ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 Motherboard Review

Voltage Regulator

ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3 comes with a 10-phase voltage regulator circuit. From the 10 available phases, eight are used to generate the CPU main voltage (Vcore) while the other two are used to generate the voltage required by the integrated memory controller. Thus this motherboard has an “8+2” configuration.

This motherboard comes with a passive heatsink installed on top of the transistors from the voltage regulator circuit, connected to the passive heatsink that is installed on top of the north bridge chip using a heatpipe. In Figure 8, you can see the voltage regulator circuit with this cooling solution removed.

Figure 8: Voltage regulator circuit.

As mentioned earlier, all capacitors used on this motherboard are solid 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.