Page 2 - Physical Look - Outside
The back of the subtle, black matte finish PC Power & Cooling Silencer 610W power supply unit is occupied primarily by a 80mm exhaust fan, behind a screw-attached metal grill. Standard power supply on/off switch and male connector for power input is located to the right of the exhaust fan; which is nothing that the user will be unfamiliar with. Like many new power supplies, the Silencer 610W utilizes automatic voltage selection for AC power input; so there's no voltage selection switch to worry about in this case.
There's no intake fan located at the back of the PC Power & Cooling Silencer 610W -- making this power supply a single 80mm fan unit. Cable leadouts are done very cleanly along the left side of the power supply; the batch is zip-tied together a few centimeters leading out of the power supply. The cables are sleeved up until this point. A two-layer array of slits are cut vertically into the power supply along the back to retain a degree of airflow into the unit itself, since there's no fan installed at the back.
A side view of the PC Power & Cooling Silencer 610W power supply. As you can see in the photo above, the design of the unit is at least several centimeters longer than standard power supplies. The manufacturer posted on their website that the reason behind this is to allow some room between the exhaust fan and internal components to reduce air turbulence noise. We'll take a look at that in the next couple of sections.
Meanwhile, on this side of the power supply is a series of attached labels -- device serial number, bar code, revision number, as well as a couple of certification stickers -- including a SLI certified label for those who's interested.
The other side of the Silencer 610W power supply is quite plain -- no labels, nothing. There's only a grill near the bottom to vent some air around the ferrite coils; where two can be seen clearly through the grill perpendicular to each other.
At the top of the power supply is the rail information label, along with more certification logos printed on top. As you can see in our photo above, the PCP&C Silencer 610W pulls 24A out of the +3.3V rail, 30A out of the +5V rail and 49A out of the +12V rail. That's an actual single +12V rail, which is quite unique and seen on many PCP&C power supplies.
Having a single rail has its advantages in comparison to multi-rail designs. Typically speaking, a single rail reduces the overhead of multi-rail designs by delivering all the necessary power over one single rail and that's that. There's no worries about how multi-rails require specific components to pull power out of one rail instead of another, because another has been shared and does not deliver enough to power up a single power hungry component.
Power delivered on each rail, according to manufacturer (Calculated) - Ignoring significant digits:
Power = Current * Voltage; P=IV
24A * 3.3V = 79.2W
30A * 5V = 150W
Combined (Shared) maximum power between 3.3V and 5V: 170W
49A * 12V = 588W
Total (Combined) power across all rails, continuous: 610W
Peak power: 670W
The high peak power comes in handy. This is especially important when certain configurations such as large arrays of hard disks in a computer will require a large amount of power to startup; and will stabilize in electricity usage shortly afterwards -- which is greatly less than the amount required for the initial power up.
- Molex: 8 Connectors
1x 20” (2 connectors)
2x 36” (3 connector)
- SATA: 6 Connectors
2x 31” length (3 connectors each)
- PCI-E 6+2 Pin: 1 Connector
1x 22 ½” length
- PCI-E 6 Pin: 1 Connector
1x 22 ½” length
- 4-Pin Floppy: 1 Connector
1x 27” length (at end of 20” molex cable)
- 20+4 ATX Connector: 20” length
- 8 Pin CPU connector: 19” length
- 4 Pin CPU connector: 20” length
The cables are actually all decently long. All cables reach their intended location even in my Antec P182 -- where the power supply is located at the bottom of the chassis. I had to install the power supply upside down into the case so the lead out cables are on the right to run it along the back of the motherboard for the ATX 4-pin/EPS 8-pin power connector to reach the motherboard at the top, but other than that it all works out.
I found the Molex connector cable configuration a bit weird for connecting two IDE devices quite a distance apart from each other inside the case (One optical drive and one hard drive), but other than that I have no complaints in this regard.
The Silencer 610W's cables are sleeved only up to the first connector in each chain, meaning that a single Molex chain with multiple connectors will result in the ones after the initial to have the red, yellow, and black cables to be fully exposed. While this is does not impact on anything but looks, we would certainly appreciate it if all cables are fully sleeved.
A couple of PCIe 6-pin connectors are available on board the Silencer 610W for multi-GPU configurations; one of the connectors is a 6+2 for graphics card requiring an 8-pin PCIe power input.
The cables used with the PC Power & Cooling Silencer 610W uses relatively thicker 18 AWG cables, which is adequate for power supplies in this power category.
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. Physical Look - Outside
3. Physical Look - Inside
4. Minor Tests and Conclusion
