Gadgetory

everyone today we're taking apart the a.m. the RX 5700 xt this is a non functional model its mechanical sample we have a functional model as well that we've taken apart after this to put thermocouples on it but this is the same board team cooler same everything as our functional model it just allows us to keep doing some testing while we still do a teardown so we're taking this apart today we're gonna look at the vrm components the cooler assembly see if there's any glue hidden in there and and see the overall build quality of AMD's 5700 xt before that this video is brought to you by us and the gamers Nexus toolkit on store document access net our brand new toolkit just launched and contains 10 custom made drivers for video card disassembly reap hasting and tear downs the 8 core tools are made of high-quality chromium vanadium alloy steel that's built for long service life and resistance to wear during use the other two tools are carbon steel hex heads that were custom ground down for capacitor clearance on video cards all the tools are easily mounted to a pegboard or stored in the GN made tool bag for easy transport learn more at the link in the description below so here it is this is Andy's new blower cooler on the Radeon 5700 XC couple of immediate comments when I was asked by AMD just casually what I thought of the cooler design I said I think Batman called and he wants his Batmobile back but that's not actually a good or a bad thing another thing that is maybe a little amusing is we had a Patrick Stone who did the wiring in our office for Ethernet came by he had not seen this card before he saw it on the table and he said yikes what happened to it so this dent is intentional just before anyone gets confused that is that is something AMD meant to do so we did not drop it although Linus is training me I'm his apprentice so my card is a an early revision we're gonna take apart our production sample as well when we are done with standard testing and put thermocouples on it that'll be done before the review if there are any differences between the two then this video won't go up at all so if this video is up then they are identical so let's start with just the back plate back plates got a couple pH one size screws Phillips screws this we're just using the GN toolkit on store documents excess net you can pick these up they are brand new and thanks to all of you who have picked them up already it's a tremendous support it allows us to keep operating with good independence and then I'm out on top of the Aegean mod mat as well so one two three four five got the old and the hot surface sticker haven't seen that since probably probably the 290x era is the last time we saw one of those warnings well no thermal pads on the back plate that is disappointing I don't believe we can only just take the back plate off of our testing model I need to do stock their own testing on some of this the components on this which is why I don't want to disassemble the whole thing but let's just make sure the back plate soon man I think there's some debug components on our mechanical sample that are not on the final sample so what's gonna happen is I'm gonna end up sending bill joy both of these photos and asked them to explain a few things to us like this I'm not sure what that is it says gh1 5e but I'm not sure what it is we can ask him if he knows and that's on the mechanical sample but not the final one and then this same story for that same story for that so I guess we're gonna end up opening both um but oh this one we'll have to wait a little bit so anyway there's no no no thermal pads on the back layer that's that's the point that how was it was annoyed about right so I'll set this aside this needs to do some more testing anyway back to this the vrm components are all the same at least even though there's a few extra components on the back of PCB and the coolers gonna be the same but pretty interesting so the reason for a disappointment about the backplate is that this is actually like aluminum and it's a good heatsink surface and you could pull a bit of extra heat through the PCB yeah it's not like it's not the end of the world end of the day you're not changing the thermals of the GPU you're changing the thermals of the components on the other side but there's no reason not to I guess it's kind of the the point we're making so anyway under that there's these three screws go to the blower and you can see that right there looks like the same one used on the Vega designs for the the mounting and then one two three 13 I think screws for the rest other than the four for the GPU let's start with the GPU and this is gonna be a pH zero it's a pH zero driver which is also in our tool kit and once we have this off the ideally what happens is the whole heatsink falls off the card and that's it but on these reference models by both Nvidia and AMD that is not the case we have to go and remove all these as well I'm just tracking the screws on the mod mat as well though this card looks pretty simple I don't think I'm going to don't think I'm gonna need the reference at the end of the day but but it does give you a visualization of where the screws are laid out there's another iOS screw in the back or in the front of the card sticking through these aren't gonna be longer we're going to leave those fan screws in there for now and see if the designs changed it all from Vega if you if you have to remove them to pull the cooler off I think you do though so pH one for the screws that are in DisplayPort and HDMI alright so I Oh plate comes off cards still going to be stuck because of the screws holding the fan in and past Vega models these three screws are actually a different size than the rest of the screws but had the same head so that was annoying but it looks like they fixed that that's good three five two one seven controller on the back which is on the production model that we just opened as well and then it should be a thermal pad in here which is part of why I wanted to use a mechanical model first to verify if it's a thermal pad instead of paste because if it's a pad then we have to take some more care with with disassembly and reassembly we did a lot of thermal pad testing on Radeon seven actually I'll get a sheet to demonstrate it for you this is from Radeon seven and so this is pressure paper that we use and what you do is you just apply it and then you mount the cooler and see where the pressure is and so this is just Radeon seven mounting pressure you can see what you want to see is this whole square should be red and this is different mounts so different times of applying the cooler and on none of them did we get full coverage there's always blank spots in the middle which we we ended up trying a Thrall pad replacement replacing it with paste because a paste should be better than the HMO three the Hitachi HMO three pad is what they're using here and it is a high-end throwing pad it's got a good thermal conductivity but it's not all about thermal conductivity which if you just look at the numbers and you see I don't know maybe 20 instead of six and twenty you would think is better but in reality it's more about contact pressure and thinness of the material and with their own pace you can get a thinner application which will have better thermal transfer characteristics than this if you can have an equal mount but with the Radeon seven card the amount was bad enough that the extra thickness of the thermal pad plus the malleability of the thermal pad while still having the thickness to reach down to the GPU from the cold plate those two things allowed this problem to be sidestepped not resolved but worked around and that's why they used to the thermal pad in in my that's my theory for why they used it Andy has some other potential defenses or justifications of using the pad in that it is a potentially better long-term solution because as thrown pace the ages on every GPU it gets bad cracks a lot of times companies you should not sue paste or Dow Corning this is Dow Corning paste this is actually what ACC is we bought a lot of this so that stuff doesn't age well and if their old pad will age better so in in AMD's defense it's reasonable for that use but we think the real reason is for mounting pressure anyway they're still using that and haven't done a mounting pressure test yet but we could do that separately as for the rest if you did want to disassemble your own Radeon and the reference model card at some point just be aware that there's probably a thermal pad on there and if there is even though it's the HMO 3 which is a nice one it is at some point going to start falling apart as you disassemble and reassemble it so you do need to be careful of that and if you replace with paste you can and on radium 7 we were eventually successful with it but in order to replace this thermal pad successfully with the paste what you need to do when you reassemble the card is for this thing the retention bracket you need to add a small washer underneath each of these four screws and that'll increase the mounting pressure enough that you can get the cooler to come down low enough to contact the GPU and that solves the mounting issue so you just need like four plastic washers basically the same kind you'd find any EK water box mounting kit alright so a cooler we'll start there throw up had we've gone over thoroughly you can see well maybe depending on the camera angle you might be able to see some small circular divots in the bottom here and if the camera ever catches the light correctly let's they appear there's one here here here here and those are from the vapor chamber so we actually have footage from a Coolermaster factory that we can hopefully drop in here I got to build a vapor chamber and big air quotes there they stood next to me and told me how to do the the powder application stuff like that of vapor chamber but you can see the inside of one in that video and that's all that is the vapor chamber plus the cylinders to hold it up the blower fan is going to be Delta it is a if you ever need to replace it the model number is bf b101 to Sh a zero one and it's a 12 volts 2.4 amp fan if you need to replace that which is quite a lot of power for a fan but it does go over 5,000 rpm from memory and that will be in the review the rest of this we need to separate so we can see the internals of the chamber it looks like there's a screw in here and here and there those are all pH one size I think yes pH one size as for the cables I disconnected this one next to the screw driver that should probably be an LED cable and this one is obviously the fan cable oh those are some massive screws check that out and Loctite pre-applied I will say that I appreciate having the mechanical sample this time because taking the cooler part with the production sample always sucks because you don't know if you're gonna be able to get the throwing pads back on the way they came out so even if the board components are slightly different like the addition of two of those or three of those back there this part is made much easier for us to go and greater depth okay aluminum base plate pretty simple so you've got shroud shroud I was correct on this that is an LED cable you can normally identify them because it's just a red and a black wire ground in power so LED shroud very simple this shroud has on the opposite side of the in on the base plate side there's a Gide here a flow guide so the fan sits in here and this is standard for every blower fan basically ever put on a GPU and even though the front end of these things kind of looks like it can pull air in because there's there's this heatsink here and you've got the hole here that the heatsink is shown through actually there you go that's made easier so if you just look at it it kind of looks like it pulls air in through here but that's not what happens and it's the same on the old Nvidia cards air comes in through here and there's no channel between these two or very limited of one if there is and that means it's it's guiding the air straight through the fin stack which is an aluminum fin stack interested in why this part is not covered but the other is why would that be is it because of the dent maybe this might be soldered or TIG welded together I'm not sure but it does not push out so what I wanted to do was push the heatsink out and flip it and see if the shroud would still fit if they just eliminated the top of the flow guidance to accommodate the dance in the shroud that would be kind of amusing but anyway aluminum fins stack vapor chamber on the bottom partially identifiable because of that which is where it's sealed vacuum sealed and some additional fin surface area over here some fins over here not a whole lot but enough to maybe help a bit with the MOSFET cooling this is located near the MOSFETs and inductors and yes this sits right on top of the MOSFET so those have a direct heat path heat sinking and then the fan I want to try and get this out just because it is a mechanical like it's not like it's the whole purpose is to be disassembled and then we could also cut it open don't think we're breaking the part I want to break maybe this will be the first time we've separated this part of the cooler because I it doesn't need to be reused so that is really cool good opportunity we might end up breaking some of the fins off the MOSFET fins or I think you're going to be compromised but it's not usable anyway so we have not had that opportunity before so I will go ahead and say thank you to Andy for providing a mechanical sample not sure this is what they had in mind but we don't get to do this normally because it is a destructive form of disassembly okay so we got the thing off and this is where I'm not 100% positive what the solution is to bond the chopper part of the vapor chamber to the base plate so feel free to post what you think that might be below my initial thought was a really strong thermal adhesive but the fact that it can't be really removed it felt a bit sticky but it can't be removed and it stripped the metal where they were contacted and pulled apart tells me it's it's maybe a more permanent solution like I don't know a welder solder or something but not sure let us know what you think there's a bit of you can see like some oxidation or corrosion on either side of it but that shouldn't really matter the reason you would bond them together that strongly though is for thermal transfer efficiency because the base plate is responsible solely for syncing from the vm components but also the memory which are all in this area and so that allows the vapor chamber to effectively sink both the GPU and the memory heat which does mean that the GPU is sharing its cooling solution so that's not not ever the greatest but it's often better than the alternative which is overheating your memory so that's why they do that what do you think is the best solution to cut through the vapor chamber safely and open it up okay so we took a couple approaches to try and drill this out to demonstrate what we know is in there but it's not we can't really get the perfect demonstration so if we haven't already we'll drop in the clip or do it again of cooler masters factory whenever there and China assembling sort of the inside part but vapor chamber that's what it looks like there is an air gap in there hence the name vapor chamber but in this one we ran so we first tried an angle grinder and the the problem here is we think that the metal may have been like folding back over itself or we were filling in or Reed resealing via heat the small opening that we were hoping to get with the cross-section and then when we what I ended up doing was taking just a metal drill bit to punch a small hole and then I took this one oh there's no battery in here but then I took this one which is a stepped bit and that is what we used for our previous coolermaster q500 i'll video where we fixed it if you can call it that so this you just kind of can keep drilling deeper to widen the hole and we could go a little more better needs to charge but yeah you can see a little bit unfortunate it's not the demonstration we were hope it's not as spectacular as we were hoping but internally there's a small gap in there where you can see where the actual part of the vapor chamber is where the the couple drops of liquid would be so anyway that's your pseudo cross-section it is very thick copper though but let's move on from the cooler and look at the PCB yes all of these are thirties so I'll send that information and some photos of the board of the well I'll probably wait till you take the take apart the retail sample and send that we'll do it along with this one and he can look at the PCB quality for us for our channel so we'll have a separate video on the PCB analysis but 31 70s for the vrm this one is a seven plus one phase and then the other the 5,700 Excel should be a six plus one I think but I haven't taken that apart yet so this one uses Samsung GTR six we've got a three five two one seven I our controller up here big blank space on the PCB where the fan is and then the rest of this like I said I'll send the builds right and we'll figure out if there any other differences with this and the retail sample and if they are they'll end up in this video but I'm thinking they're probably not any other than what we already saw definitely got some of it to go away I don't know if you can see it but it is less flat here very more flat here and this one feel that you can feel a difference okay so that will wrap this one we drilled some holes in the vapor chamber you can kind of see the actual vapor chamber part so that's cool like I said not as spectacular as we hoped but we do have footage from those factories to help visualize it you can't sort of see it though think if I took like a really skinny file and got in there then it would work speaking of things falling off the shelf behind me also a lot of people commenting about how these look dented we fixed that on this part couldn't fix this part of the dent but they just thought I'd try and smash out the dent and it worked for part of the card so that's gonna be it the PCB analysis will have up by builds I'd separate Lee and the die itself is not exciting and he doesn't print their taxes on the dies so that's nothing really to see there other than the die and we already have die sizes online I I guess I'll know this one was assembled in Taiwan which is not too common but board partners are starting to move any faction there because the tariffs so and these a bit ahead there but that'll be it for this one check back you the review should already be live at this point so go watch the review if you haven't you can go to store documents nexus dotnet to pick up a toolkit like the one I was using today with all the different screwdrivers you'll need for this card and lots of other ones and patreon.com/scishow gamers Nexus as well thank you for watching we'll see you all next time