Shortage of PWM doubler forces Gigabyte to redesign motherboards

AMD B550 chipset and motherboards only launched two months ago, but Gigabyte has already launched a second version of its B550 Aorus Elite and Elite AX motherboards. Apparently, the reason behind the launch of these motherboards is due to the shortage of PWM doubler, a component that the original B550 Aorus Elite motherboards have.

VRMs (voltage regulator module) are used in motherboards to drop the 12V power output from the PSU into something that the CPU can handle, like 1.1V for example. Additionally, there's a PWM controller responsible for handling the VRMs and each of the power phases of your motherboard. The more the phases, the better, but that usually means that the cost also increases.

By using PWM doublers, instead of having a PWM controller for each phase, it's possible to have 1 controller responsible for two phases. Considering a 6-phase PWM controller as an example, if it's using a 1:1 phase design, it will have 6 power phases, but by using a doubler it supports up to 12 phases. This is a cheap way to achieve a 12-phase design, but it's of inferior quality compared to a “pure” 12-phase VRM design with 12 PWM controllers.

Gigabyte has been using doublers in its B550 Aorus Elite motherboards, but the shortage of these components made their price increase. The shortage of doublers, as reported by OC3D probably made their price increase, therefore increasing the cost of manufacturing these motherboards. Instead of paying more than they are willing to, it seems that Gigabyte decided to redesign its B550 Aorus Elite motherboards by removing the doublers. With this, Gigabyte created the new B550 Aorus Elite V2 and Elite AX V2 motherboards without PWM doublers.

For now, only Gigabyte seems to have redesigned its motherboards, but if there's really a shortage of doublers, other manufacturers should follow its footsteps.

KitGuru says: Have you bought the original Gigabyte B550 Aorus Elite? Will you be waiting on the new wave of redesigned B550 motherboards before buying a new one?

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