It should go without saying, but bears repeating, that you should never… ever crack open a PSU. Especially one that has been energized. Without warning… it can… it will… hell… it wants to out of sheer spite kill you. So please. Don’t do it. Don’t win yourself a Darwin Award. Seriously. There is zero good reason for the end-user to crack open a power supply. If the magic smoke escaped and it’s in warranty… RMA it instead of killing the warranty. If it is not in warranty, yank, yeet, and replace.
With that public service announcement / our good deed for the decade taken care of, you can see that we are not smart. We are not even “smart”. We did take it apart. MSI makes it rather easy to do so as all there is between you and sudden death is some plain old Philips screws… and one security sticker. We would have preferred to have seen at least a security torx screw (or three) but it is what it is. With ~8 billion people, maybe a couple less ‘here hold my beer’ non-electrician electricians running around is a ‘good’ thing. It is something though that MSI might want to tighten up a wee bit and use a security screw, maybe even a Triwing or Pentalobe “tamper resistant” security screw, for the safety of their FloridaMan customers? Food for thought at least.
Either way, with our cold, frosty beverage of choice securely held by a friend, we can see that MSI has opted for one clean-looking PSU. This is no wish.com power supply, and rather has been spec’ed and built to a rather high standard. Albeit with a few corners rounded.
The most obvious rounding is the chassis itself. Quite honestly, if there is an area that MSI can improve with little complaint from us, it is in the thickness of the chassis. No one really cares if the PSU can stop incoming rifle fire. No one cares beyond it being thick enough and robust enough to take a bang or three during installation. Nothing more, nothing less.
Thus, seeing 22 gauge (though arguably 20’ish due to nominal tolerance of cold roll) steel used for the top half of the shell (aka the fan grill portion), and…
18’ish gauge for the important portion of the chassis (aka the C shell portion that has to take the weight of the internals)… is decent. Not great, especially the top half, but not terrible. This really should have been 16-gauge for both halves, but it does help keep the weight down and the cost. Since this is not a premium-classed PSU, we can let this slide as it is ‘good enough’.
Especially when the internals are this nice with even the solder job damn near perfect… and the components chosen all being top notch (for its class).
Taking a closer look, it is readily apparent that this is a custom Channel Well Technologies ODM power supply. ‘CWT’ makes very good, high-quality (by mainstream standards) kit. Arguably not the absolute best of the best of the best, but still rather good. Especially in the hybrid / “semi-digital” corner, which they pretty much lead the market in these days… and you either deal with them or you are probably dealing with a lower quality OEM/ODM.
We say this all because CWT does not ‘do’ black PCBs unless you ask them (and pay extra for it), and yet that is what is being used inside this A1000GS PSU. The same is true for the solder and neatness. Yes. CWT can deliver pure bliss from a QA/QC perspective (as proven by the fact they have done it here)… but you have to keep a tight leash on them. They will do a “Monday Build” if you don’t randomly do QA/QC on top of their supposedly QA/QC ‘passed’ products. Needless to say, yes… MSI is keeping a close watch on CWT for any ‘oopsies’ that they like to occasionally try and fob off as “Best Quality”.
As to the specifics, this PSU is based on CWT’s latest ‘CTE’ version 2 platform. In layman’s terms, this is the slightly tweaked version of the CTE platform that replaced the “CSZ” platform. A platform used in the previous A1000G generation (and numerous other PSUs). Basically, the CSZ platform was CWT’s first ‘generation’ ATX 3.x compliant semi-digital platform, and the CTE v1 was an upgraded / “generation 2″ CSZ… and this v2 is basically an upgraded CSZ with a better digital power factor correction and Load Line Calibration controller baked in. Put bluntly, the ‘Champion” CM6500 (even when backstopped by its CM03X partner) controller used in the previous A1000G series gets taken out back and beaten by the newer MPS’ “all in one” HR1280 that the v2 CTE makes use of. The differences are large and their abilities are not even close (unless you realllly know what you are doing and for whatever reason want to work around the older tech’s limitations).
This controller, and the various other upgraded internal component’s, is why MSI can advertised the a A1000GS having a “235percent power excursion”… AKA if your fancy new NVIDIA RTX 50-class video decides to randomly “spike” a load well above what it should be pulling, this PSU can handle it up to 235 percent of the total rated power draw. Kinda-sorta. It is actually three hundred percent on the GPU portion, and ‘merely’ 235% on the rest of the PC side of the equation. Which is great. Modern CPUs do like to randomly ‘spike’, and so too does every mechanical component in a system upon startup. Typically, 2 to 3 times rated power draw. Which semi-digital PSU can handle.
It is just unfortunate that this 3X on the GPU side was not paired with… 3x thickness wires that can handle 3x the power over one pair of wires (which sadly can happen with certain high-end GPUs). Make no mistake, these two 12v-2×6 cables are sweet. Arguably, some of the best you can buy as they combine a built-in color-coded “go/no-go” gauge on each end of the cable, but also are double-coated. They just still are using 18-gauge wires, and the first PSU maker to use a high enough (American) wire gauge to handle all the potential amperage over just 2 of them… will ‘win’ the hearts and minds of enthusiasts. Considering the cost of wire for a cable or two is not that significant (typically only about 2 to 3x per foot of 18AWG at the wholesale level) MSI might want to think long and hard about such an upgrade in their 3rd gen A1000Gx series’ 12v-2×6 cables… or whatever the next gen NVIDIA cable gets called when this design gets EOL’ed.
Counteracting this missed opportunity, to some extent, is the fact that the double coating is very nice. Each wire gets its protective coating from the ODM’s wire source, then CWT dips it a second time. The end result is a pebbly, highly grippy “premium” looking cable. One that combines the best of both worlds: light diffusing/dulling “flat black” look with supreme flexibility (and heat resistance) that flat wires cannot match.
Of course, the downside to premium individual cabling is that it can get ‘messy’ looking fast. Thankfully, MSI included multiple cable combs on each cable. Meaning you can get the bend juuuuuuuust right and not have it look like a bulldog’s bollocks… or worse a rats nest of cables. Alternatively, you can ensure you have above the minimum bend radius by simply sliding the comb on the 12v-2×6’s cable to ensure it meets safety standards.
Circling back to the internals, this latest generation CWT platform does come with some very noice upgrades on the protection end of things. The new MPG A1000GS comes with all (six of) the protection features of its predecessor but then adds in Surge and Inrush Protection (SIP) as well as No-Load Operation (NLO). Bring the total to eight… of the eight major protective features one should demand in any new PSU. Lacking these two features nuked the A1000G series from serious consideration for many experienced buyers (including ourselves). Needless to say, it is nice to see MSI step up and start taking the PSU corner of their business seriously, and not relying so heavily on their ODM for recommendations… which is kind of like ordering the about to spoil “fish of the day special” recommendation at a restaurant just based on the waiters recommendation!
(Photo Courtesy of onelectrontech.com)
So what do these two additional features do? SIP is a fancy way of saying a lightning strike’s “spike” (i.e. a massive spike of power coming from the mains wall plug in your house) will never reach your PC components. The MPG A1000GS will take the spike… and probably die. Sooo it is good peace of mind, but you really should have your PC on a UPS (or at least “surge protector” which for 15 bucks will take most of the spike for the team… instead of your new PSU).
NLO is a fancy way of saying that it will not lose its mind if it is in the power-on state, but with (as the name suggests) no load placed upon it. Older non-digital’s could get squirrelly from time to time when those rare events happen and have been known (if only at once in a blue moon intervals) to kill systems out of sheer boredom.
Before we go over the other six, you have probably heard the terms “DC to DC”, “semi-digital”, “all digital”, “rails” thrown around a lot when it comes to PSUs… but may have been too afraid to ask what they mean. In a nutshell, DC-DC is the polite way of saying the cheapest possible way to make a PSU. A more charitable interpretation is that it is using older tech where there no controller handling real-time Load Line Calibrations and Power Factor Calibrations. Instead, you got… “wavy” (on a o-scope) or loosy-goosy DC power outputs that surfed the wave of the AC 120V’s actual voltage at any given time and kinda-sorta changed it into 3.3/5/12v DC via filters, rectifiers, bridges, and a bunch of other low-level wizard (e.g. tigers blood, blood of a virgin, magic smoke, favor of the dark/chaos gods… etc. etc.). Thus, bottom of the barrel and really should not be used in any mainstream system build this side of Y2K is what ‘DC-DC’ infers.
The extreme opposite is the case with an “all digital” based PSU. Here each stage (aka primary / AC to high DC and secondary… high DC to precise DC) are covered by a controller that is actively monitoring and… tweaking the output based upon real-time load demand, the actual voltage of the AC coming in, and making sure that that the “rails” (aka DC voltage lines e.g. 3.3v, 5V, 12v) are all as close to spec as they can be at in a given time slice. This takes a lot of extra components to do properly and is thus the Gol… err… Platn… err Titanium standard of PSUs.
Semi-digital solves the problem of line ripple that invariably comes with non-digital “DC to DC” power supplies, and yet also solves the whole ‘firstborn’ asking price problem of all-digital PSUs. It does this by having the primary stage filtering be monitored by a digital controller (and using power phases – chokes/fets/cap/etc) to help smooth things out. However, by ignoring some to all of the secondary, it keeps prices in check. Put another way, the power output is “good enough” for those who don’t want to spend a ton of money for their 1000w PSU but still do not want to use trash tier either. Or to put it into MSI terms… the semi-digital middle path is the MPG of their world. One where the VRMs are not covering everything, but in return, you get a good Gold-class 1000-watt PSU that does not cost all that much more than a ‘DC-DC’ power supply.
In this instance, you could go as far as saying the A1000GS 1000W is the MSI MPG Carbon of their PSU lineup. One where MSI has packed in as many features as they can, but at the end of the day, if you want truly premium MSI gear expect to step up to the MEG line… and it’s steep increase in asking price. For most builds, this middle path approach is perfectly fine. You can get safe, stable power, and no modern piece of PC electronics is going to pitch a fit over. Yet, it will also not cost you a significant portion of your build’s budget. Just a good chunk. Which is fine as these next-gen hybrid PSUs come with ripple so low that it is as good as many earlier generation ‘all digital’ PSUs.
