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Chieftec A135 Series APS-850CB Review

Published by Marc Büchel on 27.10.14

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A Look Inside

Chieftec equipped this power supply with a well made and good looking case. A closer look at the fan reveals that it's a model from Global Fan with a simple ball bearing. As soon as we remove the lid, we see that Chieftec is using a DC-DC platform from High Power for this particular unit.

First things first: the transient filtering stage, comes with two X and four Y capacitors right behind the AC receptacle. On the main PCB there is a c CM02X chip, which helps discharging filter caps and therefore positively improves standby power consumption.

Continuing we find two parallel rectifiers, which are GBU805. Next to those we find the APFC module, which has been equipped with two Infineon 6R070C6 transistors as well as one Schottky diode (CREE C3D08060). We were rather surprised to find a large aluminum profile taking care of their cooling. If we're looking for the APFC controller chip we find a CM6800TX, which is a usual suspect in todays power supplies. Furthermore there is one APFC capacitor with 470uF capacity at 400V and up to 85°C. This is a taiwanese capacitor and this part of the APS-850CB is certainly not over-engineered. Moving on we find the half-bridge converter, which is based on two Infineon 20N60C3 CMOS transistors, which are also being cooled by the APFC cooling element.

Meanwhile we’ve arrive on the secondary side and here we find a dual rail design. All MOSFETs taking care of generating the two 12V rails are on two small and vertically mounted daughter PCBs. On each of these PCBs there are four AOT480 MOSFETs. Filtering on the secondary side is being handled by polymer capacitors, which has a positive effect on reliability and endurance of this unit. Furthermore there is another daughter PCB, which hosts the connectors for the cable management. Apart from that we again find polymer capacitors from Kuan Kun. The voltage regulation chips, which generate 3.3V and 5V have been place on this daughter PCB as well, which helps reducing power losses.

Last but not least a few words about soldering quality. With this particular unit Chieftec's OEM High Power is making sure, the soldering quality matches is suprisingly good for a unit with this price point.