Thermaltake Toughpower Grand Platinum 700W Power Supply Review

A look inside the TGP-700M

The flower shaped 140mm cooling fan is supplied by Y.S. Tech, rebranded to a Thermaltake logo and part number. Funnily, the fan is branded as a “Yen Sun Technology Copy“! It is a very powerful fan, capable of reaching a maximum speed of 1900RPM, a figure which is almost ridiculous for a 140mm fan. Thermaltake claims that the flower shaped fan can reduce noise by up to 3%; not a figure of any real significance if you ask us but let’s just wait for the acoustics testing before jumping to any conclusions.

Thermaltake’s Toughpower Grand series has been around for years and the company made use of several different OEMs in the past. This time, Thermaltake entrusted the design and assembly of the Toughpower Grand Platinum Snow Edition to High Power (also known as a branch of Sirfa Electronics Co.). Although it is rare to see High Power being the OEM behind so classy designs, we have to admit that we found the quality of the workmanship and soldering to be excellent.

The filtering stage of this power supply begins on the back of the A/C receptacle, with components glued onto the plastic body of the on/off switch and of the receptacle itself. The entire stage consists of four Y capacitors, two X capacitors, two filtering chokes and a MOV, creating a by-the-book filtering design. Here we can also see one of the bridge rectifiers which is attached to the large main heatsink of the unit instead of having its own small heatsink.

The sizable heatsink across the left side of the PCB holds the primary bridge rectifiers, the active components of the APFC circuit and the primary stage inversion components. A very large 680uF/400V capacitor supplied by Panasonic and an equally large filtering coil form the passive components of the PFC circuit.

Another sizable heatsink holds the conversion transistors on the secondary side of the main transformer. The vertical PCB right next to the heatsink is home to the two DC-DC converters, which reduce portion of the main 12V line into the 5V and 3.3V lines. There are many polymer capacitors, all supplied by Enesol, with a few electrolytic capacitors supplied by Nippon Chemi-Con. The hardwired cables are tightly packed together but their number creates a significant mess to the right side of the power supply.