Often I get the opportunity to play some multiplayer games with friends and it is always a huge amount of fun. After all, what is there not to like about getting together with a bunch of good friends to duke it out in the latest and greatest first person shooters, such as Prey? Not a lot really and to make sure that I enjoy the experience as much as possible, I always use my trusty gaming rig. There is nothing worse than an unstable gaming computer at a LAN party event and this is every gamers worst nightmare.

Making sure this nightmare never becomes a reality for you is quite easy really, though it can be expensive depending on how serious you are about gaming. Personally, if I am going to do anything I want to do it to the full extent and often that means spending a little more than I would like to! That being said, I like many serious gamers have tweaked my gaming system for maximum performance, without compromising stability. This is best done with a high quality motherboard, memory, graphics card and of course a good power supply.

Take my current gaming system for example, it is not all that extreme compared to the hardware currently available but it does the job well. In fact, because high quality components such as the OCZ GameXstream 700w are in place, I have been able to get away with using my current setup for a lot longer than I had originally anticipated. Other than the graphics card, the same hardware configuration has been in use for over a year now. Of course, there are many gamers out there that manage to go even longer without upgrading, but I like to keep the game play as smooth as possible with maximum quality settings enabled.

The brain behind this system is an overclocked AMD Athlon64 3200+ (Venice) processor, which has been overclocked to a stable 2.75GHz using the ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard. Keeping things cool is a Gigabyte 3D Galaxy water cooling kit, backed up by a few 120mm case fans. Helping along the decent overclock are the Corsair TwinX2048 PC4400Pro (DDR550) memory modules, which are of course operating at 550MHz. There are a total of six SATAII hard drives, four of which are in RAID0 configurations. Then all the rendering is taken care of by a single ASUS Radeon X1900XTX (512MB) graphics card.

So there you have it, not the most extreme gaming rig to ever grace the planet, but it still packs a mighty punch. Surprisingly, despite featuring just a single graphics card, this computer seems to be quite demanding on the power supply. This has been evident in the past as the 2.75GHz overclock is not all that stable using lower rated power supplies. Previously I used the Thermaltake PurePower 680w unit which did an exceptionally good job and it was rare for the system to come unstuck. This was an upgrade from an Antec 480w unit which caused random blue screens after long periods of game play.

Since moving to the OCZ GameXstream 700w power supply I have yet to witness a single system crash, which is impressive given the system is never shut down. Running nothing more than a copy of WindowsXP the system is only reset if the power goes out, which of course happens very rarely. Moving to the GameXstream 700w was like putting expensive synthetic oil in your car, it just ironed out all the bugs. This got me thinking about 700watt and greater power supplies, as I originally believed that 550w was more than enough.

Furthermore, I began to look at power supplies and quickly realized there were few options available above 700 watts, at least ones that I would trust. For me power supplies are like memory modules, there are only a few select brands I would recommend touching. The majority of power supplies rated at 500 watts are never going to output nearly that much power and it gets worse the higher you go. The candidates that I dug up to power my gaming system included the Thermaltake ToughPower 750w, Silverstone ST75ZF 750w and of course the OCZ GameXstream 700w, which I am currently using.

In the past I found myself sticking with Antec power supplies most of the time, yet over the last 12 months I have not purchased a single Antec unit. They seem to be sticking more to the mainstream market with few units venturing over 550watts, though none come anywhere near 700watts that I have seen. Thermaltake has been quite good in the past and I still use the PurePower 680watt unit today in another system. Then there is Silverstone, I had my first encounter with a Silverstone power supply early this year. I have to say, if first impressions are anything to go by Silverstone could not have done much better. With that said, lets take a more personal look at each unit.