Gigabyte G1.Assassin Motherboard

Voltage Regulator

The Gigabyte G1.Assassin comes with an 18-phase voltage regulator circuit. Of the 18 available phases, 16 are used to generate the CPU main voltage (Vcc, a.k.a. Vcore), while the other two are used to generate the voltage required by the integrated memory controller, the QPI controller, and the L3 memory cache (VTT). Therefore, this motherboard has a “16+2” configuration.

The manufacturer added passive heatsinks on top of the transistors of the voltage regulator circuit, which are connected to the passive heatsink of the north bridge chip through a heatpipe.

Figure 9: Voltage regulator circuit

In Figure 10 you see the voltage regulator circuit with the heatsinks removed. There are 16 Vishay DrMOS SiC769 chips (each chip integrates the driver and the low-side and high-side FETs), and since each chip controls one phase, the G1.Assassin has 16 phases. From the 16 available chips, 12 are installed on the component side and four are installed on the solder side of the motherboard.

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.