Corsair AX1600i Titanium – The Ultimate Enthusiast PSU?

Peter Donnell / 7 years ago

Final Thoughts

Pricing

Tthe AX1600i is not cheap, clocking in at a wallet-busting $499.99. However, that’s not a huge leap from the AX1500i which is $449.99. The AX760i, AX860i, and AX1200i will all be $209, $229, and $349 respectively.

Conclusion

Corsair has absolutely gone to the next level with the design of their latest power supply. Of course, it’s complete overkill for almost any typical system build, and only the truly extreme end of the market need apply. However, there’s certainly a big market for big power and incredible efficiency, and I can see these quickly becoming the PSU of choice for many enthusiasts.

Innovations

Packing in all of the latest innovations, such as the use of Gallium Nitride for lower resistance and faster switching is a big one. Overall, their new totem-pole PFC circuit design is a fantastic improvement on their previous generations. Of course, their previous generations of AX power supplies are still some of the best in the world too.

The form factor of this unit is staggering. Just a few years ago, a 1600W unit would be a lot bigger, and while it’s not exactly small, it’s still impressively compact given the range of power, efficiency, and connectivity that it delivers.

Zero RPM fans are awesome, but this PSU is capable of running up to 50% before the fans kick in (25c ambient temperature.) That’s pretty amazing, and you can draw around 800W passively in a warm room. Even at 100% the fan slacks around at just 1200 RPM, which is virtually silent.

What To Do With All That Power!?

If you’re building a huge rendering rig with banks of storage and CUDA cards, then the AX1600i is an absolute dream come true. Of course, there are many other applications for such a powerful unit, but the main one that springs to my mind is Crypto Currency mining rigs. Here you can see a spare system I had running as our GPU test bench and for crypto mining research. Its running two CPUs, and two motherboards, as the PSUs can only do so much heavy lifting and this had to be split. However, with something like the AX1600i, that compromise no longer needs to be made, and with PCIe riser cards, it could easily run 6 x VEGA 64 GPUs with room to spare for system overhead.

More to Come

Unfortunately, our Sunmoon load tester had a few issues with this unit. The PSU cable wasn’t compatible with our load tester cables, and even if it were, we could only hit 80% load before the load tester shut down, as the PSU is just too damn powerful. That tells me more than I could ever prove with testing. However, once we have the right cable to hook it to our load tester, we’ll be pushing some benchmarks to prove its efficiency. Failing that, maybe an epic mining rig build would show you what it can really do?