VRM Overview

Apart from some cosmetic differences, the VRM fan cooling arrangement is identical to the original board. The top fascia undoubtedly hampers airflow, but using the latest BIOS resulted in a similar fan response as our original experience; the fan starts to spin up with the VRMs around 60 °C, but remaining inaudible above the rest of the system even at the end of our stress test 30 minutes later.


The fact that the fan seemed to remain quiet is important because, like the original board, ASUS has not included a way to change its speed to something other than off, full speed, or a pre-set PWM profile. It's definitely better to allow full control so you can fine-tune it to your own preference.


With the fan in use, the VRM temperatures mostly stayed below 65 °C, and the fan was also quick to wind down once the system was out of load.


Switching the fan off entirely impacted the areas near the fan more than at the edges of the heatsink, but at most the VRMs peaked around 10 °C higher. Even with our zero airflow test bench, the fan didn't spin up for 10 minutes under full load, so unless you're putting your CPU under full load for longer than this on a regular basis, it's likely possible to just switch the fan off or even physically remove it, if you're concerned about noise.


The 10+2+1 phase power delivery comprises Infineon PMC41420 90 A stages for vCore and SOC, while MISC has a single Vishay SiC629 80 A stage.


For PWM controllers we have the usual DIGI+ branded ASP2205 and also a RichTek RT3672JE.