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.'"

Comments

300W?

[kraiger]

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.

Re:300W?

[RedWizzard]

HTPC. That's the target market, that's where people will pay for silent, that's where this will work.

Re:300W?

[eander315]

I can't speak for your system, but most people wildly over-estimate their power supply needs. Couple that with the fact that this product is aimed at a fairly small segment of the computing population who will go as far as to underclock their processors to make their computer quieter, and you see why it's still relevant.

Needless to say?

[Radak]

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.

Re:Needless to say?

[failedlogic]

Thank you. Its about time someone tries to hold authors of hardware reviews accountable for excessive wording and babbling. They should get right to the point.

Sad to say, too many website are just like this. Reviews of simple componenets discuss the packaging, the company that makes the product, the box the product was shipped in, and then finally, they get to the actual review. But, not before 200 pictures of the aformentionned. Then you find it performs about the same as everything else. Surprise! Except it runs 1% faster and is worth an extra $200.

Re:Seasonic a much better idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Not unless you go silent with the rest of your system. Spending more to get silence is very much worth it for some folks. I spent as much on silencing my personal computer as I did on parts and most of it will be reusable when I upgrade.

A celebration of mediocrity

[category_five]

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.

Faulty review

[DaCool42]

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".

Re:Quiet PSU's should not be hard

[iCEBaLM]

You know - single-source, limited configuration, with custom cases?

Ohhhh yeah! Like Dell.