As mentioned, this unit has a modular cabling system, as you can see on Figure 3. One nice touch is that the unit comes with a sticker telling you to which +12 V rail each plug is connected to (“V1” plugs are connected to +12V1, “V3” plugs are connected to +12V3 and “V4” plugs are connected to +12V4; we will talk more about power distribution later).
click to enlarge
Figure 3: Modular cabling system.
On Figure 4 you can see all the cables that come with the unit.
click to enlarge
Figure 4: Cables.
Toughpower 1500 W comes with 10 cables for its modular cabling system. From these 10 cables, six of them are for video cards (there are two more connectors directly attached to the power supply, making the eight plugs mentioned earlier), three using 6-pin connectors and three using 8-pin connectors. The unit comes with three adaptors for converting video cards 8-pin power plugs into 6-pin plugs, so you can have four 6-pin and four 8-pin connectors if you don’t use these adaptors or up to seven 6-pin and one 8-pin connectors if you use them.
The video card auxiliary power cables from the modular cabling system have stickers attached to them identifying to which +12 V rail each plug is connected to. This is a terrific idea.
There are also two SATA power cables with four SATA power plugs each and two peripheral power cables, with four standard peripheral power plugs and one floppy disk drive power plug each.
On Figure 5 you can see the cables that are permanently attached to the power supply: two EPS12V connectors (one of them can be transformed into two ATX12V connectors), one 6-pin video card auxiliary power connector, one 8-pin video card auxiliary power connector (both connected to the same cable) and the motherboard main connector (20/24-pin).
click to enlarge
Figure 5: Power supply connectors.
On this power supply all wires are 18 AWG. It would be interesting to see some 16 AWG wires, in our opinion.
This power supply is manufactured by CWT being, in fact, a relabeled CWT PUC1500V power supply.
Let’s now take an in-depth look inside this power supply.
