Thermaltake ToughPower SFX 450W Power Supply Review

Efficiency

Although officially coming with an 80-Plus Gold efficiency rating, our testing found that while this was indeed entirely accurate, it was substantially better than this alone might suggest. Never dipping below 90% during all of our power output tests, and averaging around 93% at 40%-100%, the Thermaltake Toughpower SFX nearly touches on Platinum territory which, for those of you who don’t really understand efficiency ratings, is exceptionally good.

Yes, this might officially be Gold rated, but you can take it from us that in that tier, this is definitely on practically the highest level available.

PFC (Power Factor Correction)

Although the PFC start off quite low at 20% (which incidentally is perfectly normal) once you ask the Thermaltake ToughPower SFX to start working harder, it happily obliges you by ramping that rating up to a level which isn’t only decent, but actually pretty good. Admittedly, it’s not quite at the amazingly high level we usually see from larger more ‘standard’ Thermaltake power supplies, but it’s still excellent and manages to beat off a lot of the competition from fully-sized PSUs who, when looking at this, simply have no excuse not to be better.

Voltage Regulation

Throughout all of our testing, the voltage regulation for this power supply was amazingly consistent, and by proxy, this has resulted in some exceptionally low average deviancy scores. Looking at the charts below, no matter how hard or easy we asked this power supply to work, it consistently managed to deliver power across the rails to a very level amount and this is certainly more than a little indicative that quality components have gone into this PSUs design.