ASUS P8P67 Deluxe Motherboard

Voltage Regulator

One of the highlights of this motherboard is its high-end voltage regulator circuit, which uses a digital PWM system instead of the traditional analog design. This allows the switching frequency to be changed on the fly, in 10 kHz steps.

The CPU voltage regulator circuit of the P8P67 Deluxe has 18 phases, 16 for the CPU main voltage (Vcc a.k.a. Vcore), and two for the CPU VTT voltage (integrated memory controller and L3 memory cache). Therefore it uses a “16+2” configuration.

Figure 13: Voltage regulator circuit

Figure 14: Voltage regulator circuit

This motherboard uses only high-end components in its voltage regulator circuit: solid ferrite-core coils, which present less energy loss than iron-core coils (i.e., they improve efficiency), low RDS(on) MOSFET transistors, which present higher efficiency, and solid capacitors. If you want to learn more about the voltage regulator circuit, please read our tutorial on the subject.

Let’s not forget the other voltages used on the motherboard. The ASUS P8P67 Deluxe uses a four-phase voltage regulator for the memory voltage (instead of two, as found on competing products) and a two-phase regulator for the chipset voltage, also using low RDS(on) MOSFET transistors and ferrite coils. It is common for some manufacturers to use high-end components in the CPU voltage regulator circuit, but using regular components in the other voltage regulators available, which fortunately isn’t the case with this motherboard.