![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Monday , April 21, 2008
- Author:
- Paul Johnson
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Corsair HX1000W PSU Review
Corsair has quickly become a mainstay among enthusiast PSUs. Today it breaks new ground by joining the 1 kilowatt club. Doing 1000w is easier said than done and doing it well is tough. Is the HX1000W worth your consideration?
Overview
The first thing we are going to look at with the Corsair HX1000W is its packaging, accessories, and documentation. While normally none of these items is a make or break item for a power supply the packaging quite often contains a lot of information about the product we are purchasing. The inclusion of an owner’s manual that provides actual information about our product is also of great help in many situations. Accessories are almost unnecessary with a power supply as the unit is self contained, unless it is modular, but there cases where a manufacturer can include useful accessories to make installation, routing and use more efficient.
Each Corsair power supply released so far has had its own accent color and from the HX1000W’s packaging it would seem that the HX1000W’s is blue. Otherwise the box for the HX1000W is very similar to all the other Corsair units we have reviewed save for it being considerably bigger. On the packaging we find a good amount of data including the power label (reproduced below), a noise graph, connector count, warranty information, a number of marketing points, and certifications. Among these certifications are the advertisements for 80Plus certification, and SLI certification. Both of these are things that users would expect from a high end power supply of good caliber. A quick check of the SLIZone website not only finds the HX1000W SLI certified but it is certified for tri-8800 Ultra SLI and for 9800 GX2 SLI. The 9800 GX2 SLI certification does carry this note however:
A number of system power supplies in the market use a modular power connector to provide 6-pin and 8-pin outputs from the same cable. A subset of these modular connectors have a mechanical latch that is too wide and do not fit the 8-pin PCI-E power connector on the GeForce 9800 GX2 graphics card and are marked with an asterisk (***). These power supplies will work with the GeForce 9800 GX2 GPU with a PCI Express power connector adapter. NVIDIA is working with graphics card manufacturers and power supply vendors to offer an adapter to affected customers. Please contact your manufacturer of your product to obtain a replacement connector.
Next up we find that the HX1000W is indeed 80Plus certified, as are all of Corsair’s power supply offerings now, but only at the Climate Savers 1 level of certification which is denoted as 80%-80%-80% according to 80Plus’ test standards.
Finally, we are left with what is often some of the most interesting aspects of a power supply (or any PC component) the marketing. Specifically the HX1000W is advertised on the front of the box as having “Solid state capacitors” followed by “Reliable and clean power at 50c” and while those two features do not have to go hand in hand solid capacitors certainly are a better choice when available in the appropriate capacitance and voltage. When we flip over to the backside of the box we find that the advertising for the solid capacitors appears to be restricted to the secondary as that is what is pictured above the bullet point and the primary picture that is included shows a standard electrolytic capacitor from Hitachi (we will see if our review unit comes with Hitachi primaries shortly). The last time we saw a power supply advertised as having solid capacitors it was the Seasonic S12-II 500w and it advertised solid capacitors on just the 12v rails. When we opened the unit found that it actually only had 1 solid capacitor but the advertising was technically true as the unit also only had one 12v rail. Today we will see if Corsair and CWT have used this same approach or if they have stepped up the consumer power supply market and gone with solid capacitors throughout the secondary.
*The 8 pin PCI-Express connectors are all the modified 6+2 pin design.
* Four represents the maximum number of connectors that could be configured here as two are fixed and there are an additional two modular connections available.
**Values indicate the maximum number of connectors that could be configured here as all connectors are modular.
***The second 8 pin EPS connector can be configured on either 12v1 or 12v2 via the 8 pin PCI-Express modular interface.
The Corsair HX1000W electrical characteristics are certainly interesting, unfortunately they are also a bit complicated and not well explained with the current shipping literature so let’s cover a few basic points. Starting with the actual connectors the HX1000W has six modified 8-pin PCI-Express connectors that are good for supporting tri-SLI setups along with a total of twenty-four Molex/SATA connectors for powering just about anything you could conceivably fit in a full tower case and then some. Previously, only the Enermax Galaxy DXX had shown this level of peripheral connectivity in our reviews and this kind of layout certainly speaks to the high end crowd Corsair is targeting with this power supply. However, while looking at the connector count and the rail breakdown we begin to find some weak points in this unit’s documentation/user friendliness. The first being the unit includes an 8-pin EPS modular cable which is great except nowhere in the manual, or on the unit housing, does Corsair tell us where to put it or what rail would be feeding it! Upon inquiry about this subject I was informed that the 8-pin PCI-Express connections on the housing will also take this 8-pin EPS cable and that it can be used on either 12v1 or 12v2 configurations. Furthermore, Corsair has said it will be updating the literature on this unit to make it clear to users how to properly use the second 8-pin EPS connector should they be using a Skulltrail platform or other boards that requires two EPS connectors. Moving on, we find that each 12v rail has 40A available to it which is ~96% of the unit’s total possible DC output. While this is excellent this unit does feature truly independent 12v rails so you are left with these hard rail breakdowns unlike what we have seen on a number of units that use OCP circuits to separate their rails. In addition, if you were to just go by physical connectors and not look at the rails you were using, a user could run into a theoretical problem in that 12v1 could become overloaded due to supporting up to four PCIe connectors capable of supporting 150 watts each plus, an 8-pin EPS connector, and a motherboard. Realistically though, that is unlikely as say a 9800GX2 SLI setup that a user unknowingly configures on 12v1 alone will in theory only be utilizing connectors capable of delivering 450w combined (150w per 8-pin PCIe connector and 75w per 6-pin PCIe connector) but the real world power draws for the 9800GX2 make that level of power draw seem unlikely. At any rate, as a preventative measure it would have been better had Corsair/CWT configured a more even split of PCIe connectors than what we have here.