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- Date:
- Monday , July 13, 2009
- Author:
- Paul Johnson
- Google +1
Thermaltake Litepower 450W Power Supply
Overview
The first thing we are going to look at with the Thermaltake Litepower 450W is the packaging, accessories, and documentation. While normally none of these items is a make or break item for a power supply the packaging quite often contains a lot of information about the product we are purchasing. The inclusion of an owner’s manual that provides actual information about our product is also of great help. Accessories are almost unnecessary with a power supply as the unit is self contained, unless it is modular, but there cases where a manufacturer can include useful accessories to make installation, routing and use more efficient.
The Thermaltake Litepower 450W comes in a nice white box with precious little else on it. The rear of the box has a little message saying this is a computer power supply in 10 languages, a blurb about dual 12v rails and the fact that the unit has a silent (probably not) 120mm fan. Lastly, there is a connector count for all three current members of the Litepower series and some regulatory compliance certifications. That would be about it. Now, while the packaging does not indicate the length of warranty on the Litepower 450W, the Thermaltake website gives it as being 5 years. For what is a very entry level product this is certainly a reasonable to good length for the warranty. We have spent a lot more on an upper end PSU and gotten a lot less from other companies, so a big kudo Thermaltake on the warranty front.
From the power output information we get with the Thermaltake Litepower 450W we find ourselves looking at an interesting unit. The 12v rails, which are most heavily loaded in modern systems, have 34A or ~91% of the unit’s total capacity available to them if necessary. This 34A is spread across two 12v rails laid out in accordance with the ATX12v2.X specification which results in the P4/Aux connector being isolated while the Molex, SATA, Motherboard, and PCI-E connectors all share a 17A 12v rail. This is generally not the best layout but with a 450W unit very few people are going to be running a ton of high draw components to cause an issue. Indeed, with its four SATA and five Molex connectors the only really heavy duty setup you could hit this with to cause a huge problem would be some TEC’s running off of those Molex connectors and that seems unlikely with a 450W PSU. So, all in all this is not as bad an arrangement as it could have been for a higher powered unit (or one that has more connectors capable of supporting higher draw components).
Once we open the Thermaltake Litepower 450W packaging we find the usual assortment of the power supply, the power cord, mounting screws, the user manual, and a warranty card. The manual weighs in at 80 pages in 10 languages and is good. It provides the majority of the electrical specifications about the unit (and the other units in the Litepower line), power label, pinouts, rail distribution, contact information, installation instructions, and some basic troubleshooting. The information included in the Litepower manual is surprisingly complete for such a low end unit and generally well done as it is missing just a few small points.