PC Power & Cooling - Visiting a Legend
by Christoph Katzer on January 23, 2009 8:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Cases/Cooling/PSUs
If you're a PC enthusiast and care about power supplies, you'll definitely be familiar with the name PC Power & Cooling. The company has been around a long time now and is responsible for many innovations in the power supply industry, particularly in the USA. In May 2007, Doug Dodson, the founder and owner of PC Power & Cooling, sold his company to the OCZ Technology Group; with that move, the brand also entered the European Union. What many users don't know is that PC Power & Cooling has been around 24 years, bringing inventions to market like no other company in this field. They were building power supplies when most of today's enthusiasts weren't even born.
After this year's CES, we took the chance to drive down to San Diego where PC Power & Cooling has resided for the past 17 years. We met up with Doug Dodson, the CTO of the OCZ Technology Group, and James Dickensen, the Quality Engineer in charge of Quality and Testing. If you are a reviewer like us and received a PC Power & Cooling unit before, you might have seen his name on the Chroma report that came with the unit.
James Dickensen in his lab; you can see that he does more than sharpening pencils in here.
Today PC Power & Cooling helps OCZ with RMA, testing, and development, but OCZ continues to do much of this on their own for OCZ branded products. OCZ has a product development team that develops for both OCZ and PC Power, and Doug's role in this is more consulting based now. The differences between the two companies is still large, since PC Power was always and still is a high-end power supply vendor that cares less about prices and focuses primarily on components and best quality merchandise. OCZ as a brand caters mostly to other parts of the market where the price wars are more taxing.
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Phlargo - Saturday, January 24, 2009 - link
For me, whenever you visit a site like this, I really feel I can so much better connect with the purchases I make. To see real people doing their work and seeing the conditions they work under (I noticed almost everyone was smiling, even in the backgrounds). I am far more likely to consider a PCP&C Power Supply for my next one now and I feel like I have a neat little insight into their company.Thanks!
Phlargo - Saturday, January 24, 2009 - link
Okay.. I'm going to make fun of myself here - I just read through what I wrote. It's terrible. The idea is that which I intended to convey, but I fear an 8 year old could have said it better. Sorry.. just wanted to make sure I didn't get away with anything ;-)m3rdpwr - Saturday, January 24, 2009 - link
I've been using PCP&C since the mid 80's.We use to buy the proprietary Compaq Power Supplies all the time from them as they Compaq versions always blew up in the PC's and luggables.
I still have a 400 watt Turbo Cool that's older than hell that I still use today...
-Mario
Conscript - Saturday, January 24, 2009 - link
From the pics, it appears your PC Power&Cooling PSU was likely assembled by an largely overweight mom?StraightPipe - Tuesday, January 27, 2009 - link
I've got to admit that this explains alot.Background: I've always used PCP+C PSU's in the past, great units, great company.
Horror Story: On a recent build I bought an OCZ Elite Extreme 800W for a gaming rig/media server. 2 months later the PSU died, RMA took 3 weeks.
After waiting I finally got a replacement and it too died, after 5 days. This time i did not want to wait an additional 3 weeks, so I paid for an advanced replacement. They charged my CC and gave me an RMA#, but nothing came. Week after week, they said, it's on the way, then eventually they told me it was out of stock. Why was my card charged for advanced replacement if the PSU is out of stock?
6 weeks later i got the second replacement. I'm testing it now to see if it is as bad as the first two.
so far: 8 weeks of uptime, 9 weeks of downtime. 2 bad PSU's...
OCZ is not the same quality as PCP+C
StraightPipe - Tuesday, January 27, 2009 - link
I think the term is "Grossly overweight"MihiAir - Saturday, January 24, 2009 - link
Is the PC Power & Cooling S61EPS 610W any good, I heard good things about the 750w. I wonder is this power supply any good. I read some sites say its good and some sites say its normal.Christoph Katzer - Saturday, January 24, 2009 - link
The 610 is much quieter than the 500 watts if you care about noise.MihiAir - Sunday, January 25, 2009 - link
Thx for the info~archcommus - Saturday, January 24, 2009 - link
I have that PSU and love it. System is P35-DS3L, Q6600, 4GB DDR2, 8800 GTS 512MB. Very quiet and feels solid.