Vantec has come out with their first power supply and it is in a class by itself. These Stealth power supplies are designed to give you stable power with silence. This power supply is the first one that I have seen to have three fans inside, it also has a three-speed fan control switch to balance the cooling with noise while it generates power. Unlike traditional power supply, Vantec Stealth Power Supply designed with a lightweight black aluminum casing. Universal connectors fit most of branded motherboards, including AMD servers and Intel servers. Over usage protection functions ensure and stabilize your system so that you do not have any problems with your system.
- 3 Speed Thermal Fan Control Switch
- 3 Temperature Controlled Dual Ball Bearing Fans
- Universal Connector Fits Most of Branded Mainboards
- Additional AC Output For Peripheral
- Lightweight Black Aluminum Casing
- Electric-Shock-Free Protection
- Over Voltage Protection
- Over Current Protection
- Short Circuit Protection
- ATX 12 V
- Low Noise Level
The box of this power supply is pretty cool and is quite eye catching. If I were to go to the store looking for a PSU this would probably be the first to intrigue me. The top, bottom, and side of the box have a lot of specs and features of the power supply. It’s nice to see when companies take the time to make a box look nice rather than making it look like a cheap OEM product.
The power supply comes with a few accessories: a power cord which is pretty standard, four screws to mount your power supply to your case, four zip ties so that you can make all of the wires neat when you get everything installed inside of your case and an ATX adapter. The reason that you get the adapter is because the connector coming out of the power supply has 24 pins which is used for server motherboards. Normal desktop motherboards use a 20 pin ATX connector so this adapter will make it possible to use this power supply when you are using a motherboard with a 20 pin ATX connector.
When I first took this power supply out of the box I was very impressed, this power supply looks really cool. I really like the black aluminum casing for this power supply it’s a great change from the standard silver colored steel or aluminum. There are three 80mm fans in this power supply and all of them have clear fan blades on them so it looks very cool. There are two features on the back of this power supply which are very nice and that are very unique to this power supply. There is a 3 position switch which controls all three fans, you can choose low, medium, or high depending no how much noise and cooling you want. The other cool thing about this power supply is that it has a 3 prong plug so that you can plug your monitor, speakers, or even better your pump for your watercooling so that it will turn on when your computer does.
This power supply has just about every plug imaginable for just about every motherboard. There is the standard 4-pin 12v plug, an auxiliary plug, and an 8-pin plug which is used on high end server motherboards. The power supply also has 9 4-pin Molex plugs and 3 berg plugs which are used for floppy drives. This power supply has a ton of connections for basically every motherboard on the market, so if you are looking to build a server this would make a great power supply for it.
The side of the power supply has the specification sticker for the voltages, wattage, and amps for each model. I wanted to see what was inside this bad boy because a 470w power supply is no small deal. Inside the power supply I found two huge capacitors which were labeled 1200-2000uf. There are also 2 heatsinks within which will help cool down everything along with the three 80mm fans that are in there as well. This is the first power supply I have seen with 3 fans on it and should help in cooling your system because it will help pull out hot air.
The Vantec Stealth power supply has three different speeds for the fans: low, medium, and high. You can set the speed of the fans that you want with the switch on the back of the power supply. I installed this power supply into the Panther case that I reviewed a while back because I had planned on using it for the new OCmodshop server that I have built. As you can see the cables are really long, too long even for the full tower Panther. Long cables are nice for large cases but I think that these cables are a little too long and should have been made a little shorter. I ended up not being able to use the Panther case for the server because the motherboard would not fit in it so I decided to use the Blue Meany case instead which is a mid tower.
Test Bed
- MSI K7D Master-L (review to come)
- 2 1.2MHz Atlon MPs
- 2 Golden Gate heatsinks
- 1GB registered PC2100 Corsair RAM
- Adaptec 19160 Ultra160 SCSI card
- 2 IBM Ultra160 18 GB, 10,000 RPM SCSI HDD (RAID 1)
- 30GB Western Digital ATA100 7200RPM HDD
- 52x Lite-On CDROM
- ATi Rage 128
- Blue Meany case
- Vantec Stealth 470w PSU
- Onboard sound
- Onboard NIC
- Floppy drive
I went ahead and installed this PSU to my system which had all of the above hardware in it. I booted up the system and found this power supply is pretty quiet on the low setting. After Windows 2000 Advanced Server finished loading I went ahead and started up Motherboard Monitor which I will be using to get the voltage readings from this power supply. I let the computer idle for about 20 minutes and watched the readings. The 5v line was a little low and did not fluctuate much, for the most part it stayed at 4.95v. A 5v line voltage of 4.95v isn’t too bad in however it would be nice if it were higher because of the fact that this is a server and it should be as stable as possible and that it is going to drop even more under load. The 12v line is also a little lower than I would have liked to see it but it is less important than the 5v line.
After getting the idle voltages I loaded up Prime95 which I used to put the CPU to the test. The meters on Motherboard Monitor did not show any CPU usage but the system was being used very heavily. While running this test the 5v line dropped a little lower to 4.89v which is getting a little low, especially since this system isn’t even overclocked. The 12v line stayed pretty good under load of course because it goes up while the 5v goes down.
Conclusion
This power supply is a really nice to say the least. The biggest reason I think I like this power supply so much is because of the fact that it will work with almost any ATX motherboard. There were only three motherboards that Vantec said this power supply would not work with; the Tyan S2468, S2462, and S2603.
This power supply has 3 fans, which are are controlled by a fan switch so you can set the level of cooling and noise you want which is a really cool feature. I really like the way that this power supply looks as I am really tired of the drab and standard silver power supply.
There are however a couple things that I did not like about this power supply. The 5v line is lower than I would have liked to have seen it, even though the system was stable. I think Vantec needs to look at this problem and correct it, especially for the price of this PSU which is about $120.
I also did not like that the cables were so long and think that Vantec should shorten them a little. Overall I am really impressed with this power supply and would recommend it to anyone with a really nice server, or someone who wants a strong power supply with a great look to it.
I am going to give this power supply a 9/10 and award it the OCmodshop seal of approval, I would really like to thank Vantec for sending over this power supply for me to review. You can get this power supply from a few of my sponsors or use the list of vendors on Vantec’s website. I will be using this power supply in an upcoming guide along all of the hardware listed above so watch for that.
Pros:
- Looks really nice
- 3 80mm fans for cooling
- Fan speed control switch
- 24-pin ATX plug
- 4-pin, 8-pin, and auxiliary plug
- 9 Molex and 3 Berg plugs
- 24-20 pin adapter
- Will work with almost any motherboard
Cons:
- Low 5v rail
- Cables are a little long
- Good hardware is expensive (about $120)