The motherboard uses an unusual switching voltage regulator for a CPU: it uses two independent 4-phase PWM controllers (two field-effect transistors per phase), which should theoretically be better than an 8-phase controller used in many top motherboards. There wouldn't have been anything strange in this fact (manufacturers often design common PCB layouts for similar motherboards-but the fact is, X48 Platinum significantly differs from X48C Platinum in PCB design (in particular, the top model supports only DDR3 and has four slots for such memory). The mysterious third chip is a PCI Express expander (it's a bridge that routes peripheral PCI-E lanes of the Southbridge to two additional PCIEx16 slots for a quad-card graphics system). They are installed (one component only) in the more expensive MSI X48 Platinum. It's a strange situation, because the motherboard does not have additional elements that require such cooling according to its specifications. Only the second glance reveals a little discrepancy: the cooling system is designed for three chipset bridges (or other hot chips). We've already seen a similar solution in P35 Platinum (by the way, this implementation of Circu-Pipe is much smaller and has fewer heat sinks, although the chipset is a tad hotter because of the higher FSB clock rate). Except for the area of memory modules, the motherboard looks quite ordinary: the first thing that attracts attention is the heatpiped chipset cooling system.
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