ThermalTake ToughPower 550W - PAGE 3Matt Horne - Friday, March 10th, 2006
Installation
Installation was standard affair. We tested with the following:
AMD 64 3700+ @2.6GHz
ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe Motherboard
OCZ PC4200 RAM
Western Digital 120GB Hard Drive
2x BFG 7800 GTX OC SLI
MasterCraft 052-0060-2 Multimeter
Omega HHSL1 Sound Level Meter
We encountered no problems connecting the PSU to the motherboard and the accompanying devices. The
inclusion of wire shrouds is a nice added feature, providing support without being overly stiff.
Test Results
We ran the power supply in our test system, reading the voltage levels while at idle in the Windows desktop and during a loop of both SM2.0 and SM3.0 tests in 3DMark06.
| Rail | Idle | Load |
| +3.3v | 3.35v | 3.36 |
| +5v | 5.09v | 5.08 |
| +12v | 12.16 | 12.14 |
Looking at the charts you can see that the ToughPower 55W, provides move than enough power for the SLI setup. Using some really graphics-taxing games and benchmark utilities to test the effectiveness of the power supply, I was quite happy with the results that were produced.
Sound Measurements
Sound measurements were taken from the ThermalTake ToughPower 550W, CoolerMaster RS-550-ACLY and the Antec True Power 2.0 TPS2-550 EPS 12V power supplies. The Omega HHSL1 Sound Level Meter was used to measure the sound output.
| ThermalTake ToughPower 550W | CoolerMaster RS-550-ACLY | Antec True Power 2.0 TPS2-550 EPS 12V |
| Room Level(db) | 30.5 | 30.5 | 30.5 |
| 1Metre from PSU(db) | 38.8 | 41.5 | 35.1 |
| PSU Fan(db) | 49.3 | 51.4 | 48.3 |
The ThermalTake ToughPower 550W was very quiet in testing and as the graph shows, quite comparable to the Antec power supply. The overall noise levels are quite low and barely noticeable over the GPU and CPU fans.
forums
send article 
hardware newsletter 
article comments (1) 
Lowest prices check
Digg this!
del.icio.us