Final Thoughts and Conclusions
My own personal distaste for the direction the hardware industry is moving in terms of power consumption should be no secret to anyone by now. However, I have little to no say over the decisions that engineers make when they create the components that end up using the power in the first place. That said, we will continue to review ultra high-end components, including power supplies, until the current trends begin to reverse. This 1.2kW power supply from Thermaltake looked like a champion from the moment we took it out of the box. Its combination of various industry-leading features intrigued us from the get-go and taking a peek inside the device only enforced the point. However, initial impressions don’t mean anything in the hardware world, as certain peripheral reviews posted on our site in the past have shown.

The only way to truly get a feel for how well this unit performed was to put some real world loads on it generated by one of the most power-hungry gaming computers we have seen. The TP1200 performed admirably in all of our tests, and proved to be more efficient than the TG1100-U96, which also seems to be an excellent unit and will be given a full review by us hopefully in the near future. All things considered equal, the performance of these two power supplies is pretty similar. Therefore the main thing you need to look at when buying a power supply in this range is price. The best price we could find online for this particular version of the 1200W Toughpower unit is $332.86, which is about $20 more than the $313.99 Tagan Turbojet TG1100-U96 that was also seen in this review. In comparison to other 1200W power supplies like the NZXT PRECISE 1200W at $389.99 and the ePOWER EP-1200P10-T2 at $368.99, the TP1200 is a bit less expensive. With this information, it seems to us that the TP1200 is clearly the best possible choice you can make in the 1200W range. However, there are very few gaming systems that are capable of consuming up to 1200W or anywhere near it for that matter, so your money may be better spent on a less expensive power supply in the 700-900W range. Such a power supply should give you ample power for your current configuration as well as a decent amount of headroom for future upgrades. We fear the day that a 1200W power supply will not be able to handle the most powerful of gaming systems – but imagine the how nice games will look on such a system…. *drool*.

Pros
+ Integrated fan grill
+ Single fan design, quiet
+ Active PFC, high efficiency
+ Modular
+ Well-priced
Cons
- Slightly longer than similar products.
Rating
9.0 out of 10



Make sure to check out our gallery of the Toughpower 1200 for some exclusive pictures!