Hi all - so whilst I’m fairly convinced now at least, that the Corsair AX860i has some potential internal design fault (or extreme sensitivity), I’ve managed to get one of my systems to go from constant reboot loops to switching in a HX supply and over a week’s worth of uptime. More details of my ranting here.
I decided to bite the bullet and ordered yet another HX850i to potentially fix another box – I’ll report back my findings once it arrives (sometime after June 15th).
I’m sticking to Corsair (unfortunately) as I’ve got so many of them across multiple boxes, that I have a decent stock of their cables. If things go south in this last ditch attempt, I’ll replace with a different brand. Having the same cabling though, means I can just swap out the PSU rather than re-wiring everything…
Seasonic makes some of the corsair PSUs (not sure if they make that one).
Cables change and worse case you just repin the one end (most use standard 6 pin connectors on the psu side and you can move the pins in the connector)
A friend of mine lost his mainboard, CPU and one HDD to a Xilence PSU.
The thing went with a bang, fire and smoke. Good thing the metal was so cheap, the screws striped clean out of it when he ripped it from the case by the 24 Pin.
Personally, a SuperFlower PSU in a prebuilt killed my moms PC once. So I got some objections.
In the last 5 years I had to replace 3 BeQuiet Dark Power Pro PSUs (on 2 different machines).
Each failure involved unstable voltage. Two were on the CPU rail, which caused the PC to hard reboot at random intervals.
Another one was on the GPU rails. The GPU itself would occasionally hard reboot when under load when the voltage dipped too low. The screen would suddenly go black, turn back on and then Windows would display a message saying that the display driver crashed and recovered. That was a fun one to figure out …
The last RMA took four months. Luckily I bought a Seasonic PSU to troubleshoot that PC, so I was able to keep using the PC during that period.
BeQuiet eventually decided to give me a full refund on that PSU, which is a good thing because by then I had already permanently installed and cable managed the Seasonic and had decided to move away from BeQuiet (at least for PSUs, no complaints about their fans or coolers).
Currently my NAS and my secondary rig are still on (4 and 5 year old) BeQuiet PSUs. Those will be replaced by Seasonics when they fail or when I decide to replace or upgrade those machines.
I must be one of the few who has yet to have a personal PSU fail in over 20 years… (including various shitty “included with case” PSUs from Thermaltake, AOpen, etc. over the years).
Currently running a HX850i - its about 2 years old at this point. It did several months of GPU mining with a pair of Vega 64s, so I’d say it’s been battle tested as far as my box is concerned.
None of these home boxes have ever been on UPS or filtered power, however…
If you’re seeing repeated PSU failure, unless you can confirm that it is a design fault I’d look into a filtering UPS if you don’t already have one between your PC and the wall outlet.
Just remember that your PSU isn’t the only thing lying between the internals of your PC and the wall. I’ve always been in the habit of swapping out power cords when I get a new PSU. It was a habit formed in the late 90’s after personally seeing many of the PSU’s returned to a parts wholesaler I worked for at the time work fine on my bench. And it would do the same for the customer as soon as they used the replacement power cord I gave them… There were some seriously sketchy power cords bundled with those PSU’s manufactured overseas…
And most recently I got reminded of another potential culprit - surge protector. Especially one that has been lying around for a good many years. At first I was having just random intermittent issues with a PC and in the end, after adding more hardware (aka more load), it got stuck in a endless reboot cycle. I started troubleshooting and in the end nothing worked until the idea struck me and I plugged the machine directly into the wall. Solid. No reboots. I felt rather silly for ignoring something so basic, but honestly I haven’t had a power problem in some time.
Might not be the problem here but something to keep in the back of your mind.
Quick update - I cancelled the HX750 order and instead ordered an EVGA P2 750W; it’s a bit of work removing all the existing wiring but fingers crossed on this end…
Only by shipping company error, early last year i ordered an EVGA 750B3 for my system, somehow the shipping company damaged it so badly they didn’t even show it to me, they just called me to give notice and said the store would e-mail me some options later.
And that’s how i got my Thermaltake Toughpower Grand Gold 650w RGB (obnoxiously large name :V).
As for catastrophic failures, never had one myself, i’ve only changed burnt or dead PSU on friend’s and client’s computers, most of the time i had previously warned the owners of possible failure in the future.
Sounds like the type of thing you’d have more than one machine connected to and assuming this is the only problem child I guess you can probably cross that off the list. Hmmm… I just checked your original post, my next go to would be the MB. Especially if you had a bad PSU, it might have been damaged. Before that you could always try the easier stuff. If you haven’t already start removing anything non-essential to the boot process… which might not be much so ymmv. Wait, you have multiple boxes that aren’t running? You sure it’s not your UPS?
Also rewiring things is a good thing (even if it is a pain) as internal cables can go bad as well.
The EVGA P2 750W arrived today; I removed the AX860i and the only cables used for the EVGA PSU are
Mobo 24pin molex
CPU 8-pin
SATA - single cable
That’s it… and the system is working again!!
To summarize - the AX860i I had in the i9-7920X box also presented similar instability (different room, smaller APC UPS); replaced with a 2-year old HX1000W - been running rock solid for over 9-days now.
EVGA P2 750W on the 6700K/Maximus Formula VIII - running fine now.
This is totally triggering my O_O > at Corsair’s AX line up now.
Ah, I see now. I wasn’t clear on some of the details like the 2nd machine. Well it’s good that it was fixed. Assuming the corsair PSU are out of warranty (you likely wouldn’t want the replacement even if you could RMA it) I would be tempted to crack open their cases to see if any of their caps were leaking or burst. Now that I think of it I recently replaced a corsair PSU on a machine I was troubleshooting with an EVGA PSU. It didn’t fix the problem, or rather the problem changed at that point, and in the end it ended up being my power strip (hence my Bias against old strips). Now I kinda want to pop open the Corsair I replaced… perhaps I was working with two points of failure. Not that I can really totally blame the Corsair in that case, but it will be something I keep in mind the next time I have PSU issues as I have quite a few machines with Corsair… /shrug. Well bias is bias. We shall see. It’s not like Corsair PSU are the only brand I’ve ever had die.
Got one Corsair branded PSU that hasn’t given me any problems, everything else I own is Seasonic. Minus the stuff that can be found in the prebuilts around here. On the other hand one of the people I play with regularly went through 3 of the same Rosewill before they switched to Seasonic, and another that had One of their EVGA’s go SuperNova but they didn’t have problems with the replacement that I have heard of. Only problem I have had with Seasonic is the fans in them are prone to dying but I just swap in a better fan when I get one anyways.
I pretty much only get Titanium or Platinum now as many companies will replace your whole PC if it kills it and 7-12 year warranties are nice.
Though my 386’s PSU finally died last year, but what ever it was over 30 years old.
oO Surely this wasn’t a machine that was in service 24/7? And here I was impressed that an old celeron dual processor “server” I built back in the day was in service for 15 years before they finally retired it.
Bonus points if that 386 ran at 40mhz.
That reminds me of those old pre-ATX PSU. Was always fun attaching/removing those four wires to the power switch. I might have gotten zapped once or twice when I wasn’t paying attention and tried to remove them on a running machine. Now that I think about it was active cooling (fans) even used on the 386? Don’t honestly remember as I was a kid and only ever had two 386 processors.
