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- Date:
- Tuesday , December 01, 2009
- Author:
- Paul Johnson
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
Corsair TX950W 950 Watt Power Supply Review
Corsair's cannons are blazing with its 950 watt TX series PSU that claims to sustain a full 950 watt load at 50°C and up 85% energy efficiency under "real-world" load conditions. We put the TX through our normal gamut of higher-than-industry standard tests and tell you if our TX sinks to the bottom or stays proudly afloat.
Overview
The first thing we are going to look at with the Corsair TX950W is its packaging, accessories, and documentation. While normally none of these items is a make or break item for a power supply the packaging quite often contains a lot of information about the product we are purchasing. The inclusion of an owner’s manual that provides actual information about our product is also of great help. Accessories are almost unnecessary with a power supply as the unit is self contained, unless it is modular, but there are cases where a manufacturer can include useful accessories to make installation, routing, and use more efficient.
The packaging of the Corsair TX950W follows the trend of all of the other Corsair units we have reviewed to date. However, like the HX850W it recycles a previously used accent color, yellow. As is typical for the packaging of a Corsair unit, the TX950W carries a large amount of information about the unit on the packaging. This includes the connector count, power label (which will be broken down below), fan noise level graph, an efficiency graph, and a number of marketing points. The efficiency graph and text indicates the unit peaks at ~87% efficiency at 50% load at 115v. However, like the HX850W the box lacks an 80Plus logo, but unlike the HX850W the 80Plus website does list the TX950W as being certified for Climate Savers 3 (85%-88%-85% efficiency at 20%-50%-100% load). More interestingly however, the Corsair website has only an 80Plus Bronze (Climate Savers 2) logo adorning the TX950W product page. We will see in a minute which if those two is correct. While on the TX950W product page we also notice that the unit is advertised as being SLI certified and a quick check of the SLIZone webpage does indeed turn up SLI certification for up to GTX 260 SLI. Moving on, the last Corsair unit we reviewed, the HX850W, came equipped with a new 7 year warranty. But today, we find that the TX950W steps that back down a notch with just a 5 year warranty.
The Corsair TX950W is a single 12v rail power supply from CWT and it shares this 12v arrangement with all of Corsair’s previous power supplies except for the HX1000W. The single 12v rail that the TX950W is sporting is rated at 78A which makes it good for a possible ~99% of the unit’s total DC output capacity. To go with this 12v capacity, the TX950W comes equipped with six modified 8-pin PCI-Express connectors (like the HX850W) as well as eight Molex connectors for peripherals and twelve SATA connectors good for powering your RAID array. Overall this setup is well appointed but oddly does come with fewer Molex connectors than the lower powered HX850W. Corsair does position the TX line below that of the HX line, so in addition to not making the unit modular this maybe a part of their attempt to segment the market.
Once we open the packaging of the TX950W we see the usual assortment of items including the power supply in a pouch, mounting screws, user manual, zip ties, and a case badge. The user manual is the same for all current members of the Corsair TX lineup and comes in eight languages spanning about five pages per language. The manual includes the power table, installation instructions, cable count, and warranty information. This is some of the desirable information in a manual, especially the warranty information, but it really isn't as complete as some other manuals we have seen that include all the electrical specifications and the pinouts. Surprisingly, (or maybe not) the cable length measures that were lost in the HX850W manual, which had been present in the TX850W manual, return here. This could be because the TX950W manual is the TX850W manual though. Since these numbers reappear, we find this manual to be a bit more complete than that which shipped with the HX850W, but it still could be better.