Thermaltake Toughpower Grand 850W review index

• Page 1 – Toughpower Grand 850W: Presentation
• Page 2 – Toughpower Grand 850W: Packaging
• Page 3 – Toughpower Grand 850W: Specifications
• Page 4 – Toughpower Grand 850W: The Torture Test
• Page 5 – Toughpower Grand 850W: Conclusion

4 – Toughpower Grand 850W: The Torture Test

Here we are: the stress test. To stress test the Grand 850W PSU, I’m going to apply a load on the CPU and on the GPUs. We know that high-end graphics cards can draw several hundred of watts when they are stressed by FurMark.

Three 2-slot graphics cards can be plugged on the motherboard of my testbed (GIGABYTE X58 UD5). The highest power consumption can be reached with three GTX 580 or two GTX 590. But I won’t use these configurations because I don’t have these cards!

What I have is two GTX 480 and one GTX 580. Hum… how can I do to stress these 3 cards at the same time?

For the GTX 480, it’s simple: just enable SLI and run FurMark 1.9.0 or EVGA OC Scanner in 1920×1080 fullscreen. For loading the GTX 580, I will use an OpenCL test included in GPU Caps Viewer 1.12.0. OpenCL is cool because you can select the GPU that will process the OpenCL kernels. And GPU Caps Viewer allows you to choose the GPU for each OpenCL demo. Then to load the GTX 580, I launched the Julia4D demo in a 256×256 window in order to limit the rendering on the GTX 480 (the GTX 580 processes the OpenCL stuff, but the graphics rendering is still performed by the GTX 480).

The testbed:
– CPU: Core i7 960 @ 3.2GHz
– RAM: 4GB DDR3 Corsair Dominator
– Motherboard: GIGABYTE X58-A UD5
– Two GeForce GTX 480
– One GeForce GTX 580
– Windows 7 64-bit
– Graphics drivers: R275.27
– PSU: Toughpower Grand 850W

Let’s go!

First thing to notice is the power consumption when the system is switched off: 23W. Stronger, when you switch to off the main power switch, there is still a power consumption of around 11W… Just for the comparison, the power consumption with Corsair’s AX1200 is 1.5 watt in the first case and 0 watt in the second case.

When the testbed is in idle state under Win7, the total power consumption, measured at the wall outlet, is 243W.

To load the CPU, I used AOGenMark 1.3.0. This utility is not the best to burn a CPU but it’s enough for that test and I can select the number of threads used by AOGenMark.
The Core i7 960 is quad core with hyperthreading: 8 logical cores are available under Win7. One core will be reserved for FurMark or OC Scanner, another one for the OpenCL test. Then 6 cores are available for the CPU test. I then launched AOGenMark with 6 threads.

The total power consumption with AOGenMark is 293W (AOGenMark: +50W).

Now, I add the Julia4D demo in the stress test:

Total power consumption with AOGenMark + OpenCL Julia4D: is 500W (Julia4D / GTX 580: +207W).

As you can see, the GTX 580 running an OpenCL test coupled with AOGenMark allow to remplace a GTX 480…

Now let’s add EVGA OC Scanner:

In a 512×512 window, OC Scanner adds around +421W. The total power consumption is now 921W.

In 1920×1080 fullscreen, the graphics load generated by OC Scanner is more important and now the total power consumption exceeds one kilo watt: 1050W!

No need to go farther: I run the +1000W stress test during 15min without any problem. 1050W at the wall outlet means an output power of 1050W * 0.9 = 945W. Thermaltake’s PSU has been able to run flawlessly at a power very close to the peak power (Grand 850W peak power is 950W in the specifications).

I also did an overclocking test. I removed the GTX 580 and I overclocked the GTX 480:
– GTX 480 default settings: GPU @ 700MHz and VDDC @ 0.988V
– GTX 480 OC: GPU @ 750MHz and VDDC @ 1.000V

For this test, I used FurMark 1.9.0 in place of OC Scanner. AOGenMark is still used to load the CPU. Here are the total
power consumption measured at the wall outlet:

– two GTX 480 SLI (default settings): 850W
– two GTX 480 SLI (OC): 900W

900W at the outlet is equivalent to an output power of 900*0.9 = 810W

Thermaltake Toughpower Grand 850W review index

• Page 1 – Toughpower Grand 850W: Presentation
• Page 2 – Toughpower Grand 850W: Packaging
• Page 3 – Toughpower Grand 850W: Specifications
• Page 4 – Toughpower Grand 850W: The Torture Test
• Page 5 – Toughpower Grand 850W: Conclusion