ThermalTake ToughPower 1200w
Testing
As this is a fairly hefty PSU, a single PC just wouldn’t be enough. Instead we decided to recreate an old trick where the power supply has the job of powering two PC’s instead of one.
Master PC
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
Asus P5W-DH Deluxe
2 x X1950 PRO (Crossfire)
OCZ 2GB PC6400 5-5-5-15
Slave PC
AMD Athlon X2 3800+
Asus M2N-E
eVGA 8800 Ultra
OCZ 2GB PC6400 5-5-5-15
The power supply has to power everything but the motherboard of the slave PC, and hence is powering three graphics cards, five fans, three hard discs, and a couple of opticals. To make things even more power hungry, each PC had a Physix card installed which requires a single molex.
To test we will be using Asus Probe set to grab voltages every second. The results are the highest and lowest each rails was during both idle and load. Load consists of running RTHRDIL fullscreen, ATI Tool 3D view, Orthos StressPrime and Physix box demo on each machine. Should be enough I reckon.
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Click to enlarge
As things soon started heating up with all the graphics cards so we threw in a load more fans to cool stuff down meaning extra load.
The testing rigs were pulling upwards of 600W at load meaning that the power supply should be at around half load.
At idle, the power supply was fine and could easily deal with the load. However, once everything got going, the power supply continuously knocked us out of testing after about 10 minutes, and crashed the master PC, causing the 8800 Ultra to scream as it had no power. After this happened four times in a row, we decided against the red neck testing facility, and used just the master PC.
The power supply was a little hit or miss as to whether it would power up and stay on. After a couple of tries, the old ‘wait 10 minutes’ rule was used and then everything ran smoothly. Until load testing.
The ToughPower managed to survive the single PC load testing for around 10 minutes until it would crash the rig. While we managed to get results, they aren’t the full 30 minutes that we normally run our testing for so they should be taken with a sizeable lump of salt.
After spending near the entire day changing connectors and messing around with the power supply, we decided to call it quits. Considering as the unit itself had difficulty powering up the system to Windows some times, I can only guess that we have a slightly faulty unit. There wasn’t any apparent reason as to why these crashes occurred; everything was cooled sufficiently and none of the rails looked out of place; being well within ATX specs. You may be thinking that we overstretched the power supply but other brands of power supply, weighing in at 600w, managed the full stress test
both PC’s).
Idle voltages were very good, with little variation, apart from slight blips every now and again. Load voltages were similar and shows that this power supply is good until it fails for whatever reason.
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