Corsair HX1000W Power Supply Review

Power Distribution

In Figure 19, you can see the power supply label containing all the power specs.

Figure 19: Power supply label.

Each power supply inside HX1000W has a single-rail design, so this power supply has two independent +12V rails, +12V1 and +12V2. This is one of the main differences between Corsair HX1000W and Thermaltake Toughpower 1,500 W. Thermaltake’s model has four +12 V virtual rails, two for each power supply. The difference between a single rail design and a multiple rail one is how the over current protection (OCP) is connected. On single rail design there is only one OCP circuit that monitors all the +12 V outputs at the same time, while on multiple rail design the power supply has several OCP circuits, each one monitoring a group of +12 V wires (the virtual rails).

The two rails are distributed like this:

• +12V1: Motherboard main cable, EPS12V/ATX12V connector that comes from inside the power supply and auxiliary video card and EPS12V connectors from the modular cabling system.
• +12V2: Peripheral and SATA connectors on the modular cabling system and auxiliary video card cables that come from inside the power supply.

Now let’s see if this power supply can really deliver 1,000 W.