Thermaltake Toughpower Grand 1200W Power Supply

Introduction

Recently we've been testing power supplies here at Bjorn3D, and we're trying to give our readers a good overview of different manufacturers and different categories of power supplies. Last week, we've took look at the Seasonic X-Series 660W Modular PSU, which we found extremely stable with rock solid voltages, very quiet due to its Sanyo Denki San Ace Silent Fan with Hybrid Silent Fan Control, highly efficient with a 80 Plus Gold Certification, and using one of the nicest features that we don't see on many modular power supplies, 100% modularity. The Seasonic X-Series 660W Power Supply is a perfect choice for gamers that want to run high-end gaming systems with a top of the line video card or two mid-range video cards in SLI or CrossFireX configuration, though it is not the best power supply for overclockers due to its lower wattage support.

Today, we will be taking a look at Thermaltake's flagship 80Plus Gold Certified ToughPower Grand 1200W Modular Power Supply. While this power supply is designed for overclockers and gamers that use multi-GPU setups, it is not 100% modular. This usually is not a problem with users that run high-end gaming hardware, but it might be a bit frustrating for those that just want to have a powerful PSU for the future but might not be running high-end hardware at first. For instance, its double 8-pin CPU power connector is hard wired into the power supply. Only a very limited number of motherboards support dual 8-pin power connectors, and this type of setup is only necessary for extreme overclockers for extra stability.

Because we have a quite powerful power supply to test, we will be pushing the ToughPower Grand 1200W with 10 Drives, 2 power hungry overclocked GTX 580s, one RAID card, and an overclocked Intel Core i7-2600K processor and lots of other hardware. This will be a great comparison against the Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 1200W Power supply which is also 80 Plus Gold Certified and comes with very similar features. We will also compare the ToughPower Grand 1200W to Sapphire's PURE 1250W 80 Plus Bronze certified PSU, during which we will examine how different efficiencies can affect computer performance and power consumption.

So let's take a look at the features and specifications for this power supply before we continue to unboxing and taking a closer look at it. After that we'll push the three competing power supplies as far as we can to see how each performs.