Gigabyte X58A-UD7 Motherboard

Voltage Regulator

Gigabyte X58A-UD7 has a 24-phase voltage regulator to generate the main CPU voltage (Vcore) plus a two-phase circuit to create the VTT voltage (used by the memory controller, L3 memory cache and some other internal components of the CPU). So this circuit has a 24+2 configuration.

Besides that, the copper power lanes on the motherboard are, accorging to Gigabyte, twice as thick as the ones found on competing products (this feature is called "2 oz. copper"), which means less energy loss (and less heat dissipation) and thus more stable power for the components.

Another interesting features are LED sets that indicate CPU, memory, north bridge chip and south bridge chips voltage levels, and also LEDs indicating temperature.

You can see in Figure 8 the voltage regulator circuit and the set of heatsinks for the chipset and transistors, which use two heatpipes and a liquid cooling block.

Figure 8: Voltage regulator circuit.

As mentioned earlier, all capacitors used on this motherboard are solid made in Japan 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.