Page 4 - Minor Tests and Conclusion
Power supplies are interesting products -- because often, reviews of products in this category are conducted and tested in methods that make it difficult to distinguish one power supply from another. Many aspects have to be taken into consideration -- of which certain criteria consists of efficiency, noise, power ripples, and of course the ability to pull out the rated specifications. Because many cannot afford such equipment to obtain results regarding those aspects, articles covering power supplies often come out with less than adequate and acceptable information. As this is an product report -- not a review -- what we are doing is a close examination of the power supply, and the internal hardware and build. But what we can do for you is do some minor testing with the results we can present to you with, and let other review sites with professional equipment show you the actual test results.
Using our power supply tester which exerts minimal load on the power supply, the initial consumption was 25W as measured by our wall meter unit -- indicating that the basic load-free power consumption of the power supply is pretty much the worst we've seen so far. The lowest we've seen is the Seasonic M12II 500W at 8W. This looks like the stabilized load before some sort of protection kicks in after a few seconds and shuts down the power supply. This means that you probably can't use the paperclip trick on it. Reviewers with professional testing equipment indicated that its efficiency exceeds 80% in most tests.
Voltages with minimal load is generally accurate, which is a basic requirement of power supplies out of the box. In this situation all are within 0.2V. The PG (Power Good) delay seems to be well within its rated range and general power supply standard at 300ms.
The active power line correction was only acceptable on Thermaltake's Toughpower Cable Management 650W power supply; our Seasonic PowerAngel reported a power factor of 0.95 (95%) -- not quite the 0.98-0.99 range as most power supplies are in the market today.
The Thermaltake Toughpower QFan 650W is actually a very quiet power supply -- under regular load, the power supply is very quiet; quite similar to what you'd expect from Seasonic power supplies. While this is very subjective, I am quite a picky person on noise and the loudest component in my entire system is my hard disk. On a scale from 0-10 where 0 is the silent and 10 is the loudest, I would rate the Thermaltake Toughpower QFan 650W to be at 2.0/10 -- which is just slightly above the Seasonic units and the same as the OCZ EliteXStream 800W, in idle conditions. There's turbulence noise only when the fan spins up to a somewhat high RPM when the power supply is past 50% to 60% load -- in idle conditions, there is a small clicking sound with the fan bearing if you listen very closely. As the load increases, the Toughpower will increase voltage to the fan -- in which the higher the load, the more audible the fan is. Under our nominal load of around 180W to 220W this power supply is very quiet, and most computers in the idling state should be around this range. However, once you push it to over 50%-60% of its maximum capacity, the fan will start to kick in. Most people won't have a computer that uses that much power anyways, especially in idle conditions. Overall, in terms of noise, the Thermaltake Toughpower QFan 650W won't disappoint.
Special thanks to Ramsom over at Thermaltake for making this report possible.
Well, it's nice, has a quality build, is modular, but the Toughpower QFan 650W acts a bit weird in our minor tests -- not to mention our unit's Active PFC didn't work so well at nominal loads of ~120W. The thing is that this PSU costs more than the OCZ EliteXStream 800W at press time -- which is another excellent performing unit; the only thing missing are the modular cables.
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. Physical Look - Outside
3. Physical Look - Inside
4. Minor Tests and Conclusion
