Thermaltake Toughpower 1500W PSU

Results

The rail weighting by Thermaltake works very well – 12V1 is dedicated to the ATX and SATA/Molex connectors, 12V2 is dedicated to the 4+4 and 8-pin CPU plugs and 12V3 and 12V4 are dedicated to PCI-Express. The 12V3 and 12V4 also offer twice the power of 12V1 and 12V2 as well, and between all four they can supply 1,440W out of the rated 1,500W!

At 750W load the unit was cool to touch all over and ran very quietly, but when this was raised to 1,000W there was a lot more airflow but the PSU was still reasonably quiet. By now the sides were getting warm while the base and exhaust air were hot to the touch.

Thermaltake claims its PSU is good enough to run at 50˚C at the full 1,500W, yet only rates the 120k hours MTBF at 25˚C. The fact is we didn’t even need to stretch to the full 1,500W because the unit got so hot at between 1,100W and 1,350W in open air (~20˚C) that we couldn’t hold it or even touch some parts of the base. There was a particularly bad hotspot right under the modular connectors where there's very little escape for the hot air. We recognise that power supplies get warm after extended sessions under full load, but it shouldn't get so hot it hurts.

To make it worse, the unit doesn't feature any kind of facility to keep the fan on after the PC is powered down like the Enermax Infiniti's CoolGuard for example – this means the heat remains in the PSU rather than being exhausted. The more powerful Galaxy DXX series doesn't feature this though.

Despite the hot spots the PSU kept running just fine – in fact unfortunately the equipment's 300W per channel limited us from fully testing it. The efficiency and PFC are both very high in all tests, topping out at just over 86 percent efficiency and not dipping under 98.5 percent PFC the entire time. We were extremely sceptical about the "up to 87 percent efficiency" claim on the Thermaltake website but it is genuinely true.

While all the voltages are green in the results below, we just simply can’t recommend this – after all it’ll be a part of case brimming with hardware churning out a significant proportion of that 1,500W as heat.