I've currently got a Thermaltake Smart SE 530W PSU which I chose due to the lovely flat ribbon cables but it's the loudest thing in my system so it's time to swap that out.
I'm on a budget though so these are my 3 options:
Corsair HX750 - £54
Corsair TX650M - £47
Corsair CS650M - £51
They're all refurbished but that doesn't put me off because the way I see it is that they had a problem previously and Corsair have probably resolved the issue so that it doesn't have any issues in the future. Or at least that's me being optimistic.
Now I used to own an ITX system which was almost silent as I only had a GTX 750 Ti (almost silent), a Silverstone ST30F (silent as fan never spun up) along with a Thermalright AXP200 Muscle (very quiet as I forced it to 800RPM or so) but I have since moved back to ATX simply because I liked the look of the NZXT S340. Now the build is far from silent, but it's further away on the floor so it's actually very quiet from where I am.
I have 2 slow spinning case fans, a fanless CPU heatsink and a PowerColor R9 280X (quietest compared to Asus and MSI). When I stop the fans in rotation, the PSU fan is definitely the loudest one. I don't really want to faff around with opening the PSU up and replacing the fan so I'll just get a new PSU instead. On idle, my system only draws around 50W at the wall. With the GPU fully loaded, it can draw around 300W. I didn't bother to load the CPU as there'll never be a situation where both CPU and GPU are on 100% load.
Now the question is, which of those 3 will be the quietest running? I don't care about anything else, only noise.
I see that the HX750 and TX650M both have "zero-fan technology" at low loads and that's one thing I really liked about the Silverstone ST30F. However, it seems it's only zero-fan when the load is between 0% up to around 20-40% and I'm worried about the noise once the fan spins up. In synthetic tests I never go over 300W so I imagine I won't ever go over 50% load on any of the PSUs.
The HX750 states that the fan spins up after 20% load and goes up to 15dB up to 40% load (around 300W):
http://www.corsair.com/fr-fr/hx-series- ... odular-psu
The TX650M states that the fan spins up after 30% load and goes up to 16dB up to 50% load (around 300W):
http://www.corsair.com/en-gb/tx-series- ... wer-supply
The CS650M states that the fan is always on and goes up to around 9dB up to 50% load (around 300W):
http://www.corsair.com/en/cs-series-mod ... tified-psu
Now it seems the CS650M is the best from their own information but 9dB sounds too good to be true to me.
Has anyone had the luxury of owning the CS650M or the other listed PSUs?
Many thanks!