Category: Power Supply
Manufacturer: OCZ Technology
Product: GameXStream 850W SLI
Gallery: Click Here
Price: $169.99

Power supplies today are huge. You can tell just by looking at them. If you have access to an old pre-built PC from Dell or HP, open it up (the warranty is void by now, no worries) and take a look at the power supply. Compare that with the one powering your high-end gaming PC of today, and you might be quite taken aback. Though some manufacturers have managed to continue with true compliance to ATX size standards, all too many have abandoned these dimensions and made the behemoth power supplies we have seen cropping up over the past two years. While the Thermaltake ToughPower 1200W PSU we reviewed a couple of weeks ago was a huge power supply in its own right, it paled in comparison to such products as Enermax’s Galaxy 1000W and a similar unit from PC Power & Cooling (OCZ Group). Power supplies are not growing just in size either.

If examining the maximum outputs of power supplies over the past two years tells us anything, it is that power supply internals are increasing in quality and size right along with their swelling exteriors. 350W was a huge amount of power about 5 years ago. Today, you would be hard-pressed to find any kind of high-end system (with the exception of a Shuttle, perhaps) that could be well-supplied or let alone run on 350W. Today we see power supplies with up to six +12V rails providing the juice for two honking video cards (soon to be three honking video cards), quad core processors, and disgustingly huge hard disk arrays. 1200W is not an uncommon number to come across when browsing the PSU inventories of your favorite e-tailer these days. If certain power supplies occupy a form a factor almost double the physical size of their ancestors, then the inside components of each and every power supply claiming high outputs must have doubled as well, right?

Not necessarily. Thanks to enhanced quality of PSU components like MOSFETS, transformers, and capacitors, certain PSUs have managed to reach pretty high output ratings from the same ATX form factor of old. The 850W GameXStream power supply from OCZ Technology is one such device, and we will be taking a look at it today.