900W to 1100W PSU Group Test

Silver Power SP-1000E

Supplied Connectors

• One 50cm black braided 24-pin ATX cable;
  
• Two 55cm 6-pin black braided PCI-Express cables;
  
• Two 55cm 6+2-pin black braided PCI-Express cables;
  
• One 55cm 8-pin black braided 12V cable;
  
• One 55cm 4-pin black braided 12V cable;
  
• One black braided cable with three Molex plugs: first plug 50cm, third plug 80cm;
  
• One black braided cable with two SATA plugs: first plug 50cm, second plug 65cm;
  
• One black braided cable with two SATA plugs: first plug 55cm, second plug 70cm;
  
• One black braided cable with three Molex plugs: first plug 55cm, third plug 85cm;
  
• One black braided cable with one Molex and two floppy plugs: first plug 55cm, third plug 85cm;

Four SATA connectors? C'mon guys, you can do better than that! This is a thousand watts of power for just four SATA devices? The connectors are all black, so they blend into the background a little easier but it does make differentiation harder. None of them have any extra EMI shielding like the Tagan has on its PCI-Express and 12V connectors, but there are 6+2-pin and 6-pin PCI-Express connectors supplied, unlike the Tagan, meaning it supports a pair of AMD's Radeon HD 2900 XTs in CrossFire as well as future PCI-Express 2.0 cards.

The separate 4-pin and 8-pin 12V connectors are good for server boards, but it makes hiding the extra cable in a consumer system require a little more effort to avoid cable mess. The floppy connectors should be on an extra adapter cable as well, rather than strung two on the end of one of the cables.


The cables vary slightly in length, and they are sleeved in bundles only up to within 5cm of the unit itself, rather than properly separated and sleeved up all the way inside. It's a little messy to say the least, but it's still better than having nothing at all.

The unit has an all over plain black design with a single 80x80x25mm fan in the rear than uses a black fan grill. In that respect it's similar to the Seasonic, but it has a honeycomb grill rather than just parallel slits. A single PCB is used internally and even the heatsinks are black, but they aren't as large as what the Seasonic uses.

Along the side there are four little variable POT resistors allowing you to tweak the rails in the unit. Unfortunately there's no actual indication which is which, what way to turn them or how far you should go before you cause damage, so it's probably best to leave them alone.

Testing

The SilverPower is an extremely quiet PSU under nominal 50 to 75 percent load, however, just like the Seasonic as it hits 100 percent load it gets noticeably louder. For a single 80mm fan it shifts a lot of air and works really well; the air temperature was 32.8°C and PSU surface temperature was a respectable 39°C.