Photos Part Three: Up Close and Personal
We’ll start with the CPU power bits.
CPU power controller, an IR part. IR bought CHiL, who had bought Volterra. That’s why this layout may look somewhat familiar. Note the eight current sensing arrays across the top of the photo, one per CPU power phase.
With the heatsinks removed, we can see the eight IR power bits, plus two phases of normal LowRDS(on) MOSFETs on the left there. Likely for VCCSA(IMC) and VCCIO/VTT
One of the MOSFET/MOSFET/Driver ICs.
In keeping with the power theme, here’s the IC that appears to control vRAM, VCCIO and VCCSA:
Not surprisingly, it’s another IR bit. If you want digitally controlled power, IR’s the place to look.
RAM power is generated with these two phases. You can see the MOSFET driver IC off to the left there.
Thunderbolt! From Intel.
The two BIOS chips, next door to a PLX PCIe splitter. The PCIe spliter likely dices up one of the PCH’s PCIe lanes to feed a couple of the PCIe 1x slots, plus maybe some USB3 controllers. That’s generally what they use them for, anyway.
Z77X-UP4-TH BIOS chip up close, in case anybody else is trying to find the part number. It’s a 25L6406E. I’ve gone through a lot trying to find a BIOS chip part number in the past, hopefully I can save someone that trouble here.
Audio is courtesy of Realtek, with an ALC892.
Asmedia made the PCIe switches to switch between one 16x PCIe slot and two 8x slots for SLI / CFX.
As usual, ITE is in charge of the SuperIO operation. The vast majority of motherboards use ITE SuperIO bits.
CPU goes here! No unpopulated capacitor spaces, this should be well filtered power. I’ll slap a CPU in the socket and light this thing off. Let’s see what it can do!
