Thortech Thunderbolt Plus 800W Power Supply Unit Review

The first stage inside a PSU is the transient filtering. This is where the unit filters the AC power coming from the mains so there is less noise which is extremely important as it impacts the efficiency and safety of the later stages, which is partly the reason you see people investing hundreds of pounds in UPS systems which do a similar job. To do this, a system of capacitors, ferrite coils and a metal oxide varistor is used. The quality of this stage is determined by the number of components doing the filtering. Many generic units will only have a singular capacitor or won’t have a metal oxide varistor (MOV). On this unit, it consists of an MOV, two chokes, two X cap and four Y caps which indicates a very high quality design.

These four IXTH260N055T2 MOSFETs are responsible for the 12V rail.

The main caps used on this unit are Nippon-Chemicon and are rated at 105 degrees- it is invigorating to see Thortech going with the best components.

Here we can see the control board that utilises a L6599 high-voltage resonant controller.

On the other side of the board we find the other control daughterboard which uses a PS232S Monitoring IC for OVP, OCP and UVP. On this board you will also find the IC for the digital power meter.

As well as the modular connectors, this daughterboard houses all the DC-DC converters for the 3.3V and 5V rails.