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.
The first impression we had when opening this power supply was that we were in front of a very low-end (“generic”) unit that was put inside a nice housing as the printed circuit board was too small for the size of the housing, as you can see on Figure 3. Let’s see if this was just an impression or if there is some truth about our hunch.
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Figure 3: Overall look.
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Figure 4: Overall look.
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Figure 5: Overall look.
As we mentioned on other articles and reviews, 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 and the first coil.
This power supply has one X capacitor more than needed but it has only one ferrite coil instead of two.
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Figure 6: Transient filtering stage.
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.
Now let’s have a more detailed discussion on the components used on Kingwin ABT-450MM.
