Motherboard Makers Revising Designs Due to PWM Phase Doubler Shortage

[Tsing]

Image: GIGABYTE



Plenty of motherboard revisions could be hitting the market soon. According to an exclusive report from OC3D, the industry is suffering from a severe shortage of PWM phase doublers – chips that, as the name implies, allow PWM controllers to handle twice the amount of power phases. These components reduce manufacturing expenses, but at the cost of efficiency or responsiveness.



“With PWM doublers, a chip is placed between a PWM controller and the connecting it to two times as many power phases,” OC3D explained. “This allows a 6-phase PWM controller to control 12 phases, splitting the frequency of the controller between two separate parts. This induces a delay between the controller and the phases it controls...

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[Dan_D]

Like anything, simply removing the doublers is a trade off. While it does improve transient response times, it won't output as much power. Some CPU's, like the Ryzen 9 3950X and Core i9-10900K pull a considerable amount of power when overclocked. Things get much worse in the HEDT space where you can easily go well beyond 400w on CPU's. Intel's Core i9-10980XE famously pulls over 500w when heavily overclocked.

 

[Riccochet]

Like anything, simply removing the doublers is a trade off. While it does improve transient response times, it won't output as much power. Some CPU's, like the Ryzen 9 3950X and Core i9-10900K pull a considerable amount of power when overclocked. Things get much worse in the HEDT space where you can easily go well beyond 400w on CPU's. Intel's Core i9-10980XE famously pulls over 500w when heavily overclocked.

Sounds like you have some reviews to do. Savvy?

 

[Dan_D]

Sounds like you have some reviews to do. Savvy?

Working on it. I've got quite a few in the pipeline.