Performance

Please note the unconventional power sharing. 12V1 + 12V4 + 3.3V are together and 12V2 + 12V3 + 5V. This seems to confirm my first impression that the PSU actually consists of two fairly separate units. In the manual Thermaltake also recommends putting both connectors on the same rail if you use a video card that uses more than one power connector, like the 8800 GTX or the HD 2900.


Tested on: AMD Athlon64 FX-62 @ 2800 MHz, ABIT AT8, 2x 512 MB DDR400, WD Raptor 36 GB, Radeon X1900 XTX + Radeon X1900 XTX Crossfire

The 12V and 5V lines are as stable as you would expect from a 1200W power supply. The 3.3V line tends to fluctuate quite a bit, but no important devices are connected there, so this is of minor concern.


The ripple voltage was measured on the 12V line at idle. With an amplitude of 13.8 mV from peak to peak, the ripple voltage is quite low, we have seen better results though.


Standard deviation is a statistical term, which tells how far away from the average the measurements are. In other words it's the average of the average. A large standard deviation indicates that the data points are far from the average and a small standard deviation indicates that they are close within the average. The better the voltage regulation of the PSU, the smaller this value.


The Thermaltake Toughpower 1200W has a very good efficiency, which is partially caused by the fact that our 320 W test load (which is a typical high-performance system) barely makes the PSU sweat.