Date:
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Author:
Paul Johnson
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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SilverStone Olympia 1000w Power Supply

SilverStone Technologies has built an incredibly solid name in the power supply business in just a few years. Today we take one of their flagship 1000 watt units for a spin and see how it fares in our 45C incubator fully loaded. Is your money well spent with SilverStone at the 1 kilowatt mark?

Introduction

SilverStone is a company best known for their high quality cases but their product lines extend into other components such as cooling, power, fans, storage and so on. As a company Silverstone has built up this impressive product repertoire in a very short time having been founded in 2003. Today, however we are interested in their power supplies which are comprised of the Strider, Decathalon, Element, Nightjar, Zeus, Gemini, and Olympia model lines that range from 350w to 1000w DC output. In this review we will be taking our first look at a power supply from SilverStone's well regarded Olympia power supply line in the form of the current flagship SilverStone power supply the Olympia 1000w (OP1000). As a relatively older member of the SilverStone power supply lineup, SilverStone nor its subsidiaries serve as the manufacturer of this particular power supply. Instead SilverStone has partnered with power supply OEM Seventeam in order to bring to market the Olympia 1000w.

Seventeam is a company that has flown under the consumer power supply radar for some time in the US even though they have been making power supplies for close to 20 years. This is for good reason as a quick search of their website shows a large number of server oriented offerings that would not be noticed by most enthusiast consumers.

This product structuring has begun to change recently as a number of Seventeam based power supplies have begun to show up in the US consumer market including the Ultra X-Pro 750w that we recently reviewed. In that outing the Seventeam built X-Pro 750w had a very good showing and hopefully today they will do the same with their partner SilverStone and the Olympia 1000w.

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Olympic Contender?

The SilverStone Olympia 1000w is definitely a power supply that is aimed at the absolute top tier of the power supply market and is a member of the increasingly crowded 1000w club. Beyond that SilverStone is aiming to position the Olympia line as a premier solution for users as is apparent from their product briefing:

For SilverStone, reaching the 1000 watt milestone is another great opportunity to introduce a new direction for performance enthusiast power supplies. The Olympia OP1000 was built to withstand enormous loading requirements of high-end industrial server PCs at above average temperature of 50°C so its ability is unmatched by ordinary power supplies. However, to make this power supply more usable to more enthusiasts, SilverStone engineers altered several parameters such as inclusion of intelligent fan controller that adjust fan speed to run quietly at low to medium load and conversion to a single +12V rail. If the goal is to build a future proof multi-core CPU and GPU system, the OP1000 is a must have with its 80A (88A peak) +12V single rail and 1100W peak power output.

SilverStone certainly has good things to say about the Olympia 1000w including some very impressive specifications, but how much of that is marketing and how much is performance? Today we will find out.

First, let’s see what we have to look forward to when we purchase the SilverStone Olympia 1000w power supply in terms of documentation, accessories, cable count, rail layout, output characteristics, and general build quality.