Silverstone will release higher wattage 80Plus Gold SFF PSUs in 2015

At Beat IT 2014 in Taipei, alongside a whole heap of new hardware from MSI, its partners were also on hand to show their wares. KitGuru spoke with Chris Liu, hardware guru for Silverstone.

With the move toward smaller form factor PCs (SFF) and emphasis on performance-per-watt etc, you would imagine that smaller means less electricity.

Not so, according to Silverstone.

They were showing off some neat SFF kit at the Beat It event, one of which was an 80Plus Gold rated 600w PSU.

Which brought the conversation round to the SG13 chassis seen at Computex back in June.

“We really expect this part of the market to grow next year”, Chris told us.

“Silverstone has a lot of experience in this area, dating back to the original SG01”, he explained. “But, in the past, smaller chassis normally meant systems that were a lot less powerful. That is changing”.

“We have the 600w 80Plus Gold rated PSU in production now, but we are already working on bigger supplies into the same form factor”, Chris told us.

You can find small form factor PSUs with very high wattage ratings if you get into the server sector, but they generally don't worry about noise – so the airflow can create some serious decibels.

It will be interesting to see just how far Silverstone can go with this kind of PSU.

KitGuru says: Given the improved efficiency that Maxwell brings to the market – and Intel’s continued control of power draw within its CPUs – it’s hard to see how a small form factor PC could need much more than 600 watts, so it will be interesting to see (a) just how big Silverstone makes its next PSU and (b) what exactly it will be powering.

Let us know what you think about small form factor PCs over on Facebook.

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