Thermaltake Toughpower 1200W

Twelve hundred stonking watts of almost good enough power.

The Thermaltake Toughpower 1200W is designed for the pinnacle of the high-end enthusiast scene. Based on the CWT-constructed OEM power supply units, though without the Fuhjyyu capacitors, the 1200W, like its 1000W brother, has a respected performance heritage. Designed to feed power to dual-graphics, quad-core/multi-processor, multi-storage personal super computers, this monster demands respect… but does it deserve it?

We hooked the unit up to the Antec ATX PSU tester to see what the readings were. The LED readouts showed the 12V, 5V and 3.3V rails to all be healthy. We then tested each voltage reading with a digital multimeter and found the readouts to display 12.27V, 5.15V and 3.37V.

Not happy with the results as there was little load on the system, we then went to work to construct a system many would deem worthy of such a beast of a power supply. The system consisted of an ASUS L1N64-SLI WS motherboard, 4GB of DDR2-800 @ 5-5-5-15 2T, two AMD FX-74 Socket LGA-1207 processors, an NVIDIA 8800 GTX and Western Digital WD7500AAKS hard drive. Though nowhere near filling the amount of expansion ports and slots offered by the motherboard, this system was nonetheless going to offer some fairly serious strain to the power supply.

Running on our behemoth, the Toughpower 1200W held it’s own on the 3.3V and 5.0V lines, pumping out 3.248V and 5.021V respectively, yet fell to its knees on the 12V line providing an underwhelming 11.369 volts.

The Thermaltake Toughpower 1200W is a modular, cable-sleeved, high-wattage, steady hitting super heavyweight, and congratulations to Thermaltake for hitting this amazing milestone. It was a pleasure to work with and ticks almost all the right boxes.

Unfortunately, the less then satisfactory results on the 12V output on our AMD 4x4 dual-FX processor behemoth left us pondering whether it is really ready to take on the heights of personal computing technology.