Silverstone Zeus 850W

Your small God of a PC deserves proper power, and a power supply named after an ancient God might be the ticket.

Silverstone is a name weighted heavy with respect, and rightfully so -- it makes bloody high quality products. Its latest ingress into labs is the Zeus 850W power supply, surprisingly contained in a pretty much normal sized case.

It's not modular, so the mutated hydra's worth of cables snaking out of it may be too much for some. It does ensure that it should fit pretty much anyone's PC though, unless you have a 20 pin connector on your motherboard.

Lacking is a 120mm or larger fan in the top, Silverstone instead electing to stick a dinky 80mm fan at the front near the cable exit point. When it's not spinning, the Zeus stays pretty damn near silent, with a faint electrical buzzing noise that has come to be a trademark of Silverstone supplies. Unfortunately when it spins up it increases the volume quite a bit, sounding like the wind tunnel we've all come to love. It's thankfully low enough in pitch to not be particularly annoying. But it is quite noticeable, allowing the likes of Hiper, Seasonic and Enermax to leave the Zeus in their dust.

There's something for everyone here, with four PCI-E power connectors for those into 8800GTX SLI, six SATA, eight and bizarrely six pin EPS 12V connectors, with an eight to four pin adaptor, six molex and two floppy connectors.

Routing the plethora of cables into associated sockets on an MSI 965P Premium motherboard with Core 2 Duo X6800, 2GB of OCZ PC2-8000 VX2 Titanium Alpha and a MSI GeForce 8800GTX, we broke out the multimeter to see what magic the head of Olympus could muster.

Under idle the Silverstone gave us 3.39V, 5.15V and 12.11V on the 3.3V, 5V and 12V rails respectively. To put it under load we turned up 3DMark06 to 1920x1200, 8xAA, 16xAF and ran the SM3.0/HDR tests. This resulted in the 12.11V dropping to 12.10, and nothing else shifting. Impressive. Just a shame about the noise.