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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?

Overview

The first thing we are going to look at with the SilverStone Olympia 1000w is its packaging, accessories, and documentation. While normally none of these items is a make or break item for a power supply the packaging quite often contains a lot of information about the product we are purchasing. The inclusion of an owner’s manual that provides actual information about our product is also of great help. Accessories are almost unnecessary with a power supply as the unit is self contained, unless it is modular, but there cases where a manufacturer can include useful accessories to make installation, routing and use more efficient.

The packaging of the Olympia 1000w is on the bigger side of what we typically see but as we will see in a few minutes it takes a big box to house a lot of power. The box itself carries a decent amount of information in relation to other power supplies we have seen to date. Included in this information is the power label (though the one on the box is a bit abbreviated compared to what we will break down below), fair amounts of marketing speak, and interestingly a breakdown of sound output levels at various loads. This is the first time that we have seen a manufacturer put this information right on the box in such detailed quantifiable terms.

Also seen on the box is the advertisement that the unit is rated at 50c, a definite plus if true given our load testing is done at 45c. We also find that the unit is equipped with "Quad 6 pin PCI-Express" connectors and "Dual 8 pin PCI-Express" connectors but strangely the packaging lacks any mention of SLI or Crossfire certification that would seem to accompany such an arrangement of connectors. On the SLI Zone website we do not find the SilverStone Olympia 1000w listed but we do find the OEM listing for the power supply in the Seventeam ST-1000E-AD as being certified for 8800GTX SLI. The ATI Crossfire page however, lists the SilverStone Olympia 1000w as being HD2900XT certified. Whether this certification maze is intentional or not it is an interesting end around to the petty labeling requirements found in the certification process for multi-GPU ready products.

Absent from the packaging, manual, and SilverStone’s product page is mention of warranty length on the unit. Some searching on SilverStone's website finally turns up the following MS Word document that includes the warranty information putting the warranty at 3 years, but it would be nice if SilverStone made some mention somewhere in the packaging of what the warranty is or how to proceed if something goes wrong besides the vague last page of the manual that reads:

To be valid this sheet must be filled out by your salesperson at the time of purchase.

On that note it should be stated that it seems doubtful that Newegg or any other online vendor is going to open your brand new power supply and fill out that page at the back of the user manual that is in the box to satisfy the mysterious warranty requirements that are good for (according to the package, manual, and product page) an unknown amount of time. True, the document from SilverStone's website indicates that a sales receipt is fine or barring that the warranty is extended based on serial number, but this just further magnifies the frustratingly vague and confusing nature of the warranty information provided (or more correctly not provided) with the unit.

The power label gives the impression of a very high-end unit that has 96% of its output capacity available on the 12v rail (there is only one as the ST-1000E-AD it is based on has had its 12v rails Over Current Protection removed and a different output filter fitted to make this unit). This is certainly on the high end of the power supplies we have reviewed and should be capable of running anything a user throws at it that is currently on the market. The remaining power figures are all impressive with a large 5v and 3.3v capacity as well to help spin up those RAID arrays or power system memory. It is nice to see 6 Molex and 6 SATA connectors on this unit though the power label would make it seem that it could in theory run a lot more devices, though not quite as many natively as the Enermax Galaxy DXX. The unit also features 4 6 Pin PCI-Express and 2 8 Pin PCI-Express connectors as was mentioned above good for CrossFire or SLI configurations as your flavor dictates.

Once we open the SilverStone Olympia 1000w packaging we find the usual arrangement of contents. There is the massive Olympia 1000w itself, some screws, user manual, and unique power cord (this is covered in the build section). The user manual is a bit of a mixed bag as while it is only 5 pages long it is jam packed with electrical information, certifications, and minimum loading requirements but lacks any information about the warranty as we discussed above. This omission would not be as bad if the information was easily available elsewhere without some serious digging around (which it is not). Since it is not included in the manual or packaging it is only going to serve to frustrate people at a time when they already are frustrated with a product in the event they need to RMA the unit.