. For those not into quite so insane loads, the MaxBron and MaxGold BM and GM lines will likely prove more enticing.

As another interesting test, LEPA had a notebook cooling pad on hand that I tried out, just to see if it would help temperatures on my CES laptop. The cooler is called the Lepad A15, and I fired up a CPU+GPU workload known to heat up the system pretty rapidly, to the point where the clocks would start to throttle to target 80C max GPU temperatures. With the cooling pad, GPU temperatures maxed out at 71C instead of 81C with GPU clocks much closer to maximum, so the Lepad A15 basically works as advertised. If you have a laptop that tends to run hotter than you'd like, give something like the Lepad a look. The A15 is an upcoming model where you can position the fan according to your needs, while the V17 is an existing model for larger notebooks and the S17 is a large cooling pad with built-in subwoofer.

Wrapping things up with LEPA, they had their reasonably attractive LP306/LP307/LP308 cases on display, as well as a newer LP309 (basically the same case but with a guady plastic "Transformers" front panel). I don’t have any information on pricing or availability for these, sadly, and I can’t seem to find any US sites selling LEPA cases, but perhaps that will change in the coming months. The cases come with dual 120mm front fans (with spiral LEDs just for good measure), and I’d assume they’ll be priced well under $100 so they could offer a decent blend of price and performance.