It’s been a long time since we last heard from silver stone, one of those legendary manufacturers that has been in the hardware industry for decades. However, they were present at Computex and one of the most notable products they presented was their new power supply. HELA 2500R, the most powerful in its catalog with 2,500 watts of power and capable of handling four RTX 4090 simultaneously (and literally, because it includes cables and connectors).
It is clear that the power requirements of PCs have increased significantly in recent times, not least due to the high consumption of modern high-end graphics cards. For this reason, if a few years ago having a source of 600-700 watts was already more than sufficient, today it is necessary to go practically up to 1,000 watts to maintain a high-end gaming PC. Okay, but isn’t 2,500 watts a bit excessive?
Silverstone 2,500 Watt Power Supply
The truth is that when we talk about 2,500 watts of power it seems like it has gotten a little out of hand, especially when for a few generations we have forgotten about multi-GPU configurations, basically because they are no longer necessary. It used to be relatively common to have 1000 or even 1200 watt sources to accommodate the power needed for two high-performance graphics cards, but today this no longer exists.
However, here we have SilverStone’s new 2,500 watt source, which they boast is capable of servicing four RTX 4090s simultaneously. To do this, it natively has four 16-pin 12VHPWR connectors, capable of delivering up to 1,800 watts of power on the +12V rail, which still leaves 700W of margin for the rest of the PC components (processor, card , RAM, etc.).
Pay attention to the data, because this 2,500 watt power supply It’s not the most powerful on the market. At this same Computex, the famous manufacturer SuperFlower presented a model of 2,800 watts and with the same number of 16-pin PCIe 5.0 connectors (in fact it is almost the same but it has more SATA and MOLEX connectors for peripherals, with 300 W more margin for peripherals). CPU and so on).
You have to take one thing into consideration… we’re talking about a 2500W source prepared for you to install four RTX 4090s on your PC (how you configure them and what you use them for is another matter). If you live in Europe you will not have a problem, but be careful if you live in a country where the power lines operate at 110 volts (in Europe they are 230 V) because standard sockets only support one power of 1,800 watts, you will need an adapter (16 amps and 240V recommended) to be able to manage this consumption.
Has it gotten out of control?
As we mentioned earlier, it’s true that the power requirements of modern high-end PCs have increased significantly, and it’s now common to see gaming PCs with 1,000-watt sources, something that used to be reserved until now. a few years ago to enthusiasts and overclockers. However, the truth is that a font size of 2500 (or 2800 like SuperFlower) seems… absurd.
And in the end, why want four RTX 4090s in a PC if they can no longer run in SLI? In fact, who spends almost 9,000 dollars just for these four graphics? We’re not saying that there aren’t some people with budgets and needs who end up purchasing one of these sources, but what percentage of the population will that be? The truth is that it has gotten out of control…
