Thermaltake, well known for their line of Orb CPU heatsinks and chipset coolers such as the infamous blue orb, have recently ventured out into other markets, namely the power supply market. The power supply market is flooded with companies, but only a few really stand out as top performers for enthusiasts, such as Antec and Sparkle. In this review we’ll find out if Thermaltake performs with the best of them or suffers from problems that plague most cheap PSUs.
Here are the stats from the Thermaltake Website:
As you can see, this PSU is rated at 360 watts, but as most avid overclockers know you can’t always judge a power supply by its rated wattage alone, although this is what many people tend to look at when shopping for a PSU. This PSU also comes with passive power factor correction (PFC) circuits, which allow the unit to supply more steady power to the rails without power dropping, and also allows the system to run more efficiently with less energy loss. Hopefully this will allow the unit to supply a good amount of power to the +5v and +12v rails, which are what really matter for overclocking and stability. Now lets look at the PSU itself:
Here we see the box that the unit came in, with a little man surfing on a snowboard it looks like :-) On the side of the box we can see the specifications of the PSU, that it is 360W and it has Passive PFC technology. I’m really not sure what the difference is between Active PFC and Passive PFC, but I’m willing to bet that the Active PFC is gonna cost more. This is also a single fan unit, the double fan units cost a little bit more and are usually reserved for the higher wattage units.
Here we can see the inside of the box. This includes the unit itself, a black power cord, and 4 screws to attach it to your case. Nothing fancy, but wholly adequate.
Here is a picture of the back of the unit, we can see the fan and the 115/230 switch. Make sure to set it to 115 if you’re running it from an ordinary wall outlet in your house, at least if your in the U.S. To my surprise the unit came with the switch on 230, so you gotta make sure and look before you plug it in.
The unit also comes with a fan monitoring cable, which is used to guage the RPMs of the PSU’s fan. Just plug it into the motherboard like you would any other fan cable and fire up a program that can use it, such as Motherboard Monitor. Simple as that! Just a nice added feature. Well, let’s see how well this thing does in real world situations, such as overclocking and benchmarking.
To test this power supply I used Motherboard Monitor 5.2 to check the 5v and 12v rails to see if they dropped to any unacceptable voltages. Here is the test rig that I used for this review:
- AMD Athlon XP 1600+
- EPoX 8KHA+ motherboard
- 256MBytes PC2100 DDR SDRAM
- Radeon 8500 Retail Video Card
- 1x 80GByte Western Digital HDD ATA100 @ 7200 RPM
- 1x 15GByte Western Digital HDD ATA66 @ 7200 RPM
- Lite-On 16x10x40 CDRW
- Red 12v Cold Cathode Fluorescent light
- 1x 12v 120mm Sunon Fan
- 1x 12v 92mm Panaflo H1A Fan
- Thermalright AX-7 Heatsink with 80mm Low output fan
- Linksys 10/100 Ethernet Card
- Sound Blaster Live! Digital
That’s quite a bit of equipment to power, but I really wanted to stress this PSU to the limits, since enthusiasts will undoubtedly do the same. To kick it up a bit I overvolted the CPU to 1.85v (the max that the motherboard would allow) and I upped the RAM voltage up from 2.5 to 2.9 volts. I also ran the computer with the CPU overclocked to 1.54 GHz (up from 1.4). I would have liked to overclock the CPU more, but since my CPU is not multiplier unlocked this is as high as it would allow me to go. As a side note, this power supply unit allowed me to overclock the CPU 10 MHz more than my Antec 300w PSU would allow, which is a plus.
Here you can see my WCPUID screen:
To round out the stress testing, I ran Prime95 Torture test to push the CPU, along with loops of 3DMark2001SE to stress the video card to its limit, and I also burned a CD, just for good measure. I then used MBM5.2 to get the scores. On the left are the scores for the system at default speeds and voltages, and on the right are the scores for the system being stressed to the max:
As you can see, the only thing that drops is the 5 volt rail, but even then it doesn’t drop below 5 volts so there’s no problem there whatsoever. It seems that this PSU will handle anything you can throw at it. Another plus to this unit is that it is SO quiet. It honestly makes no distinguishable noise whatsoever. The only gripe I have with the unit is that, unlike some of the other high performance PSUs, it doesn’t have any type of mesh or split loom over the cables to keep them tidy, as you can see in this picture:
Also, the cords were a little long for my case, but if you have a decent sized mid to full tower case then this shouldn’t be a problem at all for you. Also, the only one I could find online was the dual fan model, which goes for $52 at newegg.com. This is a pretty nice price for a sweet power supply. Overall I believe that this is a solid product that I would recommend to anyone in the market for a good power supply. I give this product a 9.5 and award it the OCmodshop Seal of Approval.
Pros
- Quiet
- 360 Watts of power
- Voltage rails don’t dip
- Pentium 4 Compliant
- Decent Price
Cons
- No wire tidying mesh