Introduction
During my research for higher performance I've come across many different electronic schematics. Most of you know the existence of usual voltage mods and current protection tricks, let me tell you that for the NVIDIA 8800GTS we are having quite a hard time finding out what is holding back our overvolted cards. From what it seems, a over current protection kicks in whenever the GPU is heavy loaded (i.e. when high current is flowing through the GPU). The screen freezes and the PWM voltage module reads 0V. In order to know how we can fix this we must first understand how the PWM module exactly works and how the current sense network can be modified. For GeForce 8800 cards NVIDIA has chosen for the Primarion PX3540 PWM controller, here is a small schematic:
For most people this won't look very clear, but let me tell you that this controller isn't that much different compared to many others I've seen, it only has more options and more PWM phases... Let's us first have a talk about how this type of voltage converter actually works.
+12V
Modern PC's have 3 common voltage levels available which feed most of its components, 3.3 Volt, 5 Volt and 12 Volt. Back in the old days the 3,3 and 5V line were used to feed the processors and DRAM modules, though over time the power usage of some modules become so high that is was in fact more attractive to use the 12V line as feed for CPU's and GPU's, it is much easier to supply high power at those voltage levels. Though, 12V is far beyond the maximum supply voltage for the high switching transistors found in modern microprocessors, therefore we needed a circuit which converted the 12V DC voltage coming from the PSU into the 1,5 Volt which is needed to feed the CPU. Such circuits are called DC-DC converters because they convert a certain DC voltage into a lower level DC voltage. Have a look at the following picture:
The above picture shows a 12V DC power supply, a switch, a coil, a diode and a certain load which could be a lamp for example. The lamp will only light up whenever the switch is closed, that makes perfect sense to anyone. Now, if we rapidly set the switch to open and closes states, then the lamp will light on/off too, and if the on time is on par with the off time then the average voltage would be 12/2= 6 volt. If we would measure the voltage over the lamp we would see a square wave, something like this:
_|-|_|-|_|-|_
Now, in order to no longer switch on/off the lamp you could add a powerful coil in line with the lamp. Properties of coils tells us that they will work against the current flowing through them, therefore you will get a sawtooth kind of current flowing through your lamp, it will no longer have to switch on/off, we have created a kind of DC voltage though there is still lot of AC characteristic inside it. If you use your scope you will see something like this over you lamp:
/\/\/\/\/\/\
What the above picture doesn't show is the capacitors which are needed to filter the ripple out. After the coil one should add few capacitors, depending on their size the voltage measured over the lamp will become more or less a stable 6V voltage line. The caps aren't placed in line with the lamp but rather placed over the lamp, in parallel if that is easier to understand. You now will now have decent supply voltage which also could be used to feed CPU's, DRAM modules, ...
In real life that switch isn't set on/off twice a second, but rather few hundred thousand times per second. We won't dive further into the whys here, you must only know that for this rapid switch we can't use human power to make the switch flip levels, nobody is that fast. We could use mechanical switches like a relais, though mechanical switches tend to have a very limited life cycle, after a month a relais could be burned for example. Mosfets on the other hand can be turned on/off almost unendless and are perfect for such operations, in computers we find N-type mosfets to switch the 12V line on and off.
GPU nominal supply voltage
In the above example we successfully converted 12V DC into 6V DC, but how can we build a DC-DC converter which is capable of delivering 1,5V on it's output? It's all in the name in fact... PWM, Pulse Width Modulation. With this technique we are going to change the on and off times of the switch/mosfet.
In our above example we've switched the mosfet on for 0,5s, and switched it back of for 0,5s. The total wave length would be 1s, and the on state would be 50% of that total wave length, we speak of a duty cycle of 50%. Now, if we change the duty cycle to only 25%, then the mosfet would be switched off for 75%, and the average voltage would be only 25% of 12V -> 3V. If you understand well, the duty cycle defines the output voltage, the lower the duty cycle, the lower the average voltage, and the lesser light your lamp will create.
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