Farewell, Corsair CX430, you have done your duty!

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on June 3rd 2026 - Listed in Hardware Personal

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Some things last a surprisingly long time. 

This can surely be said about the ATX power supply, a Corsair CX430 (Model: CMPSU-430CX) of my primary workstation, which had undergone a lot of changes in the past.

Power cut - good bye

But today's power cut (house wide) was too much for the PSU. Although I properly shut down my machine prior to the power cut, the power surge after the power came back online seemed to have fried the power supply for good.

Besides the Corsair CX430 ATX PSU, nothing in the house got fried, when the power came back.

Impressive runtime

Out of curiosity I wanted to know when I purchased this ATX Power Supply. And I had to go back. Way back. I found the order confirmation in my mail archive - dated June 7th 2011 - from a Swiss online shop which meanwhile no longer exists (Internet.ch). 

Two thousand eleven! That's, almost exactly to date, 15 years ago! 

That date matches one of my very early blog posts, where I built the initial version of my workstation. The same mini-tower (Sharkoon AL2) is still in use by the way, but obviously almost the whole interior has changed. Almost - because the PSU was the last original piece.

With today's power supply failure, the last remnant of the original hardware components of my primary workstation has been removed. 

This workstation, and with it the Corsair PSU, has undergone some major changes:

• June 2011: Initial setup with Windows 7
• November 2015: Replace original HDDs with SSDs (Samsung 850 EVO)
• May 2018: Full Switch from Windows to Linux Mint as Primary Desktop OS
• March 2021: Replace Motherboard, CPU, Memory (hello, AMD Ryzen!)

Farewell, Corsair CX430. You've done your duty. Thank you. 

And that's why you keep spare parts!

Having worked with computers for longer than I can remember, it wasn't the first power supply that got fried. This experience, and also the fact being an IT professional doing its living working on the computer, taught me to have spare parts for every component at hand. 

After a couple of verification tests (is it REALLY the PSU or maybe a cable or the motherboard?) I grabbed a spare ATX Power Supply from my lab and built it into the tower. Good situation to dust-clean the interior of the tower, too.

45 minutes after the power outage I was back online again. Now that the spare PSU is in use, I obviously need another ATX Power Supply. Either as primary PSU for my workstation or as new spare. I decided to order a BeQuiet Pure Power 13M with modular cables (AMZN product link).

PS: If you need an excuse to keep spares (cables, power supplies, disks, etc) around, use this blog post as proof!

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