Thermaltake Toughpower GF3 Snow 1200 Watt ATX 3.0 Power Supply Review

How Much Does it Cost?

The Thermaltake Toughpower GF3 Snow 1200-watt full-modular PCIE Gen 5 ATX 3.0 80+ Gold PSU is available now from Scan for a very reasonable £159.98. I think that’s a pretty fantastic price for such a good quality and powerful unit. It’s also the same price as the GF3A, so you’re not paying a premium for it being white. However, the GF3A comes with a 120mm fan and the GF3 snow with a 140mm fan, which I think is a nice advantage.

Overview

Thermaltake has a really nice power supply with the Toughpower GF3 Snow 1200 Watt. It’s obviously very powerful, and at 1200 watts, it’s got more than enough grunt for any of today’s flagship CPUs such as the Intel Core i9 series, the top-end Ryzen, or even a Threadripper, and still has enough juice left over for a flagship graphics card such as the RTX 4090 or RX 7900 XTX, as well as all your storage and other devices too.

The build quality is excellent too, and really the only two small details I can pick are not a big deal. The AC Line-in soldering looked a bit scruffy, but certainly not unsafe, but this is quite a common site in many PSUs. The flat cables look great, but they were packed in a bit tight and that left some of them with folds and twists in the package that take time to work out and get looking neat again.

It’s nicely overbuilt too, and being part of the Toughpower series it means that it’s designed to cope with continuous loads over a long period of time. If you want to draw 1000W+ 24/7 it’ll do it without breaking a sweat. If you have a system that tends to power spike and exceeds that 1200W rating, again, not a problem, it’ll pull up to 1700W for a short period before the OPP kicks in and shuts your system down.

I like that Thermaltake made the PSU outer casing bigger too, seemingly just to put a larger 140mm fan inside, and this means it’s a lower RPM that moves more airflow with a lower noise output compared to a 120mm fan that has to spin faster to move the same amount of air. The slightly larger size of the PSU also means there is more room for passive airflow throughout, and there’s additional ventilation on the sides of the PSU to help this even further.

Should I Buy One?

Ther GF3 Snow 1200 Watt PSU features a stylish aesthetic that’s going to match up with a wide range of other Snow Edition products that have been released over the years from Thermaltake, ranging from peripherals to cases. The performance is excellent, delivering big power, low ripple and good voltage stability with a low-noise fan, and best of all, it does it all at a competitive price too.