Specifications

According to CM efficiency is 80 Plus Silver but at least at the time of the review the 80 Plus organization hadn't evaluated this unit. Unfortunately, as Enhance the OEM of this unit uses to do, the max operational temperature reaches only 40°C so it is 10°C lower than what ATX spec recommends (not requires). Thankfully the unit is equipped with all protections including OTP so if its internal temperature goes high it will shut down to prevent damage. The cooling fan according to CM is equipped with a Hydraulic Dynamic Bearing which ensures a longer lifespan along with quiet operation. However when looking up the fan's specific model number (DFS132512M) the original manufacturer, Young Lin Tech, states that this fan uses a plain sleeve bearing. To clarify this we fully disassembled the fan and shed lots of light on this matter. More about this on the corresponding page of this review (A Look Inside).
The dimensions are the standard ones for a PSU with 1kW capacity and the weight is increased thanks to the large heatsinks that Enhance uses. Finally the warranty is set at five years, showing CM's confidence in this product and unfortunatelly the MSRP is on the high side.


Let's startwith the minor rails. These are pretty strong at 180W combined, a power level that most likely no contemporary PC system will take advantage of. On the contrary the +12V rail, which is mostly used nowadays by almost every component, needs high power to cope with power hungry systems and in this case it can deliver up to 80A in a single rail so it won't run into any problems, even with high-end VGAs, CPUs etc. Finally the 5VSB rail with 15W total capacity has 2.5W more power than the minimum seen in modern PSUs. We would highly prefer though, to have 20W or more power.

Cables & Connectors, Power Distribution

As you can see the fixed cables are very few whereas the number of the modular ones is large enough, something very convenient. Of course all fixed cables are fully sleeved while the modular ones are flat (ribbon cables). The unit has a sufficient number of connectors and strangely enough isn't equipped with any 4+4 pin EPS12V connectors but instead both are two 8pin ones. Also the main ATX connector is a 24pin type and not 20+4pin, as most PSUs use. Apparently CM wanted to cut any ties with the past. Also cable length is adequate but the distance among connectors is too short at mere 100mm while the ATX spec recommends 150mm. Most likely this won't be a problem for the PCIe connectors, since usually they are connected in pairs on the power sockets of the VGAs with small distance between them and probably for SATA connectors, but for the 4pin Molex ones this could be an issue. Finally the 24pin ATX connector, the two EPS and all PCIe ones use 16AWG wires while all other connectors use 18AWG.

Since this PSU features a single +12V rail we do not have anything to comment about its power distribution.