The fins that extend on what would be inside your case are much shorter and unfortunately do not have the same protective cage.  While this didn’t present a huge problem, it was something to be aware of when hiding extra power cables on the install.

Plenty of connectors are available off of four rails.  Two of these lines have three 4-pin Molex and one FDD connector per line.  Another has three 4-pin Molex connectors while the last has two native SATA connectors.  Still another notable is the cable sleeving that ThermalTake now puts on most of their products.  Thermaltake’s website says that the cable sleeves on the Fanless PSU are supposed to be color coded as they are on other models of their Pure Power line. 

As you can see, the cable sleeving here is black with matching black shrink wrap on the ends.  No big deal since most of us can distinguish a 4-pin Molex connector without any color coding help.  I still applaud Thermaltake as they are one of only a few manufacturers who actually sleeve their lines to begin with.  The three Molex connector lines each measured 80cm in length while the SATA line was a bit shorter measuring 68cm long.

Here we get a look inside the Tt Fanless PSU.  Notice the oversized aluminum heatsink with the heat pipe running through its length.  Very impressive.  The heat inside the unit doesn’t circulate by any active means but with the outer casing having venting on every side, heat not cast out by the heatpipe is given every opportunity to escape all the same. 

The heatsinks can be larger because they can with the space opened up by not having a fan and because they have to.  This passive cooling approach requires far more convection area than usual for obvious reasons.

Installation

Installing the Tt Fanless PSU was not much different than putting in any other power supply.  The exception being the smaller external fins that will be on the inside of the case.  These are easy to forget about and accidentally bend up if your not careful.  Keep in mind that they also extend the effective depth of space needed for the power supply by an additional 25mm.  If you have a case with a top mounted blowhole that is closer than 175mm or so to the rear of the case, you aren't going to get that blowhole fan and this PSU in the same box.

Performance

On a device of this type, we need to look at performance in two separate areas.  First and foremost is the delivery of clean stable power.  Secondly, this baby is being marketed as a Fanless PSU.  How well does a fanless power supply do?  How much heat is it putting out within the case and how much is this going to raise the internal case temperature?  We installed the Thermaltake Fanless PSU in our AMD XP test bed.  Here is specifically what we put it in.

Test Bed

• ABIT AN7 (nForce2) Mainboard
• AMD Athlon XP 3200+
• ThermalRight ALX-800 with 76CFM fan
• Albatron GeForce 5950 Ultra VGA
• (2) 256 mb sticks of Corsair XMS3500
• Maxtor 80gb IDE HDD
• Generic DVD/CD-RW
• Lian Li PC-7 Case
• (2) 80mm case fans
• Windows XP Professional with all patches and service packs installed.