Thermaltake Toughpower 750w review

Installation & Testing

The power supply is probably one of the hardware components you can most easily install into a computer and tue 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.