SilverStone Decathlon SST-DA750 750W PSU review
Inside the PSU
We don't recommend that you take your PSU apart. It voids your warranty and if the PSU has recently been in use it can be quite dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. Even hours after you've turned off your power supply the capacitors still contain enough power to severely hurt you.
After opening the PSU I noticed two big aluminum heatsinks and also one smaller aluminum heatsink.
The primary side uses three capacitors from Toshin Kogyo, the view is kinda blocked by the heatsinks and a PCB board but the one that is visible is a 180µF 450V cap rated at 85°C.
On the secondary side I noticed a small PCB board to which the fan was connected. The fan was connected with a 2-pin connector and shouldn't be too hard to replace if necessary. This PCB board also has a small on/off switch, a potentiometer and two thermal probes. The potentiometer can be used to finetune the regulation of the +12V rail, there's even a small hole in the PSU's enclosure to reach it but to do this you have to break a "Warranty void if broken" sticker. Bottom line: you can't use it without breaking your warranty. On this side I also found a couple of Teapo capacitors but the exact specifications of these caps weren't really visible.
In the past manufacturers tried to make us believe that more +12V rails are better but now we're seeing more and more high-end units using the single-rail approach. One of the reasons for this is because some components like high-end graphics cards use an enormous amount of power, especially in SLI, Quad SLI or CrossFire setups. If multi-rail power supplies follow the official ATX PSU specifications, each rail may only provide a max of 20A (or 240W). For most hardware that's not really a problem but considering the upcoming R600 will use up to 540W in CrossFire you can see that multi-rail PSUs will get into trouble. 75W per card comes through the PCI Express slot which is on a different rail so an additional 195W per card is needed from the PCI Express power connectors. With two cards you need a voltage rail that can deliver 32.5A and that's not something you'll find on multi-rail PSUs.
Nowadays it's definitely recommended to get a PSU with a single +12V rail if you're building a high-end PC. I'm not saying that multi-rails are bad, but if you need a lot of power a PSU with a single rail may be better.
Cooling
The bottom of the DA750 features a large 120mm fan with a black fan grill. The fan has a SilverStone sticker but when you remove the cover from the PSU you notice the fan is made by Everflow.
SilverStone used the Everflow R121225BU 120mm double ball bearing fan for the DA750. This fan has a maximum airflow of 99.99CFM at a speed of 2900RPM and produces a noise level of 42.9dBa. But those are the maximum values of course, the fan is temperature controlled so normally it will spin at less noisy levels. The only bad thing about the fan I could find is that there's no sensor cable so your motherboard can't read out the fan's speed.
Previous Page (2/4)
Added: March 20th 2007
Product reviewed: SilverStone Decathlon SST-DA750 750W PSU
Reviewer: Thomas De Maesschalck
Score: 8/10
Page: 3/4
