Thermaltake Toughpower SFX 1000 Watt Fully Modular 80+ Platinum Power Supply Review

Thermaltake has one of the most impressive PSU line-ups on the the market today, offering high-end build-quality, performance, efficiency, and great aesthetics too. Their latest SFX power supply looks set to continue that trend too, delivering a massive 1000W of power in this smaller form factor is impressive. However, it also features 80 Plus Platinum efficiency, ATX 3.1 certifications, PCIe Gen5 12VHPWR, a fully modular design, and more. Designed with 100% Japanese capacitors, all rated for up to 105c, and a DC-to-DC design, it's no surprise this unit is able to deliver big on power and efficiency. Efficiency is always good, but even more so in SFX, as it means the PSU generates less heat, and I think that's especially importing in the SFX form factor. Featuring a single 12v rail design, this PSU can output a massive 83.3A, so dealing with the massive power demands of flagship CPUs and GPUs should be a breeze. Features of the Toughpower SFX Series Fully Compatible with ATX 3.1 Specifications: Meets the latest standards for reliable and powerful performance. 100% High Quality Japanese 105°C/221°F Capacitors: Ensures long-lasting durability, stability, and reliability. Fully Modular, Low-Profile Flat Black Cables: Simplifies cable management and improves airflow for better cooling. High Amperage Single +12V Rail & DC to DC & LLC Design: Provides excellent compatibility and precise power output. Extremely Strict Voltage Regulation < ±2%: Delivers clean and stable power for optimal performance. < 30mV Low Ripple Noise Design: Minimizes electrical noise for a quieter and more stable system. 80 PLUS® Platinum Certified Efficiency: Reduces energy waste and saves on electricity bills. Supports Energy Star 5.0 Energy Standard:* Helps conserve energy and reduce environmental impact. Supports Intel Deep Power Down C6/C7 Status: Improves energy efficiency when the system is idle. Corresponds to the EU Directives on WEEE and RoHS: Complies with environmental regulations for safe disposal and manufacturing. What Thermaltake Had to Say Designed with a native PCIe 12+4pin modular connector, the Toughpower SFX series is built for next-gen hardware, and is fully compatible with Intel ATX 3.1 specifications. The fully modular Toughpower SFX series comes in 1000W, 850W, and 750W, and is built to deliver 80 PLUS Platinum efficiency. The compact size of Toughpower SFX Platinum series perfectly fits in any ATX or ITX case. Packaging & Accessories The box looks great, and keeps the theme we've seen from all previous Thermaltake PSUs and other products in recent years, with a clear photo, and all the main features labelled right on the front. Around the back, you'll find all the main technical details, such as the efficiency curve, voltage regulation, connector specifications, and the wattages and amps it's able to deliver on each rail. All the cables come stored in a protective bag, which you can use to store any unused cables. A Closer Look The latest Toughpower is an SFX power supply, so it's a very small form factor, which I think is incredible, as getting a 1000W in this form factor is pretty exceptional. I've been doing PSU reviews long enough to remember when 500W 80 Plus Gold was impressive in an SFX PSU, and 1000W Platinum PSUs would have been massive. This means you can now power the latest graphics cards such as the RTX 4090 and any flagship processor from this tiny power supply, meaning you can have smaller and slimmer PC cases. It looks stunning, with that huge perforation on the fan grill and a 90mm hybrid fan on the inside to keep things cool, but it can operate at 0 RPM under 30% load so it's completely silent when you're just doing your day to day work or watching YouTube. Down the side, there's a simple branding sticker. There's a good amount of ventilation at the rear of the power supply, and an AC line-in and power switch, so all pretty straight forward stuff really. There's a sticker on the base, showing all the main specifications, and as you can see, it can deliver 83.3A/1000W on the +12v rail. Then onto the business end, you'll find a fully-modular design, with the ATX 24-pin split into two headers, four CPU/PCIe 6+2 connectors, three peripheral connectors, and then a full 600W capable 12VHPWR (12V-2X6). A Closer Look - Interior Cooling this SFX unit you'll find a good quality 90mm fan, obviously that's about as big a fan as you can get in an SFX PSU, and just goes to show you how compact this unit really is. There's quite a lot of hardware in here, but there's a reasonable amount of space between the coils, caps, transformer, and AC-line-in to provide good airflow around each of the components. However, this PSU does use a DC-to-DC topology, which helps give it the 80 Plus Platinum efficiency, but that also means significantly reduce heat generation, so I doubt this PSU will ever get much more than slightly warm to the touch. There are two main bulk capacitors, which are 105c rated Japanese manufactured by Rubycon, and rated at 400v and 470uF. All the smaller capacitors throughout are of the same quality too. 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 can 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-8800 Active Load Tester Stingray DS1M12 USB Oscilloscope Voltcraft 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") which also uses a 50% load test, 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. Transient loads taken with an oscilloscope are taken from 0% to 100% on the 12v raid, 3.3v rail, and then both combined. Measuring fan speed after a stabilisation period of five minutes at each loading 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. Any deviation from this will be explained per review as appropriate on the respective testing pages, but this methodology page will remain unchanged. 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) so we used an adequate number of cables for each power supply to ensure there is no efficiency loss from poor cable selection. If there is more than one 12VHPWR on a PSU, all will be used to test their combined loads. 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 deviation 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 the 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. Transient Loads Power Factor Correction Power Factor Correction is the ratio of the real power flowing to the load, to the apparent power in the circuit. PFC aims 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 An oscilloscope can easily measure noise and Ripple. 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 are often quoted as having various protection mechanisms 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 of the noise. The ambient temperature during testing is held constant at 22 degrees, with 1 degree of variation. Each power supply had a consistent 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/Silent 800 to 1000 RPM - Barely audible 1000 - 1200 RPM - Audible but still quiet 1200 - 1400 RPM - Moderately noisy 1400 - 1800 RPM - Noisy 1800 - 2000 RPM or above - Intolerable Internal Components This is just an example of what you can expect to see on a PSU interior. Efficiency This PSU is rated for 80 Plus Platinum, and of course, it held up great throughout the testing, scoring well above 90% at all loads. PFC (Power Factor Correction) The PFC is excellent, and the closer to 1.0 the better, as this means less conversion and less heat generation, and as you can see, it starts of strong, but gets even better at higher loads. Voltage Regulation Ideally we can't to see voltages within 3% of their targets, and this is especially true of the 12v, which actually has some of the most accurate results I've ever seen, hitting an average deviation of... zero! Ripple Ripple results are extremely low, on par with the best of the best of any PSU, and that means consistently clean and stable power delivery on all rails at all loads, which is great for system stability and health. 3.3V 5V 12V Over Power Protection and Max Wattage 1000W is a lot of power, but the quality of this PSU is fantastic, so it's not surprising to see it pulled an impressive 1239 before the OPP kicked in a shut it down. This is good for dealing with power spikes, meaning you can pull above 1000W for short periods without any cause for concern. Cross-Loads Much like our voltage regulation tests, the target here is within 3% and while there is some slight variance on each rail at different loads, there's quite small and again well within the 3% target, actually, the highest change seen is just 1.9%. Fan Speed The fan has no selectable hybrid fan mode, but under 30% load or in low temperature scenarios, the fan is inactive, making it completely silent for your day to day work. How Much Does it Cost? The Thermaltake Toughpower SFX 1000 Watt Fully Modular 80+ Platinum PSU/Power Supply is available now from Scan for a very reasonable £179.99. That's not a bargain, but it is competitive with similarly equipped PSUs on the market, and any premium brand SFX unit of this power will cost you £170-£200. Overview I am impressed by the latest generation of SFX power supplies. As I said before, when I started this job, 500W in SFX-L was regarded as impressive, and even then that was with 80 Plus Gold efficiency, now ten years later, we have a true SFX power supply, which is absolutely tiny compared to SFX-L and full size SFX. The efficiency is now 80 Plus Platinum, which is simply incredible. However, best of all the power output has doubled, and there's no combination of high-end gaming CPU and GPU that cannot be powered by 1000W of power. It's also a surprisingly quiet PSU, and again, going back to older SFX units, they were less efficient, the ran hotter, and as such, needed higher fan RPM to keep them running cool. Being able to push 1000W and still have such a small power supply remain no louder than a typical case fan is really impressive. However, with the DC-to-DC topology, the SFX 1000 doesn't generate much heat at any load. The build quality is excellent too, and Thermaltake has used 100% Japanese capacitors throughout, which are rated for 105c and promise long lifespans. It features ATX 3.1 and PCIe Gen 5 certification, there's a robust LLC topology with DC to DC design, and overall, it should just be more reliable and stable as a result, and this is of course reflected in the testing, which showed low ripple and noise, stable voltages, and excellent efficiency. Should I Buy One? A good quality power supply can be a big investment, and spending £179.99 on a tiny PSU may seem like a lot, but it's a solid investment. This power supply has absolutely massive power, exceptional efficiency, and it's form factor is exceptionally small for those who love SFF and mini-ITX case builds with powerful gaming hardware.