Sharka Corporation specializes in quiet cooling and carries a ton of products to help keep your system quiet. The latest product that I have received from Sharka is this True Silent 450w power supply which is titanium coated.
This power supply looks to be competing with some of the other “silent power supplies” on the market right now, such as the Zalman 400A-APF. This power supply features: true silent technology, case fan controlling connector, serial ATA HDD connector, gold plated connector pins, OVP (Over Voltage Protection), OCP (Over Current Protection), OTP (Over Temperature Protection), and SCP (Short Circuit Protection). All of these features sound great but lets see what the power supply really stands up against the competition.
The power supply comes inside of a shrink wrapped box with a picture of the power supply and some other information. The power supply comes with a 3 year warranty which is longer than I have ever kept a power supply. On side of the box are some of the features and a graph to show the difference in dB during operation. One thing I found a little amusing was that on the features list they wrote “Fold Plated connector Pin” when it should have read “Gold plated connector pins.”
When I first took this power supply out of the bubble wrap that it came packaged in I was quite surprised to see how reflective it was. As you can see the titanium coating does a really good job making the exterior of the power supply look really nice. The side of the power supply has the standard sticker on it with the power supplies specifications and warnings. You can see also to the very left of the picture that the warrantee sticker is still in tact.
Again from the picture of the top of the power supply you can see that it is very reflective and looks really nice. This is the first power supply I have seen this reflective and with a titanium coating which I think more companies should think about using. The back of the power supply has a on/off toggle switch, a 110v/220v toggle switch, plug, and 80mm fan which hopefully is actually silent.
I unscrewed the four screws from the bottom of the power supply to see how the inside of this unit looked. I am quite impressed with the inside layout because of the fact that there is a good sided heatsink and it looks to be controlled by the blue PCB electronics on the side of the power supply. There is also an extra fan header within the power supply so if in the future you want to make this a dual fan power supply you can plug it into it directly.
The first thing I noticed about the cables on this power supply is that they are a really good length. With a lot of power supplies the cables are either too long or not long enough. This power supply cables are a good length and have eight Molex, two berg, one auxiliary, one 12v, and one ATX power connector(s). Along with the standard plugs this power supply also comes with three Molex connectors which are for case fans only. I really like this feature because your normal Molex connectors will not be wasted on fans which is a huge benefit if you have a lot of hardware.
This power supply is also SATA ready and comes with one Molex to SATA adapter so that you dont have to use one that comes with your motherboard and dont have to go out and buy one. As you can also see from the second picture the pins within the connectors are gold plated which means the electricity will be transferred better and with less interference.
Though this may not make any noticeable or any difference whatsoever I like the fact that this feature was added because it shows that the manufacturer wanted the highest quality power supply designed.
Test Bed
- Abit NF7-S Rev 2.0
- 1800+ Athlon XP
- 60GB Seagate Barracuda IV HDD
- 80GB Western Digital HDD
- 1024MB PC3200 Corsair TwinX (review to come)
- Abit Geforce 4 Ti4200 OTES 8x AGP 128MB
- PcToys VGA MAXX Heatpipe Cooler
- Koolcase’s Panther
- Plextor 40x12x40 CDRW
- Plextor PX-504A DVD+RW (review to come)
I installed this True Silent power supply to my normal test bed which is the above hardware. In my opinion the cables are just the right length that they should to be. I had this power supply installed in a full tower and it was able to reach everything and have some leftover slack to spare but not too much.
Once I had everything in place and plugged I booted up the computer and was very pleased with how quiet this power supply was. This power supply is much quieter than the Zalman 400A-APF which was a little surprising because the Zalman one costs more and comes from a more established company.
Overall this power supply is much quieter and is basically silent when you turn it on, even while the system is at full load and gets hot.
After booting up the computer I loaded up Motherboard Monitor 5 so that I would be able to get the voltage readings from the power supply. The main concern of mine for power supply currents is in the 5v and 12v line which is what I watched closely. I let the system idle for about 15 minutes and after that time the voltages on both lines had not changed at all.
I was very impressed at how stable this power supply was and how strong the 5v line which is usually not this good. With a reading of 5.08v and 11.98 there is nothing to worry about and I was very curious to see how well this unit would do while stressed. As you can plainly see this power supply outperforms all of the others tested in both the 5v and 12v lines.
After getting the idle voltages I loaded up Prime95 which I used to get the CPU to 100% load. Again I was very impressed with the voltages from both the 5v and 12v lines. The 5v line stayed at 5.08v while the 12v line only dropped to 11.86v which is very normal. As you can see this power supply beats both the Zalman 400w and Power Glow 420w with only the 12v line of the Power Glow being a little better. There isn’t much really to say about these results as the numbers speak for themselves.
Conclusion
If you have ever read any other reviews by me you know that I really like a quiet system and products that can deliver what they are designed to do. I am very impressed by this power supply in almost every way and with every feature that it offers.
The look of this power supply is awesome, the power output is really good, it uses gold plated connector pins, has a SATA adaptor, is extremely quiet, and is well priced. There is really nothing bad about this power supply that I can find either inside or out.
Because there is nothing negative about this product and so many positive aspects to it I am going to award it a 10/10 and award it the OCmodshop Seal of Approval. I would like to thank Sharka Corporation for sending over this power supply.
Pros
- Titanium coating looks awesome
- Powerful 5v and 12v lines
- Inside of power supply designed well
- Gold plated connector pins
- SATA adapter included
- 3 fan only Molex connectors
- Extremely quiet
- Low price of $69.95
Cons
- None