ASRock 890GX Extreme4 Motherboard

Voltage Regulator

The ASRock 890GX Extreme4 comes with a ten-phase voltage regulator circuit. From the ten available phases, eight are used to generate the CPU main voltage (VDD, a.k.a. Vcore) while the other two are used to generate the voltage required by the integrated memory controller, the HyperTransport controller, and the L3 memory cache (VDDNB). Therefore, this motherboard has a “8+2” configuration.

This motherboard comes with a passive heatsink installed on top of the transistors of the voltage regulator circuit, connected to the passive heatsink that is installed on top of the north bridge chip using a heatpipe. In Figure 9, you can see the voltage regulator circuit with this cooling solution installed and, in Figure 10, with it removed.

Figure 9: Voltage regulator circuit

Figure 10: Voltage regulator circuit

All capacitors used on this motherboard are solid made in Japan and the voltage regulator circuit uses ferrite chokes, which are better than iron chokes. Please read our Everything You Need to Know About the Motherboard Voltage Regulator tutorial for more information.