The SilverStone Strider Gold S 1500W PSU Review
by E. Fylladitakis on April 7, 2015 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
- PSUs
- SilverStone
- 1500W
Conclusion
The Strider Gold S 1500W may not be the most advanced but it is the most powerful PSU SilverStone currently offers. SilverStone is a company that designs and produces many non-standard cases for HTPC and SFF systems, therefore having a PSU with massive external proportions in their product ranks would not offer the correct synergy. The ST1500-GS is "only" 180mm long - longer than a standard ATX PSU but much more compact than the majority of equally powerful units. However, compactness alone is not enough to win in this segment of the market. Such power is unnecessary for typical HTPC, living room gaming and SFF systems. Virtually no enthusiast would purchase a 1.5kW unit for its external proportions alone and an extremely small number of users would even attempt to compress a system that requires this level of power inside a small chassis.
Regardless of its proportions, the ST1500-GS does match the competition in both quality and performance. The designer of this unit did an outstanding job with the layout, creating a compact and yet a very clean and powerful platform. Despite its relatively small size, they do not cut corners by removing filtering components or using smaller heatsinks. The only exception is the lack of an on/off switch, which would be of considerable size in order to hold such a large input current and apparently the designer decided not to install one at all. SilverStone is using high quality components as well, all coming from very reputable manufacturers. Albeit crude, the assembly quality certainly has room for improvement but it does not cause reliability concerns. Strangely, the warranty period of this unit is, at the very least, unclear. There is no mention of the warranty length on the box or in the web page of the PSU. Only the manual mentions, "Most SilverStone PSUs are covered by a 3 year warranty. For some models the warranty may vary from 1 to 5 years (North America) or 2 to 5 years (EU)". The warranty period should be clearly mentioned on the packaging and online.
In terms of performance, the ST1500-GS does not break any records but does very good overall. It is strange that SilverStone rates this unit for operation at 40°C, as it proved capable of delivering its promised power and performance at much higher temperatures without issues. Most likely, SilverStone is playing it safe, as the power output of this PSU is massive, its proportions are compact and some people may actually install it inside a case not exactly suitable for such monstrous systems. The energy conversion efficiency is good and resists high temperatures well, while the power quality remains excellent even when the internal temperatures of the PSU are very high. As the company promises, the ST1500-GS is also fairly quiet - at least while it is not heavily loaded. This should please the majority of the users, as everyone want their systems to be comfortable when performing casual tasks, such as web browsing or watching a movie, but few would even notice the noise of the system while gaming.
In conclusion, the SilverStone Strider Gold S 1500W is not only compact but also is a high quality PSU that performs very well overall. The ST1500-GS has only one true enemy - its own price tag. With a retail price of $350 including shipping at the time of this review, it is one of the most expensive consumer PSUs in existence. There are several other high performance 1500W PSUs that are considerably cheaper and excellent 1200W PSUs may be purchased for nearly half the price. Even though it truly is a very good product, the price tag of the Strider Gold S 1500W PSU is unquestionably going to limit its sales.
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malkolm - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
Maybe i missed it, but what about security features like OCP and so on?From the "power specifications" on page 1 i would asume the PSU to be a multi-rail device, of course. But is it truly a two-rail design or is it split even more?
DanNeely - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
I'm curious why your full load test pulled so much current on the 3.3/5V rails. You've got them both over 90% individually; but only have the 12v rail at 78% load. Any realistic load near the full output would be skewed much more heavily toward maxing out 12V. On the mobo, USB ports are the only significant user of +5V; and I don't think there're any major users of 3.3V at all. (PCIe cards are allowed to draw upto 10W of it; but AFAIK the only ones that did were transitional models that combined an existing legacy-PCI design with a bridge chip.)More troubling is that you're drawing a total of 193W of 3.3/5V power but the PSU is only rated to give 150W combined on those rails. While it obviously didn't cause anything to fail or go out of spec; but going nearly 30% out of spec is troubling. The only justification for doing so deliberately that I can think of is if your tester couldn't go above 110A on the 12V rail; although in that case I think it should've been called out explicitly in the article.
E.Fyll - Thursday, April 16, 2015 - link
Actually, I have a much better justification for that.The only official testing procedures that exist, which are given in the methodology article, result to these minimum loads. If you had checked this article, you would see that my tester can go up to 240A on the 12V alone anyway.
I cannot lower the load to the 3.3V/5V buses without inventing my own testing methodology, in which case I would be rendering all comparisons between reviews useless and misleading. This is a general problem with very high output PSUs, the specifications go down the drain and fail to meet even basic certification standards, all in the name of massive power output. Perhaps I will consider "circumventing" this issue in my future reviews by forcing a divider once the load exceeds 1000W.
Pissedoffyouth - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
Is there any hardware which could even use this amount of power?Let's say some OC'd 8 core Intel i7 or dual CPU 18 core xeons, 4x crossfired 7990s under full mining load with a 8 drive raid 5 15k RPM SAS setup, let's add some hardcore water cooling and every device in the house charging off USB.
Would this even push a kilowatt?
MobiusPizza - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
The only case you are even anywhere close to using >1kW is with quad SLI/Crossfire and top end GPUs.DanNeely - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
Even without overclocking even a 3 GPU system could exceed 1kw. There've been cards with rated TDPs of at least 300W; IIRC seeing 375 for something but that might've been a 3rd party dual GPU card not an official design since IIRC the PCIe spec tops at 300W.4x300W cards is 1200W, add an overclocked CPU fast ram and all the other odds and ends in a case and you could hit >1400W easily enough. (According to CPUz, my 4790k hit 145-150W at 4.7ghz with 32gb of DDR3-2400 ram under some prime95 FMA stress testing loads.)
3DVagabond - Saturday, April 11, 2015 - link
Try and get a quad sli/crossfire setup to load all 4 gpu's 100%. Not going to happen.hammer256 - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
4x GTX690, a -E platform, and lots of fans would do the trick ;) Not for gaming though.hammer256 - Tuesday, April 7, 2015 - link
The PSU used for that system is a LEPA G1600, a bit cheaper than this one.rtho782 - Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - link
You can't crossfire 4 7990s, as they are dual chip already, so 2 7990s is quad crossfire, and would use less power than 4 7970s.I used to have an overclocked i7 920 (130W TDP, pushed to 4GHz so probably ~180W), 12GB ram, a few hard drives, 7970+7990 trifire, and absolute max I'd use (corsair link on an AX1500i) was ~880W.
Now, with 4970k and 980SLi, I struggle to hit ~475W.