Zippy PSL-6720P(G1) (720W) and PSL-6850P(G1) (850W)

The two power supplies from Zippy, a well-known brand on the server market that has recently taken a dash into the home market too, are opponents to the Silverstone Zeus series described above. They have the same wattage and price. I will describe both models together as they are based around the same platform and don’t differ much from each other.

The PSUs are very large, longer than a standard ATX power supply. With all their impressive wattage they are definitely not to be installed into a compact system case. The components are densely packed inside the PSU case. There are four heatsinks in there with an additional 40mm fan on one of them.

Three out of the four heatsinks have contact with the top panel of the case. Two are fastened to it with screws and one more is pressed to it through a heat-conducting pad.

The fan’s airflow goes somewhat aside of the main PSU components. Anyway, the air stream from this fan is exhausted though the main fan grid, so the smaller fan indeed contributes to cooling the PSU.

Most of the “smaller” electronics is located on the cards standing upright along the other side of the PSU case. You can see a large transformer tied up with steel clamps. The choke peeping from behind it is large, too. Some reviewers pay special attention to the size of components, but a power supply is such a complex device with a lot of interconnected subunits and it would be wrong to examine those subunits independently of others. The dimensions of the transformer and chokes, for example, depend not only on the wattage of a PSU but also on its topology and the operating frequency of the PWM regulator. Here, this regulator is based on a ML4800CP chip and works at a frequency of 75 kHz, which is not high by today’s standards.

Besides the high current, up to 52A, on the +12V rail (by the way, the PSU doesn’t have any splitting of this power rail into several output lines), the PSL-6720P allows putting a high load on the +5V rail, up to 45A, which is higher than any other modern PSU can offer. The question is if anyone needs so high a current today.

The senior model has an 8A (96W) higher current on the +12V rail. Its overall wattage is higher by 130W, too.

The PSUs both offer the same set of cables and connectors:

• Mainboard cable with a 24-pin connector (59cm long)
• CPU cable with an 8-pin connector (59cm)
• CPU cable with a 4-pin connector (61cm)
• Two graphics card cables with 6-pin connectors (62cm each)
• Four cables with two Molex connectors on each (61cm+15cm)
• One cable with a Molex and a floppy drive connector (59cm+15cm)
• Three cables with two SATA power connectors on each (61cm+16cm)

In comparison with the 850W Silverstone, there are only two graphics card connectors instead of four. This matters for Quad-SLI systems (you can learn more about them in the Graphics Cards section of our site) as well as for ordinary SLI systems built on two graphics cards based on Nvidia’s new G80 GPU that has tremendous power consumption.