Thermaltake Toughpower QFan 650W

Q? Fan?

The PSU comes in a metallic grey colour that looks quite good although it’s not as nice as the Ultra X3's gunmetal shine, but it also doesn’t pick up fingerprints anywhere near as badly. The side has a huge and very garish plastic sticker on advertising the PSU brand and power rating – I guess it’s designed so when press or end users take pictures of a case, people know that a Thermaltake PSU is being used.

It’s quite frankly hideous – and while Corsair and others are also guilty of this large branding, those companies design their logos to fit flush into the casing and merge seamlessly into the aesthetics. In contrast, Thermaltake could definitely learn a thing or two, but as we’ve often seen from its cases for example, that’s not how it works – heavy contrasting colours are the preferred way of doing things. Personally, I’d just peel the sticker right off.

Other than that the design feels very solid and the modular plug sockets are almost flush to the back of the case with reasonable spacing between them so you can get your pinkies in to unclip the connections. These connectors are also well fabricated so they fit perfectly together when we tried them out.

An additional embossed Thermaltake stamp is included above the modular plug sockets – exactly how much branding does it need? (Lots – Ed.)


The 20+4-pin ATX cable and one 8-pin PCI-Express cable sprout from the box still. Both of these are tightly braided like the modular cables, but the braid stops outside of the PSU (and in the case of the ATX cable – by quite a margin) making it look a little untidy.


Thermaltake’s huge 14cm QFan is one of the largest in the industry. It spans the whole of one side of the unit and actually makes a nice change in white as opposed to the usual black – that said, we're sure it’s not for everybody. Thermaltake claims that the fan can do a huge 93CFM at a fast 1,900RPM. Don’t be confused though – its claim of just 17dBA is between 20-50 percent loads, which should be less than 1,000RPM. Most people should end up using up to 75 percent load if they’ve specced out a PSU correctly for their system, so it should provide them with a very quiet product.


The QFan (Quiet-Fan) design is basically a normal fan without most of its casing. The fan is designed to suck air in from the sides as well as the top to "increase airflow at a lower RPM". Well, that’s the theory at least. It seems the same OEM Company, Channel Well Technology (CWT), which makes the Corsair TX750W PSU also makes the Toughpower QFan for Thermaltake and, again, we find the same piece of clear plastic screwed under the fan blades that’s meant to push air in and around before exhausting it out the back. Yet again though, this fails in spectacular fashion.


Instead, because of the QFan design, the air is now forced out the sides rather than into the PSU – it does keep it marginally quieter than the Corsair, but it negates the point of the QFan design. The plastic needs to go down the honeycomb back, filling the unit with air and forcing it out the bottom by the PCB instead.