Corsair SF1000L SFX-L ATX 3.0 PSU Review

Conclusion – Plenty of Power for Modern Mini PCs 

High-end PC components have become a lot more power hungry in recent years, and that has created a lot of demand for high-wattage power supplies. This demand event stretches to the world of small form factor PCs, with PC builders wanting to push as much performance as possible into tiny form factors. That’s where the SF1000L comes in.

With the SF1000L, Corsair has delivered an SFX-L power supply, which as the name suggests is Longer than a standard SFX power supply. This means that the SF1000L is not compatible with all SFX PC cases, but the good news is that the SF1000L is an ATX 3.0 compatible power supply that can deliver 1000 watts of power and supports the 12VHPWR (PCIe 5.0/16-pin) GPU power connector.

If you want to create a smaller than normal PC that consumes a higher than average amount of power, the SF1000L is a solid power supply. The unit is efficient with its 80+ Gold rating, and the unit remains fairly quiet under maxed out loads. With its seven year warranty and ATX 3.0 compatibility, you can be sure that this PSU will stand the test of time, supporting the latest PSU standards and power connectors. You can be sure that this PSU will meet your current and future needs. 

Like most of Cosair’s premium PSUs, the SF1000L is a modular power supply. That said, the SF1000L is one of the first PSUs from Corsair to utilise the company’s Type-5 PSU cables, which use smaller micro-fit terminals. This allows a lot of cables to be connected to this compact SFX-L unit.

When we asked Corsair about the potential release of pre-braided Type-5 PSU cables, Corsair simply stated that they do not comment on unreleased products. CableMod however has confirmed that they plan to support Corsair Type-5 PSUs as soon as they are able to. SF-L PSU users can rest assured that pre-braided cables are coming, if not from Corsair, 3rd parties like CableMod will make custom pre-braided Type-5 cables. 

So what are our thoughts on Corsair’s SF1000L? Well, it’s a solid PSU that delivers a lot of power to small form factor systems and remains reasonably quiet under full load, which is a great achievement for a high wattage PSU of this size. This is an impressive power supply, but is has not wowed us, and to be honest, that is a good thing for a power supply. When you are buying a PSU you don’t want something exciting, you just want something that works, and Corsair’s SF1000L just works. 

Corsair’s SF1000L is a product that does what it says on the box, our testing has proved that. That may not be an exciting conclusion, but at least you can be excited at the prospect of fitting 1000 watts of components into an ITX system. That is a crazy amount of power to push into a small form factor PC, but that doesn’t mean that somebody won’t try it. You can be sure that somebody somewhere is trying to do that.

PSUs like Corsair’s SF1000L are opening up new doors for the world of mini PCs, and that is an exciting prospect. We look forward to see what the PC building masses do with this PSU, and what kinds of crazy systems it enables.

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