Date: June 5th, 2006
Article by: Joe Anderson (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Thermaltake
<--SHOP FOR A COMPUTER POWER SUPPLY HERE
PRODUCT PICTORIAL AND WALKTHROUGH
A full compliment of connectors is provided, including a 20-24 pin main ATX connector, and two PciE connectors for dual vid card support. The cables are sufficiently long for all but the tallest cases available.
Some purists may take exception to the Siamese SLI/CrossFire power solution that Thermaltake has employed here, preferring two separate cables coming from the PSU. With the heavy gauge wire and ample wattage on this line, I don't have a problem with it.
Four SATA power connectors on two lines are nice to see, and the right-angle configuration makes for a tidy installation.
The 4-pin molex design make the connectors much easier to remove. The Toughpower provides two floppy power connectors, and I used both of them on my test rig. I may be an old dinosaur, but I still like having a floppy drive available. The other one was used as auxiliary power on the DFI SLI-DR mobo.
PRODUCT TESTING
The testbed we'll be using consists of the following:
AMD Opteron 148 processor @ 2.6 GHz
DFI Lanparty UT nF4 SLI-DR motherboard
eVGA 7800GT
GSkill F1-4400DSU2-1GBFC (512mbX 2) memory
Thermaltake Toughpower 550W PSU
Western Digital WD800 SATA hard drive
Lite-On CDRW/DVD Combo drive
Testing consisted of monitoring voltages from the +3.3V, +5V, and +12V rails while running multiple passes of Prime95 and playing a few rounds of UT2004. Voltages were monitored with SmartGuardian software and a digital multimeter. I was very impressed with the results, in light of the high demand of the components and the notoriously picky motherboard. Over several days of testing, including overclocks exceeding 30%, rails were rock stable and not one power issue reared its ugly head.
Random checks with the multimeter throughout several days of testing yielded the following results:
Very impressive indeed! I tested the Toughpower 550W every way I could think of and I couldn't get it to budge off of these numbers. I wasn't able to hear the PSU over the CPU and chipset fans at any time during testing.
