PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750W
An Editor's Choice defends its crown

An Editor's Choice winner from our first PSU round-up with The Beast, PC Power & Cooling's Silencer 750W has been our favorite high-end power supply for the better part of 10 months now. The Silencer delivers near-perfect power, and plenty of it, with low noise levels and high efficiency, making it a good benchmark for the new PSUs we're looking at today.

The Silencer may not be the freshest model of the bunch, but it still looks to be a competitive option. A five-year warranty gets the Silencer off to a good start right out of the gate, and its $140 street price is really quite reasonable for a PSU that used to command upwards of $170.

Aside from its brilliant red paint job, the Silencer looks like pretty standard fare. A relatively small 80mm fan mounted at the rear takes care of cooling, and it works surprisingly well for the size.

Under the hood, the Silencer is anything but a traditional design. Rather than splitting 12V power between multiple rails, PC Power & Cooling uses a single, massive 12V rail with an impressive 60A output capacity.

Although delivered voltages are a little on the low side, particularly for the 5 and 12V lines, they barely waver as the load climbs from 25 to 100%. The Silencer's DC voltages are all within less than 2% of their target values across the board.

This plot looks curiously similar to what we saw with the OCZ EliteXStream just a few pages back. AC ripple is incredibly consistent across the board.

We've seen a few PSUs in this round-up hit higher efficiencies than the Silencer at lower load levels, but few can match its 82% efficiency when pushed to the brink.