- Back to homepage

OCZ Z-Series PSU Gets 80 Plus Certification

@ 2009/04/03

World of power supplies is quite a confusing one, especially after the debut of "80 Plus" certification. According to the standard's body,80plus.org , 80 Plus is combined between Bronze, Silver and Gold certificates, with gold being over 90% efficient at 50% load and a minimum of 88% efficiency at full load.

During last months' CeBIT show in Han(g)over, Germany - the company stated that their upcoming products will feature 80 Plus Gold certificate for some products. Couple of weeks later, we received news that upcoming 1kW Z-Series received its 80 Plus Gold certificate, claiming that their new power supply will feature 88.23% at 20% load, 90.93% at 50% load and 89.20% at 100% load. Put it layman's terms, this power supply will output 892W at 100% load, or equal amount of juice than some 1100 and 1200W power supplies with lower efficiency ratings.

Comment from Kougar @ 2009/04/06

Quote:

Originally Posted by wutske

Second, if a 400W audio station can't run stable on 850W+ PSUs than I think it's time he either change the motherboard or change the electrical wirings in his house.

Agreed completely. No reason he should have PC Power & Cooling PSUs blowing up when not even close to load, they test each of those units by hand to 110% of their specifications before shipping.

Comment from wutske @ 2009/04/06

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kougar

I think he's trying to say that he had a 700W pulling system powered by two 750W rated power supplies ... Which I think is overkill and also inefficient because both power supplies would only be running at 50% capacity at which most power supplies have a lower efficiency (+the inefficiency is doubled because he has two PSUs instead of one).

Second, if a 400W audio station can't run stable on 850W+ PSUs than I think it's time he either change the motherboard or change the electrical wirings in his house.

Comment from Kougar @ 2009/04/06

Quote:

You're free to call us conservative, but when a 700W-pulling system works for two years with two OCZ PP&C CrossFire 750W PSUs, we call that a success.

This by itself is proof of the opposite. By his reasoning those 750W rated PSUs are rated for 600-640W, and he would be overloading them! The efficiency isn't subtracted from the official wattage rating, it is multiplied by the rating and then subtracted from the power draw from the wall to get actual system power usage.

It also must be taken into consideration when looking at readings from a wall power meter... 750W draw from the wall means the system is drawing 600W to function assuming a flat 80% AC/DC conversion efficiency (which is a huge oversimplification, but for the sake of an example... )

Quote:

The machine was consisted out of C2QX6700, 4GB DDR2-800 RAM, nVidia GeForce 9600GSO and four WD Black 500GB drives in RAID5 array. Simple, right? Well, it wasn't.

I find it unlikely this setup could pull 700 or greater from the wall... the voltages and overclocks required would need to be dangerously high. Considering it required a Q6600, 8800GTS, 4 HDDs in RAID 10, extra HDD, sound card, fan controller, MCP655 pump, ~9 120mm case fans and some extreme CPU/GPU overclocking for me to reach >700W power draw from the wall...

PSUs are rated for a set output. This is not like hard drives where the GB rating is overstated. Some PSU manufacturers still cheat and overstate their PSU rating / capability. If he wants to convince me of this I'd need to hear an electrical engineer from one of these PSU companies confirming this. Just as he claims it goes against his experience, it goes against all the experience I have and what information I have studied regarding power supplies.

Comment from wutske @ 2009/04/05

Same idea. I just had a 3 years cours of electronics behind my back, the theory is still fresh in my head and power ratings never include the power efficiency.
Peak power sometimes is used for commercial purposes, but this values doesn't include efficiency either.

Comment from jmke @ 2009/04/05

nice story; but doesn't make his claim through

Comment from wutske @ 2009/04/05

This is what he had to say:

Quote:

In terms of power supplies, various manufacturers offer various claims and yield various performance. We do understand power supplies, unfortunately for us - from the good and from the worst side.

While editing this story, I deleted a paragraph that went on to explain our experiences with PSUs, such as a last-months issue with a audio workstation system that pulled less than 450W from the wall socket, yet it was unable to get a stable run with seven different PSUs, including several from the manufacturer in question. Not a single PSU had less than 850W of power and a price of less than 180 EUR.

The machine was consisted out of C2QX6700, 4GB DDR2-800 RAM, nVidia GeForce 9600GSO and four WD Black 500GB drives in RAID5 array. Simple, right? Well, it wasn't.

Our PSU expertise is based on our experience. In the past 10 years, I assembled more than 600 high-end systems ranging from single to quad-socket solutions, up to 128GB of RAM (during my 7-year stint as Testing Manager in VidiLab, we assembled numerous systems... and test something like 110 LCD displays, 80 motherboards, 92 graphics cards, 50 PSUs, 80 CPUs etc etc etc).
I've assembled systems for gaming, CAD/CAM, Hackintoshes and many more. But overall, we do have several thousand systems experience from the people involved in the project [we work with unnamed industry experts form the world of system building, who are giving us feedback] - so, I do think that we have a in-depth knowledge about PSUs, especially in the long run.

But just like you should never load a hard drive below 15% free space, there is unfortunately, no way that you can get stable long-run operation with a 1000W power draw. You're free to call us conservative, but when a 700W-pulling system works for two years with two OCZ PP&C CrossFire 750W PSUs, we call that a success. When a 720W power drawing system causes OCZ's PP&C 860 ESA PSU to go kaboom, then we do not call it a success.

PSUs from various manufacturers, including the manufacturer and the brand mentioned here, we will not put a conclusion on capabilities of a device from a press release, that coming from Airbus SAS, Ferrari, Virgin Galactic or Intel, AMD, and ultimately, the company in question.

What we believe in is that we see. When this PSU comes to our lab and performs stable under 1kW load, we'll say - nice.

Comment from jmke @ 2009/04/05

yes that's quite a goof by Theo

Comment from wutske @ 2009/04/05

Your indeed right ... I realy don't know what confuses these guys. Every PSU (and not only those in computers) mention the amount of energy it can deliver, the amount of energy it consumes is hardly mentioned. It's the most easy way because you don't need the now the power efficiency to select the right power supply.

//edit: took the time to contact Theo from BSN, hope he'll update the article to prevent more confusion

Comment from Kougar @ 2009/04/05

NPP you are very correct, they do not know how PSUs function.

Comment from npp @ 2009/04/04

Layman's terms like those are what confuses people most - they got it completely wrong: the PSU will (hopefuly) output 1000W DC at full load, that's what it's rated for, and those 1000W will be 89,2% of the total amount of energy consumed by the PSU, which is hence 1121W. For comparison, a 1000W PSU with 80% efficiency at full load would consume 1250W, which is 129W more - a huge amount of additional heat.

So that's what some people may be thinking - I'll buy the higher efficiency model, because its real output will be closer to the rated output... lol

All information and graphics contained in Madshrimps are sole property of the Madshrimps crew and may not be reproduced or copied in any manner without written permission from us.