Here on mods-n-clocks I try to provide clear and honest reviews of hardware but when a product is new it is impossible to comment on the products reliability. However sometimes what seems like a good product can fail just a short way down the line and that is where these long term failure reports come in useful.

If you are not familiar with the Kingwin Mach 1 900W power supply then you can read my earlier review here – Review: Kingwin Mach 1 900W modular power supply. You’ll notice that in the review I gave the power supply a 7/10 rating and mentioned in the summary that the warranty was lacking in comparison to the big brands and also that the power supply was from a lesser known company without a proven track record. Well unfortunately it seems that I was well within my rights to be concerned on these points.

My Kingwin power supply failed recently just inside its first year. Fortunately this is within the UK standard warranty so it would not be a problem, however if someone had a PC that didn’t require so much power or was used less often then the failure would likely be outside of the warranty but still disappointingly in the first 2 years. I expect a PC power supply to last far more than 2 years. Crucially so do the top PSU brands, for instance Corsair are now offering 7 year warranty on their premium ranges of power supplies.

My Kingwin power supply failure isn’t the only one I’m aware of either. If you scroll down to the bottom of the original review you’ll see a comment from Dave Fordham about his Kingwin Mach 1 power supply failure after 17 months. Also a disappointingly short period of time for any PC component to last.

My power supply failure was a complete lack of power. The PC had been shutdown but the power was still on and my motherboard BIOS is set to continue to supply power to the USB ports in this state. When I came back to the PC I noticed that the bright red LED on my Wolf-King Warrior gaming keyboard was off, this being USB powered is usually on all the time. So it came as no surprise that when I pressed the power button on the case nothing happened. After this I turned off the power completely and tried again, I then tried again with a different power cable that I knew was working and then finally I took the power supply out of the case and used my power supply tester to confirm for certain that the power supply was fully and truly dead.

At this point I don’t know whether the power supply took out any other component when it failed but I’m hopeful that it hasn’t. It certainly wasn’t under much load when the failure occurred and it wasn’t a spectacular failure either. Of course being as the power supply was within its warranty period, it has been returned to ebuyer where I bought it from and I will be getting a different supply in return so keep your eyes open for another power supply review on here sometime soon.

As a result of this failure I’ve deducted 2 points from the rating in the original review, so the Kingwin Mach 1 900W power supply now get a lowly 5/10. I’m not willing to take the score any lower than that as some supplies might well last longer than mine did and provide a satisfactory job. However based on my experience I certainly will NOT be recommending Kingwin power supplies to anyone.