PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750W Quad Crossfire Edition PSU
The Silencer 750 Quad power supply series gives you legendary PC Power and Cooling performance and reliability along with a unique ultra-quiet cooling design and a price that seals the deal. The brilliant red exterior of this special edition Silencer 750 PSU will look amazing in your high-performance graphics system or gaming rig, but does it perform well? Read on as figure that out with two power hungry ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT video cards running in CrossFire.
First we will look at the power consumption of the system. This was taken with a P3 Kill-A-Watt EZ. Idle numbers were taken after the system set idle for 30 minutes, load measurements taken while running 3DMark06 benchmarking tool. Now as one would expect the configuration that drew the most power was the overclocked system with crossfire. With a total system draw of 541 watts; which just goes to that with today’s systems a quality power supply is needed.
That 12v rail drop, while acceptable, seemed to be a bit much for a PCP&C, but then I guess it isn't their top line of PSUs.
I'd love to be able to heavy load test my PCP&C and know how it fares, with my meagre system, it holds up well, but I know it's not pushing it in the slightest.
Shane, why did you prefer a mildly overclocked system? What happens you max out the GPU's and the CPU on air? Why not use a quad-core CPU for your tests?
super nade wrote:Shane, why did you prefer a mildly overclocked system? What happens you max out the GPU's and the CPU on air? Why not use a quad-core CPU for your tests?
Because with LR's reviewers being spread out so far, they use the hardware available to them (at the time of writing) to test out the review product
And the mild overclock is in CPU only (CPU multiplier limitation), 1600Mhz FSB, while could be pushed further, is not what I'd consider a mild FSB clock.
The most I had ever gotten the CPU to 3.1 on air, under water this particular chip hit 3.2 (if I remember right) under the Nautilus water cooler, at that level that is what I would call it an extreme overclock and the average enthusiast will not push the system that hard for very long. Now as for why I didn't use a quad, I don't have one yet.
For the cards, those were loaners that I had for only for an afternoon and were not mine to do as I pleased. I wasn't going to try to overclock them risking killing them and have to replace them.
"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."
-Thomas Jefferson
bubba wrote:The most I had ever gotten the CPU to 3.1 on air, under water this particular chip hit 3.2 (if I remember right) under the Nautilus water cooler, at that level that is what I would call it an extreme overclock and the average enthusiast will not push the system that hard for very long. Now as for why I didn't use a quad, I don't have one yet.
For the cards, those were loaners that I had for only for an afternoon and were not mine to do as I pleased. I wasn't going to try to overclock them risking killing them and have to replace them.
Sure man, I understand, not everybody can afford the expensive hardware. At least you guys hooked up a beast of an X-Fire setup to put some load on the unit.
The big primary capacitor is pretty much a standard feature in all APFC units (some use two or more due to physical dimension constraints). It is made by Hitachi and is pretty much what high end manufacturers use. United/Nippon Chemicon and Matsushita are also common among high end OEMS. United Chemicon caps are on the Primary side. Also, this unit is group regulated from the looks of it (2 chokes on the secondary side).
super nade wrote:Sure man, I understand, not everybody can afford the expensive hardware. At least you guys hooked up a beast of an X-Fire setup to put some load on the unit.
The big primary capacitor is pretty much a standard feature in all APFC units (some use two or more due to physical dimension constraints). It is made by Hitachi and is pretty much what high end manufacturers use. United/Nippon Chemicon and Matsushita are also common among high end OEMS. United Chemicon caps are on the Primary side. Also, this unit is group regulated from the looks of it (2 chokes on the secondary side).
To be honest Bubba wrote this article back in December 2007 and it was 'lost' until now... so back when he wrote it there was no CrossFireX. I loaned him my 2900 XT's as they consume more power than the 3870's, so we were trying to load it up the best we could. Legit Reviews has just one person full time and a limited budget. We can only do so much and I think with the four main writers we have we are doing a great job!
It's tough to say that 750W will be enough in the future when the video card companies keep pushing out crazy video card setups like Quad CrossFire (CrossFireX) and Quad SLI!
Come on now, that's just dumb. You can't honestly believe this PSU won't handle 4 gpu's. Half of this "YUO NEED MOAR POWAR!111" BS is marketing, and the other half is GPU manufacturers anticipating the idiots who buy crappy generic PSU's that cant handle what they are rated for.
Overkill definitely doesn't hurt if you have money to burn, but let's be serious: 1000w+ PSU's are a complete and total waste of money for most of us.
1000W PSU's are a waste of money for most of us, but then so is quad Xfire/SLI.
However needing more than 750w is completely do-able right now with 'just' 3way 8800GTX SLI and a mildly overclocked C2Q. This doesn't even account for other high end typical enthusiast things like watercooling or overclocking the graphics cards (or even using faster cards like 8800 ultras), etc.
Sure 750w will be fine for the vast majority of users for the near future, but the power needed by high end cards has only grown from generation to generation, so for extreme enthusiasts 750w already might not be enough today, and based on the trend of graphics cards needing more and more power it really could not be enough for the future. This wouldn't power a maxxed out Skulltrail system for example.
So I don't think it dumb to question if 750W is enough for extreme enthusiasts to set you up for the future, and with the review being written 3 months ago (before XfireX and Quad SLI was actually released) makes this more of a guess into the power requirements, notice that the statement was actually left open ended.
if it aint stable it aint worth nothing.
thats one hell of a capacitor 
