Thermaltake Toughpower QFan 650W

Value

At a shade over £70 including VAT, the Thermaltake Toughpower Qfan 650W is inexpensive—especially for the 600-700W market range, although you have to ignore the £25 tat that some places try to fleece as "650W."

It's certainly worth buying over the non-QFan version which is an identical price – you might as well go for the newer and quieter model. However, for £2 more what about a 750W Thermaltake that also comes with cable management?

Alternatively, Cooler Master makes its Real Power M620 Modular available for a shade under £70, and on the other side of things Corsair's modular HX 620W, a favourite in our community, is only about £8 more at £78.72.

In addition, if Corsair's TX650W is anything like its 750W it could be another bargain at just £76.51, however it isn't modular like the aforementioned HX-series unit. How about another non-modular unit built by the well respected PC Power & Cooling? Its Silencer 610W is just £64, undercutting the Thermaltake by around £6.

There is undeniably a lot of choice in the 600-800W range, as well as significant price differences, and that’s not including the Enermax Infiniti and Gigabyte Odin which are significantly more expensive at £100+. Are these significantly better PSUs for that kind of money? I don’t think so.

For what you get with the Thermaltake, it’s a very good price – not so cheap that it'll be a steel box that's more valuable as scrap metal, but it's far from expensive as well.

Final Thoughts...

We like this PSU, but only to a certain extent – it's certainly a solidly built unit with awesome efficiency and it's virtually silent for just about everyone that will buy this kind of unit. The modular connectors work well, however the cable choices could be far better in more than one case. In addition, the branding is overpowering to the point of grotesque – having that in a case will only make us feel like an ad-whore rather than letting the PSU speak for itself. Even though it's nice to see a variation in colour—the white fan in particular—we're not wildly in love with the whole look.

The QFan design, while very quiet, is nullified by the stupid piece of plastic screwed under half of it. It's not like the unit gets hot, but it makes a super-large 14cm fan quiet pointless if the airflow is being forced out where it was supposed to be sucked in from! I'm not entirely sure still if it's that revolutionary either – it's essentially a shroudless fan rather than one with specifically clipped edges from the likes of a Noctua NF-P12 fan, which, to us at least, seems significantly technically superior.

Regardless the power supply seems to work well, and even if it is a multi-rail design, the spread of rails and their weighting is sufficient to cover the 600W+ out of the total 650W they can push between just three out of four.

But the question is: is it worth it over the likes of Corsair, PC Power and Cooling, Seasonic or Tagan in the same price range? It's difficult to say and it will come down to a personal preference of looks and package. An educated guess would tell me that most people will still go for the tried and tested Corsair HX620W, or the Seasonic M12 (which are virtually the same thing!) if they are looking for modular connectors. If you are tempted by a Thermaltake though – at least we can say you’d get a good deal with this Toughpower QFan 650W model.

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