The Montech Titan Gold 1200W PSU Review: A Capable Contender for the ATX 3.0 Club

Montech is a rather new player in the PC Power & Cooling market. The Taiwanese company first appeared in 2016 and quickly made its presence international. Montech is currently focused on designing and producing PC cases, power supply units (PSUs), and CPU coolers. As the core philosophy of the company was to be competitive in terms of pricing, the vast majority of its products were targeting the high-volume mainstream market.

Lately, in an effort to entice gamers and enthusiasts, Montech shyly began releasing high-end and top-tier products. Not too long ago, we examined the Century Gold 650W, an interesting high-quality PSU that was excellently balanced between quality, performance, and value.

Entering 2023, the company is taking a big leap of faith and releasing its new Titan Gold PSU series. The Titan Gold consists of high-output units designed for powerful gaming systems, a completely new market segment for the company. In today’s review, we are closely examining the most powerful unit of the series, the Titan Gold 1200W PSU. Besides being a high-quality unit on its own, the Titan Gold comes with a leg up in the form of ATX 3.0 compliance, which makes Montech a member of what's still a fairly exclusive club for companies with ATX 3.0 units available.

Packaging and Bundle

Montech supplies the Titan Gold 1200W unit in a sturdy cardboard box. The artwork on the box is simplistic and focused around a picture of the PSU itself, but there is plenty of information about the specifications and certifications of the PSU on the sides and rear of the box.

Only the absolute basic items for the installation of the PSU can be found inside the packaging of the Montech Titan Gold, with the company supplying just a power cord and four mounting screws. There are no cable ties or straps, or any other accessories to be found.

The Titan Gold 1200W ATX 3.0 PSU is a fully modular design, allowing for the removal of every DC power cable, including the 24-pin ATX connector. Most of the cables have individually sleeved black wires and with black connectors, but the ATX 24-pin cable and the 16-pin PCIe 5.0 cable consist of black wires bundled inside nylon sleeving. The strange thing here is the presence of five PCIe connectors, as one of the cables only has a single connector.

The Montech Titan Gold 1200W ATX 3.0 PSU

External Appearance

Unlike what most would expect from a company that is trying to keep costs down to a minimum, Montech actually invested some resources into making the Titan Gold 1200W PSU visually attractive. The chassis cover is punched to create a natural finger guard shaped after the company’s logo. The entirety of the PSU is sprayed with matte black paint that is highly resistant to fingerprints but also rather easy to chip if mishandled. It measures 160 mm long, which is 20 mm longer than what the ATX standard dictates, but we do not foresee any compatibility problems with any modern case that is meant to house an above-average PC.

The sticker with the unit’s electrical certifications and specifications is found covering most of the PSU’s top side. About a quarter of the sticker is blue and may draw unwanted attention if visible from a windowed side panel. Both sides of the unit have the company logo embossed onto them.

At the rear side of the unit, right next to the AC power connector and the basic on/off switch, there is a latching push button that controls the “smart-zero fan mode”. As the name suggests, this mode allows for passive operation while the PSU’s load is low – a frequently applied technique by many manufacturers nowadays. Disabling it will force the fan to continuously spin as long as the PSU is powered on but its speed will still be controlled thermally.

The front side of the unit is host to the numerous connectors for the modular cables. A legend and the company logo are printed on the chassis. There is also a sticker with the unit’s serial number.

Internal Design

Montech is making use of a 135 mm fan for the cooling needs of the Titan Gold 1200W PSU. The fan is made by Hong Hua, a popular manufacturer among PC PSU OEMs. It has a fluid dynamic bearing (FDB) engine for quiet operation and longevity, but also has an extremely high maximum speed of 2300 RPM.

The OEM behind the Titan Gold 1200W PSU is Channel-Well Technologies (CWT), which is not a huge surprise considering that Montech has been in collaboration with them for several of their better products, including the Century Gold 650W PSU that we reviewed a few months ago. The surprise here is that, while we didn't know this when soliciting PSUs for review, the Titan Gold 1200W is using the same platform as the MSI MPG A1000G that we recently reviewed as well. It is an upgraded version of CWT’s most popular platform, slightly tweaked to add ATX 3.0 support. So this affords us a second look at CTW's platform, running at a higher wattage.

Overall, the design of the Titan Gold 1200W is based on proven and relatively simple topologies. The filtering stage is typical, with four Y capacitors, two X capacitors, and two filtering inductors, with two rectifying bridges on a sizable heatsink following right after. The long heatsink that follows holds the active APFC components. Two very large capacitors, one 450V/680μF from Nippon Chemi-Con and one 420V/470μF from Rubycon, as well as a massive filtering inductor. The total capacitance of the circuit is very high and will undoubtedly cause a high inrush current that may cause small or quick circuit breakers to trip.

Moving on to the primary side of the main transformer, we find two transistors on a medium-sized heatsink, forming a typical half-bridge LLC inversion circuitry. The core of the secondary side is on a vertical daughterboard, which is home to eight power transistors that convert the transformer’s output to the main DC output of the PSU. The 3.3V and 5V lines are being generated via DC-to-DC conversion circuitry that can be found on their own vertical daughterboard. The secondary side capacitors are all made by Nippon Chemi-Con and Nichicon.