How damaging is the inrush current to the overall life of a power supply and can it create any collateral damage to the PC? Is there a threshold at which point damage is more likely to occur? I am looking at the Corsair RM1000i and the Corsair HX1000i. Overall the RM1000i looks like the better unit, however the inrush current in the RM1000i is over 10A higher than the HX1000i and had the 2nd highest inrush current in the 1000 watt (ish) comparison chart. I would like to go with the RM1000i, but the inrush current issue makes me nervous because I am not sure of the overall implications and don't want to fight with Corsair a couple years from now (and pay the shipping) to have a power supply repaired because of it. Any feedback is appreciated.
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Inrush current impact?
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Sadly, the ATX Form Factor guide for PSUs is a bit vague on this.
That said, I have seen other sites claim the ATX specification for inrush current must not exceed 50A at 230V and 100A at 115V but I have not seen that in any published ATX Form Factor document.
46A is higher most other monster PSUs. Do you really need that big of a PSU? Unless you are running multiple monster graphics cards, it is likely 1000W is way overkill.
That said, I have seen other sites claim the ATX specification for inrush current must not exceed 50A at 230V and 100A at 115V but I have not seen that in any published ATX Form Factor document.
46A is higher most other monster PSUs. Do you really need that big of a PSU? Unless you are running multiple monster graphics cards, it is likely 1000W is way overkill.
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Inrush current doesn't damage the PSU all that much. The problem of high inrush current is that it can trip circuit breakers.
Bill, First off thank you for your service!!
Do I need 1000 watts currently? No. The thought was to leave a little headroom for added expansion or transfer to a different rig down the road. I am currently running an older i7 w/24 GB of RAM, 2 7200 rpm hard drives (and may add an SSD down the road), will be changing to an R9 390 8GB graphics card (once I have a new PSU in place, various peripherals, and will likely upgrade my motherboard and processer down the road which will probably include the addition of a liquid cooling system at that point. May upgrade fans as well. It seems like when I ran the calculator (sans new processor and liquid cooling) it was coming in as needing just over 800 watts so I figured a should get a little more than I need so I don't have to replace it again down the road in order to upgrade. Reasonable supposition or bad plan?
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Good to know that it shouldn't thrash the PSU. This would definitely be the biggest PSU I have run. Is the 46A surge likely to be a problem?
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I wouldn't worry about inrush current damaging anything. You're buying a decent brand and it's been designed to handle it.
I'll second buildzoid that the only potential issue is to possibly trip circuit breakers, but even that isn't all that likely.
All you need to concern yourself with is to buy a decent brand and model that's had good reviews. Seasonic make some of the best PSUs out there for example, although there are other really good brands too.
I'll second buildzoid that the only potential issue is to possibly trip circuit breakers, but even that isn't all that likely.
All you need to concern yourself with is to buy a decent brand and model that's had good reviews. Seasonic make some of the best PSUs out there for example, although there are other really good brands too.
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Thanks! Much appreciated.
Still, even with the monster R9 390x, 850W would be more than enough. I only use the eXtreme PSU Calculator because I think it is the most accurate. But it still pads the results a bit.
Still, if you get a good 80 PLUS Gold, it will not matter if you go larger.
I do agree with buildzoid that the inrush current is not likely to hurt a quality PSU especially if you don't turn it on and off many times per day.