SilverStone Silver Strider 750 Watt PSU V2.0 (ST75F-GS), Mighty Mini!

Methodology & Results

Testing Power Supplies I generally put them to heavy use for several days to break them in a bit. During actual testing I run the machine a couple of hours gaming to get everything heated up. If I’m not running SLI I put in a power-hungry GPU or use one with a physics card behind it. I’m in a nostalgic mood this review so I’m going to break out my Palit 4870X2 dual GPU single card toaster. The pull on the Palit 4870×2 is heavy by today’s standards and should provide a good load on the power supply. I Run for a couple of hours, then drop back to an Idle and test the PSU. After Idle testing I load it as heavy as I can get it within reason then test it at load.

I Measure the 12v, 3.3v and 5v rails on all PSU, I measure the heat exhaust using an infra-red thermometer. If there’s any real noise from the fan I measure that with a Decibel meter but that reading is influenced by chassis noises other than PSU. I test the Rails cold using a dedicated power supply tester but don’t lend much credence to any tester that simulates load.  I run all tests a minimum of 5 times. I take the best score and the worst score and ignore them leaving the three median scores and report the average of the three median runs. If I get an out of range score on a test run (something obviously hinkey) I throw out the anomalous score and re-run the test.

Test Rig

Testing Results

Power Consumption Measured at wall with a KillAWatt Device.

As the chart indicates the SilverStone Silver Strider is well within the 3% tolerance set forth in it’s specifications and truth be known I retested this power supply 9 times in different conditions ranging from 40° F night-time desert temperatures, to normal room temperatures and finally heated a walk in closet to 90° F and tested it there. It was amazing to see such little variance in the power supplies Rails given the range of temperatures I tested at.  Most of the scores ranged in the 1 to 2% range no matter the load or external temperature.

Thermal Reading

I took the thermal reading after loading the SilverStone Silver Strider 750W PSU for an hour, then retested at the two-hour mark and once again at the three-hour mark. I ran the system as hard as possible with Crysis running a looping macro in a scene fulled with enemy action for 3 hours. I added a 4870 single GPU card to the Palit 4870×2 to warm it up good and that should be representative of the worst case load on this class PSU. The thermal reading came in at 42.5° C or about 108° F. Typically the more efficient the PSU the lower the thermal output so true to form the 80 Plus Gold rating on the SIlverStone Strider is helping keep it nice and cool. Keep in mind that there are more fans running in the Corsair Obsidian 800D than typically found in a Wind Farm so your reading may run a little higher.

Noise Output

At the very worst my decibel meter registered a 33.2 dBA for those that don’t speak dBA that’s the desert at night when it’s totally quiet. A whisper quiet library environment is a good description. In short the SilverStone Strider 750W power supply was whisper quiet as is the entire test rig.