SilverStone Strider Gold 1500W Power Supply Review @ [H]

SilverStone Strider Gold 1500W Power Supply Review - SilverStone is a well known name among computer hardware enthusiasts. It has a good record of building solid PSUs, some of those good, some of those great. Today it comes to us with 1500 watts of power in an extremely small footprint, sporting 100% fully modular cables, and claiming extremely good efficiency.

I find it difficult to understand how the unit can be worthy of any award - let alone a silver one - given the poor build quality. Just because it passes the tests now doesn't mean that it will pass them after a year or more of use. Poor components and poor soldering are major QC issues.

Anyway, thanks for your hard work in discovering the true nature of this PSU. I hope Silverstone sort out the issues you found because then it would indeed be worthy of a silver award.

We had a bunch of Silverstone ST 1500s running 4-5 card 290 mining rigs earlier this year. In the end, we had 0 PSU failures in approximately 10 months of 24/7 mining in a 95-125F environement.

Rough job or not, i would expect this unit to continue that track record of reliability given its component selection.

Quartz-1 said:

I find it difficult to understand how the unit can be worthy of any award - let alone a silver one - given the poor build quality. Just because it passes the tests now doesn't mean that it will pass them after a year or more of use. Poor components and poor soldering are major QC issues.

Anyway, thanks for your hard work in discovering the true nature of this PSU. I hope Silverstone sort out the issues you found because then it would indeed be worthy of a silver award.

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So you would like us to test it for another couple years then get back to you guys on an award? Seriously, I would love to do that, but we simply do not have the resources to pull that off.

The fact of the matter is that crappy looking work means zero when it comes to reliability. We have some PSUs that were expertly crafted that we have killed during testing.

That all said, we would like to see it done with more care for sure for the price.

It is one of, if not the best 1500w PSU you can buy right now and that does not go unnoticed by us. Had the craftsmanship been excellent, it would have been Gold.

Quartz-1 said:

I find it difficult to understand how the unit can be worthy of any award - let alone a silver one - given the poor build quality. Just because it passes the tests now doesn't mean that it will pass them after a year or more of use. Poor components and poor soldering are major QC issues.

Anyway, thanks for your hard work in discovering the true nature of this PSU. I hope Silverstone sort out the issues you found because then it would indeed be worthy of a silver award.

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What you mentioned is maybe the most critical question, but unfortunately, no one can give a guaranteed answer except time itself !!.
Just like Kyle said, the product should be reviewed a couple years later in order for the reviewer to express a solid opinion about the build quality. Right now, he can only state what he noticed, but the longevity factor based on the build quality it's an issue pretty hard to determine.
Nice review Paul !

And let me follow up with this. We do all of our testing inside a 45C/113F degree incubator. All tests including the 8 hour Torture Test at 80% load are done in this high heat environment.

3) Torture Test

a. The incubator’s temperature is set to 45c, the Variac output voltage is set to 120v, and a load approximately equal to 80% of rated continuous output is applied to the power supply by the Sunmoon SM-8800 for a period of 8 hours. Ripple is logged by the USB Instruments DSM1M12 Digital Oscilloscope, and the PF/Efficiency are determined from the data provided by the Extech Power Analyzer.

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We hardly go easy on these units. If there were real issues we would see these crop up.

Quartz-1 said:

It would be very nice if you had a time machine! I think you do need to consider longer-term reliability. I mean you do already - witness your comments on the cheap capacitors - but you need to put far greater weight on it. After all, this is a device that is going to be switched on and off many many times over its lifespan and has the capability of destroying everything in your PC.

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As with any review we do, we give you enough data to make your own call on a product. We have never asked any readers to agree with our opinions and of course provide a format here for you to voice your own thoughts about the data.

Quartz-1 said:

It would be very nice if you had a time machine! I think you do need to consider longer-term reliability. I mean you do already - witness your comments on the cheap capacitors - but you need to put far greater weight on it. After all, this is a device that is going to be switched on and off many many times over its lifespan and has the capability of destroying everything in your PC.

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cheap != unreliable.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of 10+ year old Dell, HP, IBM desktop PC's still in use around the world and they use the cheapest crap they can find.

Seems to work well enough, but that build quality... Oye.

I'll let this first batch pass by and wait for a product revision or something before looking at it again.

It's selling at a good price on Amazon right now. ST1500-GS for $285