Dissection: Part 2
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.
Next up is the APFC unit:
Decently beefy Nippon ChemiCon primary capacitor. You can also see the green thermistor for inrush current control as well as the white relay to short it out once the unit has started. The yellow cap on the right cleans up the rectifier diode switching noise.
The APFC brains reside on a small daughterboard:
The rectifier is this U30K80R unit, rated at 30 A and 800 V. I removed the heatsink for easy visibility.
We get two 5R199P MOSFETs for APFC switches, they’re rated at 550 V and 17A at 25°C, 11A at 100°C.
The primary switches are two more 5R199P MOSFETs:
Can’t see them very well, but they’re there.
On the secondary side we get four 041N04N MOSFETs rated at 40V and 80A for the 12 V rail. That oughta do it don’t you think? 5V and 3.3V both get four 060N03L MOSFETs rated at 30V and 50A.
Controlling the 12V side of things as well as doing the various protections we have a Superflower proprietary chip. Nobody really knows exactly what it does outside of Superflower, and they aren’t talking. It has a wide array of protections though.
Once created and cleaned the power heads off to the modular output board:
We get a few more (a bunch more, really) small caps to clean the power up a bit, given the ripple results I’d say that 5 V especially could do with a couple more, or maybe some ceramic SMD caps. If you’re wondering why two standoffs are missing in these pictures it’s because those two decided to stay stuck to the case rather than coming off nicely. Punks.
The overall solder job is good, the main transformer leads always look meh on Superflower units. The mains AC wires have more solder than they really need, but that pales in comparison to the torn up trace we saw earlier. Whoever did the hand soldering on the unit had a bad moment there. Other than that, no issues.
All told it’s a classic Superflower unit, well designed and well built. The completely different QC errors on the two units I got are very unfortunate as it’s not like PC Power and Cooling, or Superflower either, to miss such things. So it goes.
