Has anyone else noticed that these boards seem to have a very significant 5V plane resistance?
For example, if I downclock a CPU to 5 x 100 -> 500Mhz @ 1.6V, I measure 4.90V getting to the mosfets on their high-side. If I clock the CPU at a moderate setting of 9 x 200 -> 1.8 GHz @ 1.75V, the mosfet reading has already dropped down to 4.75V! COnsidering that eventually I'm going to pull out this leftover chip that maxes out below 2Ghz and plop in a CPU that'll do over 2.4GHz, this (already present) level of vDrop seems a potential problem.
To clarify, I am quite certain it's not a system power supply problem. Power at ATX connector is rock-steady at 4.97V and besides that I have this in a dual PSU testbed that can sustain over 700W, near 350W on 3V/5V. Voltage is definitely dropping on the board, yet when I measure the mosfet voltage @ 4.75, the bios or PCProbe is still reporting 4.9V, it's reading is not of same point in the circuit so it can't reflect this drop at the beginning of the CPU vCore regulation circuitry.
Anyway, just wondering if anyone else had noticed this. I'd already planned to mod the he!! out of the board but hadn't yet decided on a PSU connector next to the inductor or just running a 14 ga. wire on the back from the ATX conn. to the inductor leg. I've seen others connect leads directly to mosfet vIN but I'm not going to bypass the first inductor (it is there for a reason).
Then I thought, I could be a pioneer instead and take off the inductor, put it inline with a 12V connector... in theory (AFAIK, haven't confirmed specs on this particular controller yet) it should accept 12V in as well as 5V, though I suppose I ought to take some readings and do a bit of testing beforehand if I follow that path, or do you think that with only a 2-stage regulation that the induction isn't high enough to use 12V? Didn't really want to rework the whole thing, maybe I should've bought an Abit NF-7 but I'm partial to Asus.