First Looks
The Cooler Master Silent Pro M has a regular power supply appearance: a dark (black) shell with a product label on one side. The output chart is on the opposite side of the unit.
The rear is hex-mesh for increased airflow from the 120 mm fan on the underside. The front of the unit has the modular plugs in six banks: one each for the two PCI-Express connectors, then four plugs for the cables with the five 4-pin device connectors, six SATA connectors, and lone floppy. Obviously, it has a 20+4 pin motherboard connector and 4+4 pin CPU connector.
The motherboard and CPU cables are meshed for airflow reasons, but the modular cables are not.
Installation & Use
I connected the PSU to my rig with an ASUS M3A32-MVP motherboard, Athlon X2 6000+, 8 GB of DDR2 RAM, three SATA hard drives, a Creative X-Fi gamer, and a Foxconn-made nVidia 8800 GTX.
I used OCCT Perestroika to perform a stress test. OCCT produces some very telling graphs. I’ve included for reference the extreme output graphs of the Rosewill Xtreme 630W for comparison. The graphs from this review were generated with OCCT 3.1.0, the latest version of the package. The graphs are a little different, superimposing a CPU usage graph overtop of the voltages.
Spot checks of the voltage on the rails were 3.28V idle and 3.25V load, 5.05V idle and load, and 11.97V idle and 11.9V load.
The 3.3V rail undervolted throughout the entire test, rippling nearly 1%. This is still stable though: 5% is our “uncomfortable” zone. You can tell that the power supply was being stressed though.
The 5V rail overvolted throughout the test, but also showed signs of stress. The ripple was 1.6%–among the highest I’ve seen in some time. However, read on for a key note.
The 12V rail was the wildest ride I’ve seen on a power supply in a long time. A ripple of 2.62%, voltages all over the place between 12.21 and 11.90, and lots of peaks and valleys along the way. This is to be expected, though.
The reason which I’m not surprised to see this power supply rippling so much compared to other units is that it’s the lower wattage unit I’ve reviewed with this rig. At load, it pulls nearly 470W-30 W short of the maximum sustained output of the unit. For once, this rig gave a power supply a hard time.
My ear says the noise level is quite silent compared to my standard unit, the Antec TruePower Quattro 1000W. I could barely hear it, even under load.
[ad#review985-bottom]
