SilverStone SX550 80 Plus Gold SFX Power Supply Review

A Closer Look – Interior

Being a compact PSU, we expected to see things looking a little cramped in here, but even then we’re still surprised just how much hardware Silverstone has managed to pack into their SFX PSU.

There’s not one, but two main bulk capacitors in here, each rated for 450v, 750 uF at 105C, which leads me to think this unit will easily blast past the 550W rating, but we shall see in our final testing results.

There’s plenty of hardware in here for filtering the power, and I’m hoping this results in low ripple, which is usally very good on Silverstone PSUs anyway. There’s a small PCB at the side, which also houses the fan header and PWM control hardware.

The EM/Filtering stage for the AC line-in looks a little crowded, but good quality cables, fittings and shielded solder are abundant here too, so we’ve expecting clean power delivery right from the get go here.

All secondary capacitors are high-quality 105c rated, which should mean stable voltages throughout. The DC/DC converters and the chokes all look well made and shielded too.
It is pretty crowded in here, but throughout the PSU, you’ll see smaller daughter boards mounted vertically, as well as various heat sinks around major hardware, which should help greatly with keeping the unit running nice and cool.

This is a hard-wired unit, but there’s minimal cable travel inside the PSU which should help with airflow. All cables are very well soldered to the board and major connections are wrapped to keep them protected.

Finally, the included fan is a Protechnic Electric MGA8012YS-A15, an 80mm 12v rated PWM fan. We don’t know the full spec, but we suspect it’s rated for up to 3000-3500, and is the same model we once saw in the be quiet! SFX Power 2 300W, where it was quite noisy over 60% load, so it’ll be interesting to see if we see something similar here.