Thermaltake Silent Purepower 480 Watt
Sep 14th, 2004 | By Archive
Thermaltake Silent Purepower 480 Watt
Date
: 09/15/04 – 01:13:33 AM
Author
:
Category
: Power Supplies
Page 1 : Introduction
Manufacturer
: Thermaltake
Price
: ~$56.00 Street
Continuing our look at power supplies this time we have a one from Thermaltake. Learning of Thermaltake's short presence in the computer parts industry might be a surprise to some, considering the quality of the products they continually release. Believe it or not, Thermaltake was formed in 1999. The following year in 2000, they put a spin (no pun intended) on the heatsink industry with the world's first turbine CPU cooler, the Golden Orb. Despite their short presence in the computer parts industry, they continue to distribute quality, mostly affordable, products to the consumer market. Today we will take the Silent Pure Power 480watt Power Supply on a run for it's money.
Page 2 : Package
The power supply arrived in good time as always from Newegg in a beautiful brown FedEx box filled with those fun packing peanuts! Yay! Err, anyway, now to the goods . . .
The box:
Included in this package you get:
- The power supply
- PCI Slot fan speed controller
- 5.25" bay fan speed controller
- Several adapters
All the stuff!
The 5.25" bay fan controller.
The pci fan controller.
Some nice closeups:
The front of the power supply.
The bottom of the PSU
The back of the power supply.
That is a lot of wires. And so long! I measured these things and they are running about 3 feet 8 inches long.
Now a look inside the PSU:
Here is a little better look inside. You can see the two fans for this power supply. One of which is a normal 80mm that is mounted inside the PSU, the other is a slimmer 80mm to fit on the inside of the top without chopping your wires as it spins :) .
When the top is on, the fan lines up perfectly to provide nice airflow over these heatsinks.
Page 3 : Specifications
From Thermaltake:
Order of values is +5v / -5V / +12V / -12V / +3.3V / +5VSB
Max Load: 40A / 0.3A / 18A / 0.8A / 30A / 2A
Min Load: 1.5A / 0A / 0.2A / 0A / 0.3A / 0A
Load Reg.: +-5% / +-10% / +-5% / +-10% / +-5% / +-5%
Ripple V(p-p): 50mV / 100mV / 120mV / 120mV / 50mV / 50mV
Input
Input Voltage Range: 100-240 Vrms
Input Frequency Range: 47-63Hz
Input Current: 8.0A
Hold-up Time: >16ms at Foll Load
Efficiency: >65%
Detailed Specification
Maximum Power: 480 Watts
Switches: ATX Logic on-off additional power rocker switch
Color: Black or Silver
Fan: Dual fans, 80mm Ball Bearing, auto or manual temperature control (1300rpm at 25C ~ 4800rpm at 90C)
P.G. Signal: 100-500ms
Over Voltage Protection recycle AC to reset:
-> +5v trip point ~ +6.8V
-> +3.3V trip point ~ +4.5V
-> +12V trip point ~ +15.6V
Dimension: 15cm(L)x14cm(W)x8.6cm(H)
Weight: 2.5kg
Page 4 : Installation
Installation is pretty straight forward of a power supply. You simply pull the old one you had in your case out, and put the new one in. You can then proceed to plug in the necessary accessories, the +12v into your motherboard as well as the ATX plug, and you are good to go!
The PSU installed in my case.
But the question here is what to do with all these extra wires?!
Wires, trying to hide.
You simply tuck them away :)
Now with the PSU wires tucked away things look a little better. Don't make fun of my case clutter :) My cat, Smokey, also likes the PSU's wires out.
Page 5 : Benchmarking
Next up is to see how this baby performs out of the box, then under different scenarios. So without furthuer adue, the test cases:
Case #1 – Powered On, No Motherboard
Case #2 – Motherboard + 12V Aux + Water Pump
Case #3 – Case #2 + 80mm Fan
Case #4 – Case #3 + 2x80mm Fans (Total of 3 80mm Fans)
Case #5 – Case #4 + 1 Hard Drive
Case #6 – All components Idle
Case #7 – All compontents Full Load
The test system used was my desktop:
MSI K7N2 Delta-L
AMD Athlon XP-M 2500 @ 2.5ghz
1x512mb Crucial PC2700 DDR @ 350mhz
Western Digital 40gb HDD
Western Digital 80gb HDD
1xCDRW, 1xCDROM
Thermaltake Aquarius II Watercooling
3x80mm fans (Including the radiator fan)
Results:
The results clearly show that this power supply can hang in there showing only a 0.02v differences in our tests directly from the 12v rail. The BIOS however shows a different story reporting as much as a 0.05v difference in the 12v rail. The 5v rail showed us only a 0.01v margin directly from the rail, and a 0.02 difference in the BIOS. The 3.3v also played nicely with as much as a 0.04v variance in its output.
By using automatic fan speed adjustment, the power supply ranged anywhere in sound from a quiet hum to a medium roar depending on how hot it was inside it's encasement. By using the manual fan adjustments included, you can have more control over the sound and of course the temperature as well.
Page 6 : Conclusion
Thermaltake has been able to please both the enthusiast and the bargain buyer with their Thermaltake Silent Purepower series of power supplies. Some things that keep it in the running are the built in temperature control (to help keep the PSU quiet), a decent internal design, and plenty of connectors.
Some things weren't so great. One being the fact that it does get quite noisy when those two fans decide your power supply is too warm and run full speed ahead. Of course you could fix this with the manual control, but be weary, because when they crank up it's for a reason. The lack of wire management may cause some problems. Some other companies are starting to include some wire management already on your power supply which leaves this power supply behind somewhat. Some other companies like Ultra, are providing alternate solutions with the ability to choose which connectors you need hooked up. A perfect example of this is the XConnect Power Supply.
This power supply boasts things that get marked in the win column, as well as some marks that don't make it too appetizing. With the current innovations in power supplies which make them stand out, power supplies like the Thermaltake Silent Purepower series are starting to lose the edge on the market. However, for a quality budget power supply your search can end with this series from Thermaltake.
Advantages
- Temperature control
Disadvantages
- No wire management
- Fairly noisy with fans @ full rpm