Silverstone Strider Gold Evolution 750W PSU Review

A look inside the ST75F-G

Silverstone heavily advertises their
own “Air Penetrator” 139mm fan they installed inside the Strider Gold
Evolution, claiming that it can enhance the thermal performance of the power
supply severely by guiding airflow into a column. This is achieved by the
spiraling grid which also doubles as a fan guard and, according to
Silverstone’s demonstration videos, it does really work. But will air guidance
do any good inside a power supply? We will find that out later, during our
thermal testing.

The OEM behind the Silverstone
ST75F-G power supply is Enhance and the design is very popular among manufacturers
for units of that size. The distinctive feature of this particular design is
not the topology or and special features but the very large aluminum heatsinks
instead. The manufacturing quality is very good but everything is very tightly
packed together, as the heatsinks and the internal cables take a lot of space.

The filtering stage begins at the
behind of the A/C receptacle and continues onto the main PCB. We counted four Y
capacitors, four X capacitors, two filtering chokes and a MOV; more than enough
components for a good filtering stage. There is also a simple glass fuse hidden
below the tightly packed components.

Two Matsushita 270uF/420V 105C capacitors
can be seen next to a large coil, forming part of the APFC circuit. The active
PFC components, two transistors and a diode, are on the main heatsink,
alongside the two switching transistors which form the primary side inversion
circuit.

Unfortunately, the secondary side is
excessively crowded, to the point that one cannot take a proper picture of the
design. The synchronous rectifier comprises of four transistors which are installed
on the large heatsink. Below the heatsink, two DC to DC conversion boards
generate the 3.3V and5V lines. All of the secondary capacitors are supplied by
Nippon Chemi-Con, another renowned Japanese manufacturer. Unfortunately, the design is using cables to
bring the power to the vertical PCB which holds the modular connectors, which
cables do take a lot of volume inside the unit.