Power Supply

Our first experience with Silverstone was the ST65ZF Zeus Power supply which we used last summer. Over last 6 months, we subjected the PSU to more real-world and stress-test conditions, and bumped the ST65ZF's Bull's Eye Award to a full fledged Editor's Choice Award. To put that into perspective, the only PSUs that have been awarded the Editor's Choice award are the PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool SLI 510, the Silverstone ST65ZF Zeus, and the Seasonic S12-500.

For this system, we wanted to try another Silverstone PSU. We know that PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool PSUs are the gold-standard, but we want to find cheaper alternatives. The Silverstone Zeus ST65ZF proved to be a good alternative as a workstation power supply. This time, because we wanted something quieter, we went with the Silverstone ST56F.

This is a 560W power supply with a single 120mm fan. The unique feature is that it is more than 80% efficient, much like the Seasonic S12's that we've enjoyed using. This means that there is less heat production and less waste of electricity. Importantly, the Silverstone ST56F isn't a re-badged Seasonic. It's manufactured by the same factory that produces the Silverstone Zeus ST65ZF so we anticipate very good long-term stability with this PSU. It's not that much cheaper than the ST65ZF, but it certainly is quieter.

Silverstone Strider ST56F
$125 – http://www.silverstonetek.com

Summary

The total cost for this machine? $2545 in core hardware components. Add another $50 for a DVD burner, $100 for a licensed copy of Windows, and another $100 for a high-end keyboard/mouse combo and you’re looking at $2800 for a machine. Clearly, our money went into the terabyte of storage in two Hitachi 500GB drives, the stunning Silverstone Temjin TJ-07 case, and the ASUS EN7800GT TOP Silent, the fastest passive cooled GPU in the world. We’ve hardly gone for the best value products in this machine, but there’s no doubt that the quiet, yet exceptionally fast and robust system has been a pleasure to use.

These system builds are starting to get fairly repetitive and boring because it seems like the products with the proven track records are the components we end up selecting time and time again. It’s been more than 2 years since we’ve ever recommended an Intel CPU for a gaming machine, a workstation or server. The AMD64 platform with NVIDIA core logic has been such a reliable combination that with the exception of Pentium M and Core Duo, the only reason to buy Intel is if you’re participating in some sort of promotional discount form Dell or if you’re looking at a notebook. When it comes to motherboards, we’ve pretty much stuck with the top tier brands only, ASUS and DFI at the high-end, MSI and Abit for the mid-range, and Tyan for the enterprise/workstation technology. Corsair and OCZ continue to be our top two picks for memory, with Corsair tending to be our more conservative pick. It’s probably our bias, but then again – if it works and it’s not more expensive, why not? Hard drives have ended up with the 10,000 rpm Raptor taking the high-end, and the Hitachi T7K250 taking the 7200 rpm segment. Sure there are Caviar RE2’s or silent Seagate drives that are also useful products, but it’s hard to ignore the bang-for-the-buck that the T7K250 offers. The 7K500s we used in this article let you achieve terabyte-capacity without compromising system thermal management by having too many drives. Optical drives are so close in performance today, that it’s not really worth reviewing them anymore. Even the video card market seems to fall into place. The decision between NVIDIA and ATI continues to be a personal choice, but unless you’re going for ASUS’s Silent solutions, most GPUs end up being very similar. For power supplies, we’ve now identified several good choices ranging from 500 to 650W; the Seasonic S12-500, the SilverStone Strider ST56F, the PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool 510-SLI, and the SilverStone Zeus ST65ZF. Pick any of these four and you’ll be fine.