Photos and Features
The Lian Li SP850 is available in both black and white but the white model that Lian Li sent over looks especially good. White color options are rare in the SFX world so I’m happy to see that they included them and the SP850 goes full out with it with white being used for the cables, cable plugs, modular plugs on the housing, and even with the silver finish used for the branding on the side of the housing. All together the SP850 which has a very standard housing from the side profile looks great.
If you haven’t seen an SFX power supply before you will be impressed that they are able to fit as much into such a small form factor, which is also what makes 850-watt options in this size so rare. It isn’t easy to do, especially when in a true SFX form factor, not the larger SFX-L size. What that means size-wise is that the SP850 is 125 mm wide and 63.5 mm tall which both SFX and SFX-L both do, it is the short 100 mm depth that makes the difference though.
The inside facing end of the SP850 has all of the modular cable connections. I mentioned it before but I love that even the plugs here are white to match the housing. On the left side, there are two plugs for the 24-pin motherboard power. Then on the top row, there are three 6-pin plugs for the peripheral and SATA cables. Then most of the bottom row has 8-pin plugs for the two CPU power cables and the PCIe cables, which if you use the included PCIe 5 cable and only need one CPU power you could still have one plug left for a second PCIe cable if needed. All of the connections have labels in silver/grey and the SP850 is small enough that the peripheral/SATA section was too long and I’m bothered more by the fact that the SATA part isn’t centered than I should be.
The outside facing end of the SP850 has all of the exhaust ventilation for the cooling fan. Most of this end has honeycomb-shaped openings for the airflow but Lian Li did also fit the C12 power plug and a miniature power switch as well. Both of those are also bright white.
Both sides of the bright white aluminum housing on the SP850 have that same white finish. One side does have the Lian Li branding as well as the SP850 model name printed on it in a silver finish. I love that they didn’t use a sticker for this and that the color goes well with the white finish. The other side of the SP850 uses this flat space to fit the information sticker which also uses the same grey/silver. That sticker has your serial number on an additional sticker on it. It also has an AC input to the DC Output table and all of the normal certification logos.
The top of the SP850 is just a completely flat panel with nothing on it. I kind of wish they would have put the information sticker on here and left both of the sides to have the cool printed SP850 branding so that would be visible no matter how you arrange the power supply. On the bottom side, the SP850 has its fan which is hiding behind horizontal bars to keep fingers from getting into it. I love the slot guard look which is simple but not done by most power supplies and Lian Li put their branding next to that with a silver stripe and bright white for the Lian Li font.
The first cable out of the included cable bag for the SP850 is your standard NEMA 5-15P to C13 power cable.
Going in with the SP850 having those bright white cables and connections that I saw in the packaging I was expecting the cabling to be the standard flat rubberized design. So I was a little surprised when I pulled the cables for the SP850 out of the cloth bag and almost all of the cables were individually sleeved. They do have the bright white sleeving which goes perfectly with the white SP850 and each end on both ends of all of the cables are bright white and they also have small labels printed on each end. Being an SFX power supply the 24-pin motherboard power cable is the shortest by far at just 13 inches long. The SP850 also comes with two 8-pin CPU power cables which both have split plugs on the end to support 4 or 8-pin layouts, these cables are much longer at 24 inches long each. You get two standard PCIe power cables which are 8-pin on the PSU end and have 6+2 pin connections on the other end to support 6 or 8-pin video cards. One cable has a piggyback setup with two plugs, one at 165 inches and the other at 31 inches. The second PCIe cable has just the one plug. Then for peripheral or accessory power, the SP850 comes with three cables, and all three of these drop the individually sleeved cabling for the standard flat cable type. Two are SATA power and one is Molex with both cables being shorter than your standard ATX PSU. They both have four plugs with connections at 5, 50, 15, and 20 inches.
The individually sleeved cables were a surprise but so was the inclusion of a new PCIe 5 power cable with the SP850. You may have seen this power connection style before with last generation Nvidia Founders Edition cards which included adapters to run this smaller more compact plug. This cable uses two of your PCIe plugs at the PSU and the compact 12-pin plug on the other end which can support up to 400 watts. To help with that the flat cabling does seem to be a little thicker than what Lian Li used on the SATA/Molex cables.
