Is the Blood Rage PWM as good as the Blood Iron?

[DavidNJ]

The Blood Iron had a 8-phase Volterra digital pwm, as did the ELA. The Blood Rage says its a 'hybrid', but look like a 14-phase analog pwm. The Renaissance seems to have a 6-phase analog pwm.

What prompted the changes and how do they compare?

[Raja@ASUS]

Blood Iron? That's a board made by DFI.

[Sailindawg]

Read. (http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3489) The Bloodrage PWM is about as good as it gets for X58.

[Raja@ASUS]

The main reason the change was made (i believe) was becasue Foxconn wanted to go with a 12 phase solution over the 8 phase Volterra solution used on the Black Ops. Nehalem is more bandwidth hungry and probably draws some very fast transients from the PWM, it has increased clock for clock efficieny over Penryn at equivalent Vcore and Speeds. The Volterra 8 phase solution is probably the best around the 1MHz mark from what I've been told by a couple of lab engineers. But everything is dependant on the current draw and this time round Foxconn thought it wise to employ a scaleable phase controller (which incidentally boasts upto 1.5MHz switching) set to around 600 KHz for this board. It's not always about switching speed though, it's about having a clean low osciallation, fast settling power supply. What you see on the Blood Rage now, is pretty serious stuff and is beyond the current draw that even LN2 users could impose on the board. The combined 12v rail inductors can pass upto 60 amps, while each phase can handle peaks upto ~ 30 amps. It's brutally over-engineered and is the one board I would not even dream of taking a soldering iron to for over voltage mods.

later
Raja

[saaya]

i dont know as much about this stuff as raja or others here, but from what the engineers told me, they could build a much more efficient and powerful pwm with the pakfet and IOR drivers/controllers as with the volterra digital pwm stuff, and all that at a lower cost too. the pwm is very efficient and you can actually run the board without a pwm heatsink with a 965 under load :D

each phase can clock up to 1.5mhz, which is pretty high, but the special thing is that each phase has its own driver, so eactually each phase is clocked individually.
As a result the voltage should be much more stable and the voltage response time should be very very small, since effectively the clockspeed of the whole pwm is 12x0.6mhz (cpu phases, 2 vtt phases) which is a whooping 7.2mhz, which in cpu terms is slow, but for a pwm thats very very very fast :D

and yeah, the amps this pwm can push if heat is not limiting are huge... way more than an 8phase digital pwm according to our engineers :)

[DavidNJ]

I will agree that the Blood Rage probably has the best analog VRD and more power capacity than the DFI. However, both are way over anything you can do unless you are on liquid nitrogen.

However, the phase need to be synchronous and evenly offset, don't they? I read that the DFI is 733Mhz for the CPU, so this is faster. However, the digital 'should' be more stable with less overshoot and bounce. Should...

Clearly, the Blood Rage is an impressive board. And the DFI gives back some features in other areas to possibly give the Blood Rage an advantage. The new EVGA, at probably 150% the price, would probably have a little edge.

[Raja@ASUS]

That's 733KHz there David. Higher switching speed also equals more heat, and then you have thermal runaway coming into play if you really go insane as RDS-on changes. Any skewed contact with the heatsink at that point is usually deadly or results in a board shutdown. Although that's been fixed now with the inclusion of backplates. Part of the funny thing with the Volterra solution of old at least was that if one fet reached shutoff temp the others would carry the load. Kinda weird, if 8 can't handle the load lets switch down to 7 and then cascade the failure down the chain..lol

You are right though, for air/water, you won't find much advantage using either. Both are 'good' enough to max out your CPU. For LN2 the 12 phase Blood Rage should theoretically have an advantage over the 8 phase DFI solution using the smaller fets'. The coming months wil reveal that when people start loading 3D across the boards at high LN2 clocks instead of just a single thread of 32M. All that being said, both solutions are better IMO than ASUS's 'multiplexed 16 phase' shebang any day of the week...

later
Raja

[jcool]

The DFI x58 still has the exact same PWM solution that was introduced with the X38 LT T2R and X48, my MIPS PWM freezer from x38 fits the X58 fine :D
Loved the Dual Volterras back then and still love them now, my X38 held my phase-cooled Q6600 with 0,00 vdroop stable for almost a year of 24/7 crunching, and still it is alive and kicking, no noise coming from the PWM either like on some boards showing their age.

I get the tiniest of variations with the x58 and my i7 at 4,5Ghz full load, HT on, but that's at around 280W CPU so I can't complain really.

[Raja@ASUS]

The DFI x58 still has the exact same PWM solution that was introduced with the X38 LT T2R and X48, my MIPS PWM freezer from x38 fits the X58 fine :D
Loved the Dual Volterras back then and still love them now, my X38 held my phase-cooled Q6600 with 0,00 vdroop stable for almost a year of 24/7 crunching, and still it is alive and kicking, no noise coming from the PWM either like on some boards showing their age.

I get the tiniest of variations with the x58 and my i7 at 4,5Ghz full load, HT on, but that's at around 280W CPU so I can't complain really.

Dual Volterra's? I assume you're referring to the two 4 way inductors.
There's only one controller chip and 8 fets..


Since the cooling has been fixed things have certainly been a lot better. The early boards had a 6 phase controller and quite a flimsy heatsink that just could not handle the loads and lost contact when the PCB bowed from torque from the CPU cooler. By and large though south of 4.5Ghz, there's barely a whisker between the boards thus far, it's all down to the CPU and cooling. So much of it's all a moot point, unless soemone is interested in hitting 5GHz+ with 4 core 8 thread loads.

[gambling]

I remember that when P965 launched last year,
all motherboard manufacturers were rush to release related products.
From the beginning, Gigabyte’s 965-DS3 priced around USD$160.
no matter OC or the components it used are really splendid.
DFI’ P965 is not bad at OC record, but the price around USD$180.
Nowadays, the P35 chipset motherboards are also the same in the situation.
The prices are down to NT$5000 or cheaper…
This one is the excellent entry-level platform for “performance users”.
DFI has already launched their high-end LANParty UT P35-T2R.
It takes advantage of its good OC ability and the unique heat pipe,
to gather the reputation from market; nevertheless,
the price is a bit higher than Asus, Gigabyte and MSI’s top models…
For this reason DFI launches a new P35 model in market.
The price is also reasonable between other manufacturers.
It is DFI Blood-Iron Inf. P35-T2RL a new “sub-series”.