ECS A890GXM-A2 Motherboard

Voltage Regulator

The ECS A890GXM-A2 motherboard comes with a seven-phase voltage
regulator circuit. From the seven available phases, six are used to generate the CPU main voltage (VDD, a.k.a. Vcore) while the other one is 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 “6+1” configuration.

This motherboard has a series of seven LEDs for you to monitor the activity of each phase.

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 U-shaped, 5-mm 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 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.