Date:
Monday , March 16, 2009
Author:
Paul Johnson
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Thermaltake Toughpower 1000W

Is that a fully modular kilowatt in your chassis or are you just happy to see me? Thermaltake is back with a 1000 watt computer power supply that has some big shoes to fill after we have seen such great performance out of the previous 1200 watt PSUs from TT.

Introduction

Today Thermaltake Technology Company is back for a fourth time through our power supply testing program with their Toughpower 1000W. 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 almost 2 years ago Thermaltake took their power supply business in a new, and quite frankly better, direction. Today we are again looking at a product from Thermaltake's partnership with Channel Well Technology in the Toughpower 1000W (W0132RU) which is the smaller relative of the Toughpower 1200W we saw almost 2 years ago. (We use the Toughpower 1200W units on all of our motherboard test bench stations now for a good while with great success. The 1200W is a very cool and quiet running unit that has not let us down.)

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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Tough on the Competition?

The Thermaltake Toughpower 1000W marks the second 1000 watt+ unit from Thermaltake's Toughpower line of power supplies we have seen to date. The first was the Toughpower 1200W almost two years ago and that unit represented the first time we had seen the CWT PUC platform in our review process. In that intervening two years a number of other companies have picked up on this platform and begun using it for their products leaving Thermaltake as one of the lead partners on this platform but without much of the originality that they had by using this platform so early on. So with the Toughpower 1000W today we get to see how the venerable Toughpower PUC based units have held up over the last two years and how this particular iteration compares to the other PUC based units on the market. But first, what does Thermaltake have to say about this unit since they revamped their marketing page in the last two years:

Thermaltake, the market’s most trusted brand name also produces the market’s most reliable Toughpower series power supply. Built with the latest technological advances in circuitry design with industrial-grade components, Toughpower offers industry’s leading 87%+ efficiency, power protection and performance that today’s cutting-edge PC components demand. Recognized for its highest level of performance, Toughpower power supply carries either Nvidia SLI Ready or AMD/ATI CrossFire certification that fully supports Nvidia 2-way and 3-way SLI configuration as well as AMD/ATI 2-way, 3-way and 4-way CrossFire configuration.

As we see here the marketing information for the Toughpower 1000W is identical to that of the other Toughpower units including the 1200W model. So, let's move on to see what we have to look forward to when we purchase the Thermaltake Toughpower 1000W in terms of documentation, accessories, cable count, rail layout, output characteristics, and general build quality.