oh dude, please do not give any praise to the VRM on the ASRock Extreme4, its a joke. the VRM under the heatsink isn't the MSI's 4 phase would take your ASRock's 8 phase to town, beat it up in the first round, buy it a drink for losing so badly and then drive it home because it passed out and broke so quickly, and then the MSI's 4 phase would go back out to party some more. Now the MSi 6 phase is something you should actually be afraid of. In all seriousness, i am not a fan other either MSI nor ASRock, but I can say both have made decent boards in the last year, i have used both of their ultra top end, MSI Bigbang X79, ASRock X79 Extreme 4 Gen 3, ASRock Z68 Extreme 7 gen 3, MSI P67A-GD65. Now ASRock on the boards I looked at used very high quality lower RDS ON MOSFETs, but ont he case of the ASRock Z77 Extreme 4, now here is the mystery, how is ASRock able to give you such a cheap product with so many features? because they cut it where you don't see. The PCB is very cheap on the asrock, but not only that, listen i am just going to show you a picture i took at computex:
Okay so that isn't LF-Pak as you see two LF-Pak MOSFETs on the outside of the capacitors, so perhaps the user might think that inside the heatsinks are LF-Pak(like most Z68 asrock) or they might think they are PowerPAK(like most X79 ASRock), however it is D-PAK like asrock P67 fatality(asrock z68 fataility used LF-pak after user outrage). D-PAK is not very good for modern SMSP design because of its extremely high power losses, which can reduce its output, and most of all provide issues with power efficiency, power stability, and temperatures on the heatsinks.
I don't really mind what people say about the asrock Z77 extreme 4, just don't count its phases and say it is better, because it's one of the very isolated cases in which the higher phase count board is not using the same quality. With ivy bridge you don't notice this because asrock is using a lot of output capacitors to dampen the power quality. If you put a sandy bridge CPU in that board you will see how hot it gets because sandy bridge pulls a lot more power than ivy bridge, which is why i am thinking asrock chose.
also intersil doesn't make digital PWMs.
You should try to show this post to asrock, perhaps they will try to sue me or shutdown my website again. I think it is ll fun and games because they break so many patent laws inside the USA, and my friend is a rising patent attorney, it really is fun for me.