The SFX market has been slowly growing and with that companies have been finally taking notice with new brands now making SFX and SFX-L power supplies. Silverstone though was there at the start, being one of the only companies looking to provide a modular and high-power option for small builds. This has given them time to refine and work on their designs, that is why they have been increasing the wattage available over and over as well as coming out with new more efficient designs. They introduced the SX800-LTI early this year and the 800-watt capacity alone is worthy of getting your attention. With X299 and X399 systems having an extremely high-power draw and a renewed push in the GPU market that is starting to require more demanding power supplies the additional wattage is perfect for high-end SFX systems.  But the 80 Plus rating was really what surprised me. The SX800-LTI is an 800-watt SFX-L PSU with an 80 Plus Titanium rating, the highest certification currently available.

Product Name: SilverStone SX800-LTI

Sample Provided by: SilverStone

Written by: Wes Compton

Pictures by: Wes Compton

Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE

 

**Disclaimer**

LanOC Reviews only covers the features of power supplies due to not having the equipment to test them up to our standards. Because of this, you will not see a performance section, a final verdict, or awards. Therefore, we prefer to call this a preview rather than a review. Thank you for understanding; we keep our standard to the absolute highest for you, our reader.

specifications

 


Packaging

The box for the SX800-LTI is bright blue and will catch your eye right away. The front of the box has a photo of the power supply that shows the full-sized fan and the modular cables along with another fan picture faded away in the background as well. The front really covers the most important stuff like a note that this is an SFX-L power supply, the 800-watt capacity, and the 80 Plus Titanium rating. Down along the bottom though they have even more information with short one line facts about it.

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Then around on the back, there is even more of that bright blue. Here they have six key features split up into boxes to show graphs, pictures, or line drawings to support them. This gives you a look at the fan RPM curve, the ripple and noise graphs, an efficiency graph, and even a picture of the flat cables that are included. SilverStone still needed more room so they also slipped in the specifications along the edge of the box as well with a connection count also with it to help you know if you have enough for all of your devices. 

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Inside the box, the power supply itself is wrapped up in a plastic bag and then inside of two pieces of foam to keep it safe. It also has yellow warning wrapped around it to remind everyone that the fan only comes on when load or temperature targets are reached, so people don’t worry when they don’t see it on right away. For documentation, you get two things. One of SilverStone’s default manuals and then a smaller book specific to the SX800-LTI. Then there is a second box also inside, this is where you will find all of the cables. I was disappointed that there isn’t a small bag inside of that though to store your unused cables. You will have to keep this box to store extra cables.

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Photos and Features

So if this is your first time checking out an SFX or SFX-L power supply you might not know just how small the SX800-LTI is. The fact that it is an SFX-L means it is longer than a normal SFX power supply, this gives is more a normal looking scale so in photos it almost looks like a normal ATX power supply.  Well, it is actually 4.92 inches wide, 5.12 inches deep and 2.5 inches tall. A smaller ATX power supply would be 5.91 square and 3.39 tall for scale so this is much smaller than normal. A normal SFX, on the other hand, would be shorter with a 3.94-inch depth. It’s that size that makes the 800-watt capacity so impressive, the first enthusiast focused SFX power supplies were 450 watts and it wasn’t THAT long ago that even full ATX power supplies were longer when you got up into the 800-watt range.

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The other big aspect here is obviously that 80 Plus Titanium rating, some of you may not know or care at all about 80 Plus but it basically is a rating of the power supplies efficiency. Originally 13 years ago the first PSUs with an 80 Plus were just coming out and there was just one rating and it meant that the power supply (under 115v power) tested with an 80% efficiency rating at 20%, 50%, and 100% load. 10 years ago they updated this to include additional ratings with the Bronze, Silver, and Gold. Those weren’t pure numbers across the board, they had different requirements depending on the power load. That continued on later as well with the Platinum and Titanium ratings. Here is a breakdown.

80plus

You can see that Titanium is the current highest rating and with it, they added requirements down at 10% load. A Titanium rated PSU is at least as efficient at 10% load as a gold rated PSU is at 50% the most efficient load and at 50% the titanium rated PSU is required to be 94% or better. The best part about 80 Plus is every power supply has to be tested and if it was tested the results are available on their website. In the case of the SX800-LTI, you can check them out HERE. So in their test the SX800-LTI ran at 92.64% at 10%, 94.33% at 20%, 94.27% at 50%, and 91.23% at 100%. This put the SX800-LTI in the Titanium rating with 67 other power supplies on the market. That’s right, of the 6549 PSUs tested (as of writing this) only 68 have that rating currently.

So the side profile shots of the SX800-LTI have a few stickers on them. One side has the main sticker with all of the certifications and information on it. It also has the SilverStone branding and the wattage in a larger font but it still isn’t something I would want ultra visible in my build. The other side would be the better choice but it also has a revision sticker, an inspection sticker, and what I assume is a serial number as well not to mention a sticker covering one of the screws to keep you from digging inside.

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The inside facing end is really the workhorse end of this power supply. They packed it full of modular connections with plastic caps in all but the 4 pin and 20 pin connections that make up the 24 pin cable. The modular connections do stick out a little so keep that in mind but I do like how SilverStone has gone out of their way to make sure everything is labeled. There is a sticker at the bottom with all of the legends on it then in addition to that the PCI-E plugs are also color-coded blue on both the PSU and the cable to keep people from trying to force the EPS cable into them or the wrong end of the cable.

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The outside facing end does have some ventilation to help the 120mm fan but they did still have to fit the power plug and an on and off switch so the exhaust hole is much smaller than the intake fans hole. The back has six screw holes for mounting, typically it is just the four in the corners that are used on SFX though. Speaking of, I was disappointed that SilverStone didn’t include an SFX to ATX adapter bracket like they used to. The expectation is to use this in an SFX case, but I think I have used SFX power supplies in ATX power supply locations more often than not to open up additional room in small form factor builds. In fact, that is the plan with this PSU as well and currently, the SilverStone adapter plate is almost $11 on Amazon right now. I may make my own lol.

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As for the top and bottom. Well the top of the SX800-LTI is all black and just has the SilverStone logo stamped into it at 45 degrees. Then on the other side, you can see just how tight it is to pack a 120mm fan into a 125mm x 130mm PSU. The fan takes up every possible square mm of this side with just the corners with any meat on them and that is only to be able to mount the fan and fan grill. The fan is a thin design with 13 fan blades. Covering it is a traditional wire circles grill with a larger black and chrome SilverStone snowflake logo in the center.

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So I pulled everything out of the cable box and what you get is one large bundle of cables with a long twist tie. There is also a single small cord that is an adapter from Molex to a very old floppy drive connection. I see this being included a lot but haven’t used one in 10 or more years, I would have rather that money be put into a cable bag or an SFX/ATX adapter plate. The power cord is also included obviously then you get a small baggie with four black screws to mount the SX800-LTI.

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So as expected, with an SFX power supply, the cables are a little shorter than normal but this was mostly just with the 24 pin cable and the 8 pin EPS cable. The EPS is a little longer than the 24 pin thankfully as that normally has to reach the far side of the board. The PCI-E cables were interesting as well. Specifically one of them is much shorter than the other and I love that people with just one video card have the option to run a shorter cord. Both PCI-E cables are dual connection cables, so they plug in with one 8-pin into the PSU but they have two 6 or 8 pin connections. This should support most video cards as most need no more than two 8-pins but if you have a weird card that requires three you will only be able to run one card but that should be okay with most people, SLI and Crossfire is really overrated IMO. Then for accessories cables, well you get a lot of options. There are four cables and they are all nearly the same length. Three are SATA cables and they all have four SATA connections and the last is a Molex cable with three Molex connections.

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Now all of the cables included with the SX800-LTI are of the flexible type. I personally love the cable type for every cable except the 24-pin. They are thin and can be tucked away easy and because they are so flexible they can be bundled up tightly when you have too much cable. The SATA cables have a side benefit in that you can trip off the extra connections if you only need one or two and then you can transfer the connection punch down cap over to the last plug to cover it all up. Of course, that will void your warranty and you have to know what you are doing, but it is a little-known benefit to this style of cable. My problem with the use of it with the 24 pin is that no one makes a nice 12 cable wide version of the flex cable that could be doubled up for a nice and tight 24 pin cable. They end up using a bundle of four 6 wire cables and then an extra few for the 4 pin addon and it is a mess. For this, a nice 24 pin cable with individually sleeved cables would look much better and honestly be easier to work with in some ways.

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Overall

Well like I said when I started out, I can’t test the SX800-LTI up to our standards so today I have just been looking at the power supplies features. With that in mind, I can’t give any awards or a final verdict on something that hasn’t been tested, but I can talk about the feature set and its pricing.

So SilverStone seems to of put together something very unique with the SX800-LTI, SFX power supplies are very small and they managed to put together an extremely efficient power supply into the form factor. The 800-watt capacity is also a big milestone because this is the sweet spot for a lot of people when building a high-end system to be able to run a top of the line video card and CPU and to leave room for overclocking. It also finally offers a real option when it comes to an SLI or Crossfire, anything less in wattage isn’t going to handle two 250 watt or more TDP video cards in addition to a system to support it.

The SFX-L form factor isn’t going to fit in every system, but when it comes to systems that would need that wattage I think the larger form factor is fine. I also think it really opens up options in SFF cases with ATX sized PSUs as well. I’ve done this multiple times now to open up airflow or to make room for other customization like water cooling or packing in an extra hard drive.

So the SilverStone SX800-LTI comes in at $179.99 on Amazon and right now is available for $187.99 on Newegg. I was curious how this compared to the competition so I had a look on Newegg for other 800-watt Titanium rated power supplies and it's not a big shock that there aren’t a whole lot of options. SilverStone actually had two of them then there was a Seasonic Prime Ultra for $190 an EVGA SuperNOVA for $221, both at 850 watts. The Full ATX SilverStone does come in cheaper at $164.99 but not by a large margin. In fact, the pricing for the SX800-LTI is in line with the market ignoring the SFX size. I personally think the smaller size makes this a good deal. Obviously, this isn’t a cheap power supply when you are just comparing at that wattage, but if you are looking for high efficiency it really brings the price up.

Coming back to the issue of the testing, I did want to drop a few links of power supply coverage of this exact power supply that I would recommend checking out. These are both LanOC friends but also most importantly extremely detailed testing of the performance itself. You should always check out more than one review anyhow and you don’t really get any better coverage than these for PSU performance testing.

Check out the SX800-LTI at JonnyGuru

Check out the SX800-LTI at HardOCP

Keep an eye out here soon, you will see the SX800-LTI in use here soon in a build.

Author Bio
garfi3ld
Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org
Editor-in-chief
You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.

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