Biostar TA890FXE Motherboard

Voltage Regulator

Biostar TA890FXE comes with a six-phase voltage regulator circuit. From the six available phases, five are used to generate the CPU main voltage (VDD or Vcore) while the other one is used to generate the VDDNB voltage, which is used by the integrated memory controller, the L3 memory cache and the HyperTransport bus controller. Thus this motherboard has a “5+1” 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 6, you can see the voltage regulator circuit with this cooling solution installed and, in Figure 7, with it removed.

Figure 6: Voltage regulator circuit.

Figure 7: 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.