Corsair 850AX 80 PLUS Gold Single Rail Gaming Power Supply Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,786 words · ~8 min read
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this is the Corsair ax850 I've had a lot
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of requests to have a look at the ax Series so this is the 850 wat version
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from the ax series I'm actually going to check out the 750 as well as the 1200 so
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we can talk a little about about what the differences are between these three
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models but I haven't seen those ones yet so I won't be able to talk about any
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differences today so this is a high performance ATX power supply why thank
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you Corsair thank you for telling me that that is so incredibly helpful
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what's high performance about it is this is the one one of the most efficient
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power supplies on the market this is 80 plus gold okay so that means that it
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achieves basically 80 plus gold is almost like 90 plus um because at about
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a 50% load which realistically if you're running like a pretty high-end gaming
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machine a couple GTX 460s a quad core
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that's about what you're going to see you're going to run even at 120 volt AC
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you're going to run at almost 90% efficiency okay so okay I exaggerated a
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little bit it's not 90 plus but the way 80 plus is measured is that it has to
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achieve at least I believe this one is 88 to 89% for 80 plus gold at uh very
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low load very high load as well as at medium load so that's pretty cool all
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right so here on the back they also talk a little bit about what connectors it
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has they talk about the true modular cabling system so all cable cables are
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detachable from the power supply now whereas Corsair's power supplies used to
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have hardwired 24 pin as as well as I believe EPS pin EPS pin EPS
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connectors incredible efficiency so yeah with 90% efficiency and they're talking
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about 220 volt for the most part there uh which most people in North America
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are not running so the course are Advantage with more than 15 years
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experience okay and then the last thing we should probably also say before we
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even open the box is it comes with a 7year warranty so Corsair's warranty
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service is legendary and with a 7year
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with 7 years of coverage from their warranty service you can pretty much
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rest assured that if anything goes wrong
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they will replace it for you they will get you taken care of and you will be a
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happy Corsair customer I've actually personally ARM made something from
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Corsair I don't remember what it was but I remember just they got back to me
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really fast and uh yeah I think the best
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RMA experiences are the ones that you don't really remember because that means
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that something went right and nothing went wrong okay so industry leading
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protection oh yeah they've got an eup logo on here as well so that's that new
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uh that new green thing I don't remember exactly what the requirements are but
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it's on there so it uses a different kind of box from Corsair's previous
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power supplies you can see we've got a sleeve here and then we have their more
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traditional box shape underneath which is sealed again look at that so I get to
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unbox more things in this particular episode look at that break more seals I
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do like breaking seals I'm not clubbing seals not all
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Canadians are into that okay so here is our manual it is in
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English France and that pretty much covers all
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the ones that I sort of remotely even know how to say maybe a cameraman can
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contribute this one for us RI ah there
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we go all right next we have the power
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cord and Corsair is using a nice quality
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flexible power cord with uh let's see
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maybe we can even say what the uh no
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never mind anyway it's thick there enjoy
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that knowledge all right next we have some cable ties as well as a Corsair
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case badge we also find four black
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screws so if you want to make sure that the back of your case has black screws
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holding in the power supply instead of mismatch silver screws then use that and
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that will be good okay let's have a look at the power supply itself and then
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we'll look at the modular cables so it comes in a nice little baggie here which
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you could use to store your gym strip if you're in high school and you still need
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a little bag for your gym strip so you could carry it to school in your Corsair
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bag and then you'd be the top of the town because realistically once you
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unplug this power or once you open up this power supply you're pretty much
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going to use it forever because it's pretty darn good okay wow it's actually
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surprisingly small for an 850 W unit so they have a 120 mil fan and you can see
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that even with only a 120 mil fan it's not a particularly long power supply I
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was actually expecting for an 80 plus uh power supply that it would be a little
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bit longer because with the well-built quality units unless they're using even
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more well-built even higher quality uh components you tend to see them a little
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bit bigger to make room for all of the extra uh extra junk inside so here if we
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look inside you can see the heat sinks are actually quite small and that's a
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product of this being um a very very efficient power supply you don't have a
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whole lot of excess heat to get rid of when you're running with it running with
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it I meant running it I didn't mean running
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with it all right let's have a look at the modular cables that we have included
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here so actually no let's finish looking at the power supply change my mind okay so
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here we've got our 120 mm fan as I mentioned before we've got our kind of
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pretty much industry standard honeycomb Grill on the back with an onoff switch
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and a power plug then on the top oh yeah
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this is a single rail power supply check that out 70 amps on the single 12vt rail
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up to 840 Watts don't do that it doesn't Focus up to 840 WT on that single 12vt
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Rail and then uh I think that's pretty
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much the highlight of that label you can see there's a bit of a gold color scheme
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to the power supply which goes along with its 80 plus gold rating and then
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here is the modular interface so let's look at what we would potentially plug
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into this okay so this this plug says
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750 850 ax only so only plug it into
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this so it goes wow 10 10 plugs that's
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kind of interesting I wonder why they've gone and done that so it goes where I
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don't know where it goes It goes here okay so it looks like we have two plugs
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for either 4 plus4 or eight sorry about that my memory card filled up is which
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happens a fair bit okay so you can plug in up to two uh 4 plus 4 or 8 Pin uh EPS
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connectors so you can see that's what these two right here are for and then
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wow there's so many cables in here I mean look at this this is like
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ridiculous okay so I'll go through and I'll find everything that is relevant so
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here we have this is two 6 plus2 pin PCIe so these ones plug in
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here presumably somewhere here no here
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no okay yeah okay so you can plug in two
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6 plus 2 pin PCIe or you can plug in EPS
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connectors here okay and then you can also plug in
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6 Plus TW pin connectors
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here no wow this is one of the more complicated modular interfaces I've seen
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to be uh to be perfectly honest because
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I don't actually see how to plug in oh I guess you I guess you can't I
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guess you can can't plug in oh wait here we go oh I get it okay here so here we
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are this is a 4 plus4 or 8 pin connector
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and this one goes here so then then you can either plug in two 6 + 2's * 2 so up
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to 4 6 plus2 pin PCIe connectors or you
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can plug in two 6 plus2 PCIe connectors
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and an additional 4 plus4 so if you have
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a board like a rampage 3 Extreme that takes two 8 Pin CPU connectors then you
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can plug those in but then you can only run one high powerered graphics card or
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you can plug in only one and you can run two high powerered graphics cards yes we
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figured it out excellent so then here's some Molex ones each of these has four
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molexes on it and that's pretty much the whole top row of connectors here so this
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is for Mox and SATA 1 2 3 4 five of those all right so let's uh go through
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here and see how many of those we have so this is four SATA this one is four
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SATA uh this one is uh oh yeah four pin
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Molex to Floppy adapter because really most people don't use those anymore
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here's two s and here is another Molex to Floppy just
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in case you're running uh Crossfire radon 9700 pros and then we've got a
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another dual SATA so you could potentially Run 4 + 4 is 8 so 12 SATA
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connections off here and then like four Mo X's uh and then last but not least we
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have the 24 pin connector which is broken up into two pieces so you
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actually plug that in with one here at the bottom so that's with that last uh
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last rank on the the bottom was four and then one here at the top and that is
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your 24 pin connector thank you for checking out our very confusing unboxing
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of the ax850 power supply from Corsair
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