Silent 500W Power Supply

NightRyder writes "To cope with the increased power demands of today's processors and video cards a 500W silent power supply has been released by Antec. The topic of silent power production has been an important one to the computer community recently, especially concerning the increased hardware demands by new game and operating systems. Considering the processing demands of something like, *cough* Windows Vista, its important to be able to keep your computer cool without it getting loud."

Comments

Direct link to Froogle with Price Sorted Low to Hi

[Work Account]

http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=Antec+Phantom+ 500+(PHANTOM+500)+500-Watt+Power+Supply&btnG=Searc h+Froogle&scoring=p

Buy the highest efficiency p/s with a 120mm fan

[Brian Stretch]

You're better off buying a high-efficiency power supply that has a 120mm thermistor-controlled fan. Seasonic's S12 500W is my current favorite. The 120mm fan is virtually silent at moderate loads and not too bad at higher loads. High efficiency means less waste heat for the fan to need to cool and lower electric bills.

Re:There was a story about power supplies earlier

[nametaken]

This newest incarnation of the Antec Phantom line has an 80mm variable speed fan. Its in the article.

Seasonic S12

[clarkie.mg]

Fully agree. The excellent (french) hardware site http://www.matbe.com/ has just tested yesterday the 600W version and it squashes the competition :

http://www.matbe.com/articles/lire/250/seasonic-s1 2-600-watts-l--alim-parfaite/

Even if you can't read french, look at the figures especially the one concening the silence, it's almost as silent as a fanless yesico!

A better review

[alexo]

here

Hmmm

[yum]

Do you really need that much power?

While you're spending $200 on a PSU...

[saskboy]

Don't forget to invest at least $50US into a UPS, so that your investment is isolated from surges, and browouts. You'll also benefit from being mostly immune from short power flickers, as long as your modem and router are backed up by the battery in the UPS too.

Batteries produce power

[Markus Registrada]

... silently.

Power is defined as energy transmitted/consumed/converted per unit time. A battery (like a fuel tank, or a dam) stores energy. Unplugged, power is zero. When you draw from it, it's producing power, and drawing down its energy reserves to do so.

Things get simpler when you use precise language, and avoid confusing yourself.

Newegg

[DavidLeeRoth]

For all you guys jumpin' to get this, the detailed specs of it are located here, as well as a place to buy it. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16817103926#DetailSpecs

Lousy review, and about 5 months late

[freidog]

Silent PC Review did a review of the Phaton 500 back in May; and did a far better job of actually putting it through its paces.

This is a typical PSU review, that is to say worthless. The problem is to do a good PSU reivew you actually need quite a bit of hardware, most little online sites lack even the most basic testing tools (a good multimeter and a controllable load). They make no mention of how they measured the voltages (software, or voltmeter, and from where, pigtail, ATX connector, somewhere else), they put a system that probably doesn't draw 125W DC at load to test out a 500W PSU, they have no real PSU temperature or efficency information. Typical of a site who's reviewing expertiese consists soley of swaping out parts, running 3D Mark and reporting the difference.

Silent PC Review does half way decent reviews, and over the last year or so XBit Labs has starting doing very good PSU reviews. Beyond that there aren't too many places that consistantly hit the mark.

For a silent PSU (not sure why this is that big of a deal, I have a TruePower 330W and can't hear it over the HDD, but I guess some people will always pay for that last dB quieter), there's of course the Phantom 300, the SilverStone 'NF' series, a 300 and a 400W version, the Fortron Source Zen 300; recently reviewed on XBitLabs and Silent PC Review, with just rock solid voltages across the spectrum. And of course the SeaSonic S12 line while not fanless is known to be extremely quiet and highly efficient

Not really

[Moraelin]

To put things into perspective, 10 dBA would be a completely unobstructed 80mm fan at less than 1000 RPM. (And a _good_ fan at that. El-cheapo ball bearing fans are noisier.) You can easily get PSU fans which are around the 30 dBA mark at full speed. E.g., a "silent" Tagan I bought has 28 dBA ones, but it's two of them, so make that 31 dBA for both.

Again, that's for completely unobstructed fans. When you have a fan blowing against an obstruction (e.g., a heatsink), it will make an extra whoosh or whistle. When you have something obstructing its intake, as is the case with most exhaust fans on PSUs, then it makes even more noise. Spin a 28 dBA fan to full speed when it has a big heatsink obstructing its intake, and it really starts to scream.

And you can reach full speed easier than you think. Most of these "silent" PSUs are happy to give you the dBA number when it's running completely idle and in a cold room. That's what it really means for most of them when you see "less than 20 dBA!!!" on the box: yeah, you'll get that if you don't draw more than 1A out of it, and you have your window open in December. Or rather, even then that would be what their fans would do at 5V if they were completely unobstructed, not what they do when mounted on the PSU. But put it in a power-hungry PC and run it on a hot August day, and you'll see most of them hitting the max RPM within minutes.