Desktop PC Power Supply Replacement and Dust Mitigation

My 10 year old PC Power & Cooling power supply unit died. So, I bought another one by the same company. Here is to another 10+ years!

In around fall 2006 having suffered a power supply failure I did a lot of research on desktop power supplies before purchasing a replacement. A company I came across was PC Power & Cooling. They had papers on their site discussing the importance of large capacitors, heat sinks, and a strong high amperage single 12V rail (at a time when power supply wattage was rapidly climbing but on dedicated rails). The said their power supplies were such high quality that they only needed a single 80mm fan to cool their power supply and were offering a 3 or 5 year warranty when 1 year was industry standard.

I bought one of their power supplies, they charged a premium, and I initially used it with twin ATI based X1950XTX cards in Crossfire (which back then were power hogs) and an AMD Opteron 185 or 195 CPU. It performed marvelously.
My PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750 Copper died after a decade of service.
It had gone through systems booting with 4 HDDs, a SSD, and a water cooling system, dual Crossfire graphics cards, and tons of fans. It was the one constant in my system through three motherboards, three CPUs, numerous hard drives, many sticks of RAM, and so on. Multiple cases as well. I had bought other PC Power & Cooling power supplies since and have yet to have any others die on me. And this one died gracefully taking out no other components in the process.
So, I replaced it with a PC Power & Cooling Silencer Mk III 850W.

First, to prepare for this install I decided to add dust proofing in the form of vent filters. My wife had done this previously on her desktop and while it does not eliminate all dust inside the case it does greatly reduce the amount that gets pulled in.

You put the pieces to fit the application area.  Pulling out the old power supply left me with a lot of room to play with in terms of some rerouting of wiring.

Interestingly, as mentioned earlier, the new power supply unit (PSU) is modular and has a much larger fan. Features anathema to the original publishing and features of my older PSU.

The modular cables are threaded onto the PSU as opposed to just pushed in or clipped in. This presents a very solid connection.

Here is the PSU installed in the bottom of the case.

I was able to route the power cables differently this time, particularly on the far right I was able to route CPU power up the back and over the motherboard.

The graphics card (GPU) shroud and fan unit is now reinstalled. Lots of white vent filter is visible. I also installed vent filter in each piece of the desktop's front face and on the side panel for the side fan.

My wife took a picture of me working on the desktop. Particularly of note the new desk, being adjustable in height, makes it much easier to work on the desktop with extra head room.

At this point I would consider adding a fan controller. It appears at some point, probably due to conflict between motherboard fan control and the software to control my water cooling loop, my system stopped using all its fans to their best potential. So, this is a next possibility. At the same time this desktop is still pretty old and I am considering throwing no more money at this rig and just taking all of this into consideration for the next system I build.

Lastly, as with all my computer posts, I give you the current configuration:
Desktop: Custom
Case: Cooler Master HAF X 942 (Fans: 1x 230 mm front, 1x 140 mm rear, 2x 200 mm top, 1x 200mm side, 1x 140 mm to GFX card, custom wiring, modded for 280 mm x 140 mm top mounted radiator)
MB: ASUS Crosshair IV Formula AM3 AMD 890FX
CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition Thuban 3.2GHz Socket AM3 125W
HSF: Corsair Hydro Series H110i
RAM: 4x 4GB G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 [16 GB total]
GPU: 1x Sapphire Vapor-X Radeon R9 270X (2 GB GDDR5)
Sound: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer Fatal1ty Pro
PSU: PC Power & Cooling Silencer Series 850 Watt
HDD: 1x Samsung SSD 850 Pro (OS)
HDD: 1x WD RE4 500 GB SATA 3.0 Gb/s (OS)
HDD: 1x WD RE4 500 GB SATA 3.0 Gb/s (Spare)
HDD: 1x WD Caviar Black 1TB  SATA 6.0Gb/s (Backup + Media)
HDD: 1x WD Caviar Black 1TB  SATA 6.0Gb/s (Backup + Media)
Networking: Dual Gigabit
Optical: LITE-ON 24X DVD Writer Black SATA LightScribe
Optical: LG Black 10X Blu-ray Burner SATA LightScribe
Primary Monitor: Samsung SyncMaster P2770HD 27" Widescreen w/ TV Tuner
Secondary Monitor: Samsung T220 Rose-Black 22" Widescreen
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64