Thermaltake Toughpower GF3 ARGB 850W PSU Review

The Thermaltake Toughpower GF3 ARGB 850 is one of the very few ATX v3.0 and PCIe 5.0 PSUs featuring RGB lighting. If you don’t need RGB, you should look at the CWT-made GF3 model with similar capacity. 

High Power makes the Thermaltake Toughpower GF3 ARGB line, while the non-ARGB GF3 models with up to 1200W capacity are by CWT. I can imagine two reasons behind that: CWT didn’t want to mess with RGB lighting, or Thermaltake didn’t want to put all of its eggs into one basket (CWT), so it also used High Power for some of its PSU products. Indeed it is not wise to use a single OEM for your entire portfolio of products, but you should go with several ones, trying to make the best products in every category.

The Thermaltake Toughpower GF3 ARGB 850 is an ATX v3.0 and PCIe 5.0 ready PSU featuring a 450W 12VHPWR connector, supporting the high-end NVIDIA RTX 4080 and most of the RTX 4090 graphics cards. Compared to the 750W model, the 150W increase in the 12VHPWR connector means increased compatibility, so it is safe to assume that most users will go for the 850W unit. With 20 dollars difference in price, with the 750W GF3 ARGB model, the 850W unit is a one-way road if you ask me, even if you don’t plan to buy an RTX 4080/90 soon. Once the new generation GPUs are out, the older models will have substantial price cuts so that you can afford them, and it will be a shame to have an incompatible PSU.