Dissection: Part II
Disclaimer: Power supplies can have dangerous voltages inside them even after being unplugged, DO NOT OPEN POWER SUPPLIES. It’s just not a good idea. Opening a power supply and poking around inside could very well kill you. Don’t try this at home. Don’t try this at work. Just don’t do it
An overview of the secondary side.
On the left, we find another issue, a dented cap:
Again, it’s clearly not an issue. If it actually caused a problem internally the cap would have exploded violently. I’m not impressed, though.
The 12V bits live between that heatsink and the PCB they’re soldered to. Getting the heatsink of requires far more effort and larger tools than I have, so like every other PSU reviewer I’ve seen look at one of these, I’m going to leave that mystery for later. As usual there is no thermal compound connecting the two heatsinks, there should be in my opinion.
DC-DC bits, Seasonic loves the APW7159 controller and use it on a lot of units. 5V and 3.3V each get three K0332 MOSFETs rated at 35a and 30v.
On the flip side we find the connectors and inductors:
Every cap inside the unit is Nippon Chemi-Con, as Japanese as you can get. One of them isn’t fully seated, largely due to not being the same size as the silkscreen/lead spacing on the PCB.
Some glue/caulk that is actually touching it would be nice from a vibration resistance standpoint:
The overall soldering is very good.
All told it’s a bit frustrating. The specs and layout and such are top notch, but whoever did the actual assembly was having a bad day. To be fair a bad day at Seasonic (or CoolerMaster, if they do the assembly and soldering, I don’t know) would be a mighty good day at some manufacturers, but it’s still disappointing.
That said, there isn’t anything that is causing problems nor that is likely to.
