Reviews - Corsair AX860i Digital ATX Power Supply

[HEXUS]

Would you pay a premium for performance excellence?

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[aidanjt]

Produce a 400W version for us sane people, -£100, and then yes. I'd pay the premium.

[Clydonian]

I love my ax1200i, I may get one of these babybirds when I upgrade my htpc after Christmas...on the note of upgrades has anyone upgraded to win8 and made use of the windows media centre, any difference to the win7 version?

[Gareth - ASUS]

Produce a 400W version for us sane people, -£100, and then yes. I'd pay the premium.

I'd be interested to know if there's support for this (i.e. a low wattage Platinum unit, with or without the DSP). The benefits of the extra efficiency would diminish at lower loads, or is it simply a case of wanting the performance/features, efficiency aside?

[aidanjt]

I'd be interested to know if there's support for this (i.e. a low wattage Platinum unit, with or without the DSP).

I can't speak for everyone, but I think it would be worth looking into. I can't imagine the 'modest desktop/gamer' market to be small by any means. And certainly there's no shortage of people looking for high efficiency units for low powered boxes to power their ITX rigs, servers, HTPCs, etc. I'd humbly leave it to your market research bods to figure out how warmly it'd be received.

The benefits of the extra efficiency would diminish at lower loads, or is it simply a case of wanting the performance/features, efficiency aside?

A bit of both, but less of the former and more of the latter. I mean most machines realistically really don't draw more than ~300W. I've never had more than 1 mid-high-range GPU and really not interested in overclocking, haven't been since the Core 2 Duo days. But I would be interested in a high quality, high efficiency, clean power PSU. It doesn't really make any sense for me to splash out £175 for a 860W when I don't use half that at full load with CPU and GPU burners, stacked out with drives etc, and likely wont unless I win the lottery or something and go a little nutty with a silly high-end SLi rig. So for me at least it's a value/utility proposition thing, and a ~£75/~450W unit would make a heap of sense.

But I really like the look of the AX series, you've turned out another fantastic PSU series. Bravo.

[jim]

I'd be interested to know if there's support for this (i.e. a low wattage Platinum unit, with or without the DSP). The benefits of the extra efficiency would diminish at lower loads, or is it simply a case of wanting the performance/features, efficiency aside?

I don't need one imminently, but yes, definitely. I don't think I would want more than 500W, it's just wasted money on capacity I'm never going to need. As much as I like these digital PSUs, there's no way I'd fork out for 760W. I had an HX520, and currently use an AX650, but even that's a bit much.

If we're buying a quality PSU like Corsair make, we won't need to buy an 800W PSU to power 300W of kit - the 400W will properly handle it.

[Noli]

I have an Corsair HX620 and I agree with snootyjim and aidanjt. This is probably a bit more than I need for my Q6600 and 5850 (although I hope it will tide me over for an upgrade to core i5 and 79XX / GTX 6XX one day). Now that CPUs are hugely more efficient - and GPUs too - a single mid/high GPU must represent the main case scenario for PSU manufacturers to consider such that I would have thought the 400W - 600W range to be the main battle ground. 1200W is insane.

[kalniel]

I'd be interested to know if there's support for this (i.e. a low wattage Platinum unit, with or without the DSP). The benefits of the extra efficiency would diminish at lower loads, or is it simply a case of wanting the performance/features, efficiency aside?

From me, yes. I know in absolute terms the benefit from increased efficiency is reduced at lower wattage, but you only have to look at the efforts to reduce power consumption on other items like RAM and storage to see that people recognise that every little saving helps - less power usage, less heat generation, less cooling required.. it's a win all around.

Other reasons I'd be interested are the fan-switch off, and hopefully higher quality components - I'm thinking of fan durability as well.

Like the others have mentioned, despite being a gamer and overclocker I don't need anything like the high wattage that the current premium models are targeted at. We stopped thinking that higher numbers were better back in Pentium 4 days..

[TheGhostToast]

I'd be interested to know if there's support for this (i.e. a low wattage Platinum unit, with or without the DSP). The benefits of the extra efficiency would diminish at lower loads, or is it simply a case of wanting the performance/features, efficiency aside?

I'm definitely with the consensus in this thread. Unfortunately most PSUs at the lower end of the wattage spectrum are also lower quality and it would be nice to have a high quality PSU with some of the more advanced features we're seeing in the newer products. Although I think I'd prefer 500w over a 400w just to have a little more head room.