Corsair RM1000i PSU And Link 4 Review.

Caporegime
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Corsair Product Page - http://www.corsair.com/en-gb/rmi-se...t-80-plus-gold-certified-fully-modular-psu-uk

OcUK Product Page - https://www.overclockers.co.uk/cors...lar-power-supply-cp-9020084-uk-ca-204-cs.html



Today I will have a quick look at the Corsair RM1000i gold-rated PSU designed for quietness and powering high-end system with multiple GPUs.

This unit is made by CWT (Channel Well Technologies) who have a good reputation and produce PSUs for various other companies.

This PSU includes high-end features and parts that you would expect:

• Gold-rated efficiency.
• All Japanese capacitors rated for 105°C.
• Fully-modular all-black cables.
• Zero RPM fan mode.
• 10-year warranty.


Packaging

The PSU comes in the usual cardboard box with an outer box detailing all the main features.

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Inside is the manual and warranty guide along with some zip ties, case badge and screws.


Cables

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The cables are presented in a Velcro bag to keep the ones you do not use organised.

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Being a 1000W PSU, it comes with a lot of cables to power even the most demanding set-up. The cables supplied include:

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All the flat cables are black.

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All the braided cables are also black - not a hint of any colour, which I like.

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PSU Body

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The PSU is supplied in this soft bag.

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It is a stealthy-looking unit.

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It is fully modular and has the Corsair Link connection that allows the control and monitoring of some aspects of the PSU.

The fan test button does exactly that: press it and the fan spins. If it does not spin then you have a problem with the unit.

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A little sticker to remind you that the fan should be idle at low load.

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A 135mm fluid-bearing fan provides quiet operation and only starts to spin slowly at 400W.

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Fan Noise

Below is a short video I made of this unit powering my system. As you can imagine, I never exceeded the 400W switching point for the fan to start spinning, thus it remained silent during use.



Unscientific testing

Unlike reviewers that have access to expensive testing equipment I cannot test this unit fully but I can show the voltages via the system event viewer.

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It all looks perfectly fine.


Wattage and Amperage

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This is the breakdown of the voltages, rails and amps per rail.


Summary

This is certainly a high quality PSU and now comes with an upgraded 10-year warranty - http://www.corsair.com/en-us/support/warranty. It is quiet during use although my current setup was not enough to make the fan spin up at all. It emitted no whines or strange noises, and the all-black cabling is a lovely touch.

It is expensive at £154.99 compared to, say, Superflower Leadex Gold equivalent PSUs but if you want to buy into the whole Corsair case+cooling+PSU eco-system then this is going to be a solid PSU for you.


Corsair Link 4.0

Corsair Download page - http://www.corsair.com/en-gb/support/downloads

Corsair have, in the past month or so, completely redone the Link software which, to be perfectly blunt, was awful. I have owned an H110i GT since its release date and always found it a pain to use.

At times, it wouldn't show the pump speed, fan speed or allow you to control the LED of the H110i GT. Sometimes it wouldn't even detect the H110i GT at all (this could be fixed by pulling the USB cable while the system was ON and plugging it back in for it to detect new hardware) Sometimes it would decide the LED should be pink rather than the colour you wanted it to be. Certainly not out-of-the-box-ready, but after much hair pulling you could usually get it to behave itself and remain functional.

But moving on to Link4.0+ we have an all-new design and what appears to be a complete rewriting of the code; and I am happy to say it works as it should - first time, every time.

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This is the home screen: you can see everything connected to the PC.

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Three basic profiles just like the previous Link version: performance, balanced and quiet.

Click on an item and it appears in either its own screen or a little pop-up box.

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This is an MSI R9 380, for example.

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And this is the RM1000i PSU screen. You can see the power being drawn into the PSU and what is going out.

The rails and their amps and watts on each.

The OCP protection option switches this PSU from a single rail to multi-rail operation. This is a feature I have seen before on the Bequiet Dark Power Pro 11 but that used a cable and switch to do the same.

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And yes, you can even set the PSU fan to a fixed RPM!

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You can select the LED colour of the H110i GT or set it up to cycle through 2 or 4 colours, or even have it temperature-based such as this four colour fade:


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This is an updated version of the configuration screen. It allows you to alter the various components' temperature or fan-speed boxes within a virtual case.

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All Corsair cases are an option, or you can upload your own if you use an alternative manufacturer's case.

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The options to show graphs and log to file are also present. Pressing configure allows you to select which ones to show.

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Use Excel to view the outputted log file. This could be handy if you experience a system crash/restart so you can check if any of these values were out of bounds.

I could fill this post with far more of this new Link software but I hope I have given a good overall impression of how far it has come from the earlier releases.

This is a massive positive for Corsair and fixes the one annoyance experienced when using my H110i GT.

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