SlashGear Review - NZXT Performance Power 800

I spent several years working as a PC repair technician, and can't even count the number of issues people had that were attributed to their power supply. Most of the time what had happened was that they'd done some major upgrades to their hardware, and left their old puny PSU to power it all. These days if you're running a high-end gaming rig, you need some major power, which is where this new NZXT Performance Power 800 comes in.

The PP800 is, as you might have guessed, an 800-watt power supply, which should be enough to power many of the high end machines out there. The unit runs at 78% load efficiency, features four +12V rails and is perfect for SLI or CrossFire setups. It's actually been certified by Nvidia for SLI. You'll also find that the power supply will fit in both ATX and BTX cases.

This supply is actually one of the larger, and heavier ones I've used, which is usually a good indication of quality. There are certain electrical components that you can almost make a quick judement based solely on their weight. While I wouldn't say that a heavy one is definitely going to be great, I can't think of a particularly light one that was ever that great.

Unfortunately it is not a modular supply, which is by far my favorite kind due to the ability to remove clutter by reducing the number of cables in your PC. It does have a plethora of SATA (6) and standard 4-pin molex connectors (8) for those of you with a lot of drives in your PC. You also have both 6 and 8-pin PCI-e connectors for the latest graphics cards.

The cables themselves are extremely long, which is always good. Sure, you might have some excess cable, but that's nothing a few ties can't fix. Luckily the case I installed it in (the NZXT Tempest) has great cable management built-in, so I was able to hide most of my excess cabling.

You'll find an 80mm and 120mm fan inside the unit, both of which are surprisingly quiet. I honestly can't hear any increase in sound being emitted from the case.

I put the PP800 into our main gaming rig last week, and have been monitoring the voltages during my gaming sessions and even while running benchmarks and never noticed any drops. My system can be fairly power-hungry at times, so it was good to know that the supply kept up even after several hours of gaming. The specs on the machine used are as follows:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0GHzGPU: VisionTek Radeon HD 3870X2 OverclockedOS: Windows Vista UltimateMobo: Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3LRAM: Corsair Dominator 2GB TWIN2X2408-8500C5DFHDD: Western Digital Caviar SE 160GB SATACase: NZXT Tempest

The supply provides plenty of power without faltering, plenty of connectors, extremely long cables and quiet fans, which leaves little room for complaint. Modular supplies are showing up more and more, which would have certainly been nice, as it makes things easier during installation. Looking around I saw prices right around $140-$150, which makes it competitively priced. Overall, I give the NZXT PP800 four out of five gears.

[rating: 4]