Audioaficionado said:
They are solid rather than electrolytic fluid filled?
I thought they were digital like some of the newer motherboard designs.
Viper John, is that TechPowerUp review fairly accurate?
Electrolytic's, including the can type, haven't been fluid filled for 50 years...at least not in the sense that most
people think of a fluid anyway. They are "dry type" and the electrolyte is almost a dry powder.
The Vcore and Vddq regulators are digital. The confusion come from the erroneous term VRM that gets tossed
around all the time. Most people point to the series inductor modules (like the Pulse's) and call those VRM's
but nothing is further from the truth. They are nothing more than a coils of wire around a core (one for each
phase) packed into a common housing that simplify PCB design and lower individual parts count.
The PS consist of the regulator chip (digital in this case) which is the brains with all the operational voltage/
current/fault monitoring inputs and the user programmable I/O interfaces (be they hardware/firmware or
software). It provide the gate drive signals (ma levels) to the mosfets, which actually conduct the current
drawn from the PS. The regulator constantly changes mosfet gate drive to control where the mosfets phase
on/back/off
and/or the frequency of how often the mosfets do that in response to the changing load
(current drawn) on the power supply to maintain the target output voltage.
The series inductors, one in series with the output of each mosfet phase, primarily provide damping of the
instantaneous peak current spikes at mosfet phase on. They are completely passive and dumb but they
can produce
a lot of heat (as much or more than the mosfets) from the large current flows though
them. In a non PWM (and even in some PWM designs) the final filter electrolytics are downstream of the
phase series inductors after they are tied together to create the common B+ voltage output bus of the PS.
Viper
Got any links to help a man out? 
