We decided to disassemble this power supply to see what it looks like inside, how it is designed, 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 in 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 power rating of all components; the design; etcetera.
As we mentioned, this power supply is manufactured by FSP and uses the same printed circuit board as OCZ GameXstream 700 W and Zalman ZM600-HP. Thus the design of these three power supplies is identical. Whether the components used by OCZ StealthXStream 600 W are the identical to the ones used on these other two units or not is something we will analyze during our article.
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Figure 4: OCZ StealthXStream 600 W.
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Figure 5: OCZ GameXstream 700 W.
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Figure 6: Zalman ZM600-HP.
On Figures 4, 5 and 6 you can compare the design used by these three power supplies. As you can see, visually these power supplies are identical, even though Zalman ZM600-HP uses a different heatsink design, its printed circuit board is from a different color and it has a modular cabling system.
