SilenX 400W PSU Review - First Impressions
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I received the package from my typical postal guy, and as has been the case more and more often as of late, the box didn't look like it had participated in the Parcel Olympics. Not bad, considering that anything crossing the US/Canada border normally gets roughly handled by customs. The box contains the typical styrofoam peanuts, and the PSU is wrapped in a plastic bag, in order to keep any small pieces from getting inside it.
My first thought upon pulling it out was "Daing this is heavy!" I've handled a lot of PSUs in my time, but this has got to be the heaviest I've lifted. Do not be mounting this thing to a case that merely uses screws on a backplane to hold it in if you plan on moving it around much. One of the ways I judge the quality of a unit is the weight of it. In this case, it's doubly important that the heatsinks are beefy. In SilenX's desire to have a quiet power supply, they used a single fan configuration. It also is a fairly slow moving one, going from a meagre 600RPM to 1800RPM. That makes this a very low air flow setup, so surface area must make up the difference. Speaking of that fan, it is mounted differently than any other PSU I've dealt with; SilenX used rubber plugs, instead of the typical fan screws. That should help in keeping any vibration down. One problem I noticed with them, however, is that if your case uses a backplate for mounting the PSU, it might be affected by the plugs. They stick out further than normal screws do. I had to acquire longer screws to be able to install the unit correctly.
I would have loved to get pictures of the internals, but by having to use a screw driver of incorrect size (I'm a student! Options are limited!), I managed to strip almost all of the screws holding the casing in place; sufficient to say that they are certainly heavy duty and up to the task. They will still be getting quite hot, but should be able to keep temperatures from getting out of hand.
Connectors
SilenX used an interesting configuration for the connections. Three of the 4pin molex connectors are on strands all to themselves, two share a strand, and the last one has the single floppy connector on it as well. Normally, there are two or three molex connectors on each strand on a typical power supply. The arrangement used here is good for those that have a single hard drive, optical drive, or video card that has a requirement for a molex connector. However, if you run a multi-drive RAID array and multiple optical drives like I do, it's less convenient. Also, there are only six of the 4pin molex connectors in total. Again, for a typical system, that's fine. For one like mine, with three hard drives, two optical drives, two cold cathodes, and six fans (on a baybus however, so they only use one power connector), this is not quite adequate. That's not even taking into account that most high end video cards now require power directly from the PSU, and that not everyone does run a baybus to power the system fans. If you have a high end rig, you would do well to purchase some molex splitters.
In addition, there are no SATA power cables, as are found on many new PSUs. These drives are starting to become common, so I'd like to see more support for them from the power supply manufacturers. The rest of the connectors are quite ordinary: a 20pin ATX, a 6pin AUX (almost never used now), and a 4pin 12V connector. In many power supplies nowadays, the ATX connector has a sleeve on it, but SilenX does not provide one here. It's not going to affect performance, but it's a nice thing for aesthetics and wire management.
One other thing I noticed about the wires was they were short in comparison to my Enermax. A lot of people complain about the extra length and don't know what to do with it. In my case, the extra length is necessary to connect both the ATX and P4 to their respective spots. With the SilenX, I had to use non optimal cable routing. This should not be an issue for anyone that is not running a server case like I am. The cabling should be long enough for any mid or full tower.
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