If the power supply works normally, it always yields all these voltages at once, so you’ll have all the three LEDs of the Power Station shining when your computer is turned on. It means that this is just a piece of pure decoration without any functional load. Enthusiasts may find some other use for the neat 5” box provided by Thermaltake and put something more useful in there, like a manual fan speed controller, for example.

At the back panel the Station’s connectors are highlighted with a couple of blue LEDs. One might say this helps not miss the necessary connector, but the LEDs don’t shine when the computer is turned off. And when the computer is working, I wouldn’t recommend touching those connectors at all.

The connectors on the power supply case are highlighted in a similar fashion.

Besides the big Power Station, the PSU comes with a smaller Power Station Mini. This small box is meant for powering additional fans (it can be bought separately, by the way). This box is connected to a Molex connector and can supply power to four fans with Molex connectors and two fans with the more widespread 3-pin plugs. Alas, no fan speed control is provided; there is always full +12V voltage on all the connectors.

The Power Station Mini doesn’t have any set place to be fastened at; it can be fixed anywhere in the system case by means of dual-sided scotch tape. Note that you should attach only fans to it. The Power Station Mini is not meant for such a load as hard/optical drives, let alone graphics cards.

And here’s a list of cables you receive with the PSU to connect all this stuff together:

• Power cable for the Power Station; 49cm
• Two power cables for PCI Express graphics cards with 6-pin connectors; 45cm; these are attached to the PSU
• Three power cables for PATA drives with one connector on each; 30cm
• Two power cables for PATA drives with three connectors on each; 50cm to the first connector and 15cm more to each next one
• Power cable for the Power Station Mini with one connector; 84cm. It has a standard Molex connector, but thinner wires – load on this cable is supposed to be rather low
• Three power cables for SATA drives with one connector on each; 41cm
• Two power cables for floppy drives with one connector on each; 30cm

The cables have identical connectors on both of their ends, so it doesn’t matter with which end you connect them to the Power Station and with which to the powered devices.

Besides that, the PSU itself has two non-detachable cables:

• Mainboard power cable with a 24-pin connector (with a detachable 4-pin part); 57cm
• CPU power cable with a 4-pin ATX12V connector; 57cm

The electrical parameters of the PSU coincide with those of the W0063, except for the increased total wattage. The maximum load capacity of its +12V rail is 30A or 360W. It means you won’t be able to put a higher load on the W0073 than on the W0063 in practice because modern computers, with their low consumption from the low-voltage rails, will be limited by the load capacity of the +12V rail which is identical in these two power supplies.

The cross-load diagram for this power supply has quite an ordinary look: the +12V and +3.3 voltages are close to their nominal values, and the +5V is a little too high. It’s all normal here, without any serious problems.

At a load of 500W the voltage ripple was 25 millivolts on the +5V rail, 44 millivolts on the +12V rail, and 19 millivolts on the +3.3V rail.

A DFS122512M fan from Young Lin Tech with blue highlighting is installed in this PSU. Its speed is nearly constant at a little over 1200rpm at loads up to 250W and grows up linearly at higher loads. This resembles the behavior of the W0063’s fan, but the linear growth of speed began later in the W0063 and only a small stretch of it fitted into the diagram (I guess this is due to variations in the parameters of the employed components since the circuit design is identical in these two PSUs).

The W0073 is not very loud, at least it won’t be perceived as irritating by most of users. It is however not exactly silent. There is an audible hiss of air at the min fan speed which is over 1200rpm. So, if you do care about the noise produced by your computer, you may want to consider other models. Other users are likely to be quite satisfied with the noise parameters of the W0073.

The efficiency factor graph is similar as the one of the W0063 with a maximum of 80%. The average efficiency is about 78-79%. The power factor is high, as is expectable from a power supply with active power factor correction.

Generally speaking, the W0073 is a full analog of the W0063 plus the Power Station. These two models have the same circuit design and nearly coinciding real parameters, while the higher specified wattage of the W0073 isn’t crucial because it offer the same allowable load on the +12V as the W0063 – the rest of the lines do not matter much for modern computers. However, the W0073 is considerably more expensive at about $135 against the W0063’s $75. And this $60 difference buys you only the two Power Station boxes and the detachable cables. It’s up to you to decide whether they are really worth it!