PCB Design

Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI mainboard pleased us with its features, but didn’t surprise us that much. To tell the truth, these features are pretty common for the solutions from the highest price group. Now let’s take a closer look at the PCB design of this mainboard, to see if there is anything truly remarkable about it.

The major peculiarity of the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI, just as that of many other Gigabyte mainboards, is the specific design of the CPU voltage regulator. As we have already mentioned, Gigabyte designs a lot of mainboards within the same product family on the same basic PCB layout. The primary difference between the mainboard models within the same family is the additional onboard controllers. However, Gigabyte marketing people believe this is not enough to stimulate the sales of their expensive solutions. Therefore, the company engineers designed a unique processor voltage regulator circuitry that allows increasing the number of channels in the power converter by simply adding a special daughter card.

Gigabyte mainboards based on NVIDIA nForce4 SLI chipset are equipped with a three-channel voltage converter. However, the more expensive solutions come with an additional K8DPS card that allows increasing the number of converter channels up to 6. When you install this card into a special slot right next to the processor socket, the Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI voltage regulator turns into a 6-channel one from the 3-channel one.

This way Gigabyte marketing team can turn this peculiarity into a key attraction of Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI as well as other solutions that come with the voltage regulator like that.

The K8DPS card is also worth our attention, actually. The card does have three additional power converter channels laid out. Moreover, the MOSFETs are covered with an active cooling system that lights up blue when the fan is working. We have to stress that this cooler is not really needed there, so you can simply remove it completely: the components on the K8DPS card do not heat up that much at all. For example, the MOSFETs of the other three power channels located on the mainboard do just fine without even a heatsink.

One of the major arguments in favor of more voltage regulator channels is the increased life cycle of the components used. It is true that without the K8DPS card the MOSFETs of the CPU voltage regulator circuitry will heat up to 60^o C. By doubling the number of channels and hence the number of transistors, we can drop this temperature down to 50 degrees. But this is actually not as important as it might seem.

Of course, the 6-channel CPU voltage regulator is a very attractive feature, but most mainboards out there do just fine with a three-channel regulator and their owners don’t feel like they are missing something. So, it is important to understand that there is no real need for a 6-channel power converter. Especially since Gigabyte uses very high-quality electronic components from such big companies as SANYO, Rubycon and Nichicon.

Our practical tests of the 6-channel CPU voltage regulator (with a daughter card) against the 3-channel one (without the daughter card) showed that the mainboard performed identically in both cases. The more powerful CPU voltage regulator doesn’t even affect the processor’s overclocking potential. So, this K8DPS card will hardly contribute anything to the system performance, and all you will get is just impressive looks. Moreover, you should keep in mind that the installed K8DPS card may prevent you from using massive CPU cooling systems.