Silencer 750 Quad is a 750 W power supply from PC Power & Cooling featuring a single +12 V rail, four auxiliary PCI Express power cables for video cards, active PFC, efficiency above 80% and the very traditional ATX looks, with a small 80-mm fan on the rear side. The manufacturer promises that this unit can deliver its labeled power at 40º C and has a maximum peak power of 825 W. Sounds promising, but can this unit really deliver 750 W? Let’s see.
What is really interesting about PC Power & Cooling is they test each unit individually at a Chroma 8000 load tester and include the report generated for the unit you bought inside the product box, as you can see on Figure 3.
It is available in two colors, red or black. The red version is also known as “CrossFire Edition”.
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Figure 1: PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750 Quad power supply.
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Figure 2: PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750 Quad power supply.
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Figure 3: Individual Chroma 800 report that came with the reviewed unit.
According to the report that came with our unit it could deliver 85% efficiency at full load and 830 W peak power. Of course we will see how much this unit will deliver under our own tests.
As we mentioned this power supply uses a regular 80-mm fan on its rear instead of a 120-mm or bigger fan on its bottom. This fan was surprisingly quiet during our tests and we could only hear it working when the unit was delivering its full 750 W (more about this later).
This power supply has active PFC, which provides a better usage of the power grid and allowing PC Power & Cooling to sell this product in Europe (read more about PFC on our Power Supply Tutorial). PC Power & Cooling says that this product has 83% efficiency. The higher the efficiency the better – an 80% efficiency means that 80% of the power pulled from the power grid will be converted in power on the power supply outputs and only 20% will be wasted. This translates into less consumption from the power grid (as less power needs to be pulled in order to generate the same amount of power on its outputs), meaning lower electricity bills.
The main motherboard cable uses a 24-pin connector (no support for 20-pin motherboards) and this power supply has one ATX12V connector and one EPS12V connector.
This power supply comes with nine peripheral power cables: two 6-pin auxiliary power cables for video cards, two 6/8-pin auxiliary power cables for video cards, two cables containing three standard peripheral power connectors each, one cable containing two standard peripheral power connectors and one floppy disk drive power connector and two cables with three SATA power connectors each.
The number of connectors provided by this power supply is adequate for a power supply from this range, but very high-end users may find that the number of SATA power connectors provided by this unit is not enough for their ultra high-end systems, especially now with optical drives also coming with SATA power connectors. It is always good to remind that you can convert any standard peripheral power plug into a SATA power plug using adaptors (that don’t come with the power supply) and since this unit has eight standard peripheral power connectors the number of available connectors shouldn’t be an issue. We were only talking about the convenience of having more SATA power plugs without needing to use adaptors.
On this power supply all wires are 18 AWG, which is ok, even though we personally prefer to see some 16 AWG wires being used on power supplies from this range.
On the aesthetic side PC Power & Cooling used nylon sleevings on all cables, coming from inside the power supply housing.
Let’s now take an in-depth look inside this power supply.
