Testing

Silent Pro 800W Gold is the latest PSU to come out of Cooler Master. It comes with 80 PLUS Gold certificate, meaning that it's efficient and won't waste energy. Unfortunately, we don't own professional PSU testing equipment, so we'll have to rely on 80plus.org's data. The following grapih, as you can see, shows that the efficiency is always around 90%. You can find out more here.


 
In absence of such equipment, we decided to perform a few practical tests which have proven that this is a quality PSU. In our first test, we measured total system consumption. The rig runs on EVGA's 3xSLI motherboard, Core i7 965 Extreme and two GTX 470 reference cards in SLI. We used Prime95 to stress the CPU and FurMark to stress the graphics cards. 

Under full CPU and graphics card load, Silent Pro 800W Gold ran like a charm. Maximum consumption was 710W. Note that Silent Pro 800W showed superior efficiency when compared to the older but more powerful Cooler Master UPC 1100W. Note however, that the UPC 1100W doesn't come with 80 PLUS Gold certificate.
 


Although using two GTX 470 cards in SLI is the maximum we'd recommend in case of Silent Pro 800W, we decided to use two GTX 480, just for kicks. Surprisingly enough, Prime95 and FurMark ran like a charm but our rig drew up to 876W. The only problem was how to cool two GTX 480 cards in SLI, as the GPU temperatures on the first card constantly hit 100°C.





Before we move onto the conclusion, we must say a few words about the fan. Although this is a 12cm fan, which can make some serious noise, idle operation was as quiet as it gets. It got a bit louder in scenarios where the PSU utilization was over 50%, but it's still far from what we'd call loud.