Internals


Opening the housing reveals a standard Channel Well topology, one that has proved quite successful. This topology is starting to get a little older, but it continues to provide good and stable power with decent efficiency. There are three heatsinks instead of the usual two, with the two on the right replacing what is traditionally a single heatsink. The topology makes it very difficult to see the components, since there's always a large heatsink obscuring the view. We would need to remove the heatsinks from the power supply to provide better pictures of the various components, but we were able to make out the labels with a bit of work. The input filtering stage is well built and CWT doesn't change much with the topology since it works just fine. There is a single Matsushita capacitor in the primary, but that is about it from what we can see. Nippon Chemi-Con, a Japanese high-end capacitor manufacturer, makes the secondary caps.

We have seen many of these designs in our test lab to date, and they always performed well. Even though the arrangement of components may be somewhat busy, the outcome with CWT products has always been good. Perhaps that is why CWT has been so successful with this topology. Another one of her complaints has been the heatsink design, since the fins obscure the component and block airflow. In fact, the temperature readings later in this review will support this complaint, since the left heatsink in the secondary stage reaches up to 75°C (and that's in a room temperature environment).

Cables and Connectors Testing with the Chroma ATE Programmable Load
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  • JarredWalton - Thursday, October 30, 2008 - link

    What, like http://www.anandtech.com/casecoolingpsus/showdoc.a...">our VX450W review? :)
  • spidey81 - Thursday, October 30, 2008 - link

    sorry...don't know how I missed that. Thanks for pointing that out! :)
  • Breogan - Thursday, October 30, 2008 - link

    The TX line is built both by Seasonic and CWT too: the TX650 is built by Seasonic, while the TX750 is made by CWT.
  • JarredWalton - Thursday, October 30, 2008 - link

    That's what we stated with the following, although we didn't explicitly list any models:

    "Corsair power supplies come from two different ODMs, Seasonic and Channel Well (CWT). Both are very good manufacturers for high-end products, but Seasonic tends to be a more conservative company that doesn't want to grow their business too fast whereas CWT is kind of the opposite and is interested in selling a large number of power supplies through many different companies. Corsair blurs the boundaries between these ODMs, letting the two manufacturers produce different wattages for the same series."
  • Christoph Katzer - Thursday, October 30, 2008 - link

    There was a sentence suggesting the TX650 could be also CWT, but I changed it after.
  • Soubriquet - Thursday, October 30, 2008 - link

    Thanks for the article, one suggestion for future consideration, it would be interesting to see some of the graphs comparing like for like with with other PSUs.

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