Testing

Although there are those that see synthetic testing as the way to go when testing Power Supplies. We believe putting together a rig that mimics the most powerful PCs available is a good "real world" test of how capable a PSU is. Therefore, for testing the Xilence Power I grabbed every bit of hardware we currently have and put together one rather power hungry rig, and another with a hefty GPU also powered by our 600w GE.

The entire setup was as follows:

Master PC

Asus P5W-DH Deluxe
C2D E600 @ 2.7ghz
OCZ Special Ops. Urban Elite 6400 @ 900mhz
2x Sapphire x1900XT in Crossfire
Western Digital Raptor 36gb
Western Digital Caviar SE 80gb
BFG Ageia PhysX

Slave PC

aBit M2N-HD
AMD AM2 3800 X2
4gb Super Talent T800
PNY 8800GTS 640mb
Western Digital Caviar SE 160gb

Added to both of these were several fans and CD/DVD drives plus any pen drives we had lying around at the time.

The PSU powered not only the entire master PC, but the PNY 8800GTS and all HDD and Optical drives from the Slave PC too.

Results were taken using Asus Probe and verified with a multimeter on a spare molex connector.

Results

In terms of stability you can see that the 3.3v and 5v rails are fantastic. Unfortunately there is a .2 jump in the 12v rails between idle and load which is quite large. It also places the load voltage quite a way off its 12v target.

Noise and Cooling

Throughout the whole testing procedure, the 600w GE was whisper quiet and didn't intrude on my sensitive ear drums one iota. To steal a phrase from SorX, its mulnaz.

Cost

Cost wise this 600 watter is around the £60 mark at most retailers which is about the standard price for a PSU of this wattage. However, there are much more stable PSUs to be had for this kind of money.