There's not much you can do to a power supply to differentiate one power supply from another outside of what we've come to expect from a power supply here at jonnyGURU.com. We want superior performance (minimal ripple noise, excellent voltage regulation and ability to output advertised wattage for continuous periods of time), high efficiency, an ideal number of cables and connectors to suit the particular wattage of the power supply and build quality. The consumer wants a fair price and decent warranty or, at the very least, a relatively hassle free warranty.

Today's power supply comes to us from OCZ and has features that professional gamer Johnathan Wendel deem worthy of the "Fatal1ty" brand.

Obviously, my judgment of the performance of this unit is reserved until it spends a day on the load tester. This goes for its actual efficiency as well since that's also determined on the load tester and I've yet to see an 80 Plus report for this particular unit, although the box makes the claim that this unit is 80 Plus Gold certified.

The box also says the power supply is modular, but is it semi-modular? And if so, what cables are fixed? And we're soon to find out if we're given enough connectors and cables suitable for a 1000W power supply.

Build quality will be judged after testing when we get to take this unit apart and see how well it is built and what level of component quality is used. But assuming everything comes out as to be expected from a power supply bearing the OCZ brand. What makes this power supply worthy of "Fatal1ty" branding as opposed to any other OCZ power supply?

As we can see right on the front of the box, the power supply features a red LED fan and "individually-sleeved cables", or what I've come to call "uni-sleeve" cables, where each individual wire has it's own sleeve. We'll cover the latter feature later on in the review. For now, let's continue the tour of the box.

Whoa! Talk about optimizing real estate. Ok.. I think we need to zoom in here...

"Get the gear used by the pros!" Technically, if Johnathan Wendel. who is a pro, uses his own power supply in his rig and you use one too, you are using the gear used by a pro. Certainly "pros" would want high build quality and that certainly means using Japanese capacitors (which tend to have longer life than other capacitors) and certainly continuous power output at 50°C is very important. Uni-sleeved cables, a red LED and a single +12V rail doesn't make you a pro... unless, of course, you sleeved those wires yourself and modded a regular ol' fan with some red LED's. I'm just saying. Of course, we are a sister site to Modders-Inc, so that's to be expected.

"Extremely cool and quiet." Here we find that cooling is handled by a 140mm thermally controlled fan. This means the fan spins at quieter, lower RPM's when the unit is cool. The fan then ramps up its RPM's as temperatures increase. And certainly, if this power supply is as efficient as they claim it to be, it will produce less heat.

"5 year PowerSwap warranty." My first thought, when I see branding on something like a warranty, is that somehow the warranty is very different than anyone else's. I thought, "maybe OCZ will do advanced replacement for customers within the first year, or at least the first 90 days." No. I'm afraid not. It's a warranty service where you ship the power supply to them and they ship you a new or refurbished unit (depending on availability). Now that said, this is OCZ we're talking about. OCZ provides warranty service to almost every country in the world. And although advanced replacement is not done by default, some circumstances can get an advanced replacement if the user is willing to surrender a credit card number while the defective unit is on the way back to OCZ. Also, most users in most countries do not have to pay return shipping of the replacement product for the full five years of the warranty period.

Now here we get to some nitty-gritty. A lot of it is redundant from the last couple blocks of text, but here we have more factual and less fluff.

Well.. mostly less fluff. There's nothing more efficient about the power distribution of a single +12V rail versus multiple +12V rail. But that's a whole other issue. Hit the forums if you want to fight that one out.

Also note the size of the unit. All PS2 size power supplies are 86mm by 150mm. That's the size of a standard rectangular hole in the back of a chassis. But 180mm is a little longer than some other units we've seen. I'm sure once we crack this power supply open, we'll figure out why it's that much larger.

Here's the very useful side panel that tells us what cables we get and what their lengths are. Below, we'll put this in our usual format:

The only discrepancy between the list of cables on the outside of the box and what I found inside the box is that there are TWO of the floppy adapter cables.

Finally, we find the DC output table printed on the box:

Of course, here's the same information in our usual format:

We can see that the bulk of the power available (99.6%) is on the +12V rail. This tells us that this power supply probably uses DC to DC for the non-primary (+3.3V and +5V) rails.

Now let's crack the box open and see what's inside...

Inside, we have a beefy power cord, a nylon bag with all of our cables in it, an "instruction manual" and a bag with zip-ties and four mounting screws.