Nice article on fanless/quiet power supplies

[korben_dallas]

http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20050401/index.html

"In reckoning the usability of these devices, note further that in more normal modes of operating - such as running typical office applications, or surfing the Web - these units remain stable (and quiet) for days on end. But those users who want to.. encode video data for hours on end will not be happy when their machines shut down after an hour or so of full-tilt use. In those situations, the Antec Phantom 350 and the Silverstone SST-ST30NF just won't cut it. Elan Vital's Greenerger SSM and Epower's Lion 450 hold up even during heavy use. But that's because neither device uses purely passive cooling. At normal half-power operations (250 watts for the Greenerger, and 225 watts for the Lion) neither unit made any noise. Only at high loads do the fans turn on, and they're never loud enough to be objectionable. This lets users count on relatively quiet hardware that keeps running even at heavy loads."


I'll stick by my Enermax Noisetaker 485w.. it's super duper quiet for Saging.. and can sustain 3d games and video transcoding for hours on end.

[something fishy]

I don't want to take this off topic but another vote for the Enermax noisetaker (mines a 375 watt version); inaudible from more than 12 inches (driving a 2 GHz P4, 6600GT, PVR350, PVR250, a HDD controller card, 3 HDDs and an Audiotrak prodigy 7.1LT). Plus I just replaced replaced the fans in an old Enermax "silent" psu with nexus ones for use in a Sage client, it was never really silent in the past but is now.

Cheers
Eric

[salsbst]

Anybody know of a *quiet to very quiet* 2U or 3U rackmount form factor power supply that can pump out at least 600W?