As we mentioned on other articles, the first place we look when opening a power supply for a hint about its quality is its filtering stage. On generic power supplies this stage has only one coil, two ceramic capacitors, one or two metalized polyester capacitors and, if we are lucky, one MOV (Metal-Oxide Varistor).

This power supply from Enermax does not use a MOV at all, being the first time we’ve seen a high-end power supply from a respectable manufacturer not using this component, which is a transient suppressor. As a matter of fact, this is the only flaw we could find on this product.

Enermax used “only” two metalized polyester capacitors, two ceramic capacitors and two ferrite coils on this stage.

click to enlarge
Figure 9: Transient filtering stage (part 1).

click to enlarge
Figure 10: Transient filtering stage (part 2).

The other coils you see in Figure 10 are used on the active PFC circuit.

In the next page we will have a more detailed discussion of the components used in the Galaxy 1000 W.