500W Be Quiet! ATX power supply teardown, detailed overview and repair
1,169A detailed teardown and analysis of a BQT E6-500W Dark-Power-Pro power supply from the German manufacturer "Be Quiet!".
For the impatient: the teardown starts at 02:40, because in the first two minutes I explain the background info on this PSU.
In the video we go over the features and tear down the electronics to look at the printed circuit board and the components in this 500W unit. Due to the middle tear price, I have expected more from the electronics, so the commentary is given from a cheapskate perspective.
This PSU is a mid-tear unit, where the electronics was designed and made in China (nowadays nearly everything is made in China, there is no way around it). This PSU sold for around 80-100 Euros here in Germany back in 2009. I bought this unit about 6-7 years ago, and after years of use the capacitors dried out, so I had to repair it.
The cooling fan is a very quiet fan, so the manufacturer it is up to its name.
However, sadly the inner components are not super-good quality, mediocre at best, and during the design of the layout the engineers who designed the electronics have made some poor choices. I am especially flabbergasted/scared from the power button on the unit,
which is not a real power button, but more like a software button. So, if you turn it off, the system is still connected to mains live voltages. The power switch is just a switch for the +310V DC voltage from the main filter capacitor to the +5V standby
circuit, and the galvanic separation is through a tiny signal transformer going to the gates of the FETs from the active power-factor-correction circuit, which are also at the +310V DC potential.
To make this design choices even worse, they have routed the wires for this power switch through the hot heatsink of the secondary DC side.
Also, the capacitors are only rated at 85C instead of 105C, which should be nowadays standard for power supplies above 350W due to the amount of heat these units produce.
One has to keep in mind, that other PSUs in the same prince range often have even worse electronics, and they are lacking a high quality silent fan which does not even compare to those built into the Be Quiet! units. Thus, most probably I will invest again into a Be Quiet PSU for my next computer.
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