Date:
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Author:
Paul Johnson
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Thermaltake Toughpower QFan 650w

Thermaltake impressed us with its 1200 watt uber-PSU in the past. This time we move into a much more crowded section of the marketplace at 650 watts. Let’s see how Thermaltake does when the competition gets deeper and the prices get lower.

Introduction

Today Thermaltake Technology Company is back for a second time through our Power Supply testing program with their new Toughpower QFan 650w. As a company Thermaltake has a rather short history being founded in just 1999, but in that short time they have grown rapidly. While Thermaltake's primary focus has been on thermal solutions, they have for some time now maintained a group of product lines dedicated to power supplies. The early power supplies in these lines were often manufactured by Sirtec, but with the launch of the Toughpower line Thermaltake took their power supply business in a new, and quite frankly better, direction. So today we are again looking at a product from Thermaltake's partnership with Channel Well Technology in the Toughpower QFan 650w (w0163).

Channel Well Technology (CWT) was founded and began manufacturing power supplies in 1993. Since 1993 Channel Well Technology products have shown up under various guises including Antec, Xclio, 2theMax, CWT, Thermaltake, and now Corsair. While most familiar to our US users from when they used to provide OEM services for Antec, CWT is one of the more complete OEM manufacturers as they have a fairly high level of vertical integration providing transformers all the way up to their well designed independently regulated SMPS. Recently however, CWT has begun stretching out and is providing OEM services for a number of brands as today’s unit demonstrates.

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Is that a silent Q?

With the Toughpower QFan 650w coming in at 650 watts it certainly is running in the mainstream as far as total DC capacity goes in this day. So the big question becomes, in an area with so many options how does Thermaltake differentiate this product? From the branding that is apparent all of the QFan webpage it is abundantly clear that it is the fan. But what is “QFan,” why do we care, and is it enough to differentiate this product from everyone else out there?

What is QFan ?

The 140mm QFan features a unique patent designed blade shape and a 360°non-frame, effectively reducing the noise level. The air inlet is designed to increase air flow and reduce the sound of wind shear.

Why use QFan ?

The QFan special five way air-intake housing design creates the best heat dissipation environment for the non-frame 140mm QFan at minimal noise level. Therefore, the fan at low speed setting yield a 17.1 dBA without compromising performance.

How QFan performances ?

The 140mm QFan effectively decrease the noise level inside the PS

From what we find in the Thermaltake product page it seems that the new QFan is supposed to cure all of our ills when it comes to fan based cooling in power supplies as it has both superior heat dissipation and quieter operation. Well that is the claim anyway. Let's move on to see what we have to look forward to when we purchase the Thermaltake Toughpower QFan 650w in terms of documentation, accessories, cable count, rail layout, output characteristics, and general build quality before we move on to see about how that QFan works.