what is the exact use of VRMs in motherboards and how do they work ?
In: Technology
Power to the motherboard largely comes in 12 volts from the PC’s power supply. But the CPU wants a varying voltage of around 1.2 to 1.4 volts when busy and even lower when idle. The more MHz/GHz the CPU runs at, generally the higher the voltage needs to go to make the CPU run properly. But lower voltage means less power consumed which is desirable when possible.
So the VRM’s job is to provide that power to the CPU at the voltage it wants.
They’re basically just DC-to-DC voltage adaptors, but able to adjust the voltage on the fly and designed to meet the above needs. They’re mainly considered special because the CPU is a big and sensitive power consumer, and at ~1.3 volts it means that the number of amps output needs to be quite high. That means a lot of heat, so the VRM is designed to handle lots of amps more than most other components in a computer, short of the VRM on the graphics card as well. 🙂
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