Gadgetory

today we're taking a look at the AMD Radeon 7 V go graphics card we will be disassembling it looking at the PCB and the cooler the embargo for today does not allow for performance reviews so that's the only thing that is restricted currently is the performance numbers that would include thermals gaming stuff like that but anything physically with the card we can do for today so we're gonna give you a look at the PCB and II typically does pretty high on PCBs for the reference cards they've been good in the past now we're gonna look at the new cooler which is a triple fan axial design and see how it all kind of fits together and if and you can use for your screws then I suppose Nvidia that would be the goal here today so let's let's take it apart before that this video is brought to you by thermal grizzly and their high-end thermal compounds thermal grizzly makes cryo not paste for high thermal performance and conductivity without being electrically conductive so you don't have to worry about shorting components Crona is particularly good for replacing stock GPU pastes as cryo not is a non curing compound learn more at the link in the description below so here's Radeon seven you can see this is pretty similar if not the same as the one that was at CES and it does not have any secondary V BIOS which was a bit of a change from previous AMD reference designs but it is a PCB we need to look at and see if it's high end similar to the Vega cards they were actually pretty good PCBs and Andy did well on those designs the card itself has the same screw placement for the most part as previous Vega cards these are Torx I think there are TR six screws and then the rest of them are just Phillips for the most part you can see that we have the aluminum fin stack with either a vapor chamber or I mean just standard heat pipe cooling I that does kind of look like well we'll see when we take it apart it's hard to tell from here actually there are heat pipes in there and then dual or triple axial design and this is actually sort of similar although I don't have any reason to suspect they use the same manufacturer or anything but sort of similar to a very old XFX design which beyond being interesting there's not a whole lot to be gained from knowing that it's just we wanted to show it because the ghost was kind of a cool series alright so let's just get to taking it apart we have some actual content here to look at like I said I think these are tr6 that is typically what Andy uses for torques so let's find that this is actually torques 8 torques 8 but it's not security torques so that's good that makes it a bit easier to take apart in the very least and there are 1 2 3 4 or 5 of these I don't feel any beneath the stickers people like to hide stuff in there sometimes we're gonna just place these on the Gion mod mat which should be shipping about now if you go to store that gamers nexus net and you want a work surface like this one you can find one there to work on track screws get wiring diagram stuff like that so we have a couple more of these we'll speed through them alright that was very easy small hole here for a screw to come through the PCB out of the IO and then this placement is actually significantly different from the other Vega cards that's because the other ones have a single fan and it's right here and they use three smaller screws to hold those in place with the recipe and larger Phillips screws throughout the board this one obviously a bit different given that it is triple axial let's just remove this bracket first and see if the claw comes off easily does that say warranty Boyd okay Andy we're gonna have to have the talk here these stickers are not enforceable in the US and just in general its kind of ethically wrong to discourage a consumer from maintaining the product they they purchased there are reasons to avoid a warranty this is not one of them because there's no real risk here and XFX does similar things with theirs where they even got into a an argument with us on Twitter where ultimately kind of conceded and said well we don't enforce it in the US like because okay because you can't so it's only enforced in regions where we can screw people over so warranty void if remove stickers we are very very much opposed to these also does it say remove yes I mean it's not it's not removed anyway it's uh it's modified it's not removed though stickers still there so you could argue that if you needed to all right couple Phillips screws after this let's see if that coolers loose though nope so those screws are going into the base plate which will secure the PCB to the base plate now in the very least so far this is about the same level of difficulty as the r-tx cards the FE card so that's good the question will come of whether they can defeat NVIDIA and be more complex and I think the answer will be no Nvidia Zephie designs are completely insane the way they're built to a point that if you wanted to complete disassembly a card and get access to the fans to clean or CLE clean or fix the fans or something like that you would need to take out about seventy six screws on the nvidia cards the high-end ones and also you would need a heat gun at like a couple hundred degrees Celsius maybe uh and I think we ran out like 400 Fahrenheit something like that 500 Fahrenheit to melt the glue because Nvidia uses glue so so far Andy's doing a bit better than that which is good to see I think it will be easier to try and remove the IO plate although one of those screws is under the heatsink so that will be a bit difficult so it's two larger screws back here go into the shroud of the cooler and then the rest go into like the hdmi and displayport connections so that pivots a bit oh there's one more screw I missed in here we're going to have to separate that cabe all I see if their own pad trying to come off - I just like to go on record say and I specifically hate that type of connector they're very difficult to work with without ripping the connector off the PCB itself but we did it and Wow what oh my god alright so we did a cut here to do some research and this is actually a throne pad and if we look really close I'd say it's a bit better than just thrown paddle I'll tell you exactly what it is in a second we did figure that out but if you look really closely and at the right angle of light you will see that there's an indentation of the HBM right here and of the GPU right here so it is in fact making full contact okay so kind of difficult to show but there is in fact indentations there showing contact so it's making contact which is better than what I suspected and that's because it's a pad not a paste and we did some research here and also reached out to AMD and what we learned is that this is a it's a new thermal interface what we understand this is a Hitachi hm oh three solution and we have the datasheet for this so Hitachi's datasheet says I'll just quote here it's a graphite resin high thermal conductivity sheets that they referred to as a graphite sheet in which graphite filler is vertically oriented that would be in this thin here and it says although graphite material has high thermal conductivity simplex particles that themselves are hard so they have problems in both flexibility and adhesion therefore it was difficult to achieve a good balance between high thermal conductivity and flexibility and then Hitachi goes on to say how their solution fixes this problem the datasheet also suggests that it's got a thermal conductivity of 40 to 90 watts per meter Kelvin they say it's an effective thermal conductivity which may be orientation based I'm not sure of 25 to 45 and so this is a graphite sheet is what this is and that is why part of it got torn off here now like I said we've already done all of our testing so that's not gonna impact anything but what I will be doing after this is probably removing this sheet completely and we have a couple test plans for it and then well I won't go into them here because well I mean we'll just just come back for the review and you can see what we do with it so there also be really interesting for the review so theoretically this has a higher thermal conductivity than paste it's just that what are the reasons for using it is the question there are two primary reasons we can think of one is that if am these really time constraint here needs to get this out the door this is potentially faster to get done maybe fewer issues a lot of people don't know that video cards are typically assembled by hand actually there's not much machine involved at all so this might help there alternatively it could be that this one although it is all let's get a shot of the diamond HBM here you can see that this is a resin coated die so there's functionally zero difference in height like I mean there's not any difference there I could measure it with tools and we would see no difference that's because it's resin or it's got an epoxy resin on top of it and this is something we saw before maybe we can find a shot of our old pressure paper test we did for Vega where some of the dyes would be resin an epoxy coated like this and others that were manufactured in different facilities would have died height differences between the HBM and the GPU and this caused some problems like for power colors card previously so maybe the thermal pad might be a solution to that it's a bit thicker it should conform a bit better so maybe that's a solution but that's only going to be a solution if Andi still has the multiple packaging facilities creating different heights between the HBM and the GPU and we're not sure what the case is because we have sample size of one and known as posted pictures yet because it's before embargo lifts so we'll find out more about this a bit later for the review let's go through the rest of the cooler though this this is very interesting I'm not going to scrape any of it off right now we'll do some other testing with this stuff as for the rest so PCB is pretty simple in terms of basic layout you've got the the hookups here for fan cables and for I guess LEDs or something power for LEDs and then some thermal pads that fortunately are easy to peel off this time so this throne pad is on top of the the vrm MOSFETs and we'll look more closely at those right now and we have a see let's see if I can read one of these that's enough I international rectifier 35 401 M that one down there and we'll talk to build will pitch the server to builds alright I don't know if this is an existing board designer Vega memorized anymore but it does not look say might be the same as the Instinct stuff will ask him idat 1 4 7 to international rectifier so there are how many of these 1 2 3 4 on this this line here and we have some other MOSFETs under these pads so this is a sort of an l-shaped vrm which is technically a bit more efficient they can do this because there's no G DDR memory it's all HB m on the interposer which is on top of the substrate so that does give more board space to do your stuff this looks like the same thing this pads a bit different let's look at this one that's because there's nothing there ok so there's some spots for stuff there but no actual MOSFETs this one these are again I believe the same so we end up with this for the vrm once we take all the pads off here and again we'll talk to builds right about this if it's a new PCB then then we'll have him do an analysis on it but there's our vrm we also have I'm items of interest on the back so there's an IR 35 to 1 7 right here so 35 2 1 7 4 controller international rectifier and then I think that's all there is on the back mmm yes that that pretty much sums up the back of the board for areas of interest on the front there's an another ir35 217 that's down here and then we have another small vrm component over here that looks like the same ir parts that we saw a second ago ok so that covers the PCB no secondary V bios or anything like that but you get a brief look at the v RM and some interesting characteristics for the thermal solution which will again we'll talk more about that later but you do have the basics you probably won't hear elsewhere for a little while so that is a Hitachi pad the HMO 3 graphite pads sort of interesting solution higher thermal conductivity does not mean better thinner means better and this is not particularly thin but it might be a more suitable solution if there are manufacturing tolerance differences from the packaging plants so let's get the the rest of the cooler out if we can you can actually tell that this is a vapor chamber over here it's it is connected to pipes which is sort of interesting but the way you can tell it's a vapor chamber is because in the right light you can see the circles right here and if you cut this open those would actually be just small copper cylinders and those are used to to sort of keep the gap inside of the vapor chamber you know so that it doesn't I guess collapse on itself but but that is indicative of a vapor chamber typically let's let's get this off though and just confirm everything so I think for this we need some small Torx screws 5 and actually it's it's technically not TR because it's not a security screw but close enough this is so far much easier to disassemble than the RT axe parts that we looked at previously so that's at least an improvement maintaining the fans getting to the thermal solution isn't too bad either as you saw okay so that just lifts out make sure we're careful of the cables all right base plate cooler and then fans the fans our first D apparently is the brand they are DC fans of course a 0.32 apps 12 volt so that's your fan spec and if you did want to replace one exactly the model number sits first first do I guess is the brand uh oh that's interesting so I mean doesn't tell us a whole lot but the fans were made in November at least of last year so fd-80 one 5h 1 2 s is the model if you ever need to replace one of these these are 10 millimeter heat pipes they are flat heat pipes the reason that companies do flat like this as opposed to round as it does increase the surface area so the contact area to the fins which these are the L shaped flat fins on the bottom to improve increased contact surface area the contact area to the fins is increased by doing that and then they just solder between the fin yes that is soldered between the fin and the heat pipe pretty standard stuff so here's a same sort of vapor chamber standoffs as on the previous Vega cards another giveaway of vapor chamber is that tail right there so it looks like the world's smallest heat pipe that's just where the vapor chamber is closed off so this is a vapor chamber again the the biggest giveaways is that you can see there's little copper dents all through the whole thing that's not really imperfections that's just where there are cylinders inside the support the thin and then we have heat pipes so there's two four or five heat pipes and only really two and a half of those go through the relevant area which would be the GPU itself well actually we don't even know where they go through they just seem to just I guess they just terminate let's see okay so stand corrected I don't think they terminate it looks like these actually do go sort of from this perspective under the vapor chamber down here and then connect to the fin or the Finn stack so anyway about two-and-a-half of those in the GPU area which is the relevant area and the rest is just L shaped fins for contact to the base plate which is right here and the orientation of the base plate would be roughly this except flipped so there's your cooling solution really pretty simple stuff it's not like they they don't have any increased surface area on the base plate it's just a contact plate is what it is and in fact there's not any thermal interface between the base plate and the cooler itself either so I think there's some direct contact going on here maybe we'd have to look at the PCB again between the inductors are actually that those are just clearance holes for caps and things so pretty pretty simple cooler favorite chamber and heat pipes that's what it is and here's the top side just cuz it looks kind of cool will show you that so you can see the fin stack which is clearly got to have a lot of clearance for these fans that Andy has switched to so that would sock it down like this and then I mean the question at this point is you know where's your air going so with the fins oriented vertically like this as opposed to horizontally like this the air will only have one way to escape and that's going to be up and down and it'll get guided by the fins you might have a little bit coming out over here over here just because there's no and nothing really blocking it but once you put this thing down there's there's a bit of pathway to escape there at the bottom which would go into the motherboard so that's not the best place for the air to escape at the top unfortunately the fins are largely obstructed where these two fans sort of meet fins are largely obstructed by that radion shroud so that that does limit the cooling capabilities but some of the air can come out here somewhere and viddy does the same thing they both do the same thing for aesthetics it's really not great for thermals in so far as design but aesthetics I guess you got to put the name somewhere and that's where the card face is the user so that's where it goes so that covers the cooler the PCB will talk to build Zoid see if it's worth doing more depth on the PCB so that's it that's the AMD Radeon seven big a card for you today we're only allowed to talk about the card itself in a physical form we can't talk performance numbers just yet so that's the only thing that's really embarked aright now is the performance review and for that the card launch is on the seventh which is Thursday this week so you could surmise when the review would go up and that will be with all of our performance numbers for gaming maybe we'll do some production this time as well and then of course power overclock and stuff like that so some interesting stuff in here for you mostly the throwing pad solution the graphite pad that's clearly a bit unique how well it works we'll find out we have most of it already but I can't tell you what it is so check back for more subscribe as always to catch that you get a stored on cameras axis dotnet to pick up a mod mat like the one I was working on here they are shipping this week we just got another round in and patreon.com slash gamers Nexus tops out there as well thank you for watching I'll see you all next time