Gigabyte 890FXA-UD7 Motherboard
Voltage Regulator
Contents
The 890FXA-UD7 has a high-end voltage regulator circuit with 10 phases, eight for the CPU main voltage (VDD a.k.a. Vcore), and two phases for the CPU VDDNB voltage (memory controller, HyperTransport bus controller and L3 memory cache). Therefore, it uses an “8+2” configuration.
As all high-end Gigabyte motherboards, the 890FXA-UD7 uses "Ultra Durable 3" technology, which consists of ferrite chokes, lower RDS(on) MOSFET transistors, Japanese solid capacitors and 2 oz copper PCB tracks for power planes. Please read our Everything You Need to Know About the Motherboard Voltage Regulator tutorial for more information.
As you can see in Figure 8, there is a big passive heatsink on top of the transistors of the voltage regulator circuit, which is connected to the north bridge chip heatsink through a heatpipe. If you have a liquid cooling system, you can connect it to the northbridge block and all main components of the motherboard will also be cooled.
Figure 8: Voltage regulator circuit with the heatsink.
Figure 9: Without the heatsink.