Review on Corsair AX Series by Kevin Staniszewski

I assembled the system in 2016 with this power supply and now I think that it is to blame for the frying of the motherboard. From day one it had a weird performance when there were issues and the system also sometimes lost performance, sometimes during use, sometimes not. I never knew what the problem was or how to reproduce it, but instability has always plagued this essential workstation computer. Given the CPU and single GPU I installed, I probably didn't need a power supply larger than 500-600W. I particularly remember having this problem from the start because I was researching the issue and thought that the problem was that the BIOS C-states had to be disabled. That seemed to help for a while. Fast forward 3 years and now when the computer turns itself off, sometimes it turns back on and sometimes does nothing when the power button is pressed. Usually after turning it off I couldn't turn it back on until the next day when it started working again. I've noticed that if I unplug the monitors/auxiliary USB it works again, but a few months of that and then even this trick didn't work. Eventually, the computer would do nothing for days when the power button was pressed. After realizing that the old 2011v3 CPU would not fit in the socket of most 1151 motherboards out there today, I had to buy a new board and CPU. Well when I put it back together the computer worked but it seemed like I went back to when I first finished building it with weird power issues and after a windows reset or minor bios change reset didn't want to start. . It clicked (with the mobo backlit) as if to turn on, pause, and click again, and I think it will do so indefinitely, but I manually pressed the power button on the PSU to kill it. Pressing the power button again did nothing. But after 20 minutes it worked again. I've also noticed that when I press the fan test button on the PSU (which always worked btw) and then boot the system, it boots up. Seeing similar power supply issues, I didn't want to ruin my new hardware, so I bought a new power supply hoping it would fix the problem. Since I installed the new EVGA PSU all power issues are gone and the system runs like never before. Again this problem was noticed to a small extent from day one and lasted almost 4 years until the mobo completely failed when the power supply was still good enough to run the new hardware (with problems). This issue was hard to track down, but I feel like I've finally figured it out. It's outrageous that a PSU of this tier with minimal requirements was unknowingly defective from the start and ended up ruining my system.