The quest for the ultimate power supply

Ever since its entry to the cooling scene with its bizarre (and awesome) peacock heatsink for the Socket A Athlon many years ago, Zalman has insisted on doing performance in an over-engineered way. Which is great, and we love ‘em for it.

But first; the important stuff. It passed the Big Willy test with no problems. There was no staggering the power of the drives during boot to reduce initial load, no problems booting or running the benchmarks.

And now; Zalman’s engineering. Heat pipes are used to shunt heat away from the power supply’s components to behind the exhaust grille. As a result, the fan speed is nice and slow in normal use, and not as loud as you’d expect while powering Big Willy.

Sure, the PSU uses multiple rails, but there’s enough headroom here to run stupidly powerful systems without worrying about it its relatively inferior power delivery and by extension any power related computing problems.

In practice, its braided, modular power leads are a pleasure to work with, and the fan is quieter than most other PSUs across all loads. And it survived Big Willy. We should print that out on T-shirts and give them out to the power supplies that pass the test. No wait, that’s a terrible thing to print on a shirt. Who thinks up this crap?

12V1 - 18
12V2 - 18
12V3 - 20
12V4 - 20
12V5 - 18
12V6 – 18

RRP: $249