OCZ GameXStream 850W PSU Review - PAGE 1

As fate would have it, I just happen to be in the market for a brand new power supply. I'm thinking of tossing together a nice AM2 system. I'll probably start by plugging an Athlon 64 X2 5000+ chip into that Abit Fatal1ty board I had reviewed recently. It's going to be for gaming, so I'm guessing that a couple BFG 7950 GX2 cards running in SLI. There's some really nice Corsair PC8500 XMS memory that I can get ahold of. Toss in an obscene amount of cooling and I'm almost ready to go. Wait, but what about the power supply?

That processor can draw up to and over 200 Watts of juice. Those BFG 7950 GX2 cards can pull over a hundred watts each at full load. Five spinning hard drives tacks on another 20 or so watts. The list goes on. But you begin to see how important proper power distribution is. A fully loaded top of the line system can draw up to 600 watts. Do some overclocking and tack some more electricity. So keeping all those parts well fed with a steady diet of fresh clean electrons is of the utmost importance. That bringing me to the latest of power supply reviews.

We've had a fair sum of OCZ parts grace our halls. We've seen their memory in the form of some OCZ EB PC4000 Platinum Edition memory. It may have only been DDR1 memory, but it was some of the fastest DDR1 memory we've seen in some time. The OCZ Tempest Cooler was, and still is one of the prettiest processor heat sinks I've seen in ages. And the OCZ 1GB Mini-Kart Thumb Drive was actually pretty cool, and pretty small too. But as for OCZ branded power supplies, we've only had the opportunity to review the OCZ GameXStream 700W Power Supply. It was, and still is a good power supply. But now we have something bigger, way bigger upon us.

I'm talking 850 Watts big, in the form of the OCZ GameXStream 850W PSU. Can you believe it, a whole 850 Watts of power? Who ever would need so much? Even the most powerful SLI (8800GTX) and CrossFire (X1950XTX) systems will run on good 600W or 650W PSUs, but OCZ and other PSU manufacturers are not interested in maybe's and taking half measures.  They are pushing the envelope for those users who want to have huge RAID setups, maybe even 3 high end video cards (the third for physics processing), and power hungry cooling systems.  Let's see how this 850W beast does to satisfy that level of power user.