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 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 in Figure 14), while on other power supplies this connection is done simply using traces on the printed circuit board. In Figure 14 you can also see that this power supply uses a very unpractical fuse holder.

In the next page we will have a more detailed discussion of the components used in the Toughpower 750 W.