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. The recommend components for this stage are two ferrite coils, two ceramic capacitors (Y capacitors, usually blue), one metalized polyester capacitor (X capacitor) and one MOV (Metal-Oxide Varistor). Very low-end power supplies use fewer components than that, usually removing the MOV, which is essential for cutting spikes coming from the power grid, and the first coil.

Even though this power supply from Zalman has more components than the necessary – one extra X capacitor, two extra Y capacitors, one extra coil and a ferrite bead on the main power cable –, it doesn’t have a MOV, which is a sin for a power supply from this category.

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Figure 12: Transient filtering stage (part 1).

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Figure 13: Transient filtering stage (part 2).

A very interesting feature from this power supply is that its fuse is inside a fireproof rubber protection. So this protection will prevent the spark produced on the minute the fuse is blown from setting the power supply on fire.

Talking about protection, there is a thermal sensor located under the secondary heatsink, which commands the power supply to shut down in case of an overheating situation. You can see this thermal sensor on Figure 14 (we removed the secondary heatsink to take this picture).

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Figure 14: Thermal sensor.

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.

All components describe on this page are identical to the ones used on OCZ GameXstream 700 W.

Now let’s have a more detailed discussion on the components used on ZM600-HP.