Thermaltake TWV500

Watts Viewer

A really nice feature is the included watts viewer. It measures total system power consumption on the DC side of the power supply. If you don't like it - you won't have to use it, the PSU will work fine without the Watts Viewer connected.



The two knobs on the left and right are used to control the fan speeds of the PSU and the additional 120mm fan. What I noticed, is that you can only increase the fan speed of the PSU fan, not decrease it (compared to controller not connected).



This is the heart of the Watts Viewer. A small PCB with a microcontroller on it. The microcontroller is responsible for converting the measured watts into a suitable output for the LED readout.



The accuracy of the Watts Viewer is good, certainly not lab grade, but good enough to get a realistic feeling of the system's power consumption.
This maximum readout of 480W was achieved by adding a 120W and 100W high power resistor to the PSU output lines. When the DC side was pulling 480W, we measured 630W load on the AC side, not really efficient (76% efficiency).

Inside

If you open your PSU, your warranty is gone. We still had to peek inside it.



Everything in the inside looks well cleaned up. All cables are attached and not hanging around. The plastic sheets are a good measure to prevent short circuits.

Test Equipment

• The PSU is connected to an APC SmartUPS which supplies clean 220V input.
• AC current is measured using a Peaktech 4010 desktop RS232 multimeter with 0.02A accuracy.
• To measure DC output voltages of the PSU we use a 20-bit data acquisition system calibrated to 10uV accuracy.
• Power Factor is measured using a generic Power Efficiency Meter.
• Measurements for Ripple Voltage were obtained using a 30 MHz HAMEG Analog/Digital Oscilloscope.