Corsair HX1000W PSU

Value and Conclusions

£138 is fantastic value for a 1,000W PSU. In some ways it's unsurprisingly because Corsair has aggressively priced all its PSUs in the channel, however at a kilowatt of power we're into premium PSU territory with prices varying massively. The PC Power and Cooling TurboCool, the new Enermax DXX Galaxy, and it's new Revolution PSUs (more to come on that soon) have and will secure a price premium for 1,000W+.

After all, at this end of the market you want a quality unit with a good warranty above everything. If you do actually need a kilowatt PSU then your PC is worth a serious chunk of cash and dropping in some cheap and nasty "1,000W" piece of crap is not going to do you any favours - at best your PC will be unstable, at worst it'll blow its brains out when it gets too hot.

So here I am stuck for a decision on the Corsair HX1000W: it has a solid five year warranty, CWT build quality and rated to 50C, but it's only a fraction of the price of other 1,000W models although it's really quite noisy and pretty warm running even outside of a case when you really use it. There's no "hand tested" treatment that Antec Signature series or PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool products get, but for the price you don't expect it.

On the topic of Corsairs five year warranty though; while this should certainly see through the life cycle of virtually all power supplies - in five years time we'll likely have new power requirements, new cables and far better efficiency by then - the lack of UK RMA base means you'll be footing an expensive shipping bill to the continent should something go wrong, however unlikely.

Just this week a community member was complaining that to send back his 430W PSU, it would cost him nearly £30. For that money, he just went and bought a new PSU. So while the HX1000W is more than £30s worth, I wouldn't be too happy to have to send it back to Holland considering other companies such as Enermax and Nanopoint (Tagan, Silverpower, Seasonic, etc) which do have a UK office and RMA centre.

Another question is why hasn't Corsair released a HX750W or something more mainstream-friendly? Why skip from 620W to 1,000W? That's a big gap and not to many people need kilowatts of power, but plenty feel the need for 700-800W. Merely a marketing leverage? Perhaps.

Compared to other products there's the Thermaltake Toughpower 1,000W for just £145.00, which is another CWT built unit but we weren't too fussed with the 1,500W unit to be honest. The older Enermax Galaxy DXX is a little more at £170.25 and while it was good last year it's efficiency is somewhat lacking now.

Surprisingly we found the Turbo Cool 1,000W on sale for just £152.74, although it's certainly a lot noisier than even the Corsair with its single 80mm tri-bladed fan in the back and we haven't heard of a design update recently so the efficiency will not be as high either. Being non-modular it also has a weave of cables to untangle and tidy too if you're not using them.

Trying for 1,200W

After a little wink and a nudge by Corsair that "it should be capable of 1,200W" and "other people have had it working at 1,200W" we went and tested it to see for ourselves..


It didn't. In fact, it would do 1,100W... sort of, but it wasn't overly happy and the fan went nuts. At 1,200W every voltage rippled MASSIVELY and constant crackling could be heard from the inside. Both 12V rails jumped between 12 and 9-10V, and the 3.3V and 5V which feed off the 12V also went crazy. The fan promptly went even more nuts and sounded like a tornado as the temperature shot up again too, although it was still nowhere near as hot as the Thermaltake 1,500W we previously tested. In our opinion the high powered CWT design is simply not capable of over 1,000W. Oh well, at least the HX1000W does exactly what it says on the tin and we can't fault it for that, and at least the HX1000W didn't blow it's top - it still works today despite our abuse.

Final Thoughts

The HX1000W works very efficiently and it's damn cheap. End of story, right? Well, yes and no. At 1,000W there's still some that would pay more for hand fondled unit with a stamped sheet saying it works, and to be honest, at this level service matters and we can understand why.

Yes it's noisy at high load but what kilowatt PSU isn't? There are a few imperfections in cable/connector choices, but for the most part it's a very solid product so if you need a whole lot of umpf on a budget, the HX1000W should be high on your list for consideration.

• Performance
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• 8/10

• Features
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• 8/10

• Value
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• 9/10

• Overall
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• 8/10

What do these scores mean?