Thermaltake Toughpower GF3 850W Power Supply

I’m sure this is a fine PSU in and of itself, but FOR THE LOVE OF GOD if you are upgrading from an old thermaltake modular supply (Toughpower XT 750W in my case) be aware that they moved all of the power signals around in the modular cables! However, they did NOT change the keying in any way shape or form. So they are completely physically compatible, but if you try to use your old modular cables it can damage your PC.

For example, for some insane reason they flipped all of the ground and +12V lines in the CPU auxiliary 12V connectors. So I put -12V into that connection. Board/CPU seem to be OK, but now are forever suspect. I did lose one hard drive because the peripheral connectors are just scrambled with respect to pin layout.

I’m a EE myself and this is garbage tier engineering. If you use a keyed connector you don’t make it completely incompatible with an identical keyed connector. That just wiring 101. I suppose I should have double checked before using the existing wiring (was hoping for a drop in changeover without having to redo wiring) but I am still VERY disappointed in Thermaltake over this.

I see several detailed reviews here so I’m going to keep this one quick and straight to my experience.

I recently upgraded my computer and ended replacing every part except the drives and the power supply (an almost 6-year old EVGA G3 650W); everything worked fine but while gaming my new RX 7800 XT produced an annoying coil whine which tempted me to return it, however I decided to give a try first and upgraded the power supply to this Thermaltake Toughpower GF3 750W, with it the coil whine magically went away!

As other reviews point out, this power supply is very silent and the cables are long although a bit stiff for my personal preference, however they are usable. By the way, this 750W power supply comes with a PCIE Gen5 cable rated at 300W.

Good: Performs as advertised. My rig has a Ryzen 9 5900X CPU and NVidia RTX 4070 GPU on an MSI motherboard, pulling a total of about 600W max. The power supply fan is barely audible under load, unnoticeable among the half-dozen other assorted processor and case fans. The “smart fan” switch that I gather allows the fan to shut down under low load isn’t really needed. Voltage and current have been rock-steady regardless of load. Cabling is fully modular, making cable management a breeze. This also results in a bag full of unused cables to keep track of. The case is rather larger than I really needed, so I keep the cable bag tucked into one corner. It turns out I didn’t need the high-power GPU cable, but I’m happy it’s available for future upgrades.

Bad: It’s just a power supply, people, you really don’t need to put it in a cloth-ish bag in a fancy box. Please spare us the extra cost, and the environment the unnecessary fancy packaging.

Bottom line: I’ve yet to be disappointed with a Thermaltake product, and this one is no exception. Five stars.

Perfect for large builds.

The box came with a nice bag for your cables, its very well made, it’s quite enough, I haven’t heard any coil whine yet(tho I’m only using a max of 800 watts right now), it’s pretty big but I still made it fit in my micro atx case
I’ve had no issues with it so far so I have no need to test the warranty yet

The Thermaltake Toughpower GF3 850W is there with the top performing PSUs.
The unit is fully modular, is compatible with ATX v3.0 and PCIe 5.0, it comes with PCIe Gen 5 16-pin 12VHPWR connector and it runs almost silent.

When the fan runs, it has to be hot, it only produces 30dB of noise at full speed, which is the quieter fan on my computer.
Also the Smart Zero Fan switch allows the PSU fan to operate at high loads, so it does not even run most of the time.

I come from the GF1 series which offers similar performance and still going strong after 5 years running.
This Thermaltake GF3 comes with top of the line components, as good or better than other overpriced models.

The cables are a bit stiff, because they are thick (16AWG), which allow then to deliver voltage at high loads without getting hot.
Talking about cables, two of the PCIe 8-pin cables were missing, even though the package was sealed.
Quality Control (QC) should have caught the missing cables. I found out when I was already building the computer and was about to power the GPU. Thermaltake did send the cables, but the whole process set me back two weeks.
The Thermaltake Toughpower GF3 850W is a solid unit, it is fair priced and it comes with a nice 10-year warranty.

Ordered this PSU to revive my mother’s Computer for her. Exceeded my expectations. Functions excellent, awesome value, and it’s quiet. The cables are so nice and easy to route and I love all of the port options. Replaced a Corsair PSU and I’ll be buying these from here on out.