Review on Corsair AXi Series, AX1600i, 1600W, 80 Plus Titanium Certified, Fully Modular - Digital Power Supply (CP-9020087-NA) by Lance Levatte

I built a system with this PSU in 2016 and now believe it was the culprit of the motherboard frying. From day one it had an odd performance when there were issues and the system also occasionally 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 this problem showing up from the start because I was researching the problem and thinking the problem be that BIOS C-states have to be deactivated. 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. When I realized that the old 2011v3 CPU wouldn't fit in the socket of today's most popular 1151 motherboards, I had to buy a new board and CPU. Well, when I put it back together, the computer worked, but it seemed like I'd gone back to when I first finished building it, with weird power issues and an unwillingness to go after a Windows reset or a reset minor BIOS change 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 has 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 level with minimal requirements was unknowingly defective from the start and ended up ruining my system.