MSI P67A-GD65 Motherboard

Voltage Regulator

One of the highlights of this motherboard is its voltage regulator circuit, which uses military-grade components. Electronic components are available in two series, civilian and military. Military components are more expensive, but have tighter tolerance and can withstand a wider range of temperature. All electrolytic capacitors used in the voltage regulator circuit are SMD (surface mount device), also known as highly-conductive polymerized or simply Hi-c, and solid ferrite chokes, also known as SFC, Super Ferrite Choke, which, according to MSI, can provide up to 20% improvement in efficiency. Please read our Everything You Need to Know About the Motherboard Voltage Regulator tutorial for more information.

The voltage regulator circuit has seven phases, six for the CPU main voltage (Vcc a.k.a. Vcore), and one phase for the CPU VTT voltage (integrated memory controller and L3 memory cache). Therefore it uses a “6+1” configuration.

Comparing only the number of phases is unfair, though. Each phase from this motherboard switches at a higher frequency (1 MHz instead of 250 kHz) and has a lower switching loss, resulting in a higher efficiency and lower operating temperature. This is achieved by using an integrated circuit (Renesas R2J20652, click here for a detailed description and here for its datasheet) called DrMOS instead of discrete transistors. According to MSI each DrMOS phase is equivalent of four regular phases, so the “6+1” configuration used by this motherboard is comparable to a “20+4” configuration using the standard voltage regulator architecture used by competing products.

Figure 10: Voltage regulator circuit

Figure 11: Voltage regulator circuit

The P67A-GD65 has a feature called “Active Phase Switching” or simply “APS,” which disables phases in order to save energy when the system isn’t requiring a lot of power. A group of LEDs show which phases are currently active.

Figure 12: Active phases LEDs