Who doesn’t love the god of thunder? Asus has long maintained a line of premium power supplies called Thor and now, atComputex2024, the company is not only rolling out third-generation Thor PSUs but adding a Mjolnir-shaped UPS (uninterruptable power supply) for good measure. We had a chance to see both an ROG Thor 1600W Titanium III PSU and the UPS at the Asus booth and both seemed truly impressive.
While uninterruptible power supplies can be useful – keeping your PC and devices going during power outages or brownouts – they’re pretty boring and a lot of people just don’t think about them. Asus’s Mjolnir is designed to get people excited about UPSes while also delivering a ton of features.
Mjolnir looks just like Thor’s hammer turned upside down. The “handle” is actually just a flashlight that wirelessly charges when its on top of the base and can be useful if you’re looking around a dark house during a power outage.
The base of the hammer has four 3-prong outlets, two 10-watt USB Type-A ports and two USB-C power delivery ports that an output at 100W or 65W respectively. A digital display shows how much of the massive 768 Wh full charge remains on the internal battery, along with other information about how much power your devices are drawing. There’s an RGB logo on the front and Qi-capable devices such as phones can charge just by sitting on top of the base.
Asus firstteased this device in April, where some thought it might be an April Fool’s joke, but now there’s a working model and no one is laughing at its potential.
ROG Thor Titanium III Power Supply sports removable screen
Designed to compete with thebest PSUson the market at any price, the Thor 1600W Titanium III ATX 3.1 power supply comes with a screen on the side which shows your system’s current power draw. At Asus’s booth, the demo model’s display only showed about 40 watts of power usage, because it wasn’t actually connected to a PC and was lighting up its own RGB logo.
What’s really neat about the Thor is that the screen is magnetically attached to the side so you can pop it off and then place it on the opposite side of the PSU. So, no matter whether you have your PSU facing the front, the back, the top, or the bottom, you’ll be able to see that screen.
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The Thor 1600W Titanium III also has dual 12V connectors so you may power more than one GPU. The GPU power cables also have an extra, two-pin purple connector on the PSU side that the Thor uses to monitor how much voltage your graphics card is requesting and adjust its output accordingly. Like its predecessor, the Titanium II, this model uses GaN transistors for maximum efficiency.
The PSU also comes with a really nice set of cables. Where many power supplies either give you incredibly-stiff sleeved cables or flexible but ugly rubber cables, the Thor Titanium’s cables are both sleeved and very flexible. I held the cable in my hand for a second and noticed that it was really pliable.
Though Asus has only announced the 1600W Titanium III, an Asus rep said the company will come out with other capacities starting at 1,000 watts, but those may be Platinum rather than Titanium efficiency (as they are in Thor Gen 2 products).
We don’t have exact pricing or availability dates for either the Mjolnir or the Thor PSU, but we know that neither will come cheap. The current-gen, Thor 1600W Titanium II currently usually costs between $600 and $700. So expect to pay the same or more.
Avram Piltch is Managing Editor: Special Projects. When he’s not playing with the latest gadgets at work or putting on VR helmets at trade shows, you’ll find him rooting his phone, taking apart his PC, or coding plugins. With his technical knowledge and passion for testing, Avram developed many real-world benchmarks, including our laptop battery test.
