AX1200i slowly power cycling with ALL Peripheral connectors connected

Hi there all,

I have an interesting problem, Upgraded my old 1000W 8 year old PSU to this new Corsair AX1200i and powered on the system only to have it power cycle slowly on and off.

Checking the wiring I could find nothing wrong.

Leaving the MB and graphics card connected with NO peripherals connected it booted up.

Slowly adding peripheral connectors to see when it would falter, Power cycling between connections and I get to the last one and the fault appears.

Checking the 4 SATA connectors to the hard drives (UN-plugging and re connecting) nothing could be found!!

So on a hunch I left that cable connected and unplugged another and sure enough the system booted. Tried this with yet another and again it booted.

Connected to the peripheral connectors I have a total of 22 hard drives and 9 fans and the H100i Water cooling system.

What I do to get the system to boot up correctly is to power up with ONE peripheral connector disconnected, wait the prescribed time (5 seconds). Plug it in while the system is booting, the additional RAID drives are connected and the system finds all drives and works as it should.

The question is WHY or is there an issue with ALL the peripheral connectors connected?

One thing I will be doing is to make an ATX 6 pin Y adapter that has ONE plug and 2 sockets. So that I will then only have 5 of the peripheral connectors connected. Hopefully that will cure the issue at hand.

I will also say that the corsair LINK 2.6.5214 doesn't show any current draw on any of the Peripheral connectors or PCIe power connectors and randomly shows a few flashes of over 5 Amps being drawn on the ATX connector but majoritively that sits at ZERO too.

At system idle the total power draw is 280W with 99% efficiency (NICE).

So yeah, weird problem and I hope some one here can shed some light on the problem.

Astro

From what I can gather from the Corsair Link software is that Multi rail and single rail only applies to the PCIe lines and not the peripheral lines.

The monitoring software shows at idle that the peripherals are only drawing 12-13 Amps on the 12V rail, surprising there's no 5V peripheral monitoring.

But there is a PSU 5V Voltage and current and I would presume that this applies to the peripherals as well as Motherboard. But I may be wrong. But current draw on this is nearly 11A.

I would presume a BIOS / ROM upgrade to the PSU would probably cure this OR further enhanced monitoring software might detect the currents of the PCIe lines more accurately.

Then again a Circuit diagram of the PSU's output stage would help :biggrin:

Astro

I tried as you suggested but it made no difference.

I suspect the issue to be a sensor issue that could be resolved with a firmware update on the PSU to correct it.

What I'm thinking of here is that the PSU is seeing NO current draw on the ATX line and therefore I'm presuming it is getting confused.

I'm not sure though.

I know it's not a short Circuit or overload because if it WAS then the PSU would sense this straight off and power up very briefly if at all. Also if this was the case then unplugging ONE Peripheral connector while powering up and reconnecting it blows this theory out of the water...

Still experimenting ...

Astro

Well I scrounged up the parts to make a power splitter Y adapter so that I could plug 2 power cables into the one peripheral connector.

Well blow me down BUT that did NOT cure the issue... Bugga.

Slowly unplugging everything on that chain and no matter what, it still power cycled until the last device was unplugged which was the SSD boot drive!!

This is just plain stupid... it's a 1200W PSU for crying out loud...

Oh as a test, I pulled ALL cables out of the PSU and hit the test button, Fan spun up nicely and so on and all the time there was a nice GREEN LED lit up. So no errors there. Just to add insult to injury ...

Any ideas as to what the problem could be, considering the previous 1000W (Other Brand) PSU had no issues...

Astro :mad:

...Slowly unplugging everything on that chain and no matter what, it still power cycled until the last device was unplugged which was the SSD boot drive!!...

Have you tired plugging everything in except the SSD?

TWENTY TWO DRIVES?!?!?

 

What kind of drives and what RAID controller are you using?

Well in my PC Specs I say A Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD

and 21 WD Black drives.

I have 5 x WD2002FAEX connected to the MB

Then on the Highpoint RR-2740 RAID card I have 16 more.

That's 10 x WD2002FAEX, 4 x WD1001FALS and 2 x WD4003FZEX drives

Total Server storage is currently 42TB. I will be replacing the 4 x 1TB drives with 4 x 4TB drives soon though making it 52TB :)

Then in September when it's released I'll be upgrading the CPU, MB and RAM to the latest Intel i7-5960X CPU with decent MB and 32GB of DDR4 2133MHz RAM..

I could go on to further say I have a home theater sound system hooked up to the machine for the audio system via an Optical cable. But I'm only using a pair of DALI Concept 1's bookshelf speakers as the fronts and a Wharfdale 150W Active Sub. So audio sounds great etc :)

Yeah bit of a Computer Nut here :)

But this isn't fixing my problem :)

Astro

So we tried the Paper clip test and that too caused the PSU to shut down after 5 or so seconds. But NOT to cycle on and off though. So the Motherboard is trying to get things going and causing the cycling of the PSU.

So I need to escalate this to Corsair themselves and see if they can replicate this on another AX1200i PSU.

But calculating the "Average" load of the hard drives working on a MAX value of 10W per drive that's only 220W. Unfortunately Western Digital don't give Cold start current and running currents on their drives any more as far as I can find on their web site. But even so the Cold start is done in less than a second and if THAT was the issue the PSU would fail within the first second, not 5 or so seconds later.

Baffling....

Maybe a firmware tweak to the PSU would cure the issue. hmmm interesting thoughts...

Astro

out of curosity i just counted my space and not counting my ssds i have 40 tb,,of course even with all my builds combined i still to use hot swap bays

it sounds like jonnyguru is on the right track,,assuming of course there isnt too many being piggy backed..

tis the price we pay when going to new computer heights;):

Tried the delayed spinup but the WD black drives don't support that feature. Well it wouldn't show enabled on the Highpoint controller when selected...

But why would this be an issue when a previous 1000W PSU had no issues with this same load. All I've done is removed old PSU and insertd NEW PSU... nothing else has changed..

Astro

Bit hard to do when you don't have video equipment etc. Being a PC engineer of several years (23 odd), feel free to ask technical questions and I will answer them.

On the peripheral lines I have the following hardware -

P1 - 4 x WD Black SATA

P2 - 4 x WD Black SATA

P3 - 4 x WD Black SATA

P4 - 4 X WD Black SATA

P5 - 5 x WD Black SATA, Samsung 840 Pro SSD,Pioneer DVD Drive and Corsair Hydro H100i

P6 - 6 x 120MM Case fans, 3 x 140MM Case fans and Display LEDS for the RAID card.

PCIe 1 and PCIe 2 are connected to the Gigabyte GTX 780 Video card

PCIe 3 is connected to the MB with the correct cable :)

So nothing out of the ordinary.

I wanted this PSU because it has all the peripheral connectors to connect all my hard drives neatly...

As a last resort... I could disassemble the PSU, reverse engineer it and then check it for dry joints. But that's a bit drastic and considering it's NEW it shouldn't do what it's doing.

Anyway, I'll let you think of a solution to this problem before I go too far :)

Astro

Bit hard to do when you don't have video equipment etc. Being a PC engineer of several years (23 odd), feel free to ask technical questions and I will answer them.

 

On the peripheral lines I have the following hardware -

 

P1 - 4 x WD Black SATA

P2 - 4 x WD Black SATA

P3 - 4 x WD Black SATA

P4 - 4 X WD Black SATA

P5 - 5 x WD Black SATA, Samsung 840 Pro SSD,Pioneer DVD Drive and Corsair Hydro H100i

P6 - 6 x 120MM Case fans, 3 x 140MM Case fans and Display LEDS for the RAID card.

 

PCIe 1 and PCIe 2 are connected to the Gigabyte GTX 780 Video card

PCIe 3 is connected to the MB with the correct cable :)

 

So nothing out of the ordinary.

I wanted this PSU because it has all the peripheral connectors to connect all my hard drives neatly...

 

As a last resort... I could disassemble the PSU, reverse engineer it and then check it for dry joints. But that's a bit drastic and considering it's NEW it shouldn't do what it's doing.

 

Anyway, I'll let you think of a solution to this problem before I go too far :)

 

Astro

You should not disassemble the PSU. Besides being dangerous, you would void the warranty.

I asked this before but you didn't respond. Have you tried connecting everything but the SSD to the PSU?

Experiment time! :D

 

Unplug all of your fans. Move four of the drives over to that connector the fans were on. Same problem?

Yes, I've tried several things. Removing ONE of the peripheral connectors, no matter which one and the system will boot. I.E. Remove the connector with 4 HDD's and system boots. Remove 2 Hard drives from ANY chain and the system will boot up. Removing ONE drive and the system powers on slightly longer before shutting down.

I removed the PCIe Power cables to the video card but this made NO difference. The system shut down after it's 5 or so seconds of life.

As you inquired, having ONLY the SSD drive connected and it'll boot up. so it's not the SSD drive :laughing:

It has something to do with the load on the peripheral lines and the PSU sensing a possible over-load state and shutting down from what I can gather by what's happening.

So by having ONE of the peripheral lines disconnected, waiting 6 or so seconds and then plugging in that line and everything's happy. Hence why I suggested that it could be a firmware initialization issue or something along those lines.

Oh and yes I wouldn't open the PSU until all avenues have been tried. Even RMAing it of course. I know that it would void warranty if I did open it. Hence why I said as a last resort. :biggrin:

So yeah it's an interesting problem I'm having. Hopefully some bright spark can figure it out or replicate it.

Oh and the LOT number for the PSU is 140307147 and Part Number CP-9020008-AU, the serial number I'll give upon request but it's in ticket #6491605

Astro

 

But, it doesn't sound like you tried what I suggested.

 

Unplug all of your fans. Move four of the drives (one from the connector with the 5 WDs and one each from each of the connectors that has four WDs) onto the connector that the fans were on. Same problem?

Yes I see where your coming from with this suggestion and load balancing across the connectors still causes the same problem.

Removing ONE drive from any connector and the system will try to boot, taking a bit longer in the power up cycle but ultimately failing.

Removing TWO drives from ANY chain and the system will boot.

Removing 2 drives from 2 totally separate lines and the system will boot.

As I've said. it's a weird one!!

Astro

Arrived in the post today 100 PC Jumpers (Only needed 16)

Jumpered Pins 3 and 4 on the Western Digital drives to select (Power Up In Standby Mode)..

Turned on the PC... Boots up and SLOWLY powers up each drive via the HighPoint RR-2740 RAID card.

So the issue IS initial loading on ALL the peripheral lines being too much for the PSU. But this shouldn't be an issue with it being a 1200W PSU, when my previous 1000W (Other brand) PSU fired up every time with no problems.

One day hopefully there will be a firmware fix for this issue. OR more detailed specifications for the PSU. because it's NOT a common 12V rail that supplies 100A total. But Separate ones that will supply a total of 100A in my opinion. OR then again it could be an issue with the PSU.... Need more info...

Astro

So 2 years later, A system upgrade a year ago to i7-5960X etc, new Hard drives and so on the system was working fine until a windows update and the system power cycled off during the night.

Then it was found in the morning powering on for 5 seconds then off for however long since the windows update.

Reading through the forums and noting others have similar issues with other AXi PSU's I first checked to see if the cables on the HX1000i PSU I had in my games machine were the same and they are. So removing that 1000W PSU and replacing the AX1200i in the server, We power on and the system boots first time and NO issues.

So even though the AX1200i is a more powerful PSU, it's issues like this that can be very frustrating to the every day user.

I also put the AX1200i into my games box, which has the following configuration :-

I7-5930K CPU

Gigabyte Ultra Durable X99-UD4 MB

32GB of G.Skill 2600MHz DDR4 RAM

2 x Titan X's in SLI

Corsair H80 CPU cooler

2TB WD Black drive

Samsung 950 Pro 512GB M.2 SSD

LG DVD drive

and the Corsair HX1000i PSU to power it

The games system with the AX1200i powered up and ran quite ok. BUT after 4 hours it unexplainadly powered off. trying to turn the system on again and it would just power on for 5 seconds and shut down.

Leaving it off for a longer time and the system powered up and ran for 2 hours while gaming and then just went off.

So even with a lighter load it's still having issues. So I've put a request in to the supplier that I bought it from to see what their response will be.

Will keep you informed..

Astro