While many modern graphics cards feature sophisticated VRMs to facilitate overclocking, these consumer products also limit the extremes you might be interested in pursuing thanks to features like overvoltage protection. Of course the manufacturers want to set limits for the sake of the, sometimes multi-year, warranties they offer.
Enthusiasts who are interested in extreme overclocking have therefore been interested in external VRM hardware boards which allow massive overvolting. Until now ASUS wasn't a player in this market but such devices are available from Gigabyte and EVGA, reports Anton Shilov of KitGuru.
Elmor of Sweclockers showed off an 'ASUS Power Card' VRM card last week on the HWbot forums. This is "an experimental project," he revealed, and only a few test samples have been released for overclockers that work with ASUS. Right now ASUS is gathering feedback and tweaking the product before it becomes an official, or perhaps generally available, thing.
As for features of the ASUS Power Card, Elmor revealed the following bullet list:
Main features
- Single 8-phase output
- Output voltage 0-2.5V
- Output current up to 500A
- On-board voltage control/monitoring
- 6x Hotwire connectors for auxillary VRM's
- Firmware upgradable
Current functionality (FW v0002)
- Output voltage setting/monitoring
- Output voltage offset switches (+0.4V, +0.3V, +0.2V, +0.1V)
- Safety switch (limits output voltage to maximum 1.4V)
- Output current monitoring
- VRM temperature monitoring
- Load-line calibration (0%, 60%, 80%, 100%)
- Hotwire setting/monitoring
Upcoming features
- Profiles (save/load)
- Auxillary output voltage sense
It will be interesting to see how extreme an overclock this device can help facilitate. Today Elmor added a comment to the thread he started. He said that ASUS hasn't got retail plans for the device right now. In further technical details he revealed that new firmware will arrive shortly "with optimized settings for the VRM". The update will also add "support for auxiliary voltage sense (more accurate, should be connected to MLCC capacitors at the back of the GPU), optimized update rate and averaging of monitoring values, and the ability to alter the VRM switching frequency."
