Thermaltake Dr Power III AXT Power Supply Tester Review

Well, this isn’t the most complicated device ever, in that you can only really do one thing with it, and that’s to see if each rail on your PSU is delivering the desired target voltages. As you can see, I’ve hooked up a bundle of cables from my test PSU, and as I connect each cable, an icon shows on the bottom of the display to confirm what is connected; 24P, CPU, PCI-E, and MOX, the missing one in this case being SATA.

To perform a test, you simply press the big power button in the middle, and it’ll enter the auto-testing cycle.

My PSU is in perfect health, but to simulate a fail I disconnected a cable on the PSU, and also turned the PSU switch off, simulating a power loss, and as you can see, it’s showing F to pay respects. The big red display really makes it clear to understand “ALL IS NOT WELL”.

The unit doesn’t actually have any batteries, it runs from the PSU itself, but interestingly, if I turn the PSU off at the mains, the unit stays powered for a little while as it likely has some capacitor to allow readouts after a PSU failed test or loss of power.

You can perform a manual test too, allowing you to cycle through and select a connector. Here you can see a clean bill of health for the CPU 4+4 connector, delivering 12.1 volts, which is well within safe limits. Ideally you want to be within +/- 5% for 3.3v, 5v and 12v, but the closer to the target, the better obviously.

As you can see, we’re getting extremely close to the targets here, with 12V, 5.06 and 3.32v all reading great, and no red lights. The unit beeps too, it’s that obnoxious “PEEP PEEP PEEP” noise you get from cheap alarm clocks, but it gets the job done.

It’s great to see the 600W PCI-E 12VHPWR connector is supported too, we all know they’re getting a bit of a tarnished reputation for melting, so having some way to test those cables and the PSU is certainly welcome.