Gigabyte X99 Phoenix SLI Motherboard Review
A Closer Look Continued
For voltage regulation, Gigabyte chose to use International Rectifier’s IR3556M. The IR3556M contains both the low and high side MOSFETs and drivers and are rated at 50A. 76A CooperBussman inductors are located just below the MOSFETs. The IR3580 8-Phase PWM is located to the upper right of the MOSFETs.
Power to the memory modules is delivered by a pair (one for each set of 4 memory slots) of International Rectifier IR3570A PWM controller operating in 2+1 phase mode and 1 for VPP. Each set of slots also has a pair of IR3553M 40A PowIRstages. Thr IR3553M combines the MOSFET and synchronous buck controller in one IC for efficiency and space savings.
USB 3.1 is provided by the Intel DSL6540 Thunderbolt 3 controller. The controller is PCIe Gen 3 and has two ports available. On the X99 Phoenix, the USB 3.1 type C and the red USB A connector on the rear I/O are managed by this controller.
A pair of Renesas D720210 ISB 3.0 4-port ICs are responsible for the additional USB 3.0 ports on the back panel as well as the USB headers on the motherboard.
Networking is handed by a pair of Intel LAN ICs. Both LAN ports are 10/100/1000 capable. The two network adapters can be teamed for failover or load balancing in Intel’s driver software. One chip is the I211AT and the other is the I 218V.
Audio for the Gigabyte X99 Phoenix SLI is handled by a Realtek ALC1150 and a Texas Instruments OP1652 OPAMP. Nichicon Gold capacitors surround the audio IC. . Unlike other motherboards from Gigabyte, this amp cannot be upgraded. There is a physical separation between the motherboard PCB and the audio PCB. Doing this offers less interference induced into the audio circuit from other motherboard components.
Turbo B-clock adds an additional clock generator to help get a better overclock on the BCLK frequency. This is accombplished by using an IDT 6V49322NLG clock generator.
There are three ITE embedded controllers on the X99 Phoenix SLI. SuperIO which provides motherboard health monitoring (voltage, temperature, and fan control) is handled by the ITE IT8620E. The ITE IT8792E is used to add extra fan controls. The X99 Phoenix SLI adds extra independent headers in case users want to run dual pumps, or extra fans.
The ITE IT8951E is used for Q-FLASH. This allows the user to flash to the latest BIOS from a thumb drive without having a CPU or memory installed or allows the user to recover from a corrupt BIOS.
