OCZ ZT 650W power supply review - Introduction

Even though the focus of OCZ is mostly concentrated at the SSD space nowadays, the company is still a very active player in the power supply market. Recently we reviewed the ZS series but they also released the ZT (100% modular) PSU series that is designed for system builders and gamers with a more high-end hint to it.

So you are in the market for an affordable PSU, want a modular design and want bang for your bucks? Well, the new ZT series from OCZ seems to do the job quite well.

The innards of the PSU are of nice quality and you get a nice dark looking PSU with all sleeved cabling. The cables themselves are all fairly decent in length and there is plenty of ampage available to power even a fairly high-end PC; yep even with the 650W model we're testing today. Combine that with decent efficiency as the PSU has an 80+ Bronze (85% @ 50% load) certification and the sky is the limit.

OCZ releases the ZT model in a three fold of models, a 550W model priced at 55 EUR, a 650 model priced at 75 EUR and a 750W model priced at 90 EUR (USD conversion is roughly similar at the moment).

As far as the available connectors are concerned, all the units feature a minimum of five SATA power plugs, at least six MOLEX plugs, as well as two 6+2-pin PCI Express connectors.

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.