Corsair RM1000e Fully Modular 1000w 80 Plus Gold PSU Review

Corsair is by far one of the biggest names in the business for power supplies, with many years of experience creating countless award-winning products, they've been a go-to brand for many PC enthusiasts, not just for their PSUs, but cases, coolers, peripherals and so much more. So I think it's fair to say that I have rather high expectations of their new RM1000e, a fully modular ATX 3.0 PSU, which comes with 80 Plus Gold Efficiency and supports the latest 12VHPWR connector too, so it's sure to appeal to those building a potent gaming PC. Corsair RM1000e The RM1000e being able to deliver 1000W power is more than enough for a modern gaming PC, even with the most potent consumer CPUs on the market paired with something like the RTX 4090, you should have a good overhead to deal with any power spikes. It features a low-noise design too, with a zero-RPM fan at low loads, and its DC-DC LLC topology with 105c-rated capacitors means it should perform great any any load. Corsair also states that it comes "with precise timings, RMe supports Modern Standby, ensuring extremely fast wake-from-sleep times and better low-load efficiency." Features Fully Modular PSU: Reliable and efficient low-noise power supply with fully modular cabling, so you only have to connect the cables your system build needs. Dual 8-Pin EPS12V Connectors: For wide compatibility with modern graphics cards and motherboards. Keeps Quiet: A 120mm rifle-bearing fan with a specially calculated fan curve keeps fan noise down, even when operating at full load. 105°C-Rated Capacitors: Delivers steady, reliable power and dependable electrical performance. Modern Standby Compatible: Extremely fast wake-from-sleep times and better low-load efficiency. Specifications For in-depth features and specifications, please check out the official product page here. What Corsair Had to Say "CORSAIR RMe Series Fully Modular Low-Noise Power Supplies provide quiet, reliable power with 80 PLUS Gold efficiency to your PC. With dual 8-pin EPS12V cables and an array of PCIe 8-pin power connectors, RMe PSUs have the connections needed to power today's demanding PC hardware. Industrial-grade, 105°C-rated capacitors deliver superb electrical performance, backed by a seven-year warranty. Wake your computer faster and consume less power with support for the new Modern Standby sleep mode. Fully modular cables make PC builds easy, as you connect only the cables your system requires. With a 140mm-long casing that works with nearly any modern case, the CORSAIR RMe Series is steady power for your system." - Corsair Packaging & Accessories The box features the usually black and yellow we see across pretty much all Corsair products these days. There's a clear photo of the PSU on the front, showcasing the various connections it supports, and there's a Cybernetics Platinum A- rating on there too. The box is a bit battered, but that's more to do with my courier than anything else. Around the back, we can also see there's an 80 Plus Gold rating, a Zero RPM fan, the dimensions of the PSU and some technical information for the efficiency and fan curves. The RM1000e is reasonably well protected, with a thick plastic bag and compressible foam covers that saved it from the battering my courier gave the outer box. In the box, you'll find all the usual cables, with the thicker 24-pin featuring a sleeve, while all the other cables have a flat and flexible design that should be very easy to route within your computer. A Closer Look It's a surprisingly compact unit, considering just a few years ago a 1000W unit would have been noticeably larger than this. Just take a look at the beefy RM1000x I reviewed 7 years ago and you can see things have certainly progressed since then, as this PSU isn't much bigger than the 120mm fan that cools it. The fan is an all-black design so it blends in rather well and there's a large triangle-cut grille that certainly won't restrict airflow into the unit. There's also an embossed Corsair logo in the middle, again, pretty understated really. Down the side, there's a large sticker with the product name on, pretty standard stuff. And of course, it's the same on the other side but inverted. The triangle mesh design is pretty common on Corsair products now, so to match the large fan grille, there's a smaller triangle mesh at the back of the PSU too. I like that it has a nice large power button too, much easier to find when crawling to reach the back of your computer. On the backplate, there's a specifications sticker, where you can check the supports watts and amps of each rail. There is a good range of connectors on offer, with the 24-pin split into two connectors on the PSU, and four SATA/PATA ports below that. What's good to see is that the PCIe/CPU ports are all just 8-pin connectors on the PSU side, meaning you can use any of them for any cable, the 4+4, 8-pin, 6+2, or even the 12VHPWR cable, making it very user friendly. 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. Methodology & Testing At eTeknix we take the power supply testing procedure very seriously and have invested a lot of resources into acquiring the appropriate testing equipment. For all power supply reviews, we test the power supplies with dedicated power supply testing equipment. This means we can get the most accurate results from our testing as opposed to using software benchmarks (such as OCCT) or multi-meter readouts which are broadly inaccurate. Testing Hardware Sunmoon SM-8800 Active Load Tester Stingray DS1M12 USB Oscilloscope Voltcraft DT-10L laser tachometer What the eTeknix Test Procedure Involves Testing each power supply at 20/40/60/80/100% load (with load balanced across all rails) and measuring PFC (power factor correction), efficiency (actual power divided by power "pulled at the wall") which also uses a 50% load test, and voltage regulation (deviance from expected voltages of 3.3/5/12 on the main rails). Measuring ripple with an oscilloscope at 20/40/60/80/100% load. Transient loads taken with an oscilloscope are taken from 0% to 100% on the 12v raid, 3.3v rail, and then both combined. Measuring fan speed after a stabilisation period of five minutes at each loading scenario using the Voltcraft DT-10L laser tachometer and a reflective strip on the fan. Testing each power supply's OPP (Over Power Protection) mechanism and seeing how many watts each power supply can deliver before shutting down. Any deviation from this will be explained per review as appropriate on the respective testing pages, but this methodology page will remain unchanged. Other Things to Consider We recognise that a single 12-volt cable can provide only 6 Amps before overheating (which corrupts voltage regulation and efficiency) so we used an adequate number of cables for each power supply to ensure there is no efficiency loss from poor cable selection. If there is more than one 12VHPWR on a PSU, all will be used to test their combined loads. We use the same time scale and horizontal millivolt scale on our oscilloscope for all ripple tests, that is a 20ms T/DIV (horizontal) and a 0.02 V/DIV (vertical) meaning the scale is from -80mV to +80mV, ATX spec dictates that the 12v rail must fall within 150mv of ripple and the 3.3/5 within 50mv so that scale allows us to include both 150 and 50mV peaks. (Some older PSU reviews use different scales which were later ditched as the visual representation they give is inadequate, in these reviews written measurements are provided only). Deviance is the terminology used to represent the way voltages diverge from the expected values Voltage Regulation To test voltage regulation we load the power supply to five different load scenarios that give an equal spread of load across every single rail. So that means 20% on all rails, 40% on all rails and so on. We then calculate the average deviation of each rail from its expected voltage. Ideally, anything of +/- 2% regulation is seen as a very good result. Power Efficiency Power efficiency is measured by calculating the supplied wattage divided by the wattage drawn at the wall/plug, multiplied by 100 to give a percentage. We then compare that to the particular 80 Plus certification the company claims to see if it meets that. You can see the 80 Plus certifications below, we always test power supplies at 230v. Transient Loads Power Factor Correction Power Factor Correction is the ratio of the real power flowing to the load, to the apparent power in the circuit. PFC aims to make the load circuitry that is power factor corrected appear purely resistive (apparent power equal to real power). In this case, the voltage and current are in phase and the reactive power consumption is zero. The closer the number to one the better as this allows the most efficient delivery of electrical power (Source - Wikipedia). Ripple An oscilloscope can easily measure noise and Ripple. These show how much voltage fluctuation there is on a particular rail. We tested the rail stability of the 3.3-volt, 5-volt and 12-volt rails using an identical time and millivolt scale for all graphs. millivolt ripple is measured by the peak-to-peak size of the voltage curve. The latest ATX 12-volt version 2.3 specifications state that ripple from peak to peak must be no higher than 50 millivolts for the 3.3-volt and 5-volt rails, while the 12-volt rail is allowed up to 120 millivolts peak to peak to stay within specifications. Millivolt figures are stated to the closest increment of 5 given their variability. OPP Power supplies are often quoted as having various protection mechanisms and the most important of these is Over Power Protection. In our testing, we crank up the power draw until the power supply either shuts down (meaning the OPP mechanism is present and working) or blows up (meaning it is either not present or not working). We then note the maximum power consumption before the power supply shut down, or before it blew up. Fan Speed When testing in a power supply laboratory it is difficult to take fan noise readings as the noise from the Sunmoon test equipment and air conditioning corrupts everything. The next best thing in our circumstances was reading off the fan speed with a tachometer to get an idea of the noise. The ambient temperature during testing is held constant at 22 degrees, with 1 degree of variation. Each power supply had a consistent period of 5 minutes to stabilise between each load scenario. In my experience, the following general relationships apply between noise levels and fan speeds, though it can vary greatly between the type of fan used. Below 800 RPM - Inaudible/Silent 800 to 1000 RPM - Barely audible 1000 - 1200 RPM - Audible but still quiet 1200 - 1400 RPM - Moderately noisy 1400 - 1800 RPM - Noisy 1800 - 2000 RPM or above - Intolerable Internal Components This is just an example of what you can expect to see on a PSU interior. The efficiency is, of course, very good on this PSU, with an 80 Plus Gold rating, it actually needed to score 90/92/89% but managed to comfortably exceed that and on our test bench, it actually scored pretty much right on the cusp of 80 Plus Titanium efficiency, which is just fantastic. Efficiency The PFC is excellent too, from 40% load and above it's very good, and for a gaming PC that will likely sit at 60-80% load it's even better still. PFC (Power Factor Correction) Voltage Regulation Voltage regulation looks decent too, we want to see this within about 3% for stability and for the most part, it's much closer than that to the target voltages throughout various loads. Ripple The ripple on the 12V rail was a little rough at the lower loads of 20 and 40% but still well within the sub-50mv expected to meet PSU standards, but at 80-100% it was certainly much better. The same is true on the 5V rail, which did run a little high, but again that has a requirement for sub 150mv, so again, not really and issue. Anyway, the more important rails and loads are extremely low, with some of the lowest ripples on 3.3v and 5VSB that I've seen to date. 3.3V 5V 12V 5VSB Over Power Protection and Max Wattage Testing the OPP, this unit managed an impressive 1270.9, which is 27% over the rated 1000W, and while you wouldn't be wanting to exceed this limit all the time, it's clear that if you do have any big power spikes, they're not going to be a problem. Transient Loads These results measure the power supply from 0% load to 100% load on various rails to simulate a power spike from your system. Typically, we would like to see as small a spike as possible relative to the requested voltage. With modern GPUs being notorious for power spikes, this is becoming more relevant in modern PSU design. The specifications for ATX 3.0 were released in February 2022. It includes the new 16-Pin 12vHPWR connector that can deliver up to 600 W to graphics cards. These incorporate data lines for components to negotiate power capabilities with the PSU so they do not draw more power than the PSU is capable of delivering. The specification also has more strict requirements for handling spikes, two times the nominal output for 100 microseconds. 0-100% 12V 0-100% +5VSB 0-100% 12V Cross-Loads 3.3V and 5V are tested at 10-100% loads together, and then 12V is tested in the same fashion. This shows us if the PSU is able to maintain its target voltage regulation while delivering different loads. Ideally, you want to see this within 5% deviance, but under 3% is better, and of course, the lower the better with 0.00% change being the ideal result. Everything was well within tolerance here with no more than a 1.5% deviation on the 3.3v rail, but otherwise, performance was better than that throughout the rest of the testing. While loading the 12v rail, the 5v did increase by 0.2% at low loads, but again, still very stable throughout all of our testing. Fan Speed The fan on this PSU has been used in many other mid to high-end PSU models from various brands, so we know it to be pretty decent. At low loads, the fan was zero RPM, and even at typical gaming loads of 500-800 watts, it didn't seem to exceed 400 RPM for the most part, maxing out at 800 RPM after maximum load. The fan is a lot more capable than this, so if you're running it in hot weather, expect it to run faster, but otherwise, it's no louder than a typical case fan under load. How Much Does it Cost? The Corsair RM1000e Fully Modular Low-Noise ATX Power Supply is available now on Amazon for just £169.99 MSRP. However, at the time of writing it was actually just £152.95. That's a very reasonable price, and falls in line with the similarly equipped MSI MPG A1000G, DeepCool PX1000G, and Thermaltake GF3 1000W, to name but a few. Overview Corsair is one of the leading names for not just power supplies, but peripherals, cases, coolers, and so much more these days, so they have a pretty high and well-respected reputation to uphold. Thankfully, the Corsair RM1000e doesn't let the side down and delivers a performance that's right on the money for a mid-range gaming PSU. It delivers 1000W power, which is more than enough for the most potent CPUs on the market plus any of the latest flagship graphics graphics cards. It's unlikely that you'll exceed that power with such a build, but if you are expecting to run at close to the 1000W a lot, then stepping up a model would be advised. If you have any power spikes from a particularly weird moment in a game or rendering spike, the PSU can pull over 1200W for a short while before it cuts out, so again, it's unlikely to interrupt your system's performance. The build quality is very good, and while the inside looked like it was a bit of a buffet of different capacitor brands, there's clearly nothing wrong with that. The lower load PFC and ripple were pretty good, perhaps only standing out more as I've only been testing much more expensive units recently. However, for this price range, it's still a stable and reliable PSU. I'm equally impressed by the efficiency which was so much closer to being 80 Plus Platinum than it was 80 Plus Gold, which is going to mean less power goes into the PSU to create the required output, saving you money in the long run. It ran pretty quiet too, even at sustained high loads, I never found the fan ramped up particularly aggressively and seemed to sit comfortably at 800 RPM where it was no louder than a typical PC case fan. At lower loads, such as when I'm writing content, browsing reddit or watching YouTube the PSU is completely silent. Should I Buy One? If you're looking for a competitively priced PSU for your next gaming build, or to simply replace an ageing PSU that doesn't support the latest PCIe 12VHPWR cables and ATX 3.0 standards, this is a great upgrade. The efficiency, noise levels, and stability make this a solid mid-to-high-end PSU for those needing plenty of power without spending a small fortune.