Thermaltake Toughpower 1500W PSU

Value

The cheapest we could find the Thermaltake Toughpower 1,500W for in the UK was £179.78 whereas the 1,200W is just £162.20.

Comparatively other high power units we'd consider are the Enermax Galaxy 1,000W (we know Enermax usually charges a premium) is £170.25 and the new Corsair HX1000 which is also made by CWT and includes 12V to 3.3V and 5V DC-DC conversion to increase efficiency, is just £146.88.

The Tagan 1,300W BZ PSU is a little more at £185.71 but it also features Nvidia's ESA and illuminated modular connectors. The PC Power and Cooling Turbo-Cool 1,200W with is massive single 12V rail is surprisingly absent from the UK market – we could only find it at Play.com of all places for a whopping £319.99. The 1kW model is barely more available and also commands a hefty £234.94 price tag.

In fact, there are very few 1,500W models on the market and of them Thermaltake is the cheapest and the only one we'd consider since the competition is not that great.

Conclusions

While those who need a 1,500W power supply are a small few, Thermaltake (and CWT) have produced an ultra high power unit that's left us with highs and lows. On one hand it's extremely efficient and provides a the most comprehensive multi-GPU support we've ever seen, it has great modular connectors and even ferrite cores on the PCI-Express cables. However, we feel some of the cable choices could have been better and the hot spots at very high load mean we can't really recommend it – we feel it just can't quite do what it says on the tin, safely.

The thing is: you'll be extremely hard pushed to use anywhere near 1,500W. We tested a 3-way SLI system with a QX9770, 2GB of overclocked DDR3 and three Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX cards and looped Crysis for a while to warm everything up a bit. An hour later, the PSU is still very quiet yet quite warm to touch, but that's because it was only loaded to ~450W, peaking at 515W. Why do I need 1,100W for 3-way SLI again? Even with eight SATA drives connected to this unit, that'll still be less than 650W at a gross over-estimate.

Even though a Skulltrail platform (for the three people in the world that can afford one) should again bump the power requirements a little again, why should we make the 1,500W a consideration over other 1,200W or 1,000W models?

Final Thoughts

It's difficult to ascertain the value and the worth of 1,500W – while Thermaltake makes the only one worth buying for far less than the very few competitors sell for, the value of 1,500W is certainly questionable. Even if we wanted to kit out the baddest rig under the sun, we'd still opt for other units on the market. After all, if you think you need one you're already splashing out several grand for the best hardware on the planet, so at least complement it with something that’s as super high end.

• Performance
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Features
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Value
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

• Overall
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• x
• -
• -
• -
• 7/10

What do these scores mean?