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Silverstone ST30NF 300W Silent PSU reviewed
VL writes "Silence is golden as they say, but in Silverstone's case, it's, uh, silver. Will this silent PSU bring it, or will enthusiasts continue to be plagued with noisy PSUs? 'Initially I had some reservations of how a 300W PSU would handle our test system in real-world testing. Needless to say the Silverstone ST30NF 300W PSU got the job done efficiently and quietly, or should I say silently. It doesn't come cheap, ringing in at close to $150, but that's the price you pay for a high quality PSU that does not make any noise at all.'"
Read about other ethical transgressions here.
It's not hard to develop a fanless 300W PSU (or even more, if you're
so inclined). I started my career in Silicon Valley working for a
company that made small lots of custom power supplies for "the
government": everything from teeny low power jobbies to big HV
monstrosities in the KW range that drove TWT's. In the 5 years I
spent there, we probably designed over 125 power supplies and nont
one had a fan and all had very high MTBFs. The key is using
high-grade, mil-spec components that can run hot (what were called
JAN, JANTXV, and JANS back in the day), and using monster heat
sinks. They are, however, not cheap. If you want to run at 105
deg C, you pay accordingly.
~
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
>> "It doesn't come cheap, ringing in at close to $150..."
Wow. Those $200 WalMart PC's have got everyone's value systems really fucked up.
I'd be a bit more comfortable with the unit having a fan when it does reach load temperatures. I have a similar power supply of fanless design that has a "backup" fan. It is 0rpm idling and when playing games it spins up. Makes me feel just a wee bit safer. Especially during the summer.
Is this even applicable with high end systems today? I personally run a CPU at 3.5GHZ, have an ATI 9800XT, a DVD burner, a DVD player, multiple HDDs, etc. I just can't see a 300W power supply working for that type of application. Maybe for a low end system, but at that point you're not going to pay 150 bucks for a PSU in a low end system.
I have a Taurus fanless PS, and have had it for probably around a year. It's a 350W, and seems to be working fine - doesn't even heat the top of the case up. Unfortunantly I still have 4 other fans in the box to move air around. But the fanless PS really helps. So what's so great about this one?
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
What's wrong with this one?
3 30
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=Seasonic+S12+
Got mine for $50 and the 120mm fan doesn't contribute any more noise than my CPU cooler or old noisy hard drives.
What kind of system are you going to run with 300W? You'll need at least a gigawatt to run any decent system these days!
rm -rf
ok so you get rid of 1 or 2 fans but you better have good air flow on your case to keep it cool. This PSU seems to run hotter due to it's passive cooling so the case will be hotter, what will make your themally controlled fans run faster, and the result willl be a noisy tower during heavy use. So if you want to make your beast a little quieter those $150 can be spent somewhere else. That and the constant fear that it will overheat and turn off on the worst posible moment.
But this PSU, a fanless video card and an old CPU would make a nice quiet PC for the living room.
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
I have a 500 watt antec phantom in my newest computer, the thing is silent. It does have a fan in the case that the PSU does get too hot, it can cool it off. I have played some pretty high end games, done some 3d rendering and what not, still haven't had the fan turn on, and the PSU hasn't gotten hot. It is nice to know that it's there though. I don't think I would ever buy a powersupply that didn't function like this, as I due value the quiet. I hope they continue to improve on this technology to provide even more powerful PSUs than currently available. (And at a lower cost, because I seem to remember this supply costing a bit more than most other 500w PSUs)
I have 2 $90 case/ps combos in the room with me. To hear either I have to put my ear basicly on the famn things. Unless you're extremely anal, ps noise doesn't even exist.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Needless to say the Silverstone ST30NF 300W PSU got the job done efficiently and quietly...
Needless to say? Then why did you write a review about it? Or were you just padding your remarks with random babble to bring the word count up and to try to make yourself sound smart and competent?
Please, leave the verbiage to people who know how to do it, and just get right to the point.
Having just heat-fried a Enermax 600W power supply that Tom's Hardware said was so good, how about a nice noisy PSU that is actually reliable over time? Does anybody still make them? Seriously, I don't care what the sound level is in the server room. None of this thermally controlled crap. I just want a high-wattage ATX-EPS12 PSU that runs cool enough to keep on working and constantly contributes enough airflow to the case to allow the rest of the computer keeps working too.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Having used a fanless PSU before (Antec's), they're heavy, not to mention expensive. Seasonic S12's are practically silent and the PSU will run cooler with a 120mm fan giving it a little ventilation. The Enermax Liberty's are supposed to be very good too, nice to have the detachable cables in SFF machines. Spend your money on power-efficient components that don't make the cooling systems work so hard.
I have a Seasonic PSU, and it seems better in almost every way. The Seasonic's fan is very quiet, its construction is excellent, the efficiency is very high, it provides more peak power, and it costs less than this silly thing. I assume that it's also lighter, due to having a sanely-sized heat sink.
Now, while this PSU is "totally silent", the power supply is assumed to have at least a minimal fan by just about every ATX system designer. As another poster mentioned, if yours doesn't have a fan, you're going to have to either choose very low-power components, or put in/ramp up other fans to compensate. So unless you're going to put this on some teeny underpowered VIA or Pentium-M-based system, you're going to make up in noise anyway.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
I'm not impressed. I built a system for my living room last fall that needed to be completely silent. For my Silent PC Project, I used the Zalman 300W Silent PSU and a Zalman AlCu 92mm CPU heatsink. My friends don't beleive me when I tell them its on, until I turn on the monitor to show that it's sitting at the Windows desktop. Zalman has been making very high-quality products for a long time, and their emphasis has always been on the lowest noise factor possible.
n +Silent+300W&pid=2079251151970412073&oid=107283421 76813123536&btnG=Search+Froogle&lmode=&addr=&scori ng=mrd&hl=en
I run a Sempron 3200+, 1GB RAM, GeForce 6600, DVD burner, 2 HDDs and a PVR tuner card in there. For that, 300W is plenty. While no longer available thru Newegg, you can find this PSU here:
http://froogle.google.com/froogle_cluster?q=Zalma
khasim (12/9/06): In a blind taste test, more people preferred Coke over the Pepsi that I had previously pissed in.
While some might have a use for a fanless CPU, this one has 2 drawbacks.
- It is more expensive than some of the other quality products on the market.
- The cooling profile is inside the case. Which results in the case being heated up, if no other cooling solution is present.
If you really want a fanless PSU, buy one where the cooling profile is outside the case. They can even be found cheaper than this one and even with higher Watt rating.
Anyone else noticed that the submitter, VL, has his nick pointing to the site?
Sure you don't need a fan in a power supply for TWT's. That's because they are usually mounted to a cold plate along with the TWT. The cold plate is liquid cooled with coolanol, a silion based coolant. The pumps pumping the coolant are 20 time as loud as any PC. PC power supplies really don't require a fan either. The fan is used to suck air from the front of the case to the back. A CPU fan is useless if you don't have sufficient air flow. Putting a PSU without a fan in many cases will cause your CPU to overheat. The way to fix it is guess what? Add a fan, you don't gain anything.
$150 for 300W? You gotta be kidding me. I spent less than that for a 650 and a 350 on my main machine; a kilowatt of power and the main PSU even glows. For $150 I expect silent, cool, >650W, and modular. I've blogged about this.
My Blog: http://blog.damnednice.com/
Pics of System: http://www.flickr.com/photos/damnednice/99975127/
Slackmaster K Proprietor, DamnedNice Blog
http://www.pcpowercooling.com/home/
http://www.cit.gu.edu.au/~davidt/tech_comm/Orwell_ Politics.htm
I found the review rather lackluster. In reviewing a fanless PSU I would think the PSU temperature and the case temperature would be measured both idle and under load for every PSU, instead of just saying "by the way it hit 51C under load". Also I would expect a more constant load draw than "running prime 95" for an hour or so. Perhaps hook up the PSU's to resistors so we can take the randomness out of the equation. Average fluctuation on each of the voltage lines (5, 12 & 3.3) measured in 5-minute intervals over the course of a half hour rather than a single reading would be nice as well. How well does it provides power under a brownout situation, does it survive a power surge while still giving proper power to the computer components? Does it even run longer than an hour at a time? So many questions unanswered.
SPCR generally does rather high-quality reviews against consistent baseline, which allows to do the comparison. It also covers all aspects of "silent computing" (and is essentially dedicated to it - including forums). For this particular PSU, just go here.
...about 30 feet away behind three doors and I can't hear a thing. Ran the cables under the floor to the room under the stairs.
The USB hub is closer... a couple doors away which means I have to get up to change DVDs every so often. The RF remote works fine... and there are almost no wires around my desk. Plus the main unit is completely accessible and comfortable to fiddle with.
I have one of those Shuttle XPC systems that has an Athlon64 3700+ w/1GB RAM in it, as well as a GeForce 6600GT AGP, a DVD+/-RW, and of course a hard drive. This XPC only comes with a 240W PSU(!). I was worried at first about cramming a GeForce 6600GT in it, since it is a power hungry card (plus this xpc is a socket 754 setup and it's maxed out CPU wise... 3700+ is the end of the line AFAIK.)
Anyway, to shorten the story: This system runs rock solid, WinXP doesn't crash, my games run reliably -- Important since I wanted a little system I could tote easily to a LAN party. And this machine does all the tasks I need a Windows PC for not just games. My other PCs (excluding the BBS) all run Linux.
For an article that's supposed to be reviewing a power supply, it's a rather poor effort. Where are the details of (for example) the ripple current? How clean is the supply from each of the lines? Is it reasonably steady (say, +/- 0.01 volt), or are there occasional spikes as the input power spikes?
...
There's more to a PSU than just how much current it draws and how much noise it makes. Yes, ok, they gave us the voltages on the various lines. That doesn't tell us how clean those lines are, and that's the critical bit of information -- if the lines aren't clean, they could end up blowing the motherboard (most motherboards should have capacitors and other filters to avoid this being an issue, but a bit of redundancy in this area doesn't go astray.)
And please: "active PFC"? Power factor correction is only of concern for major industrial sites; it's nothing more than a marketing gimmick for the home user, and can actually cost money by drawing down more power than is actually needed. If they aren't talking about power factor correction, then what the hell are they talking about?
I'll grant that, if the power supply from the mains is clean, it's not all that hard to find a power supply that does a good job. It's when the power supply isn't clean -- when there are transient spikes and ripples and all sorts of other nasties -- that a good quality PSU will pay for itself. Some conditions are well and truly out of spec (a good lightning bolt at the wrong instant will fry just about any PSU that isn't hideously expensive, and probably even then you'll see the magic smoke escape), but the mains is most definitely not a nice, clean, 50 or 60 Hz sine wave
The major thing I see with this product isn't so much what the product is, but what it represents. As more companies produce more fanless PSU's, then that means competition will naturally bring the price down. All I need for my silent media station is 400GB of solid-state storage. Why 400GB, you ask? When you have a silent system, why would you want to use compressed audio? In fact, I believe 400GB would be the minimum, especially if I wanted to store iso's of my movies on there as well.
This is important, because there are too many unapproved power supplies out there. Those are the ones that fail, or worse, catch fire, when loaded up to their rated load.
The heat pipe arrangement looks like an afterthought. A simpler design would have the power semiconductors on the back plate with the fins. That's how industrial power supplies are usually built.
Silverstone? Dare I ask what they're trying to keep from sticking to their power supplies?
This isn't scorn against the PSU mentioned in this article, nor those people who are searching for a silent PSU but I have to ask,
What the hell are people doing to make their PSU's noisy?
I've got a 450Watt PSU that came in my Codegen Mini-server case when I bought it a few years ago. I have never heard it, even when I stick my ear near it. The only way I know it's functioning is that I can feel the breeze blowing out the back of the PSU.
The noisiest fans in my case are the little fans on the back of my HDD racks, followed by the CPU and Video card fans, and all I can hear from them is a soft breezy sound. 9 fans - CPU, Video, two large ones mounted in the back of the case, one large one in the PSU, four HDD cooler fans - and all I can hear at night is the distant sound of the waves at the beach, forever rolling in.
How come so many people seem to have noisy computers? Pimped machines? Does an extra few decibels gets you more megahertz? OG computers?
His name is Robert Paulsen...
NINE Fans, and you can't hear them?!? Go see the DOCTOR to get a HEARING AIDE!
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
According to that site, the manual actually claims it is only a 250 watt power supply when used on 120V. You might be able to scrape a decent system up to run at 300 watts, but 250 is almost out of the question.
Agreed.
And for weight, A piece by Mr. Orwell to help drive it home.
The whole computer isn't completely silent - he said as he listened to the gentle sounding, perpetually crashing waves on the beach -, just the three big mothers in the back (two case, one PSU) that push a lot of air but spin kind of slow. The little ones spin faster than the big'uns but they're not trying to spin at 10,000 RPM or more.
A little bit of heat isn't going to kill my machine.
I'm not deaf either, I can still hear the sound of muted television set. :)
His name is Robert Paulsen...
This is not a very good review. They did not make any useful measurements of the supply, nor did they even crack it open to see if it's well designed.
For some reason they used an actual computer as a load. That is going to result in an inconsistant load and useless results.
They claim to have measured "power" with a simple DMM. You cannot measure AC power this way. What they probably measured was apparant power. This doesn't take into account inductive or capacitive loads.
The voltage table is useless because the amount of load is unknown and inconsistent between tests.
There is no measurement of electrical noise on the output - which is the only problem I have ever had with PC PSUs (besides outright failures).
Basically their only real conclusion as "all of the power supplies worked".
----
All of whose base are belong to the what-now?
Cheap power supplies are the major cause of problems I have encountered when I build systems for friends and myself. In the old 486-66/Pentium 500 days, A supposed 450 Watt supply that weighed as much as a dried birds nest would actually puke out enough watts and the same amount of heat to run a K5-500 with 512K and a couple PCI cards. These Mfg scums, and the retailers are now pushing this crap for systems targed at A64 and P4 processors that require so much power you can see the traces throb when underway.
If you can hold it in one hand at arms length for a min, It's probably crap.
JimD.
Heh, Geezer showing, That's 512 Meg.
So I did some measurements and found the RPMs I wanted to run them at -- measured the voltage drop and current. Then I soldered in some resistors. The PSU is still very light, and I'm not running it at its peak power. But it's the quietest thing in the system now. The disk and CPU fan are my next targets.
0 dBA is extremely quiet, and fanless PSUs may be extremely quiet, but using '0 dBA' to mean 'practically silent' just perpetuates confusion over the dB scale.
While having no fans makes manufacturing completely silent PSU possible, it doesn't make PSU completely silent by default. Case in point is my fanless PSU - while it has no fans, it manages to produce some noise by itself (detached from the motherboard and peripherals) and through the graphics card (electric noise?). Either way it's constant whining/whistling, although rather quiet, is perfectly audible at night.
Wouldn't all the harddrives spinning in the servers be as loud as a fan would be? Also, USB cable is transmitting digital information, so there should be no loss of information.
What I'd like to know is the room temperature while they were testing, since I could just easily "cool" my computer at this very moment by opening the window, and letting -6c air flow into the room, and engulf the machine.
It would be very interesting to know what the termal probe's read-out would be when doing a full-load test during the Summer, when the room temperature is around 30c.
We don't need no stinking control room....
I've had issues when doing PC recording with the fan noise bleeding into sensitive condensor mics. Silent power supplies are great because they will allow more flexible design on home recording studios with the ability to keep the system in the room with you. A longtime issue fo DIY bands.
Right now I use a FW800 MDD Mac Dual 1.0 G4 which still has a siginicifant amount of fan noise. But much quieter than my first recording box which was a cobbled Frankenstien PC in a old Gateway case.
Right now our "control room" is in the studio with us. I can turn around and set up takes and start the recording...The Mac is quiet enough that the negligable and the seperation of the keys, guitar and drums is far enough so as not to be picked up. Vocals and acyustic guitar tracks will still be an issue. But I have panels to isolate the mic from the computer fan noise....
We've been tossing around the idea of putting together a PC for recording as well (keyboard player has been a PC user for recording and has a load of software we could use)
For you music junkies....grab some free tracks:
http://soul-amp.com/
What do these silent PSUs do with their excess heat? If they merely radiate it off of the PSU case, they're going to seriously pump up the ambient heat in your case. Transferring it to the chassis would help, but that's still not as effective as dumping it entirely outside the case.
78-82% is not very efficient unless you are a mechanical engineer. 90% is very efficient, but I don't know of any PC power supplies that are that good. The best PC supplies are about 85%. 80% is not bad, but it is not amazing either.
I bought a 300 watt power supply for $17 (CDN) - call it under $15.
The issue is: how to make it QUIET. I take a "system" level approach to the problem. Built a cabinet around the whole computer, providing sound-proofing. Did the cabinet cost around $135? It was less. Much less.
Now, my power supply has a fan (it actually has two). But so does the processor, the video card, and there are two fans in the hard drive carrier.
6 fans making noise. The box also has 3 hard drives, and a DVD.
A lot of stuff making noise. Taken care of by the cabinet. Note that the expensive power supply would have only taken care of two of the fans. Whereas my solution takes are of all of the problem.
YMMV Ratboy
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
If you are running a dualcore athlon, with two video cards running with SLI, a PVR, Soundblaster card, two gigs of RAM, two hard drives, and a few other accessories, you need at least 450W power supply. 300W PSU won't cut it for most computers that slashdotters are building.
Probably not, and as a gamer you've probably got 5.1 Surround and big speakers anyhow. As the old adage goes "if you can hear your fan or drives, you haven't got big enough speakers"
However, this would do fairly well for office machines, especially places with rows on rows of noisy machines (of course, a silent-style CPU fan would also be needed, and a lower pricetag for most offices).
This doesn't work very well for the small-form-factor people, but what I would rather see are cases with larger fans in general. A larger, lower-RPM higher-air-displacement fan is generally a lot quieter. In many cases, there is at least room for a slightly larger fan at the bottom of the PSU, but the best best is a side-mount casefan.
Some of the newer server machines here at work have larger-than normal fans to the rear of the case. They run slow, steady, and quiet.
er, As you might notice, this doesn't apply specificaly to power supplies, though they probably could have a slightly larger fan in many. However, the PSU fan does often contribute to overall air circulation in a case, so having better case ventilation would mean you could probably ease up on the RPM's etc of your PSU fan as well.
$150?? I have a Seasonic S12 500w psu for only $115. It's almost dead silent, certainly if you have any fans at all in your case you wouldn't be able to hear it. There's also a 600w version. And, Seasonic is a very reputable, high quality brand.
I blame geof's speakers.
You ARE aware that when you combine good modern hardware, you're going to need around 400W or so of real power (not the 50000000W that people assume, but, still, more than 300 and I'd consider 350 to be insufficient probably too.)
I think you need now another sound card, it is a must.