Cables and Connectors


*Please note that Corsair has informed us they will send you free of charge (not including shipping) additional modular 6-pin cables if you wish to replace the native 8-pin connectors.

Corsair really hit the proverbial nail on the head with the cable lengths and number of connectors that the HX1000W has on tap. The shear number of connectors will leave many a customer weak in the knees with six PCI-E connectors (of which two are native 8-pin and two are 6+2 pin), ten Molex and another ten SATA connectors and to top this all off, there are a pair of EPS12V 8-pin CPU connectors (both of which have a 4+4 pin layout) for anyone using a dual-CPU system.

So, what more could you possibly want? How about obscenely long cable lengths? At nearly two feet long, the main ATX cable is like a dream come true and the CPU connector is able to reach even further than that (24 ” to be exact). All of the PCI-E cables are also long enough to get the job done in any case on the market. Finally, while having 10 Molex connectors may seem to be a bit of overkill to most of you, their layout is absolutely brilliant with two of the cables being significantly shorter so you don’t have to use one long cable to reach your top-mounted drives. For those of you who have cases with bottom-mounted power supply locations, Corsair hooks you up with suitably long Molex cables as well so you have no reason to panic. All right, enough with the gushing…on to business.


While most of the cables on the HX1000W are modular, one CPU connector, a pair of 6+2 pin PCI-E connectors and the main ATX connector are all non-modular. Since these are the cables you are most likely to use, it is perfectly fine with us that they fixed in place.


The sleeving on all of the cables attached to the power supply is absolutely perfect; it is not tight enough to hamper bending them to fit into every corner of your case but not loose enough to look cheap.


Here we have the entire family of modular cables and let me tell you, there are a lot of them. As you can see, Corsair went a bit different route with these cables than we are used to seeing with most power supplies since they have used the flat “Flex Force” cables we are used to seeing on ye olde Ultra power supplies. In addition, all of the PCI-E cables along with the lone 8-pin CPU connector are color-coded blue so people won’t get their places on the modular interface mixed up.


While the flat cables have many die-hard fans due to how easily they can be routed through your case, there is one issue that needs to be brought up: the way they are handled on the PCI-E connectors. While each of the Molex and SATA cables has a quartet of wires bundled together, the 6-pin PCI-E connectors get six wires which are bundled into two bundles of three wires each. Personally, I think this looks unfinished and downright ugly and I would have much rather seen these types of cables used exclusively for the Molex and SATA cables.

Each PCI-E connector also gets a filter (also called a bead core) much like we see on some Topower builds but in the HX1000W’s case; these filters are blissfully small compared to those seen on power supplies from Tagan, Mushkin and others. Whereas the flat cables are supposed to make cable routing easier, the filters are just a royal pain in the butt to fit through smaller spaces. Luckily they are not much wider than the connectors so they should only prove to be a minor hindrance in most situations.