OCZ ZT Series 750W Fully Modular Power Supply Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
2,070 words · ~10 min read
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welcome to my unboxing of a very exciting product now this has sort of a
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more value oriented price point compared to something like a ZX Series which is
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80 plus gold and fully modular and like
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lots of good stuff it's really good power supply but they're expensive so
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this is the ZT series which has sort of
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90% of what the ZX Series has but at a lower price point so it is a fully
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modular power supply with a 5year warranty 80 plus bronze is still pretty
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darn good on a yearly scale we're talking probably about6 to7 of
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difference assuming you're running your computer at like full load like many
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hours per day uh you can go back and check out on my ncixcom channel the
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episode I did about 80 plus gold where I compared the cost of running a non- 80
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plus power supply with an 80 plus gold power supply and I gave sort of a couple
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different scenarios and yeah the cost is
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not that big of a factor as long as it's a nice high quality
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unit then you are going to be getting the performance you need out of your PSU
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so Inside the Box we find a manual which
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is actually surprisingly thick look at that okay so it talks a little bit about
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80 plus efficiency level certification so 80 plus bronze is 82% at 20% 85% at
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50% 82% at 100% okay and that's at 11 15 volt which
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is what we use in North America so 80 plus gold is about 5% more efficient
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across the board but as I said before
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it's really not the end of the world however you know what this chart really
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uh outlines one of the reasons I tell people not to over Buy on the power
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supply because if you buy a 1500 watt power supply and you're using 300 watts
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at idle which you're not because most computers use about 100 to 150 watts at
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idle you're getting less than anything on this chart in terms of the efficiency
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that your power supply is rated for you're not even in The Sweet Spot which
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is about 50% so connector specifications
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here we can look at the specifications I suppose Max output on the uh 12vt rail
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is hold on Max
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output uh okay hold on a second you know
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what let's just look at the side of the power supply because that is a less complicated chart here's a bunch of
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different languages which I do not care about but somebody does and that's why
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they're there all right next we have the power supply itself and I haven't
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forgotten about the cables we will go back and look at the cables later I just
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wanted to see once we get the little baggie opened
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up here hey it's got a 140 mm cooling fan oh it doesn't oh yeah there it is
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okay so on the 12vt rail we can do up to 744 Watts so you can do almost the
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entire output of this 750 watt continuous rated power supply on the 12
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uh on the 12vt rail which means that no matter what you throw at it in terms of
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graphics cards or where you plug them in because this is a single 12vt rail power
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supply you will get the full output that it is rated for so I'm being a little
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bit add today but I'm going to go ahead I'm going to put the power supply itself
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back down and I'm going to go back to the Box because I just want to see if in
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this unboxing I missed anything okay so
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they've got ratings for the cable lengths which is good to know there's
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that chart I was looking for continuous up rated at a demanding 45° C ambient
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temperature wow so they're rating this power supply at a completely unrealistic
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temperature and not unrealistic in a bad way unrealistic in a good way if this
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delivers the performance they say it does at that temperature I guarantee you
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it's performing better than they say at a a room temperature which is going to
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be less like what about 20 23° cius s of
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in that range single 12vt rail we already talked about that premium low
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ESR 105° C electrolytic capacitors uh
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compliant with ATX v2.2 okay large temperature and load control this is
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cool so the fan on here most fans are
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temperature controlled on power supplies this one is load controlled so what that
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means is your fan is actually going to start spinning faster as soon as your
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computer is drawing more juice from the power supply why is that important
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because it means that your power supply will never heat up any higher than it
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has to because it's already predicting
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that there is more load on the components and they're going to heat up it is cooling them before they even need
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to be cooled very neat all right next we have 80 plus bronze which we talked
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about already and a bunch of sort of
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safety stuff over voltage or over current over power and ShortCircuit to
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protect your components 5year Power Swap warranty I remember when the power swap
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warranty first launched that was with the ocz uh this was before the mod extrem
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this was Power Stream yes with the Power Stream power supply
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so that means that you do not have endless repair return for repair Loops
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they just send you a new one no big deal
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that is pretty much it I'm done with the Box okay now we're going to go back to
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the cables so we've got a big gold fat
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computer cable here so what is this
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uh trying to find out how thick it is
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why don't I just tell you guys it's thick and it's UL certified so it's
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probably safe next we have some PCIe
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cables EPS uh what's that yeah that's
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EPS okay got other more different EPS got other more different PCIe I'm just
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going to sort these into what they are and then we'll come back to them in a
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minute okay so first thing we find is our 24 pin connector so these are
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clearly labeled PSU and then like not
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PSU ATX so that goes into your motherboard cable lengths I wouldn't
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have any concerns with a premium power supply like this but I'm going go ahead and check it anyway there you go you got
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a nice long 24 pin connect so even if it's a sorry about that guys we ran out
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of memory so this will be uh adequate length for you whether you have your
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bottom mounted power supply whether you want to go around the back of the motherboard tray and come up the front
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whatever the case may be nice long 24 pin cable never hurts when you are
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building a machine all right what else we got so uh PCI E cables here let's
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have a look at the lengths of these PCI E cables tend to not need to be very
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long because whether you have a bottom mounted power
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supply or whether you have a top mounted power supply the distance is kind of the
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same so I don't worry too much about that but there you go that is the
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length in terms of Linus Heights it's about a zyo process to a top of the head
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sort of length all right next we have
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our 8 Pin EPS connectors of which there are two these look like they might be a
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little bit short but let me have a look actually that's not bad okay that's
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pretty good so that's actually longer than no it's about the same length yeah it's longer than the PCIe cable so you
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should be able to reach in anything the tallest most ridiculous full tower case
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you should be able to go around the back of the motherboard and plug into the top
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of the motherboard okay next finally not
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finally but also we have SATA so we have
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a three SATA cable okay so that's a modular cable we have another three SATA
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cable we have another three SATA cable
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and that is it so since those are all the same I'm just going to take one of them and I'm going to show you guys the
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size or the length rather okay so there you go they look a little
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bit something like that all right and then we've only got a couple Molex ones
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but that's fine so we've got two two three Molex cables and then we
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have these are these are handy we've got one of those Molex to Floppy adapters
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just in case you still have something in your system that uses floppy power we C
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we have four zip ties for cable management four screws for attaching the
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power supply to the case and now let's have a look at the unit itself it has a
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very nice aesthetic to it it I mean I'm obviously that is subjective but I
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personally really like it bold yellow here bold yellow here and then otherwise
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dark blacks and gray scales looks really
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really sharp there's the 140 mm fan you
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can clearly see the internals of the power supply itself including the
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modular interface which is very low profile actually it looks really good
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and the solder points on the back are very clean interesting okay moving along
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to the other side you can see ocz has thought of everything see look it's
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right side up no matter which way you install your power supply so you can
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either go this way and you can draw air in from the Top If you have a case that
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doesn't have ventilation on the bottom or you can go this way and draw air up
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from the bottom of your case if you do have the ventilation space on the back
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we find a honeycomb mesh nice low restriction mesh an onoff switch as well
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as the power input and finally let's check out the oh this is awesome okay
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this is right here probably the killer feature other than the load controlled
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fan 10 speed so check this out you can plug in you never see this with the 750
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W models you can plug in all four of your PCIe and then you can plug in both
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of your EPS connectors so you can power
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even super high-end boards and dual graphics cards without any adapters
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because the reality of it is 750 watts
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is enough for most systems out there but
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a lot of motherboard or a lot of power supply manufacturers give you one EPS
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socket and four PCIe forcing you to
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either use a single EPs and two graphics
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cards like if you have a high-end motherboard that takes two EPS connectors or they make you put the
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other EPS into one of the PCIe and you use up uh two EPS that way and then you
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only have three PCI Express adapters left which means you can't do dual
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graphics cards which if you're buying a motherboard that has two eight pins I'm
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pretty sure that unless you have a server board you're probably going to want a couple graphics cards in there so
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there you go that's pretty cool um next we also
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have there we are uh five modular spots
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for the SATA 1 two 3 SATA and two Molex so you can plug in all of the included
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cables without any difficulty and finally we have the ATX connector here
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which is pretty self-explanatory so thank you for checking out my unboxing
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of the ZT series 750 W power supply
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