“Of particular interest to us is just how quiet and
resilient this PSU is to any shenanigans that may
happen while it powers our test machine.”
which is capable of matching
the AX1500i. That aside, the
praise should truly be given to
CORSAIR and its engineers for
having designed such a solid
unit that has according to the
tests surpassed every other
enthusiast class PSU before.
Even more staggering is that
this unit provides the rated
1500W from a 110VAC, where
others would stipulate that this
is only possible from a 220VAC.
Do keep in mind however that
if you’re in a region where your
wall socket only provides 100V,
you’ll be capped at a maximum
power draw of 1,300Watts
instead. It’s a little down but it’s
still plenty of juice to draw from
indeed and if you need more,
well then go ahead and get a
second unit. Just for the sake
of illustrating how much power
you can draw from this PSU, its
single 125A 12V+ rail is rated to
provided up to 1,500W. Not only
is that unmatched by any other
PSU we know of, we simply had
no idea that was even possible to
begin with.
You should truly be familiar
with the TITANIUM rating this
unit has, but what blew us away
was to see that this PSU is over
90% efficient when delivering
over 1,600W of power. That’s
right, delivering more than its
rated output, it still manages to
meet and exceed the Titanium
standard. This standard
stipulates amongst many things
that a PSU should maintain a
90% efficacy level at 100% load.
The AX1500i managed to do with
a 1622W load and you can read
about it here.
At the time of writing, only a
couple of PSUs were officially
Titanium rated according
to the 80Plus standards
organisation and the AX1500i
is one of them. The other is a
600Watt unit; clearly the beast
is in a class of its own.
Of particular interest to us
is just how quiet and resilient
this PSU is to any shenanigans
that may happen while it powers
our test machine. During a
more recent testing session,
in particular during a 3DMark
FireStrike Extreme run, we
experienced a sever power
surge where everything turned
off briefly, from lights, to
refrigerators and the likes. If it
was plugged into a wall, it went
off. Everything suffered
from this apart from the
machine that was plugged into
the AX1500i. It kept chugging
along without skipping a beat.
The only effect this surge had
on the unit was causing the fan
to spin up again for a moment.
Other than that, the benchmark
finished as it should and our
hardware was saved from any
damage, including the PSU
itself. That hold up time, is
real and not just in a strict lab
environment.
Further elaborating on the
fan, it turns out that it will not
spin up unless it is deemed
necessary by the various
sensors within the unit. In our
own testing, with a Core i7 4960X
and a 4790K, both overclocked
and each powering a GTX 780Ti,
the fan was never in use at all.
We just couldn’t load it enough
to warrant this until we added
more GPUs to the system. Short
of that, there was no overclock
on either the GPU or CPU we
could attain using air cooling
that would stress the PSU
enough. So as far as noise levels
are concerned, the AX1500i is
as good as it gets. Obviously
under some extreme loads it
would become very loud, but we
can’t comment on those loads
because we did not subject the
PSU to such.
What of the CORSAIR Link
software then, well we’ve never
been fans of this software. It
isn’t as accurate as we would
like and this is easily verified
with a decent DMM, however
it does give you a general idea
of how the PSU is performing,
which is obviously better than
nothing at all. From here you
can also control OCP which is
necessary for those running the
Radeon 295X2 or perhaps even
multiple TITAN-Z cards. You can
disable OCP all together which
would help in your extreme
ove ɍ