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Passive Power Supplies Review: Silverstone and Yesico

Cases & PSU/Power Supplies by piotke @ 2004-11-28

In today?s review we continue our search for the whole grail of complete silence. We have looked at some very efficient CPU coolers in the past, and today we extend our horizon to include another noisy part of every PC: the Power supply.

Silverstone EFN-300

Silverstone send us the EFN-300 for testing, which we did on the following system:

Piotke's Test Setup
CPU	AMD Athlon 64 3000+ @ 2.4 Ghz 1.7 Vcore
Mainboard	Soltek nForce3 (150)
Cooling	Thermalright SLK948 U
Memory	2* 256 MB Corsair PC3500 @ 200 Mhz 2-2-2-5
Video	Sapphire Radeon 9800 XT
HDD	Seagate Cuda 5 7200.7 120 Gb
Optical	Nec 2500 A DVD R

High efficiency power solution.

Optimum quality standard.

Classic design in style and tasteful shape of

Aluminum casing.

Supports two serial ATA Connector

Without fan

Background noise around 0 dBA.

Heat pipe with heat sink in Aluminum case.

assumes PC stability

Indicator light to show state of PSU

Active PFC

300 watt

+3.3 V - 23 A

+5 V - 25 A

+12 V - 18 A

+5 VSB - 1.5 A

Heat pipes hidden inside the body of the EFN-300 transfer the generated heat towards the back of the unit, as shown in the animation below:

Madshrimps (c)

More info on the website.

Test results

MBM5 values

The system was put under full load during an extended period of time by combing hard drive file transfers, gaming and CPU stress programs, the high, low and average values were recorded and put in the table below:

EFN-300	LOW	HIGH	AVERAGE
+ 3.3 V	3.31	3.36	3.32
+ 5 V	4.99	5.04	5.02
+ 12 V	11.91	11.98	11.96

As you can see the obtained values are almost spot on and well within specifications, although the unit is rated for 300W we experienced no instabilities no matter how much stress what put on the system.

Multi-meter values

Using a multi-meter we verified the different voltage rails and obtained very consistant results:

EFN-300	+3.3 V	+5 V	+12 V
NO PC	3.36	5.02	12.14
PC IDLE	3.38	5.02	12.23
PC LOAD	3.38	5.01	12.17

Connectors and Pictures

Silverstone includes all necessary connectors to power your ATX systems, however, power connectors for the latest gear out there (PCI-E motherboards/video cards) is not present. Seeing as this PSU has been launched some time ago we’re confident an updated version will come along soon for those requiring the extra PSU flexibility.

	1* (sleeved)
	1* (sleeved)
	1* (sleeved)
	No fan headers were present on the PSU
	6* HDD and 2* FDD molex
	2*

Pictures

All information and graphics contained in Madshrimps are sole property of the Madshrimps crew and may not be reproduced or copied in any manner without written permission from us.