VRM Overview

With our Core Ultra 9 285K running flat out for over 30 minutes, there were no signs of throttling and the peak VRM temperature barely made it past 75 °C. This is certainly quite toasty and cheaper options have seen cooler temperatures, usually with active cooling, but the Aorus Ultra is a design that's meant to be used with good airflow.


The heatsink is an elegant design, but the majority of the 105 A vCore phases are located under the smaller heatsink at the top of the PCB, which is likely one reason for the higher than average VRM temperatures. Our test setup forces a worst-case scenario with little to no airflow, so the fact this fanless design passed means that any additional cooling will only see things improve.


The eight vCore stages are all Renesas RAA22010540 105 A, and while Gigabyte's website lists there being one 40 A iGPU and two 80 A VCCSA stages, under the hood of our particular sample, things were slightly different, with a single 80 A VCCSA stage and a pair of Onsemi NCP81526C 40 A stages for iGPU.


The 80 A VCCSA stage is a Renesas ISL99360, while the PWM controller is a Renesas RAA229130, which was also used on previous Gigabyte Intel Mini-ITX motherboards.