Thortech Thunderbolt Plus 800 W Power Supply Review

The Digital Power Meter

The highlight of the new Thortech Thunderbolt Plus 800 W is its digital power meter, called “iPower Meter.” This device should be installed in any available 5.25” of your case. It has an LCD display and four buttons: watts/efficiency, volt/amp, fan mode and Celsius/Fahrenheit.

Figure 4: iPower Meter panel

Through this panel you will be able to monitor the individual voltage, current and power of the +12 V, +5 V and +3.3 V rails, plus the total power being pulled on these outputs. The panel, however, doesn’t monitor the -12 V and +5VSB rails, so it will give you wrong results for total wattage and efficiency if your computer is pulling anything from these two rails (as it did during our tests, since we always pull current from them).

The panel also displays the power supply internal temperature and the fan speed, and you can set the fan speed to operate under “quiet” or “turbo” modes.

Let’s now take an in-depth look inside this power supply.