How can a high quality PSU fail after 6 years?

[MSWindowsinside]

It's been a long time since I've posted on this forum. But 2 days ago the Corsair AX 760 PSU that I bought in 2014 failed out of the blue. The unit had been working completely fine ever since my very first PC build. It failed while I was playing CS:GO, I noticed my GPU was making a lot of noise, which is normal and fine as I always have V-SYNC off. Then a few minutes into the game, I heard a loud pop and the power in our house went out. One of the fuses had blown, and a burning smell was coming from my PC.

 

Upon opening up the case, it was very obvious that the smell was coming from the PSU. Nothing inside of the PC looked damaged. Today I replaced the PSU, and all components have seemingly survived.

 

I find it very odd that a high quality PSU like this one could just fail after 6 years. What could be the reason of it just failing out of the blue? I suspect the fan might've died, however normally the unit would shut down without a popping noise in case of overheating. I don't have any warranty on this unit as the retailer I bought it from is out of business.

 

My question: I wonder how a high quality PSU can just fail like that. Especially because I have seen systems with very low quality PSUs last more than a decade. I know for a fact that one of my friends family had a PC running almost 24/7 for 11 years with a MS-Tech 350W unit. After those 11 years the only thing that died was the hard drive inside of the PC.

[Stu_Bear]

Heat fatigue...

[Archer20]

Just now, Stu_Bear said:

Heat fatigue...

Exactly. That is why I always leave at least 25% of wattage to be unused.

[SupaKomputa]

Get the fuse replaced and try again.

hopefully the internals are fine.

[Spotty]

2 minutes ago, MSWindowsinside said:

I find it very odd that a high quality PSU like this one could just fail after 6 years. What could be the reason of it just failing out of the blue? I suspect the fan might've died, however normally the unit would shut down without a popping noise in case of overheating.

Your power supply was often switching off before it blew? 

 

4 minutes ago, MSWindowsinside said:

I don't have any warranty on this unit as the retailer I bought it from is out of business.

The warranty is with the manufacturer, not the retailer. I can assure you that Corsair is still in business and I believe those had 7 year warranties, so if you purchased 6 years ago you should still be covered.

[MSWindowsinside]

2 minutes ago, Archer20 said:

Exactly. That is why I always leave at least 25% of wattage to be unused.

While heat fatigue might indeed explain the cause of the PSU dying, I wasn't even close to using the maximum potential of the 760 Watt unit. My system is the "Ryzinator" in my signature and shouldn't pull much more than 500 Watts at full load. Note that none of my components are overclocked.

[MSWindowsinside]

1 minute ago, Spotty said:

Your power supply was often switching off before it blew? 

 

The warranty is with the manufacturer, not the retailer. I can assure you that Corsair is still in business and I believe those had 7 year warranties, so if you purchased 6 years ago you should still be covered.

No it actually wasn't. It was working completely fine actually for all of these years.

 

Things is though I don't have a receipt anymore of the purchase. I have opened a ticket on Corsair's website just now to see what happens. But I think I might be SOL on this one.

[Archer20]

1 minute ago, MSWindowsinside said:

While heat fatigue might indeed explain the cause of the PSU dying, I wasn't even close to using the maximum potential of the 760 Watt unit. My system is the "Ryzinator" in my signature and shouldn't pull much more than 500 Watts at full load. Note that none of my components are overclocked.

There are many ways to induce heat fatigue to a PSU, I only mentioned one way. Indeed, it appears you left a bit of capacity unused. I don't know what you had in your prior build however. Ryzen came out in 2017, so it's safe to assume you had a build prior that could have pulled more power or induced more heat.

[MSWindowsinside]

1 minute ago, Archer20 said:

There are many ways to induce heat fatigue to a PSU, I only mentioned one way. Indeed, it appears you left a bit of capacity unused. I don't know what you had in your prior build however. Ryzen came out in 2017, so it's safe to assume you had a build prior that could have pulled more power or induced more heat.

My prior build is the "old build" in my signature. While this system did not pull more power, there was for sure more heat. Though I have always had this PSU with the fan facing downwards so it should always have gotten fresh air from the filtered intake of the bottom of the case. I think the main problem might have been heat cycling. As I usually only stress my system for about 20-30 hours week and for the rest of the time it is only used for web browsing.

[Juular]

Your unit still should have warranty, it's 7 years, contact Corsair. That unit are manufactured by Seasonic so sadly it didn't get warranty extension to 10 years as on their CWT-made lineups (pretty much everything high-end but AX-series). Can't say what could've failed exactly, maybe @jonnyGURU could shed a light here. But 'heat fatigue' aren't a thing unless you were running it at 100% load in hot box conditions, i.e at very high ambient temperature. High-end PSUs can sustain quite a lot of strain and most likely it's just random failure, it happens with everything regardless of it's quality, that's warranty are for.

[Guest]

27 minutes ago, Juular said:

Your unit still should have warranty, it's 7 years, contact Corsair. That unit are manufactured by Seasonic so sadly it didn't get warranty extension to 10 years as on their CWT-made lineups (pretty much everything high-end but AX-series). Can't say what could've failed exactly, maybe @jonnyGURU could shed a light here. But 'heat fatigue' aren't a thing unless you were running it at 100% load in hot box conditions, i.e at very high ambient temperature. High-end PSUs can sustain quite a lot of strain and most likely it's just random failure, it happens with everything regardless of it's quality, that's warranty are for.

Units die for many reasons.  That's why there's a warranty.  A PSU doesn't have a 7 year warranty because the manufacturer expects every unit to last 7 years.  In that 7 year time span, you're probably going to have at least a 3-5% fall out.

 

BTW:  The new AX Titaniums (also from Seasonic) do have 10 year warranties.  Those Platinum units were EOL'd some time ago.  I believe before the 7 to 10 year warranty upgrade.

[oeci]

According to their website the higher end Seasonic PSUs even come with a 12 year warranty.

[Spotty]

18 minutes ago, oeci said:

According to their website the higher end Seasonic PSUs even come with a 12 year warranty.

The Seasonic Prime Titanium units have 12 years warranty.
The Corsair AX850/AX1000 Titanium which is using the Seasonic Prime Titanium platform have 10 years warranty.

[MSWindowsinside]

Update: I requested an RMA for the Corsair AX760 on their website and it was accepted as a "one-time courtesy" according to the rep I'm emailing with. As they have no stock of a similar unit, they will be replacing it with an HX850i. I have returned the PSU and will very likely receive the HX850i in the coming week.

 

I'm actually quite happy that they accepted the RMA, I expected it to not go through w/o any proof of purchase.