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, yellow component on the pictures below) 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 stage is flawless, with two coils, one X capacitor (plus one after the rectifying bridges) and two Y capacitors more than needed.

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Figure 7: Transient filtering stage (part 1).

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Figure 8: Transient filtering stage (part 2).

Now let’s have a more detailed discussion on the components used on Litepower 450 W.