Interior Impressions


Anyone else remember where we have seen this interior layout before? If you said the Corsair 620HX you are…wrong. That was actually a trick question because even though upon first glance this looks like the interiors of Corsair’s popular unit, there are quite a few differences. First of all if you take a close look you will see that the entire interior affair is based on a small and more compact PCB with different location for the primary cap. Instead of going through all of the differences, let’s just say that while Seasonic built the interior, it is very different from other Seasonic builds we have seen in the past.

Both the primary and secondary filtering stages look hearty enough for a 650W power supply. They are well appointed with quality components but are still cut down somewhat from what we saw with the 620HX and PC Power & Cooling Silencer. Basically, what we have here is an Antec Truepower Trio 650W with slightly beefed up components and a modular interface.


In the first picture above we see a pair of chokes on the primary side which straddle a pair of rectifiers. These components are of a size we would expect to find on a 600W+ power supply but there is something interesting done with the rectifiers. Instead of using a large overhead heatsink to disperse the heat generated by these rectifiers, Seasonic has build in a pair of aluminum “panels” which are used to transmit heat from the rectifiers to the primary heatsink. They have done the same thing with the rightmost choke but why the larger choke doesn’t warrant this same treatment is beyond me.

When looking a bit closer at the PCB I noticed that this same design is used for a large number of units which are leaving the Seasonic factory. It looks like the Neopower 650W is right at the upper end of the rated output for this particular design.


The cap choice on the Neopower is a very eclectic combination of some old favourites and ones we have seen only once before this in a Seasonic OEM’d power supply. The primary cap is a single 85°C rated Nippon Chemi Con affair which is a great choice. The secondary side is a bit more interesting with a single Nippon cap alongside a whole forest of OST caps. The OST caps are usually seen in FSP builds but the last time we saw them was in the Antec Earthwatts 500W review. All in all, the choices are quite good on both the primary and secondary side of things.


In order to give the blue “glow”, there are a trio of blue LEDs which have been inserted into the heatsinks. If you are not looking for the bling factor generated by these LEDs, I suggest that you look a bit closer at the non-Blue branded Neopower 650W.

The modular interface is very nicely done with clean solder joints to ensure good power transfer to the connectors. I could go on and on about the importance of a good modular interface but I will spare you the lecture.