Corsair ax850 titanium review in Spanish (complete analysis)

In Corsair's high-end catalog, we can distinguish various ranges of power supplies. Two of the best known are the AXi and AX, which, although they have a very similar name, are totally different both in their manufacturer and in their characteristics. Today we analyze the latter, the AX, which just a few weeks ago was renewed after years without doing so.

The AX was in recent years the only model of the brand manufactured by Seasonic. In the new 2019 AX, this is still the case, but with major renovations: the one that stands out the most is its 80 Plus Titanium certification, joining the AX1500i and AX1600i as the only ranges with this certificate. Are you intrigued about the details of the AX850? Let's go see them!

We thank Corsair for the trust placed in sending this source for analysis.

Technical Specifications Corsair AX850 Titanium

External analysis

The box follows the brand's own design, with no major surprises beyond the characteristics shown: the 80 Plus Titanium certification stands out , the highest that currently exists, and the 10-year warranty.

The back of the box shows more specifications, one of them concerns the semi-passive mode: when it is activated, the fan does not work until the 340W load.

When we open the box we can see excellent packaging protection, as expected. On top of the foam sandwich that protects the fountain we have a cardboard box with 3 very interesting things that you will see now?

This box includes 3 magnetic stickers with the model's model name, in white, blue and red, in order to customize it to our liking. Although it seems silly, it is very good so that we can place the source in the position that we want, with the color that best comes to our build, and in case the source is covered and we want to show it off, we put it in the box and ready.

We now move to the outside of our protagonist, finding a quite new design line in Corsair, especially in the part of the fan grill.

The information label of the source is no longer at the top to now be located on the side, which in any case we can cover thanks to the stickers we have talked about.

Here we can see the magnetic tags in action. Certainly, we really like how it looks and we see a lot more game than it initially seems, what do you think?

The front part includes a notice (which we can obviously remove) stating that the fan stays off at low and moderate loads (note that the Spanish translation is wrong). If we wish, we have a switch to deactivate this semi-passive mode and always run the fan. (not pressed = semi-passive, pressed = fan always running)

As expected, the font is 100% modular.

We love the external appearance of this AX850, and we are looking forward to seeing the interior. What do you think about it?

Cabling management

Corsair includes the wiring in a very striking bag as it is divided into compartments for each wire. The brand has opted, as it happens in the rest of its high-end PSUs, for meshed cables for the ATX, CPU and PCIe, and plans for the SATA and Molex strips. These cables are the universalized "Type 4" which are sold replacements and kits with sleeving separately (you can check the compatibility here).

The number of CPU and PCIe connectors is as expected for an 850W source: 2x (4 + 4) pins and 6x (6 + 2) pins respectively. We missed that the PCIe connectors were in individual cables since in graphics of maximum consumption (2080Ti, Vega 64, etc.) it is recommended to use individual cables despite the fact that two connectors come per cable

As for the other connectors, we have a whopping 16 SATA, and 8 Molex.

Sadly, the brand has also opted for capacitors in the cables, which make mounting a bit difficult, since these capacitors are placed at the end of each ATX / CPU / PCIe cable, making them more rigid and less manageable.

The benefit provided by these capacitors (reducing ripple) is, in our opinion, only useful to show better numbers in reviews while in practice it hardly influences going from "very good" to "very good" values, but it does influence stiffness that they add to the wiring. Sadly, these capacitors are not exclusive to this range but are used by almost every brand in this range.

Cable length

	ATX	CPU	PCIe	SATA	Molex
Corsair AX850 Length	610mm	650mm	775mm	800mm	750mm

The Corsair AX850 cables are extremely long, especially the PCIe that will not give us any problem in terms of mounting in any box on the market. This if we also consider that a whopping 16 SATA cables in 4 strips will ensure that we always have some to spare to assemble the equipment.

Internal analisis

As we already said, this AX850 maintains Seasonic as its manufacturer, just like its Platinum and Gold predecessors. Specifically, we are facing an implementation of the Prime Ultra Titanium platform with some modifications and improvements that we will be commenting on.

This platform stands out for being one of the best on the market in terms of quality, efficiency and performance, the latter you can see in this review thanks to the data from the Cybenetics certifier.

Most of the primary filtering is invisible to us since it is isolated, as is normal in high-end sources manufactured by Seasonic, but we can distinguish the MOV to reduce surges as more notable components, and an NTC accompanied by a relay to prevent that the current spikes that occur when turning on the equipment damage the source.

The primary capacitors are two 400V Nippon Chemi-Con KMR that resist up to 105ºC, one being 680uF capacity and the other 470uF (combined, they are 1150uF, surprising values ​​in a 850W source)

The secondary side is riddled with electrolytic and solid capacitors from Nippon Chemi-Con and Rubycon, 100% Japanese.

The weld quality is, as expected, excellent. Note that in this area are the MOSFETs in charge of generating the 12V rail, which have double cooling: that of the chassis using a thermal pad, and that of a heatsink located above.

These MOSFETs are Infineon, so we can expect the highest quality.

Moving to the range of the protections we have the Weltrend WT7527V supervisory circuit , but Corsair has decided to implement something that is not present by default on this platform: the OCP protection in 12V.

This protection, typical of multi-rail sources, can be crucial in protecting our components from certain short circuits in which SCP (Short-circuit protection) cannot act. The alternative would be to use the OPP (Over-power protection) that all quality sources have, but it is a very slow protection for this purpose. Most sources claiming to have OCP actually only have it on the 3.3V and 5V rails. The AX850 is one of the very few monorail sources that also implements it in 12V.

We are very pleased to see that this protection is included in a high-end source, as it is precisely one of the great deficiencies of Prime Ultra platforms.

To finish, the fan is a Hong Hua HA13525L12F-Z which is backed by a selectable semi-passive mode that we will talk about later. This is a more audible fan than usual at low revs, although not as much as the other 135mm Hong Hua we saw on other power supplies. The key is that we are facing a version that may have lower revolutions than what Seasonic usually uses in other ranges it manufactures, with a maximum of only 1600rpm compared to fans of up to 2300rpm used on other occasions. As for its quality, the 10-year warranty does not give us any doubt about it.

Cybenetics performance tests

As we already indicated in our specification table, this power supply has a certification of efficiency and loudness issued by Cybenetics. This company stands out for carrying out more advanced and complete tests than 80 Plus (as they test more efficiency points and 80 Plus does not check loudness), but also because detailed tests with all the tests carried out are published on its website.

Since Cybenetics allows their data to be used with the corresponding attribution, we will show them in this review and explain them. Our goal is for everyone to understand the meaning of all these tests, as the data alone can be incomprehensible to many users. In addition, Cybenetics has equipment that exceeds € 30, 000-50, 000 in cost, enabling them to do some of the most reliable testing in the world.

Cybenetics Testing Glossary

As the tests carried out by Cybenetics have some complexity, we explain in these tabs what is measured and what is its importance.

This is information that we will include in all our reviews with data from Cybenetics so, if you already know how the test structure works, you can continue reading. If not, we recommend you take a look at all the tabs to find out what each test is about.;)

• Glossary of terms Voltage regulation Ripple Efficiency Loudness Hold-up time

Let's go with a small glossary of some terms that could be somewhat confusing:

• Rail: PC sources that follow the ATX standard (like this one) do not have a single outlet, but several, which are distributed in " rails ". Each of those rails outputs a specific voltage, and can supply a specific maximum current. We show you the rails of this Thor in the image below. The most important is 12V.

  

  Crossload: When testing a power supply, the most common is that the loads made on each rail are proportional to their "weight" in the power distribution table of the source. However, it is known that the actual loads of the equipment are not like this, but are usually very unbalanced. Therefore, there are two tests called "crossload" in which a single group of rails is loaded.

  On the one hand, we have the CL1 that leaves the 12V rail unloaded and gives 100% at 5V and 3.3V. On the other, the CL2 that 100% loads the 12V rail leaving the rest unloaded. This type of testing, of limit situations, truly shows if the source has a good regulation of voltages or not.

The voltage regulation test consists of measuring the voltage of each source rail (12V, 5V, 3.3V, 5VSB) in the different load scenarios, in this case from 10 to 110% load.

The importance of this test lies in how stable all the voltages are maintained during the tests. Ideally, we like to see a maximum deviation of 2 or 3% for the 12V rail, and 5% for the rest of the rails.

What does not matter so much is 'what voltage is it based on', although it is a fairly widespread myth, it should not matter to us that the 11.8V or the 12.3V are around for example. What we do demand is that they be kept within the limits of the ATX standard that governs the correct operation rules of a PSU. The dashed red lines indicate where those limits are.

Vulgarly, it can be defined as the "residuals" of alternating current that remain after the transformation and rectification of the household AC into low-voltage DC.

These are variations of some millivolts (mV) that, if they are very high (being able to say that there is a "dirty" energy output) can affect the behavior of the equipment components and in some cases damage fundamental components.

A very guiding description of what a source's ripple would look like on an oscilloscope. In the graphs below what we show is the variation between peaks like the ones seen here, depending on the source load.

The ATX standard defines limits of up to 120mV on the 12V rail, and up to 50mV on the other rails we show. We (and the community of PSU specialists in general) consider that the 12V limit is quite high, so we give a "recommended limit" of just half, 60mV. In any case you will see how the majority of sources that we test give excellent values.

In the transformation and rectification processes from household alternating current to the low voltage direct current required by the components, there are various energy losses. The efficiency concept allows quantifying these losses by comparing the power consumed (INPUT) with that delivered to the components (OUTPUT). Dividing the second by the first, we obtain a percentage.

This is precisely what 80 Plus proves. Despite the conception that many people have, 80 Plus only measures the efficiency of the source and does not do any quality testing, protections, etc. Cybenetics tests efficiency and sound, although it altruistically includes the results of many other tests such as the ones we showed you in the review.

Another very serious misconception about efficiency is believing that this determines what percentage of your "promised" power the source can deliver. The truth is that the "real" power sources announce what they can give at the START. In other words, if a 650W source has 80% efficiency at this load level, it means that if the components demand 650W, it will consume 650 / 0.8 = 812.5W from the wall.

Last relevant aspect: the efficiency varies depending on whether we are connecting the source to a 230V electrical network (Europe and most of the world), or to 115V (mainly the US). In the latter case it is less. We publish Cybenetics data for 230V (if they have it), and since the overwhelming majority of sources are certified for 115V, it is normal for 230V to fail to meet the 80 Plus requirements advertised by each source.

For this test, Cybenetics tests the PSUs in an extremely sophisticated anechoic chamber with equipment worth tens of thousands of euros.

It is a room isolated from outside noise almost entirely, suffice it to say that it has a 300kg reinforced door to illustrate the great isolation it has.

Within it, an extremely accurate sound level meter capable of measuring below 6dbA (most have at least 30-40dBa, much more) determines the loudness of the power supply in different load scenarios. The speed the fan reaches in rpm is also measured.

This test basically measures how long the source is able to hold on once it is disconnected from the current while at full load. It will be a few crucial milliseconds to enable a safer shutdown.

The ATX standard defines 16 / 17ms (according to test) as a minimum, although in practice this will be more (we will not always be charging the PSU at 100% so it will be greater), and there are usually no problems with lower values.

We recommend you take a look at the test report published by Cybenetics:

Link to the full Cybenetics report for the SF750 Cybenetics official website

Voltage regulation

The regulation of voltages adjusts to the values ​​that we expected, that is to say, excellent. With a maximum deviation of 0.26% on the 12V rail, 0.17% at 5V, 0.62% at 5VSB and 0.10% at 3.3V, we have not a single complaint.

Curly

The curly also leaves us without surprises because it is minimal. However, we believe that it is not worth the hassle of using capacitors in cables, taking into account that the only benefit that this brings is going from a " very good " curl to a " very good " one. On a practical level, the difference there would be in removing these capacitors is small enough that it has no influence. It is something that the experts confirm almost unanimously.

In any case, it is not necessary to subtract value from values ​​that are among the best we can find.

Efficiency

Efficiency leaves us as we supposed it would leave us: gaping. With values ​​that not even a ridiculous 10% load drop from 92% (practically 93%), and which peak at an overwhelming 95.36%, this is the most efficient source that has passed through our hands in recent months.

As we always say, this does not reach the 80 Plus Titanium 230V requirements by a small margin, but it is normal since the source is certified to 115, where the sources are less efficient but the 80 Plus requirements are also less stringent. It is, then, a full-blown Titanium font.

Fan speed and loudness:

According to Cybenetics tests, the fan remains off up to 40% load, starting afterwards at not too high revolutions, specifically 618rpm, with a tight but upgradeable loudness of 14dBa. At maximum load it reaches 36dBa which is not enough for a load above the nominal.

Overall, the AX850's low loudness allows it to earn its LAMBDA A ++ loudness certificate, the highest from the certifier.

Hold-up time:

Hold-up time Corsair AX850 (tested at 230V)	22.10 ms
Data extracted from Cybenetics

We have no surprises in the hold-up time data, as occurs in most sources based on this internal platform, by far exceeding the 16 / 17ms established by Intel.

We reiterate our thanks to Cybenetics for allowing the use of this test data and invite you to learn more about them here.

Our experience in terms of semi-passive mode and loudness

Again, and as we explained in the SF750 review, Corsair uses a digital microcontroller (“MCU”) to control the semi-passive mode of the power supply.

This allows a much better implementation compared to the majority of semi-passive sources on the market, because the fan is not only regulated according to the temperature, but also with more parameters such as load or time of use., and allows for smart adjustments that prevent the fan from going into constant on and off “loops, ” which typically occurs in other semi-passive sources and is especially damaging to the durability of the fan (unless its bearing is double ball).

In our experience, we have experienced a particularly aggressive semi-passive mode, that is, it has been very difficult for us to make the fan turn on even with the R9 390 that we have in our test bench and its high consumption. Titanium efficiency implies that the source does not give off much heat which makes this semi-passive mode understandable.

A relevant factor to note is that, when using the semi-passive mode, whenever the box allows it, it is recommended to place the fan up, instead of down as it is usually recommended ( we always talk about boxes that place the source below ). This is the recommendation not only of many experts but also of Seasonic itself, since as the semi-passive mode it will work most of the time ( in any semi-passive source but especially in the AX ), placing the source upwards will allow that the hot air that generates naturally escapes.

Anyway, these are recommendations without much influence on the use of the source: if our box does not allow mounting the source up (because it is covered, for example), or if we prefer, there will be no problem mounting it down, less in a source as efficient as this and that can use the heatsink chassis itself.

Final words and conclusion.

Corsair has made a more than necessary renovation of the AX range, becoming one of the most TOP on the market. This is a source that stands out especially for its extremely high efficiency, with energy losses that can be less than 5%. This makes it possible to become one of the quietest sources that exist thanks to the aggressiveness of its semi-passive mode and the little that is heated due to its efficiency and good internal cooling.

Regarding internal quality, the collaboration with Seasonic has borne great fruit and we found a great adaptation of what is one of the best internal platforms on the market. We find the additions made by Corsair in terms of protections, including the frequently forgotten but important OCP in 12V, and in terms of fan, when controlling it by means of a digital microcontroller (MCU) that, compared to the competition, allows regulation much smarter by really optimizing the durability of the fan instead of making it worse as it happens in other cases.

The price of this AX850 Titanium is around 220 euros, and 250 euros for the 1000W version. It is certainly a high price, understandable given its efficiency, but we believe that it would be more justified with a more premium cable management. We are talking about, for example, having used Sleeving and having included PCIe cables with 1 connector each instead of two, since it is recommended to separate the cables in the graphics of maximum consumption.

We recommend reading our updated guide to the best power sources.

In any case, for those who are not interested in having the monitoring capabilities that other Corsair ranges offer, and want one of the best sources on the market for 2019 in terms of quality, sound, warranty, protection and efficiency without the price being a problem , the AX850 and AX1000 are perhaps the best option out there today.

Advantage

• TOP internal quality we can find Ultra-quiet operation with semi-passive mode activated Semi-passive mode is intelligently controlled with a digital microcontroller, something almost NOBODY does in the competition. The Corsair mid-high and high range has the best semi-passive modes on the market. Full protection set with OCP in 12V, also differentiating itself from the competition. Very high efficiency (80 Plus Titanium, Cybenetics ETA A +) with almost 95.5% Peak, and almost always over 93%. 10 year warranty. Cable set with a massive number of SATA connectors: 16! Colored magnetic labels to customize the exterior of the source to our liking Excellent performance in all tests Cybenetics.

Disadvantages

• High price that would be more consistent with its benefits if the source had, for example, a more premium wiring.Without digital monitoring compared to other cheaper Corsair sources that do (HXi, RMi), but not of such high quality as the new AX.

The Professional Review team awards you the Platinum Medal and Recommended Product.

Corsair AX850

INTERNAL QUALITY - 97%

LOUDNESS - 97%

WIRING MANAGEMENT - 94%

PROTECTION SYSTEMS - 98%

PRICE - 91%

95%

One of the best sources on the market for this 2019, standing out in efficiency, quality and sound.