Quote: Kyle's Note: In this review we have results of two Corsair AX1500i PSUs. Our relationship on the PSU-front with Corsair has been somewhat strained over the last year or so. Many in the Corsair organization feel as though we are "out to get them." I can somewhat understand that as we have not had a lot of great things to say about Corsair PSUs for a good while. The last time a Corsair PSU saw an award from HardOCP was in 2012. Paul and I have truly felt that Corsair was no longer pushing the PSU industry forward like it was in its early PSU days. The strain on this relationship was not truly evident until recently, after our review of its CX750 PSU that we bought in retail over Black Friday weekend. It was then that we learned that we had been "cut off" from Corsair PSU review samples. This was never communicated to us, and quite frankly we had not been aware that we were missing anything from Corsair, which I think might tell you our overall feelings about Corsair PSU products. This is not to say Corsair is building a bunch of "bad" PSUs, but rather we just were not excited about showcasing its products. As that goes we would rather try our best to show our readers an "exciting" PSU product and a "good" PSU product that you might be interested in buying. It uses a ton less resources to write a good review than it does a bad review, but that is another story...

Our relationship with Corsair on PSUs had failed, but the CX750 review did start an honest dialogue between HardOCP and Corsair, and that is something to be thankful for. I have no problem telling you that Corsair is, and has been for a long time, one of my personal favorite brands in the enthusiast PC space. When it comes to judging products though, I have to leave that bias behind, and I hope that is evident in our PSU reviews. The big outcome of these talks was Corsair agreeing to send an AX1500i sample to us for testing. Given all we had learned in talks with Corsair however, I did not trust Corsair to send a retail representative sample, so we bought an AX1500i out of retail, the same as you would, and it is tested alongside our sample PSU from Corsair. This is far from the first time we have purchased a second retail-sourced PSU for testing, but we usually do not discuss the politics behind our decisions on doing this. However, the issues surrounding this review have been a bit different and I wanted to simply be 100% transparent on what is going on with this review and why there have been some small format changes.