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PC Power & Cooling (PCPC) is somewhat legendary in PC enthusiast annals, especially in its native USA. Known for their top-notch build quality and rock-solid reliability, its power supplies have always demanded a premium price. However, with it available for just £60, the Silencer 500W bucks the latter of these trends. Let's just hope the drop in cost hasn't been accompanied by a drop in quality.

Straight away, this unit has a more industrial feel to it than many of the other PSUs, with thicker steel sheeting used to construct its chassis and a plain tough matte black paint job. Oddly, though, PCPC has equipped the Silencer with a 75mm fan rather than a more common 120mm fan. This adds to the old-school industrial feel further and may be a look that actually appeals to some.

Like all the other 500W models on test, this isn't a modular PSU but unlike all the other PSUs it doesn't have completely braided cables. There's braiding from the PSU to the first connector of each cable, but beyond that there is no further braiding. Although this is by no means a huge problem, it does make the cables more prone to becoming entangled and also looks a bit less snazzy. As well as the lack of braiding the Molex connectors are white, rather than black, and more importantly aren't of the quick release variety like those on all the other power supplies we've tested today.

As for cable lengths, the motherboard cable is 55cm, as are the four and eight-pin axuilliary 12V cables. One of the PCI-E cables has a six-pin plug and is 55cm long, while the other is 60cm long and has a 6+2 pin plug. There are two cables each with three SATA connectors; one is 75cm long and the other is 85cm. Finishing off the set are two 85cm cables, the first of which has three Molex and one floppy drive connector while the other cable has three Molex. This amounts to a fairly average selection that should be suitable for most average case sizes and for systems with only one high-end graphics card.


So, all told this PSU doesn't win us over with its extra features, but can it come good where PCPC has traditionally been strongest - performance? Well, given that all the PSUs in this roundup passed our stress tests without incident there's not much the Silencer can do to distinguish itself in this regard. It would seem PSUs are just better nowadays so stress testing is more a formality than the be all and end all.

The only possible thing left to save the Silencer is its noise performance, but here is where it really falls flat on its face. Idle noise is a perfectly acceptable 36dB, but when under load that little fan really struggles and the noise shot up to 63dB - a level that was certainly a rival for our graphics card.

Verdict

PC Power & Cooling may have an enviable reputation for quality and certainly in this regard we can't fault the Silencer 500W. However, on every other level - noise, accessories, cable arrangement - it falls far short of the competition.

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