After overclocking a Haswell-E rig sporting an R9 295X2 and simultaneously running OCCT and Furmark, as you do, and having its 850W PSU cut out thanks to the overcurrent protection, we took out Thermaltake’s latest PSU to see if it could do better.
The first thing we noticed was that all the high amperage cabling, such as the ATX 24-pin, all the PCI-E and ATX12V/EPS cables had individual fabric-sheathed wiring (plastic wiring looms are included to keep them neat and tidy) with a red, black and beigey yellow colour scheme. Which looks great, so long as it matches your colour scheme. The rest of the cables, for Molex and SATA connectors, are your typical plastic fl at black cabling fair.
The second thing we noticed was that it came with proper 8-pin PCI-E connectors (four of them) not just the 6+2 pin connectors you might typically see on power supplies (four of these are also included, for eight PCI-E connectors total!). So we plugged everything in and ran the stress test again.
Thanks to the USB port on the PSU and Thermaltake’s DPSapp software, we could see exactly how much power we were drawing. 960W was the peak, not a bad effort for a single graphics card system, and best of all the system stayed on! It was at this peak we also saw via the software our highest efficiency reading of 94.1% no doubt thanks to its 80 Plus Titanium (the highest) efficiency certification.
It’s via the software you also turn on and control the 256 colour RGB LED lighting. You can set any colour you like or have it slowly cycle through the colours of the rainbow. As much functionality and data as the DPSapp software provides, it’s also the problem with this product. The software needs to be running to drive the RGB lighting, and being based on fl ash and the .NET framework it only works with Windows. It also means from a cold boot the PSU LEDs remain off until you’re booted into Windows and the software has started up. It’s a minor gripe, but for the main feature of this product to be hamstrung in this way it takes some of the sheen off an otherwise perfect power supply.