The Unit

The CoolerMaster M1000 is a rather impressive unit right out of its box. It weights a few kg more than other 1kW units which we have reviewed in the past. The black chrome chassis is highly reflective, but although it is impressive it is also very prone to fingertip marks and scratches easily. It does make the unit very nice to look at, but you should handle it with care. Only three cables are pre-attached (or native as CoolerMaster calls them), the 24-pin ATX cable, a 4-pin 12V CPU cable and an 8-pin 12V CPU cable (you have to use the right one for your system). The 24-pin ATX cable is not backwards compatible with 20-pin ATX motherboards as you cannot detach the last 4 pins from it, but you wouldn’t buy a 1kW unit to power your old Pentium 3 system now would you?

The front of the unit is dominated by the ten connectors for the modular cables. The connectors are color coded and the sticker above them clearly indicates the use of every connector. The sides of the unit are clean, except for the right side which contains a large sticker with the specifications of the unit. The unit is cooled by a massive 135mm fan placed at its bottom. CoolerMaster went with a typical black fan without LEDs, which is a good thing for modders who want to choose the color of the lights in their system by themselves. There is nothing noteworthy at the rear of the unit besides a simple LED which is red while the unit is off and green when it is running. There is no on/off switch, which is a shame really, especially for a unit of this class.

Opening the unit revealed an interesting and well thought out design. The heatsinks are not very large but appear to be more than adequate as they are cooled by a 135mm fan. The design of the circuits is well thought out, with EMI suppression rings present, high quality capacitors used, thicker cables at the powerful 12V line outputs and so on. A lot of care was taken when designing the M1000 and it shows.