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PC Power & Cooling Silencer 910 PSU Review

Silence is golden and we have seen before where the sound signature does not fit the moniker in terms of PCP&C's "Silencer" line. Has it changed for the better? Silent or not, PCP&C has a great track record for building excellent computer PSUs.

Overview

The first thing we are going to look at with the PC Power & Cooling Silencer 910 is the 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.

What is this we see today? Real retail packaging from PC Power & Cooling? No more boxes that make me want to send back my old PSU so I can avoid a core charge? Well that is a first for us looking at unit from PC Power & Cooling. So let's see what we have here now that the shock is wearing off a bit. As we would expect we see a lot of advertising points of various accuracy, an SLI certification stamp, 80Plus logo, some basic electrical specifications, and an advertisement for a 5 year warranty. A quick check of the SLIZone website does not currently turn up the Silencer 910 as being certified for any level of SLI even though the unit has been out for a while now. The 80Plus website however does have the unit listed as being certified for 80Plus Silver which is excellent for such a powerful unit. Lastly, the unit is covered by a 5 year warranty which is good, but short of the 7 year warranty on the Turbo-Cool's and the lifetime warranties that other companies offer.

The power label for the Silencer 910 indicates that it has 74A available on the 12v rail which is ~97.5% of the unit’s possible output. This represents a rather significant bump from the most recent Turbo-Cool we reviewed, the Turbo-Cool 860, which only has 64A available on the 12v rail (or ~89% of the unit’s possible total output). This healthy bump is very helpful as most modern systems draw the vast majority of its power from the 12v rail. To match this impressive 12v output the unit features a healthy dose of connectors including two 6-pin PCI-Express connectors, two modified 8-pin PCI-Express connectors, twelve SATA connectors, and seven Molex connectors. The minor rails are capped at ~150W but even if a user used all twelve SATA connectors for a disk array they are not going to be pulling that much power on a consistent basis so this unit seems well suited towards our modern high end enthusiast system needs.

Once we open the PC Power & Cooling Silencer 910 we find the unit, power cord, test report, and wait....is that...yes it is...a manual! Let's just move right on to that since this is the first time we have ever gotten a manual with a PC Power & Cooling unit. Once we crack that manual open we find that it contains the majority of the electrical specifications, a wiring diagram, installation instructions, warranty information, efficiency graph, and a section on noise output. That section states that the unit is only going to produce 24 dBA during "normal" operation and 38 dBA during "ultra-demanding applications." Given our previous experience with PC Power & Cooling units that sounds more like wishful thinking than anything else, but we will see what this sounds like later. For now, let’s move on to the interior of the unit.