Cooler Master Helps with the Haswell Power Supply Mystery

There has been a lot of talk about PSU compatibility for Intel’s upcoming 4^th Generation Core Processors (code named Haswell). We have observed a large amount of misinformation being spread. We would like to clarify the situation to calm and reassure our customers and partners that they will be able to upgrade safely. A full list of Cooler Master power supplies is listed here. Below are some quick facts that the public should be aware.

l   Most power supplies don’t support Haswell – False

l   I need a Haswell certified power supply to build a Haswell system – False

l   Haswell only works with DC-DC Power Supplies – False

l   Haswell only works with 80+ Gold and better Power Supplies – False

l   Haswell requires a second 12V rail and doesn’t work with single rail Power Supplies – False

l   On some older power supplies, Haswell consumes 5W more in idle mode – True

Among other improvements of Intels latest Core Processors, power consumption in idle mode has been greatly reduced from around 6W to less than 1W. This might cause some older power supplies to shut the system off when the CPU enters idle mode, or prevent the system from waking up out of sleep mode. To our knowledge all mainboard vendors will disable this advanced power saving mode by default, and no customer upgrading to Haswell should experience any issues whatsoever.

Should customers experience problems nevertheless, or would like to enable the advanced power saving mode on older power supplies that might not support it, there is a simple fix. Simply adding a single silent case fan to the system, connected to the power supply, should provide enough additional load to keep the system running in advanced power saving mode.

The only disadvantage would be that power savings in idle mode on such a system would only surmount to around 2-3W instead of ~5W.

 * indicates model only available in selected regions