One hundred amps, bolted down.

Mount the board

Stand the Power-7HC on its included M3 standoffs, never flat: there are components on the back of the board, and 100A of copper appreciates airflow. The HC carries thicker copper planes than the normal Power-7 precisely for that current. All four M3 corners are ground.

Stack position follows the same logic as the Power-7: decide now, wire accordingly.

The screw terminals stand taller than the output fuses, so under another powerboard those fuses can't be swapped. Run the Power-7HC as the top powerboard, or pre-wire it completely before stacking. A brainboard above blocks nothing.

Bolt down the PSU inputs

The input stage is the whole reason this board exists: two M5 bolt terminals replace the barrier blocks, and they accept ring, fork or lug crimps only. No bare wire, no ferrules; loose strands have no business carrying 100A.

Cable both bolts from the same power supply with at least 2x 10 AWG; together the two paths carry the full rating. The positive side has two input lugs and two after-fuse lugs with a bolt-down MIDI fuse between each pair. Crimp cleanly and torque the included M5 8 mm screws onto flat lugs.

A thin wire can melt before a 60A fuse pops. At 5V and triple-digit amps, 8 AWG and 6 AWG are the safe choices; treat 10 AWG as the absolute floor, not the target.

One power supply per powerboard, never two. Both M5 inputs must come from the same PSU; paralleling two supplies invites a dangerous load-sharing failure. One big PSU feeding several powerboards remains fine.

Choose fuses per run

Input fusing is the bolt-down MIDI style: one fuse per M5 input, 2x 60A included, and 60A is the maximum per terminal. That pair, fed from one PSU, is what makes the 100A rating real.

Outputs keep the familiar ATO sockets, and the box ships 16x 10A blade fuses. 10A per output is the cap; drop to 5A or lower wherever a run's wire or load allows, and never go above the printed maximum. Fuse to the wire, not to the board.

Spreading matters more than ever with 100A on tap: a front feed carries about 4A, a middle injection about 8A. Interleave heavy and light runs across the three output sides, and map the feeds with the ultimate power injection guide.

Land the LED power runs

The output stage is identical to the normal Power-7: 16x 7.62 mm screw terminals in four banks (two positive, two negative) across three sides, each run on cable up to 12 AWG with a ferrule.

For 20A home runs, double up: one SV5.5-5 fork across two adjacent positive terminals, another across the matching negatives, two fuses in parallel, 10 AWG cable. And the standing reminder: every run's data wire goes to the brainboard's LED terminals, never here; these banks carry power and ground.

One Power-7HC plus one brainboard makes a tidy central point for a whole 5V display: 8 data channels and 16 fused feeds with 100A behind them.

Power up and verify

Switch the PSU on and read the onboard display. It shows the board's actual voltage including drop over the input cabling, and at 100A even thick cable drops something, so trust the display over the PSU label.

Then load it. Run every channel at full RGB white for a few minutes: a blown-fuse LED flags any open output, and the board is designed to settle around 25 °C above ambient at 100A continuous, helped by those thicker copper planes.

Few supplies even play in this class. The official picks are the Mean Well HRP-600-5 (125A at 5V), LRS-600-5 (100A at 5V) and SE-1500-12 (125A at 12V); keep any of them at or below 80% of rating for continuous duty. The full shortlist lives in the power supply recommendations.

Calculate nominal load with the 50% RGB white values from the official power sheets; the fuse headroom exists for transient peaks. One exception: ws2815 gets calculated at 100%.