Corsair RM1000e Fully Modular 1000w 80 Plus Gold PSU Review

A Closer Look – Internal

With the lid removed, we can see Corsair is using a HA1225H12F-Z fan by Hong Hua, a fan that’s commonly seen in Seasonic, Phantecs and other Corsair units, so we know it to be a good choice for premium quality power supplies. I would have liked to see a Corsair-branded one, but let’s be honest, how often do you look at your PSU fan?

On the interior, things are looking very neat and tidy, but I wouldn’t really have expected anything less from a brand like Corsair. There are no weird cables, unwanted blobs of glue or anything like that either, which is always good to see. Overall though, all the main components should easily get the active and passive airflow and cooling they require, even in such a compact PSU design.

The AC line-in looks more robust than usual, with a small PCB handling its connectivity and some additional shielding we don’t usually see on most units, albeit this may be due to the more compact size of this PSU requiring it.

Behind this, you’ll find the main transformer and LLC resonant capacitor and inductor, which are again tightly packed in there, but there’s still space around each component to ensure they get properly cooled.

The bulk capacitor is an Elite Jinshan, a Taiwanese brand that I’ve not much experience with personally, but it’s rated for 105c and 680uF, which is what we’d expect to see from brands such as Nippon.

There are all kinds of colourful capacitors throughout this unit, and it’s hard to keep track of what they all are!

Especially given the size of this PSU, some of them are tucked away and hard to read. But I can see these are 105c-rated Teapo capacitors.

While this appears to be a Nippon unit, it’s a bit of a capacitor buffet in here. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if they’re all good quality units, which I am pretty confident they are, there’s no need to have just one brand in here.

There are two large heatsinks (the black fins) in the RM1000e, with the larger covering the PFC MOSFETs, with the 5v & 3.3V conversion boards (two vertical copper coils on small PCBs) sandwiched between them.

The connector board with firmly in place at the back, with some nat and tidy soldering work on the back of it. There are capacitors for the cables too, but they’re neatly hidden on the other side of the PCB out of sight and thus saving more space too.

There’s a small controlled IC board here too, which also deals with the fan regulation. The fan is a 2-pin design, so if you ever do want to replace it, keep that in mind.

The only thing I didn’t like about this PSU, so far, is that the screws are hiding under the side stickers, so I had to make quite a mess of it to open it up. This shouldn’t be a concern for most consumers, of course, but if you do have experience with opening your PSU to change a fan or for any other reason (don’t open it if you don’t know what you’re doing!) then it can be damaging to the aesthetics.