Specifications

The unit is 80 Plus Gold certified and comes equipped with all available protection features, including OTP (Over Temperature Protection), which might come in handy since its maximum operating temperature is restricted to 40°C while the ATX spec recommends 50°C. We will still conduct our full load and overload tests at 45°C-46°C to push the unit to its limits and check on how reliable it is.

Like most Silverstone PSUs, this unit is fully modular, and it, thanks to its DC-DC converters, fully supports the new C6 and C7 sleep states that were introduced with Intel's Haswell CPUs. It uses a 120mm fan to keep cool since a larger unit wouldn't fit into this compact unit, which, although it uses a sleeve bearing, is made by Adda, one of the best fan manufacturers.

Contrary to the competition in this price range going with a warranty of five or more years, Silverstone decided to only go with three. We think that they should prolong their warranty if they want to keep in line with the other offers in this category, especially since this PSU's price exceeds 130 bucks, which places the unit right next door to the high-end 750 W category.

The single +12V rail is pretty strong with 62 A maximum current output, which will easily support two high-end VGAs. The minor rails are also very strong for a modern system, and we were happy to see a beefy 5VSB rail (for a 750 W unit) that can deliver 0.5-1 A more than most of the competition's offerings.

Cables & Connectors, Power Distribution

Users have two EPS and four PCIe connectors at their disposal. We know that some incredibly high-end 750 W units offer six PCIe connectors, but think that six is an unrealistic number for this category as it will lead to problems if someones tries to power three high-end VGAs (e.g. three AMD HD7970 or Radeon R9 280X cards) with such a unit. Both EPS connectors are also 4+4 pin, which had us wonder for a moment why Silverstone didn't make one an 8 pin since users will at most need one 4 pin. The answer lies in their length as one is shorter than the other, which allows users to pick the one most suitable to their case. Some will argue here that the shorter of the two EPS cables could cause problems with a server mainboard that has two CPUs, but a user would pick a different, stronger unit to go along with such hardware, or resort to using an extension cord. Replacing the shorter of the two with a longer EPS cable is also an option.

The length of all cables is adequate, although we personally prefer an ATX cable to be close to 600 mm long. The distance between connectors on cables with more than one is good, but should probably be a little shorter between its SATA connectors. All connectors use standard 18AWG gauges.

Since this PSU features a single +12V rail, we do not have anything to comment on about its power distribution.