The only consideration with this power supply is the one that I also mentioned in the Antec P182 review; you have to plan ahead and know what components you are using. As I noted at the beginning on this review, the Thermaltake Toughpower 1000W is 20cm long. This may create some fitment issues in smaller cases, or with cases with special design considerations. This makes the modular design of most of the power cables on the Toughpower 1000W a great advantage, as you can reduce clutter by choosing to install only those cables you need. This will help with most tight fitting spaces. Add to that some proper planning, and any problems can be ironed out easily.
Test System and Setup
As noted earlier, the Thermaltake Toughpower 1000W power supply is a no frills product in the accessories department. The only extra included was the silicone gasket used for sound dampening. This made installation very easy, and fairly painless. To try to push the Toughpower 1000W to it’s breaking point, we had it power the following test system.
- AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 2.8GHZ Processor
- Foxconn C51XEM2AA-8EKRS2H NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI Motherboard
- eVGA GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB PCIe Video Card (x2 in SLI)
- OCZ Platinum XTC REV.2 PC2-6400 2GB 2X1GB DDR2-800 Memory Kit
- Seagate Barracuda 400GB 7200.10 16MB SATA2 Hard Drive (x2 in RAID0)
- Cooler Master Hyper 212 CPU Cooler
- Antec P182 Advanced Super Mid Tower Case
As for the tests themselves, we had to basically drive the computer to it’s red line; making sure that all the components were working at their maximum. To do this, we first spun up a CD and played back some music to get the optical drive spinning. Next a scandisk was run to make the hard drives start working hard. Then we added OCCT to the mix, and used it to drill the processors to 100% usage. Finally we spun up 3DMark06 and performed a full benchmark run.
To test noise levels of the power supply itself, we positioned a dB Meter 6 inches for the exhaust fan of the power supply. We then took readings at both idle and load conditions. The idle readings are simply to see how loud the power supply is, and the load tests are run with the intent of checking to see if the power supply had to spin up it’s fan to cool itself off when providing extra power to the system.
The Results
I might as well admit it right now; my intended test system was no match for the power of the Toughpower 1000W power supply. Power supply testing isn’t very exciting to begin with, and thanks to the consistent and unwavering performance of the Toughpower 1000W unit I was reduced to a drooling pile of boredom incarnate. That isn’t a bad thing, as not being bored means that this power supply has issues and there is most likely some pretty blue smoke billowing off of some component somewhere in the system.
Exercises in hyperbole aside, this power supply does post some very consistent numbers. Leading off the benchmarks is our results from testing the voltage output of each rail in the Toughpower 1000W
The 3.3V rail is the most boring of them all. Not only does it perform within spec under both idle and load conditions, but the output voltage doesn’t change between idle and load. The 5V and 12V rails had a little more action on them, with a slight drop on both when heavy load was put on the system. Overall this power supply should be rock solid in all but the most power hungry (or component loaded) system configurations. I’m not sure if I have enough gear to hook up to get there.
Noise levels were all quite sleep inducing, in more ways than one. With our dB meter in position, we only registered 50.3 dBA under both idle and load conditions. This noise level was only noticable to my ears if I put them in the same position as the dB meter. Otherwise the power supply wasn’t inaudible, subjectively speaking. To my ears, the power supply didn’t add any noise to the overall system when it was on. I decided to live dangerously, and stopped the fan in the power supply for a half minute. There was no change in the subjective loudness of the computer overall.
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