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External
Features :::...
The
box is decked out in OCZ's corporate orange colour scheme
and shows how bright and eye-catching doesn't necessarily
mean cheap and cheesy.
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The
Box
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But
it's when you get the unit out of the box that you appreciate
just how classy this thing looks, followed shortly by the
sincere desire for a pair of cotton gloves to handle it
with. The finish is created using a decorative nickel-chrome
plating process that also offers a good level of corrosion
prevention. You may think corrosion isn't a problem inside
your case but depending your room temperature and whether
or not you shut your PC down at night you may find a lot
of surface condensation can form on cold steel parts.
The
finish is pretty durable, but scratch it and it'll come
away without too much resistance so take reasonable care
when you fit it.
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Surface
Finish
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No,
it's not a new line of camouflaged power supplies, this
is all reflected in that glorious finish. I wonder if they'd
do my case for me?
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Surface
Finish
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Braided
Power Cable
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There
seem to be no shortage of connectors at first glance but
they're not as ideal as they may seem at first. The two
PowerShield™ power leads (the dark coloured ones on the
right) are a nice touch. Most units that offer these at
all tend to offer only one. That said, with most systems
these days featuring a minimum of two hard drives some kind
of splitter to feed two drives from the one cable would
have been useful. If your graphics card doesn't need an
auxiliary feed you could use the second one to power a second
hard drive but you may need it when you next upgrade.
Besides
this there are six traditional Molex plugs arranged as two
sets of three. Because of the way PC drives are usually
placed it often works better to have three sets of two plugs
but every system build is different. It just seems to work
out that way for me more often than not. Six is actually
not that generous by modern standards with eight or ten
not being that uncommon. This of course is difficult to
achieve with such a wide array of connectors already supplied
on the PowerStream including two S-ATA power feeds, a six-pin
BTX and four-pin ATX auxilliary power connector and of course
the two PowerShield™ leads.
All
the cables are twisted and cable-tied at regular intervals
which should help reduce EMI
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The
Leads
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Speaking
of the PowerShield™ leads perhaps we need to briefly touch
on what they are.
The
idea here is that by using a protective outer braiding and
a what I presume is a graphite filter, a much cleaner feed
can be supplied to your graphics card, hard drive or in
fact anything you like.
It
may be coincidence as I was using a different case but the
plain gray Photoshop background that used to shimmer very
slightly due to what I assumed was low-level EMI from one
or more of my case fans, was significantly better when the
card was run off one of these feeds. I'd need to test this
more to say conclusively that the PowerShield™ cable was
responsible but I don't see how it can do anything but help.
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PowerShield™
Lead
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From
the back you can see the gold coloured finger guard that
perfectly compliments the dark casing.
This
isn't a full range supply so you'll need to move the red
voltage selector to suit your country's output, which in
the UK meant moving it off the default 115v setting to the
230v setting.
The
need to manually switch the voltage selector hints that
this unit may be using only passive PFC (Power Factor Correction
) which is generally less energy efficient than active PFC.
This won't affect the operation in your PC necessarily,
it just means more power is wasted and thus your electricity
bill becomes a touch larger than it might have been otherwise.
This may also be why I couldn't find a PFC rating for the
PowerStream, in fact I couldn't find a whole heap of specifications
for it including things like ripple, regulation, efficiency
and hold-up time.
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Rear
View
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This
might just be the anal retentive in me but find the person
responsible for putting that black voltage ID sticker on...AND
SACK THEM! Do you think Charles Rolls and Henry Royce got
where they are by letting their cars out of the factory
with the Spirit of Ecstasy sat crooked on the radiator?
I know it's a minor point but when you have such an exquisite
exterior why spoil it with something so simple?
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LEDs,
Switch and Trim Pots
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The
three LEDs and trim pots above them are part of OCZ's PowerFlex™
system which allows for independent tweaking and tuning
of the 12, 5 and 3.3v outputs. By glowing in one of three
colours you can get instant visual confirmation regarding
the actual output.
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Green
- Within ±5%
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Yellow
- Below±5%
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Red
- Above±5%
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Simulated
The
+12v output can be adjusted anywhere between 10.8 and 13.2v,
the +5v output between 4.5 and 5.5v and the +3.3v between
2.8 and 3.8v.
Below
is the adapter to convert from the less common (at the moment)
24-pin BTX motherboard connector to the regular 20-pin ATX
board motherboard connector. Obviously those of us using
the 20-pin ATX connector will hate this idea as it just
adds to the bulk of cables inside the case and is anything
but elegant, but I must grudgingly concede that this is
probably the sensible way around to do it.
Those
tiny specks on top of the unit are because it had just started
to rain. I am in the UK after all.
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24-20
Pin Adapter
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