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 and to compare this power supply to others.

Disassembling Signature 650 it was clear why Antec decided to use an 80 mm fan instead of a bigger one: this power supply has two printed circuit boards. The upper board has its component side facing the component side of the lower board, so we have all components located in the middle with a lot of space for the airflow provided by the 80 mm fan. We could see that this fan is really a PWM model, since it had four wires and not only two as usual.

This is the second power supply we’ve seen with this kind of design. The first one was OCZ ProXStream 1,000 W, which proved to have very noisy and inefficient fans (they aren’t PWM) and to heat a lot. This model from OCZ, however, is physically smaller, which made all components to be squeezed in a very small space causing the excessive heating. This does not appear to be the case with Signature 650, where the components are well spread and there is a lot of empty space between the two printed circuit boards when the unit is assembled.

The top printed circuit board features part of the primary (transient filtering stage and active PFC) and the entire +5VSB power supply and the bottom printed circuit board features part of the primary (switching and transformer) and the whole secondary.

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Figure 5: Overall look.

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Figure 6: Upper printed circuit board.

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Figure 7: Upper printed circuit board.

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Figure 8: Lower printed circuit board.

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Figure 9: Lower printed circuit board.