A Look Inside HX620W

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.

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.

On Figures 8 and 9 you can have an overall look from inside this power supply.

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Figure 8: Inside HX620W.

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Figure 9: Inside HX620W.

As we mentioned in 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.

This power supply from Corsair uses one MOV, four ceramic capacitors, one metalized polyester capacitors and three ferrite coils, plus a ferrite bead on the main power cord, so it has one coil more than required.

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Figure 10: Transient filtering stage (part 1).

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Figure 11: Transient filtering stage (part 2).

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