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deruberhanyok
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Corsair's RM1000i Special Edition PSU

Thu Mar 23, 2017 10:00 pm

(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.
Last edited by deruberhanyok on Fri Mar 24, 2017 7:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
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deruberhanyok
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Re: Corsair's RM1000i Special Edition PSU

Thu Mar 23, 2017 10:11 pm

I will start with the box. I laughed at the scale of the box. It is bigger than most PCs I have built. Here it is next to the box for the CX550M:

Image

It comes with a bunch of stuff in that box though:

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There's the power supply (wrapped in a soft baggie, to keep the precious safe), a baggie full of white sleeved power cables, two case badges (because I guess I could power two full systems with this thing), manual, and a power cable as thick as a tree.

Here's some shots of the actual unit, as you can see the white is bright and shiny all the way around:

Image
Image
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And here it is with its little brother, the CX550M I will be replacing.

Image

As you can see, while the box was XBOXHUEG (I don't think anyone says that anymore but I am old so it is okay), the power supply is just the slightly-larger-than-normal power supply typical for these higher-rated units. It's an extra 40mm (140mm on the CX550m, 180mm on the RM1000i) in length. The fan has white LEDs in it and everything is modular, even the 24 pin ATX connector. I haven't gone fully modular before but I have to say I'm a big fan (har har). One of my favorite things about the Pico PSU for SFF builds is that is eliminates all of the extra cables I'm not going to use, and that makes it a lot easier on space and cleanliness. This is like that except with enough power to jump-start a moose.
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deruberhanyok
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Re: Corsair's RM1000i Special Edition PSU

Thu Mar 23, 2017 10:30 pm

Now, Corsair says the Carbide 88R can't repel firepower of this magnitude, and I think technically that's true:

Image

With the 3.5" drive cage in place there's very little room between it and the power supply. You could probably do some creative cable routing through the cage and leave it in place, but I don't plan to put any 3.5" drives in here, so I just removed it. It's held in place by two thumbscrews so it was easy to do. I did try to see if the cables could be connected with the cage installed and, well, no. If for some reason you had this same combination of parts (or a different power supply) and wanted to run the cables through the cage, you'd have to take the cage out, connect the cables to the power supply first, then string them through the cage while you slide the cage into place. It would be kind of awkward, though, and with the way the case is designed you can still put the cables in the bottom front of the case and not block any airflow.

Also, obviously, the power supply hangs out upside down at the bottom. There's a cutout with a removable filter piece so the power supply can pull fresh air in from outside of the case. This means the white LEDs of the fan won't be lighting up the inside of the system but maybe it will give me some ground effects. Then I'll add a racing stripe and some nos to it, it's gonna be totally sick bro.

uh, anyways.

The Carbide 88R's back panel is easily removable (there's even a cutout behind the motherboard so if you've got one of them boards with an m.2 slot on the back, or you are installing a heatsink that requires a bracket on the bottom, you can do it with the motherboard already mounted) and there's room back there to route cables to keep them mostly out of the way. With room for 2 120mm fans up front (and I have one up front in the top position, the other is in the back as exhaust and a third is up top as more exhaust) and the power supply pulling air in from under the case, cables can be lined up in that bottom spot without fear of blocking the front fans:

Image

And with everything in place (yes, the cables coming off of the video card are in the way of the front fan, I think I may route them down a little) it's still nice and roomy inside. This might be a good case for a closed loop water cooler kind of heatsink if that's your thing.

Here's a picture taken without the flash, little blurry:

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And one so you can see the glow coming from inside the PSU:

Image

I'll see if I can get clearer pictures without the flash tomorrow.

Overall I am hugely impressed with the unit. The RM1000i has received some spectacular reviews since it launched in 2015, it's in white, it's definitely overkill for my build and I just don't mind at all. It's perfect.

I decided I was going to name mine Moby, after Moby Dick. Not because I was chasing this thing to ultimately cause my own destruction, or some weird metaphor about Corsair needing a bigger boat, and now I've confused my references, I'm not even sure where I am right now, who are you people and why does this forum smell like bread? Wait, I mean, it was just because of the literal literary reference of big white whale and big white power supply.

So, world, meet Moby. Moby, meet world. And now... game on. :)
Last edited by deruberhanyok on Fri Mar 24, 2017 7:15 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Captain Ned
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Re: Corsair's RM1000i Special Edition PSU

Thu Mar 23, 2017 10:53 pm

OK, someone in the frontpage comments posted a pic of a modular PSU with the same 2x9/2x5 split for the 24-pin, which leaves me with 4 too many pins. I assume there's some blending/merging in the actual cables? The only reason I ask is that my 100% modular Corsair of about 3 years ago has 24 pins on the PSU socket and 24 pins on the board plug, and the discrepancy is confusing me.

EDIT: I'm sure the cabling standard on the PSU end changed at some point, but I never got the e-mail (at least that's my fallback position).
What we have today is way too much pluribus and not enough unum.
 
deruberhanyok
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Re: Corsair's RM1000i Special Edition PSU

Fri Mar 24, 2017 7:22 am

Yeah I was really puzzled by that too! On the other end it all merges down to the standard 24-pin connector you'd expect, so couldn't figure out why it splits the connector that way on the end of the power supply. The 4-pin or 8-pin aux12v that goes near the CPU socket comes out of the 2x4pin plugs above it, so it isn't extra pins for those. I didn't see anything in the manual either.

I did a little digging and it turns out Corsair posted a pretty good explanation of it here:

The 24-pin of the Type 4 cable set also has a unique feature not implemented in the standard Type 3 cables. There are a total of 28-pins where the cable plugs into the PSU's modular interface, instead of the usual 24-pins. The extra four pins are "sense wires". While a +3.3V sense is part of the ATX standard and is found on most PSUs, it is not often implemented. The RMi not only utilizes the +3.3V sense on the ATX connector, but also utilizes an additional +12V sense and +5V sense. These sense wires read the voltages at the load (the end of the cable) and can increase voltage automatically if voltages drop.

From: http://www.corsair.com/en-us/blog/2015/ ... e-4-cables

Neat huh?
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DPete27
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Re: Corsair's RM1000i Special Edition PSU

Fri Mar 24, 2017 8:29 am

Why didn't you run all the PSU cables through the cutout behind the 3.5" drive cage? I see you routed some of them through there, but not all. Not enough room? Setting off my OCD.

Also, maybe look into getting some PSU cable routing clips to make those individual sleeved cables look snazzy.
Main: i5-3570K, ASRock Z77 Pro4-M, MSI RX480 8G, 500GB Crucial BX100, 2 TB Samsung EcoGreen F4, 16GB 1600MHz G.Skill @1.25V, EVGA 550-G2, Silverstone PS07B
HTPC: A8-5600K, MSI FM2-A75IA-E53, 4TB Seagate SSHD, 8GB 1866MHz G.Skill, Crosley D-25 Case Mod
 
deruberhanyok
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Re: Corsair's RM1000i Special Edition PSU

Fri Mar 24, 2017 8:41 am

Yeah, it was partly the amount of space available behind the panel there, I didn't want to try and cram too much stuff in there in case it made the back panel too tight. I'm going to try and clean them up a little when I get a chance later this weekend, trust me, my OCD wasn't too thrilled about it either. :)

Also, omfg, the power supply actually came with a bunch of those clips. I had no idea what they were for, but now I have lots of tidying to do!

(you can tell big power supplies are outside of my normal realm of experience, eh?)
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Captain Ned
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Re: Corsair's RM1000i Special Edition PSU

Fri Mar 24, 2017 9:19 am

deruberhanyok wrote:

Thank you. That's one more minor mental irritation I can put to bed now.
What we have today is way too much pluribus and not enough unum.
 
DPete27
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Re: Corsair's RM1000i Special Edition PSU

Fri Mar 24, 2017 9:28 am

That's right Ned. You're getting sleeeepy. Verrrry sleeeepy.
Main: i5-3570K, ASRock Z77 Pro4-M, MSI RX480 8G, 500GB Crucial BX100, 2 TB Samsung EcoGreen F4, 16GB 1600MHz G.Skill @1.25V, EVGA 550-G2, Silverstone PS07B
HTPC: A8-5600K, MSI FM2-A75IA-E53, 4TB Seagate SSHD, 8GB 1866MHz G.Skill, Crosley D-25 Case Mod

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