Clock jitter gets worse with increased frequencies and voltages. Not much you can do about it really besides make compensation adjustments. Each board and its components will vary the effects of it as nothing is perfect, traces, capacitors, resistors, chips, everything has a part in it. Gigabyte UD3 from my understanding behaves so nicely mostly due to the increased thickness of copper between PCB layers which helps to minimize trace leak and interference. Probably why it can get away with a smaller VRM and be more consistent. All that Asus have done with adding more phases to VR is offset against the trace losses and interference that the PCB design incurs, and jitter produced when driving the clocks internally as phase timing for Vcc gets gradually worse and more inconsistent.
I understand that's the case anyhow, though GB's approach of shielding from signal interference and minimizing transit loss over traces is the correct way to handle the problem. What Asus does by improving VR capacity and output stability by adding more phases to the design is no different than a PSU manufacturer like ThermalTake who jacks up Rail Current Output and keeps introducing models with more and more W to sidestep electrical design flaws and weaknesses instead of releasing a unit that is much more efficient and can do the same job with 500W less capacity. Sidestepping a problem only makes it happen later on, handling it and managing it correctly is difficult and costly, but eventually it saves more than it costs. Problem is with Asus method is that all they are doing is band-aiding the CPU, while other devices on the board still have same poor behaviour that only gets worse and eventually cripple the system before the potential of the 16-phase VR can be reached. Designs like this aren't meant for everyday at high frequency, only stable benchmarking. Gigabytes designs are meant for everyday stability, I applaud that and wish Asus would take a leaf from their book. No point being able to run 600mhz fsb if my sound card is so crackly I can't hear the actual audio, or my HD speeds are so abismal that it's faster reading and writing off floppy drives, OR my NIC drops out so frequently I might as well switch to wireless. heh.
And for your entertainment, heres a HD Tune screenshot taken of my 4x320gb Raid 0 running off ICH9R on my Rampage Formula at 476Mhz FSB.
It looks more like a seismograph's output during an EarthquakeAsus should be proud of their engineering brilliance, turning my raid array into what appears to be an earthquake
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