Looking at the back and underside of the TWV480, we can see its twin 80mm cooling fans.  The fan in the rear is an 80x80x25mm variable rate blower.  The speed range being 1300 ~ 4800 RPM giving the TWV480 lots of room to increase its cooling power when need be.  This fan can be controlled via a rheostat mounted on the TWV display or automatically.  When in automatic mode, the rear fan adjusts its speed based on the temperature detected by an internal probe.  This being 2500 RPM at a detected 25 degrees Celsius which scales up to the fan's max speed of 4800 RPM at a detected 70 degrees Celsius. 

When running at its lowest speed, the fan doesn't operate silently but pretty close, making the overall sound level of the TWV480 17dBA when the fan rear fan is running at 1300 RPM.  The fan mounted at the unit's base is an 80x80x15mm fan that runs at a constant 2400 RPM.  Another internal feature of the TWV480 is the embedded RPM signal wire to read the fan speed through motherboard monitor.

The power lines of the TWV480 is wrapped in color coded mesh sheaths.  Three blue covered Molex lines are present.  Two of these have three 4-pin Molex connectors and one FDD connector on them.  These two lines measure 44 inches long which should be plenty of reach for most cases.  The third line has three 4-pin Molex connectors without the FDD connector.  This line is a tad shorter at 36 inches long.  A green wrapped mesh connector carries two SATA power connectors measuring 28 inches long.  With SATA hard drives closing in on becoming the standard, this is almost a must have for power supply units anymore.

Wattage Display Panel

The TWV display panel is basically the Thermaltake two knob fan controller we are used to seeing but with a LCD centered between them.  The TWV480 PSU has a small plug allowing you to attach it to either of these control knobs to give you direct control over the PSU's fan speed.  The second knob is designed to hook to the included 80mm fan if you so choose.  Should you utilize this fan on your processor's heatsink, you can now manually control its speed via this panel as well.  The LCD you see in the pic on the right displays the detected power output in real time. 

Plugging it all in

After installing everything in one of our test beds, I do have to admit I was quite curious at the power consumption of our AMD XP system we frequently use.  Here is a breakdown of that test bed.

• AMD Athlon XP 3200+

• ThermalRight ALX-800 Cooler with TWV's included 80mm fan

• ABIT AN7 mainboard

• Albatron GeForce FX5950 Ultra VGA

• (2) 256 mb DIMM of Corsair XMS3500 DDR

• Maxtor 80gb SATA HDD

• Generic DVD/CD-RW combo drive

• Generic CD-ROM drive

• Single 80mm case fan

• Windows XP Pro

• Lian Li PC-37 Case

The display's coloring blended in very nicely with the aluminum shell of the case we selected.  The figure displayed is our test bed is the under load value from running SiSoft Sandra's CPU Burn-In Wizard.  Should you be accessing CD-ROMs, the VGA card, swapping files around and the like, the wattage usage would be much higher.

BACK                    NEXT