Introduction

Silence is something that many require when it comes to PSUs and many companies have begun to cash in on it with buzz words like “Silent” and “Whisper Quiet” being placed all over packaging. Today however, I have a company that has “silence” in their name, well, sort of. Here with me is the Xilence Power 600w Gaming Edition. Well, let’s see if its Xilent and if it games well; to the test bed!

A little about Xilence Power

“The high quality standard products from Xilence are manufactured in our factory in china. we put special emphasis on a permanent control of our suppliers in order to maintain a constant high-level quality for our customers.

Furthermore, our r&d department has the task of a permanent search for possibilities to optimize our products, as our goal is to sell top-products with the newest technologies to reasonable prices. ”

Specifications

Bits and Box

The Xilence Power 600w box is black with red and white text adorning it letting you know some of the specifications of the unit.

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On the back, instead of the usual extended specifications, Xilence instead chose to advertise some of their other products; “High Quality Cases”, “VGA Card Cooler” and others.

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Along with the PSU itself, you also receive a kettle lead, a cable tie and some mounting screws; nothing fancy I am afraid.

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Xilence Power 600w Gamer’s Edition Close up

The 600w GE (Gamer’s Edition) is matt black in colour with some red styling in certain places.

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Atop the PSU, underneath a black painted grill, is a bright red 12cm designed to draw air across the internal components and expel the hot air.

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This hot air is forced out of the rear of the unit threw a honeycombed grill. This is the most effective shape of grill; to see why, read our glossary entry here.

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Also on the back, is the obvious power lead socket and the not always present power switch. No LED’s or anything, just a mat black button here.

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On one of the side panels is the usual block of specifications:

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All the cables of the 600w GE are sleeved in black braiding which not only makes cable management easier, but looks great too.

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All of the molex cables have quick release systems which is nice to see. This makes removing them from tight situations much easier.

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There’s also two 6pin PCI-E connectors; shame there aren’t four though.

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But there is only a 4pin secondary motherboard cable so those of you that need that 8pin won’t be powering you’re rig with this PSU.

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Installation

No Installation problems with a PSU of this size. Plus the braiding on the cables meant it was easy to hide them behind some of the prominent case features with no risk of damage.

Testing

Although there are those that see synthetic testing as the way to go when testing Power Supplies. We believe putting together a rig that mimics the most powerful PCs available is a good “real world” test of how capable a PSU is. Therefore, for testing the Xilence Power I grabbed every bit of hardware we currently have and put together one rather power hungry rig, and another with a hefty GPU also powered by our 600w GE.

The entire setup was as follows:

Master PC

Asus P5W-DH Deluxe
C2D E600 @ 2.7ghz
OCZ Special Ops. Urban Elite 6400 @ 900mhz
2x Sapphire x1900XT in Crossfire
Western Digital Raptor 36gb
Western Digital Caviar SE 80gb
BFG Ageia PhysX

Slave PC

aBit M2N-HD
AMD AM2 3800 X2
4gb Super Talent T800
PNY 8800GTS 640mb
Western Digital Caviar SE 160gb

Added to both of these were several fans and CD/DVD drives plus any pen drives we had lying around at the time.

The PSU powered not only the entire master PC, but the PNY 8800GTS and all HDD and Optical drives from the Slave PC too.

Results were taken using Asus Probe and verified with a multimeter on a spare molex connector.

Results

In terms of stability you can see that the 3.3v and 5v rails are fantastic. Unfortunately there is a .2 jump in the 12v rails between idle and load which is quite large. It also places the load voltage quite a way off its 12v target.

Noise and Cooling

Throughout the whole testing procedure, the 600w GE was whisper quiet and didn’t intrude on my sensitive ear drums one iota. To steal a phrase from SorX, its mulnaz.

Cost

Cost wise this 600 watter is around the £60 mark at most retailers which is about the standard price for a PSU of this wattage. However, there are much more stable PSUs to be had for this kind of money.

Conclusion

Unfortunately this PSU falls down in the testing section of our review. Although it did manage to run all tests without crashing, its 12v was just far too loose and unstable to give this a top score. It does have some redeeming features, like fantastic 5v and 3.3v rails and an excellent noise rating. Perhaps this PSU would be good for a media PC or something that isn’t going to be loading power hungry components, but for your main PC? I can’t recommend it.

I’d like to thank our sponsors QuietPC for providing us with this PSU.

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