Noise & Temperature Testing
During idle, the ST50EF-Plus-SC was very silent and it was the least noisy 500W PSU among the units that we have tested beforehand ... The PSU also felt relatively cool at idle and did not output a lot of heat. To test the CPU temperatures, we reverted back to stock Vcore but left the CPU frequency at 2.7GHz. At idle, Core Temp reported 41ºC whereas the Biostar tool reported 36ºC, which was not too shabby for a passive cooler.
Once we loaded up the system, the fan started to spin up and it took a few minutes before we could hear the fan spinning up. However, the noise was very low and you have to be really close to the PSU to actually hear it. With system at maximum load, the PSU started to get a little warm but the fan stayed relatively silent through the test. Even after 30 minutes into the load test, the ST50EF-Plus-SC was pretty silent for any HTPC setup ... again, this proves that the combination of a passively cooled NT06 and ST50EF-Plus-SC PSU installed in the SG01 is a pretty decent setup, even if you are overclocking. For the record, we recorded the CPU temperatures with the hardware installed inside the SG01 with room temperatures recorded at
28.5ºC.