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Introduction

Imagine the sound of one hand clapping. Stop reading just for a minute, sit back, close your eyes and let your ears take in the silence. But wait. Your computer is on. The sound of one hand clapping is not the sound of fans whirring, hard drives spinning, and CDROMs screaming like banshees. Unfortunately, in a computing environment, silence is a much sought after luxury. In the great megahertz race in the last few years we have seen fans that hit over 60 DB all in the name of cooling but somewhere along the line someone must've muttered "another day of noise like this and I'm going to go postal." Actually that someone was me. But I am sure that other people must have had the same thoughts. Many companies have also noticed this increase in noise and have taken steps to remedy this. Early opportunists like Zalman have an entire line of products catering towards the noise-free environment crowd and are well known for their passive cooling solutions. AMD recently has taken steps in the aural department also with their Cool`n`Quiet technology that scales down the processor, fan speed and voltage when 2.2 Ghz is not needed such as when you are testing for bugs in Solitaire at work.

With all that said, today we take a look at a 400W power supply from Southern California based SilenX. SilenX started in 1995 as a system integrator but has since shifted their focus to noise reduction products. Like my own sudden epiphany of realizing my computer is too loud, the same thing happened to the founders of SilenX but they instead did something about it by engineering silent fans and power supplies. SilenX recognizes the noise problems in computers today and have several product lines that cater towards the crowd that wants to reduce noise. SilenX actually sells Zalman products (like some of their passive cooling products that we have mentioned) off their website and also sells a MCX-462V (we reviewed the Swiftech (heatsink only) version here) with a SilenX fan.