Motherboard phases

I have been studying on what might be a reliable motherboard for my future Phenom or Athlon 2 x 4 CPU.

The main things I started to focus on was motherboard quality.

There is much debate and bias about which brands are best and generally Asus and Gigabyte are advised, but when I look into reviews, all boards from all brands seem to have malfunctioning ones between them and all boards from all brands seem to have perfect 10 score ones up to 30+ reviews so the brand is not an issue for me.

I started to focus on things as the quality of the capacitors, are they solid or electrolytic, and are they Japanese or from another Asian country.
It seems that Asus and Asrock all use Japanese capacitors, especially the critical electrolytic ones, and Japanese are claimed to be the only decent ones, so I figured that one out.

The second quality issue is said to be the amount of phases on the boards.
Up to (here in Holland) 90 euro's, all the amd boards use 5 phases for the cpu power, above that they are dubbled to 10.
I just counted from pictures on the internet so I might be 1 or 2 of.

The number of phases as I read determine for a great deal the load per phase, thus temperature and longevity and also core voltage stability.
In reviews they are never mentioned while experts, knowing a lot about electronics of motherboards mention them as majorly important.
So why not listen to that.

I come to my issue now.
I wonder if using ten phases for quad core cpu's is not something like putting formula 1 tyres on a street car.
Nice and stable but quite unnecessary.
Is there someone who knows more about this?

It's nice to buy an extreme board, but would 10 phases add anything to my system stability and reliability and isn't it just a waste of money?
Or is it the opposite and really something to reckon with but a, to many, unknown profit?

 

I think phases are marketing purposes.

As long as you get a good board with a good PSU you should be fine.

I like Asus

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/arti...e-Motherboard-Voltage-Regulator-Circuit/616/4

 

This is exactly the first article I read about it!

And you're stealing my thoughts. I could think of no other then commercially make boards more attractive by these kind of overdone features.

 

I think the Phase design helps if your overclocking and overvolting.