Thermaltake’s Silent Power Supply Uncovered

Testing

Testing Configuration:

I tested the Thermaltake Silent PurePower Fan-less Power Supply on the following setup using a multimeter, motherboard monitor, and my sound pressure level meter.

• Abit NF7-S rev. 2
• AMD 2500+ mobile @ 2.2ghz
• 512mb Kingmax PC4000
• Matrox G450 Video
• 2x 160GB Seagate SATA hard drives
• 120GB Western Digital hard drive
• Sony 8x DVD/RW
• 2x 120mm case fans

All voltages were taken from the ATX power connector and compared with voltages reported from Motherboard Monitor 5. They were taken without load (no computer connected), after the computer had idled for 30min, and again after 30min at full load. Load was achieved by defragmenting the Western Digital hard drive while rendering a 5min film in Vegas 4.0, and running folding@home in the background to use any spare CPU cycles. Vegas loads the system by reading large video files from a drive rendering a video effect frame by frame and then writing the frame to the hard drive again, this particular sequence taxed my system at 97-99% at all times, any remaining CPU time was used by F@H and the defrag utility.

As you can see even under heavy load this power supply kept its cool. And I mean that literally, when I did the touch test on the heat sinks they were just barely warm. As for voltages there is not much I can complain about, the +3.3v rail stayed rock solid throughout testing. The +5v rail is a little high for my taste; I also found it unusual that it increased in voltage after being connected to my test system. While 5.2v will not kill your system it is on the high end, but it does stay just with in the +5% that Thermaltake allows. The +12v never dropped below 12v which always makes me happy. The change from -11.95 to -12.47 is well with in the 10% margin.

While I don’t fully trust readings from the motherboard, testing at the ATX power connector cannot account for any voltage loss in the power regulation of the motherboard. In this case I think the graphs speak for themselves. All the voltages were very stable at idle and under load. I would have liked to see the 12v closer to 12 volts but at least there was not a lot of difference between readings.