GeIL, or "Golden Emperor International Limited", is a company that has been in the computer memory business since 1993. At Computex 2010, GeIL announced their own line of power supply products under the Thortech subsidiary. Not long ago, I reviewed a "Thunderbolt 1200W". And not to long before that, Tazz reviewed the "Thunderbolt 850W" power supply which includes a 5.25" bay display that shows the power supply's voltages, wattages, fan speed and temperature. Today, we get to have a look at the Thortech Thunderbolt 1000W power supply. It's 200W less than the 1200W version, costs a few bucks less, yet has all of the same connectors as the 1200W.

The box looks very much like the Thunderbolt 1200W we reviewed. On the top of the box we have an Nvidia SLI logo, a badge stating the 5 year warranty and an 80 Plus Gold logo. Remember: For 80 Plus Gold, this power supply is going to have to be 87%, 90% and 87% efficient and 20%, 50% and 100% loads. We'll find out if that's the case when we do our load tests in a couple pages.

The back of the box is chock full of information. I must say that I commend GeIL for putting a lot of good, useful information on the back of the box, as opposed to marketing fluff and Engrish slogans.

The first thing we see is "product specifications". Here we're told that this PSU should be able to continuously output 1000W at 50°C. This is important as some power supplies are rated to operate continuously only at room temperature (about 25°C).

Here, we're told that the input is good up to 13A, which is good for a 1000W PSU, even in Japan where mains voltages are as low as 100V. There are four +12V rails, each rated at 30A, and the total combined capability of the +12V rail is 1000W.

Modular cables? Yes! But this power supply is actually semi-modular. There are a quite a few fixed cables on this unit.

The fan is a 135mm dual ball bearing fan and the MTBF is an impressive 120K hours.

click to enlarge

Across the back of the box we have a listing of all of the cables, the connectors and their lengths. Note how there are eight PCIe power connectors, which I believe is more PCIe connectors than any other 1000W power supply other than the Thermaltake TP-1000M.

Here are those cables and connectors listed in our standard layout:

Here we see the DC output capabilities of this power supply:

The +12V rail is split up into four separate rails, each with a 30A OCP on it. Note that the +12V total capability is equivalent to the power supply's rating of 1000W.

The DC output table is well laid out and easy to read, but for consistancy sake I'm going to reproduce it in a table as we do in all jonnyGURU.com reviews:

On one side of the box, we have some basic feature bullet points, repeated in nine different languages. We're reminded of the 80 Plus Gold efficiency, the four +12V rails and the unit's modularity. Here they tell us that this unit has a compact housing, and by referring to the 160mm depth mentioned on the back of the box, I can certainly confirm that this is indeed a compact power supply. We're also told that the capacitors used in this power supply are Japanese and we're also reminded again of the 135mm dual ball bearing fan.

The other side of the box displays a number of icons that represent some of the features of this power supply. I particularly like the little uniped figures that look like the peg people from The Game of Life... only with arms.