First thing, thanks for the reply, I read through as much of it as I could and have a few counter points I'd like to offer.
All of the Platinum units you have linked are interesting products that I look forward to hearing more about, but none of them are currently on the market. It looks like the earliest they will be available is September, and I imagine there will probably be a large price premium to get them. Personally, I don't believe we can use an untested product that will hopefully see the light of day 4-6 months from now at an unknown price as much of a basis for comparison.
Corsair AX850 was $150 on egg last month about 2 wks ago
Corsair HX850 this is rated silver but speced gold. Corsair thought it was to close to call gold so called it silver to be sure everyone got what they paid for. This was just on sale for $120 on newegg 3 wks ago.
Seasonic Z-750 was $120 on newegg about 3 wks ago. I know not a 850w but a deal that makes you reconsider needing 850w lol .
I didn't look at a ton of comparison reviews for these units, but hopefully for the purposes of this thread, we can agree that jonnyguru is a legit source of information. That said I'd like to address each unit individually
Corsair AX850 - Looking at the review by the guru known as jonny, we see that this unit missed it's Gold rating on both the 50% load and 100% load tests by .6% and 1.4% respectively. I find these result interesting as this is a higher miss rate than the OCZ. Also interesting is the fact that JonnyGuru notes that this % is barely worth mentioning.
Corsair HX850 - Again using JonnyGuru's review, we see that this unit came in at a full 1% under its Silver rating at 100% load. This is especially interesting in regards to the information you present that says Corsair called this a Silver unit instead of a Gold unit because it was too close to call. It seems to me that they didn't call it a Silver out of the goodness of their hearts, but in fact because at 100% load it can barely make the Silver rating.
Seasonic X-750 - First off, I assumed the Z-750 was a minor typo, but please feel free to correct me if I am wrong about that. This seems like a very high quality unit and I have pretty much nothing negative to say about it. The price you are quoting is about $50+ cheaper than the PSU is currently retailing for on Newegg and thanks to CA sales tax is (for me at least) more than the OCZ 1250W. Other than that I think $120 for this PSU is a heck of a deal, but not more so than either of the OCZ units in the same price range with the same warranty period, modularity, and efficiency.
I dont know how else to put it. The 1250w OCZ is in line price wise to everything you compare it to. either by its own line or by higher quality products. It falls in line where it should. Which means this isnt a deal. This is the true value of the product.
I think I understand what you are saying here, but I definitely don't agree. Rarely do hardware prices scale one-to-one between price and performance. When you buy a mid-grade processor for $200, rarely can you buy a top of the line part for $400. Usually as the performance increases, the price starts to increase at a much higher rate for much smaller gains. While I don't personally agree that this is how it should be, it is definitely the norm. In the case of the OCZ, I think it is more a testament to the value of the entire line that you can get a PSU with ~47% higher output for ~47% (ZX-850 vs ZX-1250) higher price rather than a ~41-47% higher output for ~129+% price increase (ZX-850 vs Corsair AX1200), although admittedly slightly less for other brands/configurations.
Note: Between the time of writing and posting this, the price of the OCZ 850 has gone up considerably. That being said, it is still the least expensive of any of the competing PSU's being discussed here and I consider it fair that we are both using numbers from when an item was on sale. Thusly, I didn't bother to recalculate my figures, which are based on a ~$125 price point.
Ultimately, the fact that this is practically the only PSU line that scales one-to-one performance and price is precisely what makes this such a great deal. I still frankly fail to see the "higher quality products" that come anywhere close to meeting this price point. In fact, from my perspective two out of the three products you've listed appear to be slightly inferior products that can only match the value of the OCZ when using a sliding scale.
Perhaps you can clarify why you believe these to be higher quality products? I'd prefer something quantitative instead of something abstract, but at this point I'm honestly interested in any line of reasoning. For the sake of argument, it might even be easier if you compare them to the OCZ 850W.
Finally, at the end of the day whether or not I or anyone else actually need this much power (most don't, including me) is immaterial to the conversation on whether or not this is a relative good value/hot deal.
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