For our first installment of “Item of the Week” we have a PC Power & Cooling (henceforth, PCPC) Silencer 750 watt power supply. I bought this sucker to replace my Silverstone Zues, mainly because I wanted to have a single-rail system with enough power to drive single-GPU rigs for some time coming.

The PCPC Silencer fit the bill and for a mere $91 (after MIR and promo code) at Newegg, who could beat the deal?

Specs

It seems appropriate to start off with the specs, just to bring you upt to speed on what we are dealing with.

Amperage output:

PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750

+5V @ 30A
+12V @ 60A
-12V @ 0.8A
+3.3V @ 24A
+5VSB @ 3A

Cooling:

22 – 55 CFM ball-bearing fan

Connectors:

24-pin, 8-pin, 4-pin, two 6-pin PCI-E, and two 6/8-pin PCI-E mainboard connectors
17 drive connectors (8 SATA, 8 Molex, 1 mini)

Installation

Installation was a breeze… pretty standard stuff. The biggest pain was removing the old PSU and putting this one in because I had to take off my giant 120mm heatsink. Other then that, it was basic plugging everything in and hiding cables.

I will say one thing, this PSU is heavy. If you are trying to build a light case, this may not be the best choice of PSUs. It is a sturdy build and feels rock solid, but just weighs quite a bit.

Additionally, there is a lot of extra cabling. It comes with so many PCI-E and Molex connectors, its quite a chore to hide them all. These come in hand when you are hooking up several fans but with SATA drives being pretty standard these days, there is really no need for so many molex connectors.

Noise

As far as noise is concerned, when they say Silencer, they really do mean it. This thing pumps out a fair amount of air with very little noise. Until the fan on my GPU kicks in, my computer is very quiet. My Silverstone tended to be fairly loud, but the PCPC is quiet and only kicks the fan up when it needs to, thanks to an onboard automatic fan controller. I am not a fan of these automatic controllers but this seems to work just fine.

Other thoughts

The best part of this deal was certainly the price. This should be a $200 PSU but it was gotten for only $91. It was a damn good deal as far as bang for the buck is concerned and should power anything I can throw at it for a long time.

BIOS recognized all the voltages as reading out fine. I didn’t check it with a DMM but 12v registered at 11.96v, the 3.3v registered at 3.3v, and the 5v registered at 4.93v.

Conclusion

If you are in the market for a new PSU and don’t know where to plop down your hard-earned loot, this is where you want to be. It’s modestly priced and good for a low to mid-range system. I am definitly glad I made the purchase.