OCZ's octopus gives you ton of juice

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Product: OCZGXS850
Website: WWW.OCZTECHNOLOGY.COM
System Requirements:This is the requirement for the system to work
Price:$199.99

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BEST KNOWN FOR its high-end memory and power supplies, OCZ is even expanding into the world of graphics cards and gaming peripherals. In this review, we will be focusing on the good old PSU, a part of the computer which has a critical task for the health of the whole system. Although the name of this product may seem to indicate that it caters to gamers, we'll also address the other side of spectrum, workstations.

I have to admit that my intial foray with OCZ power supplies, some two years ago now, was less than positive with first PSU I tested from them, the 520W ModStream, being very disappointing. The PSU had poor quality cabling and did not leave the inqpression of a good product, especially when compared to Tagan, a company with probably the highest quality removable cabling out there. However, when it comes to non-moddable, octopus style PSUs, OCZ earned a reputation as a vendor of high-quality products for a pretty good price. The model we're reviewing here is oriented towards gamers who are being forced to get as much power as possible.

Dismantling the octopuss

Only by spreading all rails can a person understand the reference to a certain sea creature...fully extended, these cables could not fit my plain 17-55 stock lens on EOS-350D

This power supply comes in a retail package which shows its orientation toward gamers with a black finish and a blue colour scheme giving away the colour that shines through when the PSU is switched on. Using moddable PSUs for the past year and a half has spoiled yours truly, since I am not accustomed to having to worry where all the cables will end up. There are six S-ATA connectors, six 4-pin full-size Molex and two 4-pin floppy connectors, pretty much giving you an opportunity to fill the big tower case to the maximum extent. Base configuration for motherboards is 20+4 and 4+4 (8-pin total) rails, joined with two PCIe power connectors for the graphics card(s) of today.

After the first boot with this PSU installed, the blue LEDs shine strongly and then reduce to about 5% of the original brightness, a logical move, given the fact that the fan is thermally controlled. The fan inside the PSU is dead-silent, and the sound will easily get eaten by other components in the computer.

Is 850W enough?

The backside looks pretty usual for a PSU with 120mm fan: honeycomb grill and a mark which confirms that you can use this PSU anywhere in the world

The whole power supply industry got an initial push when Intel got over-confident in the clocking capabilities of their CPUs, which started leaking current like a slaughtered pig, easily requiring 160-170-180 Watts to operate normally. The second push came when graphics cards really started churning out billions of operations per second for breakfast, and the industry is now caught in a rat race of needing more and more juice.

Intel's "power does not matter" is still in force down the road in Santa Clara and Markham, Canada, but this time we're in the world of graphic cards. Truth to be told, GPUs of today are really worth all that juice, but it is getting out of hand. In the past two winters, I have to admit that I even managed to lower the heating bills for my apartment, due to four graphics cards doing a job almost equal to my 3.2kW air-conditioning system. Two 7800GTX's and two X1800XT's kept my working room all nice and warm when outside was covered in 50cm of snow at -18 degrees Celsius, to be more precise the difference in the ambient room temperature between having the computers switched on and off was a massive six degrees.

Testing

Loading the PSU to 100% the blueish white LED starts to shine a lot

When it comes to testing power supplies, I've been an avid evangelist of real-world usage. I really think that if you test the PSUs on simulated test-beds with lightbulbs or other power suckers you don't get accurate results. Lightbulbs do not require that a PSU deliver a 12V rail with near-perfect 20A in order to have nice and clean signal at 1.1-1.2-1.3V and 70-80-90-100 Amps, depending on what CPU you use.

For the purpose of testing, we are using three different configurations: INQtest#1, INQtest#2 and TheoStation.

INQtest#1 consists of the following components:
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700
Asetek VapoChill Micro
Intel D975XBX "Bad Axe 2"
2GB GeIL PC-8500/9600 MultiSpec
MSI GeForce 8800GTS 640MB
24" Dell 2407WFP
250GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.8
Sony BWU-100A
OCZ GameXstream 850W
testbed configuration

INQtest#2 consists of the following components:
Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955
CoolIT Freezone
Intel D975XBX "Bad Axe 2"
2GB Corsair Dominator PC-9136C5D
Nvidia GeForce 7950GX2
19" Samsung SyncMaster 193P
250GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.8
Samsung WriteMaster SH-W153A
packed in Chieftec MidiTower case
and usually powered by a Corsair 620W PSU.

TheoStation consists of the following components:
2x AMD Opteron 280
Tyan Thunder K8WE
4GB Corsair Reg. ECC DDR400
Nvidia GeForce 7800GTX
19" Dell 1905P
BroadCom GbE PCIe x1
M-Audio Studio 1010
Plextor PX-760A
Sony 80GB tape-drive
packed in Chieftec big tower case
and usually powered by a Tagan EasyCon 580W

The OCZ 850W was installed in every test configuration and run for several days under high-stress load. We tested mostly by loading the CPU and GPU to the fullest. Thanks to development in the multiprocessing arena, today we can load each and every part of the system and be able to keep everything stressed by running multiple high-load applications. One of my favourite scenarios is encoding DVDs or HDTV shows while running games as this will load the hard drive, all the cores and the system memory. In fact, lately I learned to appreciate two separated memory controllers on the Opteron configuration because performance is always there... a good reason also lies in the combination of excellent Registered ECC memory which works at 3-3-8 latency at 400 MHz. Even though the system requirements are different, there is definitely a lot of truth in AMD's QuadFX approach, and the price is far more favourable than two dual-core Opterons. However, my Opterons run nicely in Cool'n'Quiet mode.

To get back on the subject, testing the PSU under extreme load conditions called for a NetBurst CPU. The EE955 works at a default clock of 3.46GHz, but for PSU testing we have overclocked it all the way to 4.78 GHz. In this config, the CPU alone is eating around 200W, and added the CoolIT system combines peltier and water-cooling in one, of course connected to the PSU to ensure maximum load. After the initial phase was done, we started loading the PSU with hard drives and DVD burners, checking to see when the PSU started with fluctuations of current in the voltage rails.

Performance was pretty much outstanding. We cannot show you 3dmarks of pseudo-something to indicate the level of performance this PSU delivers, but all that we can write here is that voltage supplied by this PSU is outstanding. All three configurations ran without a hitch, which only compliments OCZ. On the Tagan and Corsair PSUs the EE955 at 4.78 GHz proved to be quite a handful if you use more than one hard drive on the Tagan, while Corsair didn't provide stable operation after adding the third hard drive and a Blu-ray burner. Truth be told the OCZ comes with a higher spec so an advantage was expected.

In Short
This product rightly deserves our five pints out of five on Mad Mike's scale of hardware goodness, but the lack of additional PEG adapters holds back one pints. With the 8800GTX, R600 and R680/R700/G90 all wanting two PEG adaptors and the dual 6-pin requirement being here for quite some time, multi-GPU conscious gamers cannot miss out on this sad requirement. That said, if this PSU was named anything other than GameXstream, I couldn't find a single problem.

I found this PSU ideal for workstation machines, since it has six SATA connectors, pretty much ideal for running five hard drives in RAID5 + one spare drive, while having enough juice for running dual dual-core or quad-core Opterons/Xeons, Quadros and storage devices such as tape drives. ?

The Good
Plenty of juice available
Works in both workstation and gaming rig scenarios
Passed torture test without a hitch

The Bad
A gaming PSU should not need adapters to run an 8800GTX in SLI
Cabling eats up room, not for cramped cases

The Ugly
Those octopus cables will just eat your case unless you have big tower or CoolerMaster's original Stacker, for example.

Bartender's Report
For Gamers with multi-GPU in mind: Four of out Five Pints
For normal people: Five out of Five Pints