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.'"

Quiet PSU's should not be hard

[winkydink]

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.
~

alternative

[TheClam]

What's wrong with this one?

http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=Seasonic+S12+3 30 [google.com]

Got mine for $50 and the 120mm fan doesn't contribute any more noise than my CPU cooler or old noisy hard drives.

Re:300W?

[Tweekster]

actually a most end system... you dont exactly have anything particularly fantastic in that system to begin with... the CPU and video card will be the hogs, the rest are easy to power. So for anyone going AMD and a slightly less pigish graphics card , 300watts is more than adequate.

Re:Thes things are really nice

[MarsLander]

The Antec Phantom is US$150 at newegg [newegg.com]. That compares very well with the Silverstone ST30NF from the review: the Phantom is 500W vs the ST30NF which is 300W.

It makes perfect sense to have a fan that spins up when under high load. It'll increase the longevity of the PSU, and the small amount of noise when under load will easily be covered up by the sound from your game, or won't matter too much because you're acutually working on the computer. When it's time to sleep, the fan will spin down.

The best of both worlds (so long as you're not running SETI at home! :)

How about a good PSU with a fast fan?

[Spazmania]

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.

Gotta agree

[Brian Stretch]

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.

Seasonic a much better idea

[wirelessbuzzers]

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.

Re:No fan

[unfunk]

I have a 400W Zalman (ZM400B-APS) "noiseless" PSU - the fan only switches on when the internal temperature ramps up above some certain point.
It's infinitely quieter than the 450W noname brand I had before, and probably much more reliable, too.

Misleading

[Perl-Pusher]

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.

Re:300W?

[houseofzeus]

A good, reliable 300W power supply is far, far better than one of the many cheapy 500W ones flying around. While yes the larger number sounds impressive it isn't actually necessary for a *lot* of systems.

Re:"It doesn't come cheap..."

[wyldeone]

>> "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.

That's a pretty idiotic comment. PSUs tend to cost about $50, so, yes one that costs three times that would be expensive. Similarly, if someone was charging $10 for a very good apple, one might comment that they didn't come cheap also. Value isn't some absolute: $100 isn't very expensive, but $500 is. It depends on the product in question.

Just go to the www.silentpcreview.com

[a_ghostwheel]

SPCR [silentpcreview.com] 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 [silentpcreview.com].

It's really made by Etasis in Taiwan

[Animats]

The picture of the data plate [viperlair.com] shows that it's really an Etasis EFN-300. The UL approval number is E176239, which can be looked up here. [ul.com] to obtain this data. [ul.com]

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.

My doubts on completely silent claim

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Rather half-arsed review ...

[NeoThermic]

I agree. The second thing I noted is they failed to test the PSU. You might think that putting a PSU ina "high-end" system is testing it, but suffice to say, it isn't. You need to connect them up to a load generator, not a PC if you really want to test a PSU. 'Custom PC' (a UK mag for high-end computer customisation) did a review of 31 PSU's a few issues back, and they used a load generator to do it. They found that none of the silent PSU's could either output their correct voltage, and to top it off, some of the "silent" PSU's and the low-end PSU's actually exploded while being tested.

If you wish to get a proper review of PSU's, my suggestion would be to grab that issue, as it is quite intresting to read. Infact, I've just checked, and they have put the whole Labs online from that issue, so http://www.pcpro.co.uk/custompc/labs/26/psus/intro duction.html [pcpro.co.uk] Take a peak :)

NeoThermic