OCZ ZS series 650W power supply review - Introduction

You can find power supplies a dozen dime these day, but our advice is always simple, keep your choice for any PSU at least to a decent brand and really then one rule kicks in, bad PSU's will be hard to stumble into.

If you do look for a PSU that is somewhat more affordable and do not crave that need for modular cables and extremely high efficiency (to save some money), well then you need to be a little more careful in your selection process. Cheap often results in compromises from the original device manufacturer. With that in mind we wanted to check out an entry level PSU series anno 2011, yet from a respectable brand to see if we can find anything wrong with it.

OCZ Technology has been selling PSU's for a long time now too bad the pulled their PC Power & Cooling supplies out of the EU market as they where top of the line. But that's not what today's review is about.

So you are in the market for an affordable PSU, got a closed chassis with no side window and want bang for buck ? Well, the new ZS series from OCZ seems to do the job quite well.

The innards of the PSU are pretty decent quality, you get a nice dark looking PSU with all sleeved cabling. The cables itself all fairly decent in length (not modular though) and there is plenty of ampage available to power even a fairly high-end PC, yep even with the 650W model we test today. Combine that with decent efficiency as the PSU has an 80+ certification and the sky is the limit.

OCZ releases the ZS model in a three fold of models, a 550W model priced at 55 EUR, a 650 model priced at 65 EUR and a 750W model priced at 75 EUR (USD conversion is similar at the moment).

The big question with it remain reasonably efficient and most of alls stable ? Today we'll grab a couple of other power supplies and see how efficient the PSU is and how well it behaves under load. We fire off three PSUs at a P55 / Core i7 870 based system setup with a GeForce GTX 590. We then monitor power consumption in idle, CPU productivity (stress) mode and then lock into a gaming session.

Will it be able to perform as expected ? Let's find out.