With a range of products including SSD’s, Ram, power supply’s, USB flash drives, peripherals, and even cooling products I really wasn’t sure what to expect for my meeting with OCZ. I did meet up and talk with fatal1ty at the OCZ party the night before so I was expecting to see something new from his partnership with OCZ, maybe something to go with the motherboard we recently reviewed?
OCZ’s power supply lineup has been refreshed with a couple new wattages from PC Power & Cooling on their Silencer line (760 and 910watts respectively). Their new ZS series of power supplies are available in 500, 600, and 700 watt variations. Each has a 3 year warranty along with 80+ Bronze certification and should be a nice budget PSU with a good efficiency.
The real surprise with their power supply lineup is the high wattage 80+ Gold ZX Series. Up until now OCZ has left the high end market for their PC Power and Cooling brand. Of course that has left the OCZ brand alone for the budget and low end market, not something that is always great for brand image. To rectify that, they are introducing the ZX series to show that OCZ PSU’s can be top notch. The ZX series is sporting a full modular design, it’s great to see this over the partial modular design that we have seen a lot of in the past.
On the ram front OCZ has redesigned their entire lineup and introduced their XTE memory in both Gold and Platinum variations. The new heatspreader design it a lot less flashy than their past designs but still supports gold and platinum trim. Their flagship lineup is the Blade 2 series that looks similar to their XTE but with a heatsink on the top. They were also showing off a Fatal1ty version of the blade 2, that would explain seeing him at their party. We should be getting a sample to test along with our Fatal1ty P67 motherboard that we reviewed last week.
Last but not least we did get a look at the newly introduced Vertex 3 SSD. We were very impressed with the Vertex 2 in our review. With the new SandForce SF-2582 controller built in the Vertex 3’s with a SATA III/6Gbps connection they are bound to be fast. Their new Vertex 3 lineup will come in both EX and Pro variations with the EX hitting 80k IOPS at 4k and 75K for the Pro. On display in the booth was a demo of the Vertex 3 using ATTO with a 526 MB/s write speed and 552MB/s read speed, what a monster!