We decided to disassemble this power supply to see how it looks like inside, what is the design used and what components are used. Please read our Anatomy of Switching Power Supplies tutorial to understand how a power supply works inside and to compare this power supply to others.

In this page we will have an overall look, while on the next page we will discuss in details the quality and rating of the components used.

We can point out several differences between this power supply and a low-end (a.k.a. “generic”) one: the construction quality of the printed circuit board (PCB); the use of more components on the transient filtering stage; the active PFC circuitry; the use of a thermal sensor on the power diodes heatsink for controlling the fan speed and for shutting down the power supply in case of overheating; the power rating of all components; the design; etcetera.

On Figures 9 and 10 you can have an overall look from inside this power supply.

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Figure 9: Inside Toughpower 750 W.

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Figure 10: Inside Toughpower 750 W.

Several funny things caught our attention inside this power supply. The most obvious was the use of this funny green tape everywhere (see Figures 9 and 10). We also found out that this power supply isn’t manufactured by Thermaltake, but by a company called CWT. In fact it looks like that Toughpower 750 W is actually a CWT PSH750V-C01 power supply. We found “Model: PSH750V” written on this power supply label, which corroborates our guess.

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Figure 11: This power supply is actually a CWT PSH750V-C01.

Is this a problem? Not necessarily, as several other well-known “manufacturers” are doing the same thing. The big question is: does this power supply use a good design? That’s exactly what we’ll try to answer.

Another funny thing about this power supply is that half of its 140-mm fan is covered with a transparent plastic, as you can see on the right on Figure 12. The part that is covered is the one above the rear part of the power supply, near the mesh found on the power supply’s rear.

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Figure 12: Half of the fan is covered with a transparent plastic.

As we mentioned on other articles, the first place we like to take a look when opening a power supply to have 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 Thermaltake uses one MOV, four ceramic capacitors, two metalized polyester capacitors and three ferrite coils.

On this stage we found another funny thing, a wire connected to ground cut and insulated with green tape, see Figure 13. Go figure.

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Figure 13: Transient filtering stage (part 1).

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Figure 14: Transient filtering stage (part 2).

We found more funny stuff here. The input filter is connected to the rectifying bridge using two wires (brown and blue wires with a red arrow on the left side on Figure 14), while on other power supplies this connection is done simply using traces on the printed circuit board. On Figure 14 you can also see that this power supply uses a very unpractical fuse holder.

This power supply uses a CM6800 integrated circuit, which is an active PFC and PWM controller combo. It is located on a small printed circuit board shown on Figure 15.

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Figure 15: Active PFC and PWM controller integrated circuit.

Now let’s have a more detailed discussion on the components used on Toughpower 750 W.