Corsair CS Series Modular 650 W Review

Name: Corsair CS Series Modular 650 W
Brand: Corsair

crmaris

on Dec 23rd, 2013,

in Power Supplies.

Manufacturer: Corsair

Performance Rating, Performance per Dollar & Noise Rating »

Ripple Measurements

You will see the ripple levels we measured on the main rails of the CS650M in the following table. The limits are, according to the ATX specification, 120 mV (+12V) and 50 mV (5V, 3.3V, and 5VSB).

Ripple Measurements - Corsair CS650M
Test	12 V	5 V	3.3 V	5VSB	Pass/Fail
20% Load	20.4 mV	5.0 mV	8.5 mV	8.7 mV	Pass
40% Load	28.1 mV	6.2 mV	9.5 mV	10.2 mV	Pass
50% Load	33.7 mV	7.2 mV	10.5 mV	13.6 mV	Pass
60% Load	38.9 mV	8.3 mV	11.1 mV	16.1 mV	Pass
80% Load	51.1 mV	10.2 mV	12.8 mV	18.2 mV	Pass
100% Load	65.6 mV	11.2 mV	15.3 mV	25.4 mV	Pass
110% Load	73.9 mV	13.0 mV	16.4 mV	26.8 mV	Pass
Crossload 1	22.2 mV	7.1 mV	8.5 mV	7.3 mV	Pass
Crossload 2	62.3 mV	9.8 mV	13.3 mV	16.0 mV	Pass

Ripple suppression on the minor rails was great, but we unfortunately can't state the same for +12V. Ripple on the latter rail was pretty high for a PSU based on such a modern platform. As it seems, more caps should have been used for ripple filtering, but doing so would have raised cost while lowering efficiency a bit, which had Great Wall decide otherwise. This is a shame since we hate to see more than 50 mV ripple on the +12V rail in modern PSUs.

Ripple at Full Load

In the following oscilloscope screenshots, you can see the AC ripple and noise the main rails registered (+12V, 5V, 3.3V, and 5VSB). The bigger the fluctuations on the oscilloscope's screen, the bigger the ripple/noise. For all measurements, we set 0.01 V/Div (each vertical division/box equals 0.01 V) as the standard.