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By now OCZ needs no introduction to most enthusiasts, and I'm not going to bore you with details. Instead, let us dive right into the meat of the matter: the new crop of high output power supplies now in the ultra high 700W capacities. These high end PSUs are no doubt coming to market due to the increased power consumption of high end gaming machines. Dual graphics cards running in SLI and CrossFire draw loads of current. There is also the increased likely hood that gamers and users will have a great many peripherals added to their system. Whether it be multiple drives tunning a RAID array, multiple add on cards, and even multiple optical devices, computers are hungry beasts. And let us not forget fans and other cooling solutions. But amongst those requirements the one that is most PSU sensitive is multi-GPU gaming.

I think you've probably seen many PSUs with "SLI Ready" or some other SLI statement to ensure their compatibility with Nvidias SLI system. So far we've yet to see any high end PSU fall short of being able to run SLI cards, even the 7900GTX cards, which use about the same power as Nvidia's previous generation flagship, the 7800GTX.

The ATI side of the story is a different matter, and we investigated this earlier in our review of FSP's Epsilon FX700-GLN 700W PSU, which ran through our tests with a fully loaded CrossFire X1900XT system flawlessly. Before the Epsilon, we had numerous stability issues including reboots, lockups and graphics rendering when using even the highest caliber 600W PSUs. All of these 600W power supplies ran SLI perfectly and even ran a pair of X1800's without a single problem. It's the higher end of CrossFire that has those rigorous and stringent power demands.

FSP's Epsilon was an excellent PSU and we hold it in high regard, but it is a little on the noisy side, and had a pretty steep price tag at the time of its review. Now however, it's price has come down to more reasonable levels (~$200 Cdn or ~$180USD). Thankfully, some more CrossFire certified PSUs have also cropped up recently.

With thoughts of price, performance and noise in mind, today we're going to be taking a look at the OCZ GameXStream 700W Power Supply. This black box comes SLI ready, and also with claims of ATI CrossFire compatibility. OCZ states that it is 'the ultimate solution for serious gamers'. Let's take a few minutes to find out if this PSU can handle CrossFire. We'll put the OCZ GameXStream 700W Power Supply to the test and see if we have another CrossFire winner on our hands.