Super Flower delivered another excellent Platinum platform and Kingwin did very well by adopting this excellent unit into their product offerings. Fans of quiet computing will definitely appreciate this extraordinary PSU not only for its totally inaudible operation but also for its sky high efficiency that currently is the highest on the market. Till today I never encountered a PSU with such high efficiency and from now on the STR-500 is the efficiency king in my book. On top of that, voltage regulation at +12V was tight and the unit worked flawlessly even when I cranked up the temperature inside the hotbox. What more could anyone ask from Kingwin/Super Flower? Since I am a perfectionist I would like to see a MOV in the transient filtering stage, tighter voltage regulation on the minor rails and a little higher PF (Power Factor) readings, especially at low loads. But at least the two latter requests of mine are not so important when you look at the overall performance that the STR-500 exhibited. It seems that there is a new leader in the Platinum category, which makes me eager to see the responses of other key players in this segment (Delta, Seasonic, Enermax etc.)
The statement "you get what you pay for" is absolutely true for the Kingwin Stryker 500W. The PSU may come at a high price for its capacity but if you take into account the extraordinary performance, zero noise output and the money you will save in the long run by its ultra high efficiency then it is a very decent/good buy. So far the Seasonic X-400 and X-460 completely dominated the fanless PSU market, but now a new powerful player has entered.