Thermaltake Toughpower GX1 600W Power Supply Review

Efficiency

Given that this is an 80PLUS Gold power supply, there are some very high requirements that have to be reached in terms of efficiency. Efficiency, in it’s most basic terms, means the ratio between the power going in versus the power going out. Wasted power (ie low efficiency) means wasted money on the electric bill!

As can be seen in our testing, the Thermaltake Toughpower GX1 nearly remains above 90% efficiency in all of our tests. A much higher rating than the certification alone would suggest or indeed require. We’re not quite in the platinum territory, but we’re not far from it either! Any way you look at it though, for a Gold-Rated power supply, this is far better than you might expect!

PFC (Power Factor Correction)

Given that this is a relatively inexpensive power supply, you might be forgiven for thinking that the PFC ratings would be solid, but not exactly special. Like our efficiency testing, however, the results are surprisingly high.

Peaking at over 0.96 at both 20% and 100% load, this is very impressive indeed and speaks of a solid design. In fact, across all of our tests, it only fell below 0.95 once which is a level many other power supply designs do not even peek at!

Voltage Regulation

The voltage regulation test provided some nice and consistent results across the range of load requirements. Yes, the +12v rail did seem to under-voltage a little, but not by any margin of notable issue.

The main key factor in this test is consistency and the worst it gets is in the -12V rail. Even then, however, that isn’t a particularly important rail (at least in modern PC designs) and is still well within reasonable remits.