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, reducing the design’s efficiency over designs with a proper 12-phase PWM controller.”
GIGABYTE has already released two new motherboards without PWM doublers, the B550 AORUS Elite V2 and B550 AORUS Elite AX V2 (guess what the “V2” is for). While these revised motherboards should be more efficient, we could also be seeing increased prices.