Find a prebuilt Acer board featuring the 4690K chipset.
Find a prebuilt Acer board featuring the 4690K chipset.
I'm assembling a gaming and general-purpose PC for my nephews as a Christmas present. The build will use an Acer motherboard I found after it stopped working properly. It still functions, but the 4460 is no longer reliable, leaving me with a choice between an i3 or a 4690k. Both have similar power consumption, yet higher clock speeds raise worries about overloading the VRMs. I’d hate to see it fail under load or sacrifice performance too much. The board seems to lack sufficient VRMs, which is what’s causing my concern. Can I adjust the 4690k to run at 4460 speeds instead?
If the TDP is the same, you don't really have to worry. These old CPU's don't really draw much power. I stress tested a PC with a 4th gen core i5 and the highest the CPU ever drew was 87W with the CPU and iGPU being stressed at the same time. Since it's a general purpose machine, the CPU won't be under 100% load that often. This board acutally seems to have a few phases (I can see 6), so you're going to be fine. I had a dell g5 5090 with an i7-9700 that would draw up to 130W while playing. The VRMs that weren't cooled at all (I also had 6 phases) and only throttled the CPU to its TDP under a full synthetic load and maxed out at 90°C while playing
Thanks for your response, it's nice to know it improves on what I expected. I only noticed three on the left of the CPU now, but I realized there are actually more. VRMs are those blue caps around the CPU? Six phases is a significant upgrade compared to what I thought. It seems Acer designed the board for higher-end components. Another nice discovery is that they used 1600 MHz RAM, which was common back then—prebuilt units usually had lower speeds. It looks like Acer produced quality products in the past. The best part is these boards fit standard ATX cases and use regular PSUs.
The VRMs use MOSFETs that quickly turn on and off to reduce voltage, capacitors balance it, and coils handle the remaining noise. The hottest components are the MOSFETs, the tiny black chips positioned over the capacitors.