Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W Power Supply Review

Thermaltake has certainly come a long way over the last 10 years. Having once been viewed by many consumers as something of an inexpensive fringe brand, they are today one of the most recognisable names for PC hardware components. A factor that has undoubtedly been primarily driven forwards, at least in our opinion, with their consistent launch of new and exceptionally good power supply designs. With this in mind, therefore, we take a look at their newly released Toughpower GF1 1000W. A supremely potent PSU packing masses of excellent features, and, not to mention, 1000 watts of power output, making this a highly suitable choice for enthusiast-level PC users! Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W Coming under Thermaltake's highly reputable 'Toughpower' branding, as the name might suggest, the GF1 takes a no-nonsense approach offering consumers all the features they want to see from a quality PSU design. While the bells and whistles and razzmatazz of RGB lighting might (in some views) be lacking, this power supply packs masses of excellent features that should easily manage to grab the attention of the savvy consumer. Offering a fully modular cable design, an 80-Plus Gold efficiency rating, 100% Japanese capacitors, 1000 watts of power output, and a huge 10-year warranty, even on paper this already sounds like a fantastic proposition! - Better still, available in wattage output ranges from 650W all the way up to 1200W, there's something for everyone in this series! What Does Thermaltake Have to Say? "The fully modular Toughpower GF1 series now comes in 1000W and built to deliver 80 PLUS Gold efficiency. The series features a 140mm hydraulic bearing fan, Japanese capacitors and other premium components to help deliver a continuous and stable power with an ambient temperature up to 50°C, while near silent operation and reliable performance are guaranteed. With an ample 10-year warranty, the Toughpower GF1 1000W Gold is able to satisfy the market where PC enthusiasts are looking for a premium power supply with all the latest features." Features 80 Plus Gold Certified Up to 90% EfficiencyHigh Amperage Single +12V Rail DesignUpgraded CPU/PCI-E Main Cables (16AWG Wires) For High End Enthusiasts' PCs100% High Quality Japanese 105C/221F CapacitorsFully Modular Low-Profile Flat Black Cables1000W Continuous Output at 50C/122F Operating Environment Specifications For more detailed specifications, please visit the official product page via the link here! Connections With a fully modular cable design, the Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W should be absolutely perfect for all users whether their system is relatively spartan or incredibly complex. Thermaltake provides you with masses of connectors that will give consumers no problems in easily hooking up all of their components while the flat black cabling provides more than enough length and flexibility for high levels of system management and uninterrupted airflow. Packaging The exterior box work carries all of the brand recognition consumers have come to expect with the Thermaltake Toughpower product. It has a sleek no-nonsense aesthetic with an easy on the eye black and silver colour pallet. - The front of the packaging gets things off to an excellent start with a nice big image of the power supply as well as all of the key product features being clearly indicated. At a simple and quick glance, you should know exactly what you're getting here, and from a presentation standpoint, this is absolutely perfect! The rear of the packaging goes into heavy detail on the key specifications and features of the Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W. While a lot of information is provided here, it's well-sized and spaced out meaning that it's not an assault on your eyes. Overall, both front and back, Thermaltake has done an excellent job here! Accessories As this is a power supply, you clearly don't anticipate much in the way of accessories. Despite this, however, Thermaltake still provides you with everything you could possibly need including a small quantity of zip ties to help assist you in your cable management. A particular highlight is the nice quality branded canvas bag in which the cables are provided. This should not only help you keep things tidy during your installation, but it also provides you with an excellent and safe place to keep the cables you don't need today for a potential system or component upgrade tomorrow! A Closer Look Out of the box, the Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W presents itself well with a nice clean aesthetic that feels pleasantly solid in the hand. As noted earlier, the Thermaltake has nearly always presented its 'Toughpower' branding as an all-business/performance approach to system components and that's certainly evident here. While there is some branding to the various aspects of this PSU, it is well sized and, generally speaking, quite understated. This makes it fit in really well with the overall aesthetic expected from a 'Toughpower' product. The top of the Toughpower GF1 1000W is very well presented with a nice large area of ventilation for the fan as well as a well-sized and placed Thermaltake logo to the center. The power input bank is excellent with each section being clearly denoted for its specific usage. Admittedly, this is an aspect that's fairly hard to get wrong, but for a first-time installer, this, in combination with the piggy-back port design (allowing for easy removal/insertion of the cables) should make things much more accessible and, overall, less stressful. Pretty much all available areas of the exhaust section of this power supply are vented. This should really help promote the 'Smart Zero Fan' functionality mode, which, for those of you unaware, configures the PSU to only operate the fan when deemed absolutely necessary (a feature primarily designed to minimise noise output). - This is controlled by a simple switch which you can see in the image below. Cabling The cabling for the Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W is excellent. Not just in terms of the amount and variety you are provided with, but with its sleek flat black design, and highly generous length, you shouldn't only have more than enough here to hook up your components, but you also have absolutely no excuses for poor levels of management which could impact your system's airflow. - Each cable is clearly itemised as well to denote its usage. Internals - A Look Inside! Getting inside the Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W is quite straightforward. Albeit, we clearly wouldn't recommend this to you as doing so will almost certainly invalidate your 10-year warranty. - On initial inspection, however, all of the components look excellent with a clean and tidy presentation. A closer look at the fan reveals this to be a Thermaltake own 'TT-1425'. Coming as a 140mm hydraulic bearing fan, we have seen this utilised in many other Thermaltake PSU products and have never failed to be impressed with its performance. However, getting one elephant out of the room, and particularly for those eagle-eyed among you, this is a fan that technically features ARGB lighting effects. For this particular model, however, this has been disabled and the PCB does not appear to give you the option to enable it. - This is probably an efficiency/cost-effective choice as Thermaltake does often launch separate ARGB lighting-enabled products. Albeit, these are not entirely common under their 'Toughpower' branding. The PCB for the Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W is exceptionally well presented, with all components being well spaced and cabling either being well hidden or, at the very least, well organised. A particular highlight is the good central location of the heatsinks. In this position, they should benefit well from the placement of the fan and exhaust section of this PSU. With Thermaltake citing that this power supply contains 100% Japanese capacitors, this is a feature we can happily confirm. As you can see in the image below, the two main utilised in this design come from 'Nippon Chemi-Con', an exceptionally reputable manufacturer. Being rated to 105C as well, this is exactly what you want to see within any quality PSU model! Overall Thoughts! Both inside and out, the Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W seems to represent a high-quality power supply design. It appears to be absolutely faultless in its no-nonsense approach to giving consumers a top-spec all-business PSU that is by no means displeasing on the eye. With quality components utilised, we expect this, as often we do with Thermaltake power supplies, to absolutely storm through our tests. - Will it though? Well, getting a little of our methodology out of the way first, let's find out! Methodology & Testing At eTeknix we take the power supply testing procedure very seriously and have invested a lot of resources into acquiring the appropriate testing equipment. For all power supply reviews, we test the power supplies with dedicated power supply testing equipment. This means we are able to get the most accurate results from our testing as opposed to using software benchmarks (such as OCCT) or multi-meter readouts which are broadly inaccurate. Testing Hardware Sunmoon SM-5500ATE Active Load Tester (1200W rated)Stingray DS1M12 USB OscilloscopeVoltcraft DT-10L laser tachometer What the eTeknix Test Procedure Involves Testing each power supply at 20/40/60/80/100% load (with load balanced across all rails) and measuring PFC (power factor correction), efficiency (actual power divided by power "pulled at the wall") and voltage regulation (deviance from expected voltages of 3.3/5/12 on the main rails).Measuring ripple with an oscilloscope at 20/40/60/80/100% load.Measuring fan speed after a stabilisation period of five minutes at each load scenario using the Voltcraft DT-10L laser tachometer and a reflective strip on the fan.Testing each power supply's OPP (Over Power Protection) mechanism and seeing how many watts each power supply can deliver before shutting down Other Things to Consider We recognise that a single 12-volt cable can provide only 6 Amps before overheating (which corrupts voltage regulation and efficiency) and so we used an adequate number of cables for each power supply to ensure there is not efficiency loss from poor cables selectionOur Sunmoon SM-5500ATE power supply tester is not capable of testing more than 300W on each of the 12-volt rails so where a power supply provides more than 300W on a 12-volt rail that power is distributed over multiple 12-volt rails on the load tester. For example a power supply with one 12 volt rail supplying 750 watts would be spread equally over three 12 volt rails on the load tester, a power supply with two 450W 12v rails would be spread over four 12v rails on the load tester, two 225W 12v rails for each of the 12v rails on the unit.We use the same time scale and horizontal millivolt scale on our oscilloscope for all ripple tests, that is a 20ms T/DIV (horizontal) and a 0.02 V/DIV (vertical) meaning the scale is from -80mV to +80mV, ATX spec dictates that the 12v rail must fall within 150mv of ripple and the 3.3/5 within 50mv so that scale allows us to include both 150 and 50mV peaks. (Some older PSU reviews use different scales which were later ditched as the visual representation they give is inadequate, in these reviews written measurements are provided only).Deviance is the terminology used to represent the way voltages diverge from the expected values Voltage Regulation To test voltage regulation we load the power supply to five different load scenarios that give an equal spread of load across every single rail. So that means 20% on all rails, 40% on all rails and so on. We then calculate the average deviance of each rail from its expected voltage. Ideally, anything of +/- 2% regulation is seen as a very good result. Power Efficiency Power efficiency is measured by calculating actual supplied wattage divided by the wattage drawn at the wall/plug, multiplied by 100 to give a percentage. We then compare that to the particular 80 Plus certification the company claims to see if it meets that. You can see the 80 Plus certifications below, we always test power supplies at 230v. Power Factor Correction Power Factor Correction is the ratio of the real power flowing to the load, to the apparent power in the circuit. The aim of PFC is to make the load circuitry that is power factor corrected appear purely resistive (apparent power equal to real power). In this case, the voltage and current are in phase and the reactive power consumption is zero. The closer the number to one the better as this allows the most efficient delivery of electrical power (Source - Wikipedia). Ripple Noise and Ripple can easily be measured by an oscilloscope. These show how much voltage fluctuation there is on a particular rail. We tested the rail stability of the 3.3-volt, 5-volt and 12-volt rails using an identical time and millivolt scale for all graphs. millivolt ripple is measured by the peak to peak size of the voltage curve. The latest ATX 12 volt version 2.3 specifications state that ripple from peak to peak must be no higher than 50 millivolts for the 3.3-volt and 5-volt rails, while the 12-volt rail is allowed up to 120 millivolts peak to peak to stay within specifications. Millivolt figures are stated to the closest increment of 5 given their variability. OPP Power supplies often quote as having various protection mechanisms such and the most important of these is Over Power Protection. In our testing we crank up the power draw until the power supply either shuts down (meaning the OPP mechanism is present and working) or blows up (meaning it is either not present or not working). We then note the maximum power consumption before the power supply shut down, or before it blew up. Fan Speed When testing in a power supply laboratory, it is difficult to take fan noise readings as the noise from the Sunmoon test equipment and air conditioning corrupts everything. The next best thing in our circumstances was reading off the fan speed with a tachometer to get an idea for the noise. The ambient temperature during testing held constant at 22 degrees, with 1 degree of variation. Each power supply had a consistent time period of 5 minutes to stabilise between each load scenario. In my experience, the following general relationships apply between noise levels and fan speeds, though it can vary greatly between the type of fan used. Below 800 RPM - Inaudible/Silent800 to 1000 RPM - Barely audible1000 - 1200 RPM - Audible but still quiet1200 - 1400 RPM - Moderately noisy1400 - 1800 RPM - Noisy1800 RPM or above - Intolerable Efficiency While 80-Plus Gold is certainly not the highest efficiency rating available, by today's standards, it really is what most consumers should be aspiring towards. Better efficiency ultimately means that the power supply is losing less electricity in regards to what it draws out of your wall socket. And with this in mind, a good quality PSU can legitimately save you money on your bill! So, with the Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W coming with this 80-Plus Gold efficiency rating, how did it do in our testing? Well, the short version is exceptionally good! - Our results clearly indicate that this power supply didn't just meet that level, but exceeded it by quite a comfortable margin. The results provided never dropped below 90%, and with a peak efficiency of 92.7%, this nearly has the Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W tiptoeing on the Platinum level of performance. PFC (Power Factor Correction) Following the many Thermaltake power supplies we have tested over the years, the PFC performance has nearly always proven to be one of their most highly consistent and, overall, best results. While the Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W isn't quite up to some of the highest levels we have seen from their other models, however, the results are still exceptionally impressive in general comparative terms. A particular highlight is just how stable the PFC is at low load where, in the vast majority of other power supplies, it's not unusual to see this figure around the 0.75-0.8 area. Overall though, the results here are excellent. Albeit, not quite at the exceptionally high level we usually see from a Thermaltake PSU. Voltage Regulation Regardless of the load output provided during our testing, the Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W provided amazingly consistent results leading to an exceptionally low overall average deviancy. - As you can see in the chart below, the power levels provided on the rails are notably tight, meaning that no matter how hard or easy this PSU is working, it's delivering solid levels of power to all of your components. Ripple Given that a 'low ripple noise' is one of the key features of the Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W, this was an aspect of our testing that we were very keen to confirm. - So, is the ripple noise at a good and low level? Well, the short answer to that question is a very resounding yes. Admittedly, the results at 100% load were a little more excitable than we had anticipated, but given that the EU maximum in this regard is 50, as you can see below, these are still hugely below that figure. With the majority of the results being in single (whole) digits, the Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W does indeed have a low ripple noise. And, as often is the case with their power supplies, an exceptionally good one too! Load (%) 3.3V Ripple 5V Ripple 12V Ripple 2033.86 4044.216 604.64.211.4 8055.811.4 10026.21124.6 Over Power Protection and Max Wattage Given that this particular Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 is rated to 1000 watts of power output, we would expect that, for the vast majority of you, this wouldn't just easily cover the needs of all your components, but would also allow for an exceptionally strong level of overhead. A factor that would undoubtedly be good for those of you who enjoy dabbling in the realms of overclocking. - When things are pushed beyond those rated amounts, however, it is important to know that protections are in place to shut your system down before any risk any damage to your components (or PSU itself). So, in regards to the Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W, we can happily confirm that the OPP worked perfectly. Not before, however, the PSU was able to achieve a maximum wattage output of a huge 1,684. - Given that this is around 60% above its rated value, this is exceptionally impressive, and, if we're being honest, much higher than we expected to see this PSU go. - Based on the officially rated value, this OPP score is undoubtedly one of the biggest comparative gaps we've seen for quite some time! Fan Speed Although the Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W is provided with a 'Hybrid' Zero fan function control, throughout all of our testings with this mode enabled, the power supply never seemingly deemed it necessary to actually operate the fan at all. As such, if you value exceptionally low levels of noise output, The results provided here should (not?) be music to your ears! With this mode disabled, however, the fan seemed to run at a fairly consistent 675 RPM, and, we should note, at an exceptionally quiet level of acoustic output. - In all honesty, it was so barely audible that the inclusion of the 'Zero Fan' mode does seem a little redundant. - Any way you look at this though, whether you choose to use this functionality or not, the fan performance is excellent. How Much Does it Cost? Currently available for a price in the region of £139.99, I think it would be fair to say that the Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W isn't an inexpensive power supply. You do, however, have to consider exactly what you're getting here. - Not only is this a 1000 watt power supply rated to an efficiency level of 80-Plus Gold, but this also comes with a comparatively huge 10-year warranty. This power supply shouldn't just be considered for use as a one-off purchase. There is absolutely no reason why this shouldn't outlive the vast majority of your components making it not only suitable but entirely ready for future builds and upgrades as you progress as a PC owner (and particularly so as components such as processors and graphics cards get even more power-hungry!). Performance As seen throughout our testing, the Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W is undoubtedly an absolutely fantastic power supply. Both inside and out, there is practically nothing to fault here and particularly so in its efficiency which performed much higher than its official 80-Plus Gold rating would suggest. In many respects, this is actually closer to Platinum which, while not quite making that level, if it did, you could easily expect to see another £30-£40 thrown onto the price tag! Admittedly, not everyone is going to need a power supply with 1000 watts of output. Given that this GF1 range is available from 650w all the way up to 1200w, however, based on the components you have in your system, there is something for everyone here that will not only do the job but do it exceptionally well! Practicality & Functionality Offering high levels of efficiency (that could save you a not unnotable amount on your electricity bill), a fully modular cable design, an easy to work with cable interface, and plenty of functionality for system management and overall airflow, the Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W is about as practical as things (currently) get. - This isn't, of course, going to be suitable for a lot of MITX system cases, but I daresay that if you've gotten to this point of the review you probably know this already. A key factor to consider though is that while 1000 watts of power might seem like a lot, it's hard to deny that as system components get faster, they are often now requiring substantially more power to do so. For a top-spec gaming system, 1000 watts is about where you need to be now and particularly so if you're considering a PSU purchase as a long-term investment. As such, the Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W does appear to present even more practicality when that factor is brought into the mix. Should I Buy One? Although other power wattage outputs are available in the range, the Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W does seem to tick all the right boxes for high-end gaming PCs and enthusiast-level users. A particular factor of note is the power output which clearly offers more than a little for the overclocking community. - No, this isn't a cheap power supply, but that's because this isn't a cheap power supply! The quality both inside and out of the Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W is unquestionable, and although this already comes with a huge 10-year warranty, we've seen nothing to suggest that this couldn't still happily keep your system running for 20 years and perhaps even longer. - Put simply, the Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W is a quality product, and for those who know their power supplies, this is undoubtedly one of the best options currently available on the market! Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 1000W Power Supply Review