NZXT’s E-850 Power Supply: responsible power

This is another instance where I have wanted to check out a thing but didn’t have a need to. The NZXT E-850 is an 850 watt 80+ Gold certified, fully -modular “smart” Power Supply Unit (PSU). What’s so smart about it? Well, using the NZXT cam software, you can see the current power draw of individual components. You can also look at the data for the total kilowatts used over its whole life span, starting from its first power-up in the QA lab.

Unboxing the E-850

As mentioned in our review of the NZXT H510i, NZXT has a knack for presentation. The E-850 comes in a snug-fitting white & purple box with the NZXT branding colors. A custom-fit foam packing encases the PSU. I wish the H510i case had come with this, just for the extra peace of mind. Right next to that is a purple zip up storage pouch with all of your additional cabling.

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Materials & Build Quality

I am very impressed with the E-850. Its steel chassis is packed tight with power. It’s also heavy, compared to some other PSUs I have used in the past like the Rosewill Hive 1000w.

The cables, while not individually sleeved. are all black. So there’s no need to worry about “ketchup and mustard” ruining you build aesthetics. There are also plenty of connections to meet most users’ needs: a 20+4 pin connection, 2 CPU connections, 3 peripherals & SATA, 3 PCI-E connections and a micro-USB to report back to the system, its power metrics.

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The E-850 and CAM

NZXT’s CAM software (for those that don’t know) allows the end user to customize their NZXT products like case and cooler lighting. It also allows monitoring of hardware states like heat and fan speeds. The software had a bad rap for being a system resource hog and unreliable. But I am happy to report that the newer version of CAM runs much smoother.

Using CAM with the E-850 allows you to gain much better insight in to your system’s active time by showing things like CPU power usage, GPU power usage and total system usage. I found that, while gaming, under high demand my system only pulled on average of 480-500 watts of power. Prior to this, given my PC build specs, I would have expected my system to be a much more power hungry setup.

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So what do we think?

If you’re a sucker for data and the insights it can offer, you can’t go wrong with an E-series PSU from NZXT. The E-850 comes in at $139 as of writing this, and I honestly feel this was a solid purchase.