Silverstone launching modular small form factor PSU

With the inexorable march toward miniaturisation, there is a corresponding pressure to reduce not only the size of a person's computer – but also its electrical footprint. On Monday 13th August, Silverstone will take a big step toward the future with a tiny power supply.

KitGuru takes a trip down memory lane, to remember the first time we got hands-on with a prototype of this device, several months ago.

You can drive a high-powered, 3 litre, V6 car around like Jason Bourne and it will give you a nice surge of adrenaline each and every time. Unfortunately, the motorway speed cameras prevent you passing 70mph and the petrol station can demand £1.50 for each litre you want to pump in (almost $2.35).

At some point, you look over at the lady with the 21st century car, optimised for fuel efficiency etc and realise that (a) she can also pass 70mph easily on a motorway and (b) she could be saving tens of thousands of pounds over 10 years simply by choosing a small, more efficient car.

Now let's move that across to PCs.

While you are unlikely to pack a liquid-cooled, 3-way-SLi system into a small form factor chassis, you can definitely fit a modestly overclocked Intel Core i7 3770k with 8GB of memory, SSD boot drive, 3TB data storage drive and a top end nVidia or AMD graphics card. So what else would you need?

Silverstone's ST45SF-G is a gold rated, fully modular, small form factor power supply with a 450w rating. It's expected to be on sale from top UK resellers by Monday at around £89 inc vat. Here's the full technical specification:-

KitGuru says: We love this PSU on spec alone. Sure, we'll need to bring it into the KitGuru lab for complete, in-depth testing – but the effort is admirable. Let's see if this inspires system builders to create a new range of seriously powerful mini-PCs.

Comment below or in the KitGuru forums.

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