(skip to the second post if you don't want to read my nerd rambling flavor text)
So a few months back TR ran a contest where whichever one of us managed to make enough funny word strings would win a power supply. I won and said I'd share pictures of this thing when it showed up. I don't have equipment to do a Jonnyguru style review, or, really, any kind of review (I mean, I have a kill-a-watt and a multimeter, but it's been a long time since I tapped a power supply for readings and it's not like I've got anything to use for reference/comparison anyways), but I can tell you about this thing, this thing called... love? No, wait, that's not it. It's a thing called a big honking kilowatt-sized power supply. Alright, it might be love.
Way, way back in the day of PC Power & Cooling, Deer, Enhance and Enlight, power supplies were... commodity items. If you were a DIYer most of the time you just used whatever came with your case. We weren't worried about power draw - video cards didn't draw 250W, PCI express wasn't even a glimmer in an engineer's eye, and Windows 95s roamed the fields wild and free unless you needed to change the desktop resolution in which case they'd have to reboot. Sometime in the early 2000s, when I was doing some freelance hardware stuff, power supplies started to matter. Antec had some nice units. We could buy OEM sparkle units off of Newegg. Seasonic and Silverstone might have just started popping up in enthusiast circles. I remember the Fortron Blue Storm like it was yesterday, and that was 12 years ago. If you had one you probably feel the same. That deep blue might have been an early taste of all the fun color schemes we see in PCs these days - black and red, red and black... black and grey. But it was also the first power supply I bought when I started to actually care about the quality of the power supply. A couple years later, for my next system build, after much flailing of limb and gnashing of teeth I settled on a Corsair HX520W.
Since then Corsair has been my go-to brand for power supplies. I mostly dabble in USFF mini ITX stuff these days, using a Pico PSU or similar type of unit for low power boxes, but every now and then I get the urge to put together something bigger. Antec's ISK 600 case is a favorite of mine - easy to work in, takes a standard PSU, small motherboard, room for a larger video card. Very close to being mATX sized, though. I also like Silverstone's Sugo cases, the SG05 (and in white) (a little cramped but very nice with the right heatsink and video card) and SG09/SG10. Anyways, when I've used those in the past I've always bought a Corsair something or other (well, except the SG05, there weren't a lot of SFX choices until more recently), but I've never had a need for a big power supply. I've always sat around 500W in bigger builds - anything smaller wasn't really saving me any money, and anything larger was superfluous.
The last build I did was not my typical tiny system. For the first time since 2009 I've gone bigger than ITX and put together a micro ATX system. I wanted to go old school TV and do a black and white color scheme, too. So I started with a CX550M (nice, quiet, mostly modular) and a Carbide 88R (shockingly light, lots of room to route cables, smoked plastiglass window, room for my blu ray drive so I can keep ripping my audio and movies). I added a pair of AF120 quiet series white LED fans and also wrangled up the special edition Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR4 (also a contest win, closest I can find on newegg is I guess this set although without the fan thingie) and I was well on my white to greyscaleville. I was planning to use a CM 212 Evo heatsink but learned that it wouldn't fit in the carbide, so chose a Cryorig H7 instead (a little shorter and fits perfectly, very quiet and excellent performance; highly recommended).
Anyways, back to the point: Corsair's RM1000i special edition PSU. (available from newegg in black with a plethora of choices for cable colors).
It arrived this week, I've got it installed, and I said I'd share pictures, so I'm going to share pictures and colorful metaphors where appropriate.