In today's day and age personal computers are pretty much everywhere and as time goes on our computers become faster and faster. However, this speed has come at the price of greatly increased usage of electricity. Hardware designers and manufacturers have been hell bent on making the fastest hardware possible as quickly as possible. Unfortunately the path to creating faster hardware is usually through beefing up quantity rather than improving on quality and efficiency; more system memory with higher clock speeds, more video cards running simultaneously, more cores in our processors. These solutions, while effective at creating faster computers, are very lazy and as such power consumption of personal computers has greatly risen.

Due to this quick increase of power consumption, computer power supplies have followed suit to meet the needs of our power hungry computers with quad-SLI setups. Capacity levels of power supplies have increased from a norm of 200-250W to level today where a 400-500W power supply is required. For extreme computers with multi-video card, overclocked processor and system memory setups 600-700W power supplies are needed.

Today in the labs we have OCZ's 700W GameXStream power supply. This power supply is amongst the top end of power supplies and is OCZ's flagship power supply. The GameX is designed with multi-video card gamers and enthusiasts in mind featuring two 6-pin connectors designed to plug directly into graphic cards.

In addition to being capable of providing a ton of power, a good power supply should also be as efficient as possible. It's one thing to have the capacity to deliver a lot of power but to do so in an efficient manner is another. The GameX provides Active power factor correction (PFC) theoretically making it have a power factor of at least 95%. Power factor will be covered in greater detail later in the review for those unsure what it is and what it means to them.

Click the image above to see a readable version.

On the back of the GameX is the normal power spec sticker detailing what the power supply brings to the table. We can clearly see that the GameX has four +12V rails, one dedicated for the CPU, one for PCI Express, one for the motherboard, and the last one is shared between secondary CPU and PCI Express.