Silverstone Strider ST56F 560W PSU

It’s that time again folks! Review time!

It’s been a pretty interesting couple of weeks in the tech world. With CeBIT kicking off, the GDC coming up and the launch of the 7900 from NVIDIA, the tech world is in full swing. If you think about it, that’s the beauty of the industry that we are in. It’s always moving, always changing, so there is always something to keep us occupied. Today I am focusing in on the power requirements of today’s gaming PC’s.

We gamers are a rare breed and as much as we may or may not want to be associated with these people, we are a lot like car jocks. We always have to have to best piece of equipment and we have to have it as soon as it comes out. Now for a lot of us, me included, we can’t afford every new piece of hardware to come off the line. We either save up or get the best "bang for our buck" so to speak. There is always one thing that comes to mind that most people that I talk to overlook.

Power supplies.

These are the hearts of our PC’s. They don’t do the thinking or the number crunching but they do supply the hardware that does said thinking and number crunching with the power for them to function properly. Power supplies have to be stable, reliable and ultimately good for everyday use. Some of us overclock, some of us don’t and that doesn’t matter at this point. What I am getting at is that out of everything that you spend your hard earned money on, that goes under the hood of your PC, should be a smart and safe investment. A bad piece of hardware won’t necessarily go bad but if it does, it can take other pieces of hardware with it and that’s not a chance that I am personally willing to take.

/enter Silverstone.

I have personally reviewed a few Silverstone products in the past with Techgage so I would like to think that we at Techgage and Silverstone have a good working relationship. This is proven true with the opportunity to take the Silverstone Strider ST56F Active PFC power supply.

The ST56F is a 560 Watt power supply with active PFC. While it lacks the actual logo, this PSU is NVIDIA’s SLI and ATI’s Crossfire ready. With the power requirements of 2 GPU’s, hard drives, optical drives, fans, motherboards, CPUs and anything else that can possibly plug in, we will need a powerful supply to feed all these pieces and keep them running at top level.

Let’s see what we can find out.