Corsair CX430 Builder Series 430W Power Supply Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,155 words · ~5 min read
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today we're going to be unboxing a power supply from Corsair's Builder series
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which I have never had a look at in the past this is the CX 430 and by Builder
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series what I'm assuming they mean is that it is ideal for building a system
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around it okay so there it's a no no frills no gimmicks just straight this is
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a decent power supply go ahead and use it to power a system that you need to
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run for a long time sort of approach to things so let's see what Corsair has to
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say for themselves on the back it is ideal for Home and Office use okay and
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WorryFree compatibility for your home desktop for your upgrading all that good
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stuff quick start guide Builder series with more than 15 years of building in
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it's a single rail power supply which is pretty nice to see uh because at the 430
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WT range you do send tend to start seeing uh dual rail power supplies now
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while I'm not a huge fan of a single rail power supply all the way up until
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like the the kilowatt ranges I do like to see single wat power supplies on the
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low-end units and the reason for that is because a low-end unit with two split
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12vt rails with a very low overall
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rating on the 12 volts overall low
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overall rating on overall yeah with a low overall rating on the 12vt rails as
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soon as you split them you're going to run into trouble where if you have even
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like a decent graphics card or you want to put like a high-end graphics card in
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it even though the 400 30 wat would be enough to power it sometimes you might
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run into trouble where one of the Rails is getting overloaded so that was a long
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and drawn out way of saying I'm really glad to see it has a single 12v
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rail in here we find some quick start guidish type stuff and that's pretty
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much it and then yeah yeah this is pretty much No Frills although they do
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include sleeve cables which is really nice to see on a value unit like this
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we've got a power cord we've got some do not eat presumably some screws y we've
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got screws and even some zip ties so four screws to fix to the case zip ties
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as well as a powered by Corsair sticker in there so that's pretty nice and then
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here we'll untether the cables and find out exactly what kind of connections we
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have because if you're talking about a power supply that's just kind of for
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your value Builder they're going to be concerned with things like well exactly
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what can I hook up to this thing as you can see right away it's
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quite small so even though it does have 120 mm fan it still it still even looks
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kind of like like it looks even more huge than normal on this particular unit
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because it's actually uh shorter than it is wide most power supplies are sort of
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more Square so you can see right here the warranty is void if you remove this
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sticker and open up the casing you should never open up a power supply unless you are a qualified professional
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here we see some Corsair branding on the side the general specs of the PSU itself
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are here so we've got 28 amps on the single 12vt rail it's it's capable of
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providing 336 watts of the overall 430
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Watts that this power supply can support now you see high-end systems or high-end
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power supplies that really lean heavily towards the 12volt rail where they'll be
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able to provide almost their entire power through the 12volt rail that kind
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of thing is not really necessary on a low-end PSU like this because you're not
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going to be running high-end graphics cards which are really the ones that
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suck up a lot of 12vt juice so on the back we find a power switch as well as a
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power plug you you can see inside some of the coils some of the heat sinks all
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of that good stuff actually if I flip it over this way you'll be able to see
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inside a lot better yeah that's way better okay so
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let's have a look at what connectors we have on this guy first of all we have
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your Standard 24 pin power connector we do have a breakaway four pin here so you
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can plug it into a 20 pin board whether you're using an ITX board or an older
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board cuz that's really what this is targeted at if you have an older system
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you need to replace the power supply you want something good reliable you go with
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something something like this here is a yes success we have a 4
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plus 4 pin so that's an eight pin or a four pin power connector for the
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motherboard and then we have a single PCI Express and this is kind of nice to
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see look at that we've got a PCI Express 6 plus 2 so not only can you power a
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single mid-range graphics card if they ever do change the standard to a single
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8 Pin on on like mid-range graphics cards we're going to be ready for that
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as well now in terms of of other connectors we've got aha so we have
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three Molex four pins as well as one floppy connector and then on two
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separate cables and this is smart because most of the time when you're building a new system you're going to
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have your optical drive somewhere and then your hard drives like kind of
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somewhere else so this allows you to plug in two Optical Drives together and
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then two hard drives together which is really on like a 430 W powered system
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going to be pretty much all you're going to see so thank you for checking out my
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unboxing of the CX 430 don't forget to
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subscribe to lonus Tech tips and that's
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it this whole time I was trying to find the warranty for the thing because uh I
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mean Corsair's big thing with their power supplies is they're super reliable
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they have their legendary customer and Technical Support which I can personally
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vouch for because I have used it anyway this particular unit unlike the high-end
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units which carry five and even 7-year warranties has a 2year warranty so that
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was just something I wanted to add