Closer Look and Performance
After opening the SilentStorm Cool Zero, we can see how well everything is installed. The soldering is excellent. Everything is clean and not too tight.
Most visible capacitors are rated at 105°C or more. All main capacitors are Japanese, as we can read in the main features. Most of them are Rubycon. The primary capacitor is rated at 400V, 680uF, and 105°C.
The soldering and overall build quality look exceptional. A significant part of the soldering can be seen in the photos due to the installed daughter PCB board and not so tight installation of other components.
The PSU uses a fluid dynamic bearing fan rated at 0.33A and up to 1500RPM. Its product number is S1352512H. The fan is made by Globe Fan. The size is typical for PSUs, so 135mm.
The PSU is quiet during lower and higher loads. We couldn’t separate its noise out of the running PC, so I’m sure that everyone will be satisfied with its level of noise, or lack of it, as lower wattage setups may cause it to run passively.
Performance
Tests were performed on the Intel Alder Lake-S platform, which contains the overclocked i9-12900K CPU, Gigabyte Aorus Z690 Master motherboard, overclocked PowerColor RX6800XT Phantom Gaming graphics card, and additional components to bump the wattage some more. The peak wattage is around 750W.
At first, let’s take a look at the reference results made during the tests by an external company for the 80+ Gold certification.
The results are pretty good. They’re not the best I’ve seen but around 90% efficiency in most scenarios, so still respectable.
Now let’s take a look at our results in a modern, high-end PC.
There were no stability issues during all tests. The efficiency of the SilentStorm Cool Zero 850W is great and easily meets 80 PLUS Gold certification. The PSU could handle our test rig without issues with not-so-high ripple. The most important 12V rail was close to the reference 12V value with peaks at about 12.09V. Most PSUs are going up to 12.20V.
As I mentioned earlier, the PSU was quiet in every scenario, going from passive to about 50% of the fan speed under load. There were clearly no problems with overheating.
Mixed load tests include benchmarks based on games and PCMark 10, which simulates popular applications. In this test, the PSU was running cool and quiet.
The Sharkoon 850W PSU handles much more than required, so if you wish to save some money, you can pick a 650W or 750W unit. The typical wattage for a high-end PC is around 500W, so as you see, there is still plenty of headroom for upgrades, and two graphics cards are no longer a popular option.
The SilentStorm Cool Zero 850W is a great PSU that will stay in our redaction and will be used in our following reviews. You could see it in some previous reviews in the past few weeks, so we can honestly confirm it works great.
