To me this smells 100% like a transient issue, Gigabyte probably assumed that more phases would wipe the transient response time out. The issue is that if you'r

To me this smells 100% like a transient issue, Gigabyte probably assumed that more phases would wipe the transient response time out. The issue is that if you're shutting down phases as Buildzoid mentions you'd have to do to get efficiency; you then lose that response time advantage until the phase is spun back up which is the longest part of the power system cycle. Normally output filtering is designed to make up that gap, but I think in the case of these chips that's not happening. I suspect it's a lot more complicated because I have a sneaky suspicion that adding more caps wouldn't solve the problem (completely).