Thermaltake Toughpower 750w Review

Over the past few years the requirement for high-quality power supplies has become a real issue. Since processors and graphics cards have really started to suck down power, there has been a greater demand for power supplies to perform. Computers are generating a lot more heat these days, and this has got a lot to do with its components’ high energy requirements. The latest and greatest desktop computers have indeed enormous power requirements reaching a point where anything under 400watts could be considered obsolete.

While basic office type computers can get away with crummy generic 350w power supplies, more powerful gaming systems certainly cannot. Doing so would result in serious system instability issues that can even place components such as the motherboard at great risk. High performance power supplies maintain a constant flow of power, and at the same time continue to deliver enough power.

Thermaltake offers a huge range of quality power supplies, designed for a wide range of different purposes. For example the Toughpower series consists of seven high powered units, all designed to deliver maximum performance. There is also the PurePower 350w power supply which features a completely passive design, meaning it is totally silent. The bulk of their power supplies form the PurePower series, in all there are ten power supplies ranging from 430w through to 680w. Today we will be reviewing a product coming from the Toughpower range, and is one of the bigger wattage items, outputting an impressive 750w.

Thermaltake claims that the working efficiency of the Toughpower 750w can reach up to 85%, thanks to a new design that makes use of top grade components. As was to be expected the 750w does carry a price premium simply because such highly rated units are hard to come by. We still consider the Toughpower 750w is priced reasonably for an unit of its output and quality. There is also available a similarly designed unit rated for 600w output, also part of the ToughPower family, this unit is considerably more affordable.

Despite being rated for such an extreme output, Thermaltake claims a very quiet operating volume for the 750w unit thanks to the use of a single 140mm fan. The unit features a single 20/24-pin power connector, one 4/8-pin power connector, dual PCI Express connectors, six 4-pin connectors, two 4-pin floppy connectors and six Serial ATA connectors. Furthermore, the unit features independent voltage circuit, over current, over voltage, short-circuit protection and Active PFC.

Installation & Testing

The power supply is probably one of the hardware components you can most easily install into a computer and the Toughpower 750w is no exception. Perhaps the most time-consuming part of a power supply installation is unplugging and removing the old one. The only important thing to remember is that the power supply should not be active or plugged to the wall while disconnecting all the cables inside your case. Assuming you do not need to remove an old power supply, the Toughpower 750w can be hooked up and running in less than 5 minutes.

Test System Specifications
Intel Pentium D 950 processor
(4) 1GB Corsair PC8000 CAS5 Modules
ASUS P5N32-SLI Deluxe (nForce4 X16 SLI)
(6) Seagate 250GB 7200 RPM Serial ATA drives
(4) Seagate 300GB 7200 RPM ATA133 drives
(2) ASUS GeForce 7900GT 256MB videocards SLI
Software
- WinXP 32bit – Microsoft Windows XP Pro (SP2)
- WinXP 32bit – NVIDIA Forceware 91.31
- WinXP 32bit – NVIDIA nForce4 X16 SLI 6.85

There are many power hungry systems that I could have used to test the Toughpower 750w. So I went ahead and built an SLI system using an Intel Pentium D 950 processor with a pair of GeForce 7900GT graphics cards. Of course there were a few other devices plugged in for the ride. These included a total of ten hard drives, six large case fans, a water-cooling system, 4GB of memory and a single DVD-RW. In total I estimate there is almost 700 watts of combined hardware when under load.

Given the many power supplies that have failed on this test bed, it is an ideal way to measure the performance of this little beast. Nevertheless, the Toughpower 750w worked flawlessly. After 24 hours of continuous stress testing without a single glitch, I had to be satisfied with the results. Before testing the Toughpower, it took no more than 5 minutes for the PurePower 460watt and TruePower 550watt PSUs to stuck at it, a 24 hour straight test should be a good demonstration at this point.

However, this power supply is supposed to survive much longer than 24 hours in order to meet a satisfactory operating timeline. Because of time constraints it would be unreasonable for us to have it running for months to finally give a veredict. However, the Toughpower 750w has been continuously powering this system for a week and a half now without a single reset. This computer does occasionally get used for gaming, though file sharing is its real purpose.

The system featured two ASUS GeForce 7900GT cards on the ASUS P5N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard. This computer was also configured with six 250GB Serial ATAII and four 300GB ATA133 hard drives. Furthermore, the computer featured the Gigabyte 3D Galaxy water-cooling kit.

The performance of the Thermaltake Toughpower 750w was excellent as the voltages did not vary greatly when under load. The stress test results were recorded running Prime95 along with Bethesda’s Oblivion (a game that most of you are well aware of, I am sure). Both programs were able to maintain a constant processor utilization level of 100% while using various other system devices. Furthermore, a number of the hard drives were being accessed at the same time via other networked computers. This had virtually no impact on the power supply’s performance over 2 hours of hard usage.

Final Thoughts

Thermaltake started out life as a PC company creating odd looking air coolers such as the Golden Orb, and although they did not work all that well, they looked rather cool. The standard of Thermaltake coolers is not a whole lot better today in my opinion, which is very disappointing. However, their cases and power supplies rank amongst the best.

After spending a week with the Toughpower 750w I can happily say this is another fine example of why Thermaltake’s power supplies are so much better than their coolers. The Thermaltake Toughpower 750w just could not do a thing wrong as it worked flawlessly throughout the testing phase. Since finishing the testing with Intel’s Pentium D 950 processor I moved on to see how well this power supply worked with the Intel Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors. After a few days of testing I have found the Toughpower 750w to be just as impressive on this platform.

The Thermaltake Toughpower 750w is an ideal product for those building gaming systems with the fastest available components. It has proven to be more than capable of delivering a SLI GeForce 7900GT system with more than enough juice (this PSU is actually NVIDIA SLI and ATI CrossFire certified). The power supply also worked flawlessly in an AMD Athlon64 4000+ system, coupled with the extremely powerful Radeon X1900XTX graphics card.

This 750 watt power supply may not seem all that extreme in a market crowded with ~600 watt power supplies. However, after a quick look around, there seem to be few trustworthy manufacturers offering 700+ watt power supplies. Then there are the 700+ watt power supplies, and Thermaltake seems to be one of the few offering a power supply with a 750 watt output. Regardless of the price, this is still a premium product catered to those willing to spend a few extra bucks. For this price few power supplies offer so much quality, with the only feature really being missed on the Toughpower is a modular design.

Overall when you add up all the features, the superior performance along with the excellent build quality and reasonable price, the Thermalright Toughpower 750w is one hell of a power supply. The only regret I have when it came to testing this power supply, was not having enough hardware to load the test system with. The GeForce 7900GT SLI setup with the power hungry Pentium D 950 processor and ten hard drives failed to even make this power supply blink. Therefore I am confident that the Toughpower 750w will serve all gamers well and should be up for just about any task.

Taken from TechSpot.com