À l'intérieur
The first hint, that this is a high-quality power supply comes when looking at the casing. The enclosure features an elegant design and a very solid lacker. The chrome face-plate at the top is a subject to personal taste. We would have loved to find differently colored, exchangeable fan grills in the delivery in order to make the unit blend in perfectly also in modded systems. Removing the lid reveals a fan from Hong Hua, which comes with an FDB bearing (fluid dynamic bearing), which does a great job, keeping the unit cool at very low noise.
Right behind the AC receptable there starts the input filtering stage. There is a separate PCB, where two Y and one X capacitor can be found. Going on step further to the main PCB there are two coils, one X and four Y caps as well as surge protection. Now four 5R199P power transistors from Infineon follow, which have been mounted on a thick aluminum profile receiving efficient cooling. Meanwhile we’re where power factor correction is happening and for that purpose there is one SCS110AG Schottky diode, two 6R099 MOSFETs and two big APFC bulk capacitors. Combined they’re offering 1100uF capacitance, while there are two different ones being used. The bigger one features 650uF at 400v and the smaller one is good for 450uF at 400V. If we now were to have a close look at the voltage regulation stage we’d have to disassemble the unit completely, which means unsoldering components from the main PCB. Since we do not do that, we cannot tell you what components have been used here, but we will make an educated guess at a later stage. Let’s jump to a small daughter board, which features all the protection mechanisms, of which a WT7527 chip is taking care. In this area of the PSU, after the voltages haven been regulated to 12V, 5V and 3.3V, there are electrolyte capacitors from Nichicon. Continuing to the PWM controller we find a CM6901, which is usually combined with a CM6502 regarding the PFC. Last but not least, we’re having a look at the large daughter board, that has been equipped with the different connectors for the modular cables. As we can see here all the soldering points have been equipped with connectors, which is the case with all the Seasonic Prime series power supply that have more than 850 Watt output power. Checking the capacitors, we see a mixture of ones from Nichicon and Chemi-Con.