Gadgetory

hi guys build Zoid here from actually hardcore overclocking and today we're gonna be taking a look at the RT x 28 e TI Strix PCB from asus and as you can clearly see this is not an nvidia reference PCB or a founders edition PCB as they like to call it now it's it's a bloody reference card you can stop pretending it isn't it still doesn't have more phases than any of the custom models but yeah so this this is the first of the custom PCBs and I rather like it it has some pretty MIT like this this actually has straight upgrades on like every front compared to the founders edition before that this video is brought to you by Power colors red dragon Vega 56 which is now below MSRP on new I got $380 with a rebate from the 28th to the 30th of September when we first tested Vega 56 we found the card competitive and fun for tweaking and modding and now that it's back in stock it's worth a consideration Vega 56 also comes with three free games including Assassin's Creed Odyssey star control and a strange brigade while supplies last learn more at the link below I'm gonna say that you're probably actually you're never gonna notice these improvements on this PCB over the founders edition unless you're maybe doing lnto overclocking there you might notice or maybe even maybe even with dry ice you might notice a difference but unlike air cooling water cooling and you know without any physical modifications of the card you're not gonna see a difference between this PCB and the founders edition that's not to say that this isn't a better PCB this definitely is better so let's get right into why this is better so first of all same as the founders edition asus is using the vcore vrm sort of on either side of the GPU core so you have one block of ecore vrm phases over here and you have the other block of phases over there so that's your recore and as usual the memory vrm is located right above that so that's the MM up there over here in the top we have five volts and 1.8 volts so 1.8 volts is for things like the bios like the BIOS chips that nvidia uses and i just realize that the circle goes into the vcore there but there's a fight so you have a one regulator for 5 volts and 1.8 volts right here and this is for basically things like the BIOS chips that nvidia uses this is for actually powering the RM itself because the vrm run like these power stages they don't run off of 12 volts or 3.3 volts they actually need to run off of 5 volts so that's why there's a 5 volt regulator up there down here we have the PEX rail so that power is the PCIe interface as well as some internal PLL's of the the GPU core and over here we have in a rather odd location we have the the USBC power so that's for the USB type-c port on the card right here on the rear i/o so that's what power is that and yeah that pretty much covers the the major V RMS scattered around actually all of the theorems scattered around the card you of course still have the power balancing circuitry same as the founder citation so you have 12 volt balancing over here and that's still controlled by the same chips all as on the founders Edition so the controller for this is again AUP 7 6 v 1 q and that's a two-channel 12 volt power management IC basically it just switches where some of these phases again I'm not sure without the card in hand I don't like if I had the card in hand I could actually check how that is wired but without the card in hand I just know some of the phases in this block of in this part of the V curve erm are gonna be able to basically switch if they pull their power from this connector or this connector and maybe between the PCIe saw as well I'm not entirely sure again like without the card in hand I can't see the internal power planes and how they're interconnected I I wish I had that kind of power that would actually be really also but I don't so yeah unfortunately I don't know how that is specifically wired up and the same goes for the 12-volt balance right here so I'm just gonna put about ei L for short there so yeah that's the balancing circuitry so same as the founders Edition and other interesting things is asus has a bios switch up here which basically puts you between a quiet mode and a performance mode so that is an actual bios which because that's really the only way to implement any kind of like multiple like profile system on a GPU is you need multiple BIOS chips because you can't on the fly change a lot well yes you could maybe change the fan profile with a switch but you couldn't really do anything like change clocks or power targets with a switch on the card that didn't actually just straight-up change which BIOS chip you are on so you do have dual BIOS on this card just because aces ones in that feature which is pretty neat dual BIOS is nice if you're into like tinkering with flashing different cards biases onto your card which can be useful if you're trying to find like if you've come across a BIOS for a twenty atti that has a much higher power limit than what your cards and normal BIOS would normally allow this is gonna be useful for like trying that out without running the risk of completely breaking your card so now that's a nice feature to have and then another feature that ace has put on this card and I am very surprised that an Nvidia still lets them do this are these voltage mod points right here I'm a huge fan of these things but as you can clearly see Nvidia didn't actually let them label these properly but I hope that Asus because well I'm hoping that Asus will put down some ln2 you know scores with a twenty atti and when they do that they'll hopefully release to the public released to the public how like how these are specifically wired up and I'm gonna assume that like in typical Asus fashion the only way to get these points to actually be enabled is to short these pads right here and they've been doing this on their cards for years like all the way back to at least the 500 series of nvidia gpus they've been doing this you can also find it on their AMD GPUs and it's in my opinion a really really cool feature I'm really surprised that video still lets them do this but at least you know apparently they're not letting them label these anymore because normally they'd be labeled something like V core v mem V PLL and it they would give you voltage controls for like the pecs rail the V Corps and the memory rail but yeah that would that would be far too that would give you far too many control options for your you know $1200 GPU that you just bought from a store so yeah the the the can't actually tell you how those work so that's a pretty cool feature then they have some LED on-off stuff which I don't really care about and yeah asus is still only on just two eight pins which I'm kinda sad about which but on the other hand for like your daily usage like air cooling water cooling it really won't make a difference the cards not going to pull enough power to really well unless you do like physical modifications the cards not going to be able to pull enough power to overload to eight pins so for normal users I completely understand why they didn't bother with putting like a third eight pin or something cuz really $4.99 like for everybody who buys this card that would be completely bloody irrelevant it wouldn't actually do anything so yeah that kind of covers the minor intrigue interesting feature stuff around the card let's take a closer look at the actual V RMS so for recore asus is going from the thirteen phase that you find on the founders addition to a one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen phase so three phases more than the founders addition but other than that they've made other changes for example asus has added a whole bunch of extra bulk capacitance which I assume ends like that so you basically get a bunch of extra bulk capacitors for the vcore and you actually still have the like if you the these capacitors on the back so these I assume these are going to be aluminum polymers a lot of people would say like a lot of people that called like think these are tantalum polymer capacitors but that's most of the time like well they can be but a lot of like this this would be a this is a probably a tantalum polymer but these are almost certainly aluminum polymers and the reason why those are uses they're actually in terms of sort of output filtering for a switching power supply like a vrm these are actually superior to tantalum polymer capacitors so yeah and there's actually the same number of these capacitors on the on the 20 80 TI Strix as there are on the 20 80 TI founders edition so Asus actually managed to literally just like add more capacitors on top of what you would normally get on the founders edition which is kind of interesting because initially you'd think oh they just replaced all the capacitors that Nvidia had in aluminum as like in the SMD package in the flat SMD packages now they kept those they're all on the back as well as you have some on the front here and then they added all of these on top of that I don't know how much of a difference that actually makes probably maybe like 10 20 megahertz on like if you tested a hundred cards you might see like a 10 megahertz 20 megahertz difference generally speaking extra capacitance helps more as you crank up your power consumption but considering how power limited these cards are and the fact that they probably don't scale with v core again you know it's nice like it is you know definitely an upgrade it's just I don't think you're gonna notice that there is a difference it's kind of like shaving 10 kilograms of weight off of a off of a supercar it does like yeah it's lighter by 10 kilograms it's not actually gonna make a difference in it to like not make a noticeable difference to the user so those are some of the upgrades Asus has done but there's more upgrades so not only have they gone from the the weird thirteen phase to a weird 16 phase and what the reason why this is a weird 16 phase is that yes indeed the voltage controller is still the same MP 2888 so ten phases 500 megahertz switching frequency not 500 that would be ridiculous and this is actually running in 10 faves mode so they do actually have like 10 phases interleaving the thing is there's gonna be some phases on here which actually have multiple power stages hooked up to them which means this is like this is not really a 16 this doesn't have 16 phases interleaving it has 10 but some of the phases might be coming and going depending on how much load the card is under so you know it's it's kind of this weird hybrid thing where it's like it's not really a 16 but it's not really a 10 either because it it does kind of dynamically change how many phases it has so yeah and that's that that's the same monolithic Power Systems chip that you had on the founders Edition which actually interesting sidenote apparently there's founders additions to any a TTI's with a you p90 512 which is actually an eight phase-- controller not a 10 phase so that's kind of interesting you can actually get two different variants of the founders Edition but I think for the the asus strix card you're gonna always get the mp-28 88 just because if you'll notice that like if you look if you saw the founders Edition PCB analysis then you'd notice that that PCB looks almost like it's a prototyping card because there are so many unoccupied solder points like there is tons and tons of unused SMD component mounts and that's basically because Nvidia wants to be like I assume that's done because they switch voltage controllers between foundries additions like they do two different variants with one with the U P UPI semiconductor chip and one with the monolithic power cyst chips like chip like this card anyway the next upgrade that asus has done yes the they're upgrading all the things a small amount but a noticeable amount is that they've actually upgraded the power stages themselves as well so on the founders edition you to have Fairchild Semiconductor Zeff DMF 31 70 power stages here you get Texas Instruments CSD 95 4 that's not a five that's a four ninety five that's not a five either 95 four 80s and these are also 70 M smart power stages so smart power stages are smart because they integrate things like temperature monitoring as well as very accurate current monitoring directly into the chips and the cool thing about the CSD 95 for a for a TS is that these are actually unlike the fairchild chips these are SPECT all the way up to one point two five megahertz switching frequency whereas the fairchild ones were only up to one megahertz and admittedly they're not particularly efficient at that frequency but they can do it like they will work up to that and if you are you were so inclined as to use them at that frequency you can and the really cool feature that like is just kind of insane is these have o upped like these will do 95% efficiency or better all the way up to 30 amps current output so yeah at the the lower current outputs that this fear like parfaits this vrm is not going to be pushing 30 amps for like a while like you'd need to lift the power limits and everything to get like average over 30 amps through each of these power stages the end result is that this vrm is insanely efficient because the these power stages are like they're more efficient than what you get on the the founders edition so basically like the founders edition of erm i like already its massive overkill it won't have any sir it shouldn't have any thermal issues and in fact in the in the thermal testings that Steve's done the the vrm ran it like 90 degrees and we all know that the founders editions cooling system is just kind of terrible as far as the vrm is concerned I mean it's covered by a vapor chamber isn't really making great contact with it so you can already see how the ridiculous vrm efficiency there pays off you don't really need to worry about cooling the vrm because it kind of doesn't get hot to start with but this just takes the whole not getting hot part a step further because these are even more efficient and actually capable of going up to higher switching frequencies so the end result is that this V curve erm pushing current into the core and you know from both sides and there are benefits to the the the funky vrm layout we have here that you don't normally see and there are benefits and I've explained them in the founders edition video so if you want to hear about those you can go watch the founders edition of the video so for the actual current rate while current versus vrm efficiency capabilities where we still run into the issue of the vrm is rated entirely at 1.8 volts output voltage so we're gonna do be doing 1.8 volts out and 1.2 volts out which this is scaled against a IR 3575 and that's just because that datasheet is convened convenient for me to use I use the 35 75 also for scaling down the F GM f31 70 s so this is very like that like the the ratings under the 1.2 volts are gonna be very like very it should probably be around something like that they're not accurate they're not dead-on because they're just scaled off of a different chips different chips of voltage output voltage versus efficiency curve and that may or may not be accurate at all but it should be relatively close and it's better than just you know going with like yeah 1.8 volts expect lower which I got really sick and tired of to uh which I like because all of these cards are using these 70 M power stages I've just kind of gotten sick of doing that so it's just like I don't want to do that we're gonna scale them down according to the 3575 for the actual operating parameters of the VR MMX going with 600 kilohertz switching frequency because the texas instrument datasheet is not respect at below 600 kilohertz whatsoever and 5 volts drive voltage well power voltage will just call it 5 volts VCC naught V core that's 5 volts for the power of the actual power stages because that's why we have that 5 volt rail on the card anyway so the end result is that say 200 amps output current which this so 202 sorta is 300 amps you're going to be looking at that current range for like stock settings and at 200 amps you'd be looking at around 17 watts of heat for 1.8 volts output and at 1.2 volts it would drop down to about 14 watts of heat so basically this this this will run pass if you have like you know you have less than one watt of heat per phase at 3 at 200 amps output now when you go up to 300 amps start seeing about 26 watts of heat at 1.8 volts and about 21 watts of heat at 1.2 volts so the interesting thing is actually 300 amps output 1.2 volts is actually the same rating that the founders Edition was getting for 200 amps 1.8 volts but admittedly the different voltages so there's there's minor improvements compared to the founders Edition like the founders Edition at 1.8 volts 200 amps was doing about 20 watts this is doing 17 so you know 3 watts less now 1.2 volts this is doing 14 instead of if I remember correctly something like 16 to 17 on the on the founders Edition so really not a huge improvement in these low current ranges and the reason for that is basically the like as you keep adding phases you basically in your improvement in efficiency is much higher what at like higher currents so at these 200 amp to 300 amp ranges there's not that much difference but as we start going up the current range you're gonna start seeing major sort of major drops in the like bigger differences in the vrm efficiency from this to the founders edition obviously you're not actually able to push this much power through these cards because NVIDIA doesn't allow the board partners to ship the cards with a high enough power limit in my opinion at least I don't think there's a single 20 atti out there that's gonna have more than a 400 watt power limit if even that so yeah and so far that looks to be exactly what's going on so anyway so for 400 amps and at this point we're sort of getting into like 300 - for em like 200 to 300 amps is gonna be the sort of stock really around 250 is gonna be stock on average 300 - sort of 400 amps I'm gonna say is overclocking on sort of air / water without any kind of power modifications if you did some power modifications it's quite possible that you might exceed 400 amps so 400 amps output you'd actually be looking at about 37 watts of heat at 1.8 volts and about 30 watts of heat at one point - so you know great efficiency just across the board these power sit like these more power stages from TIR absolutely ridiculous now 500 amps need to be looking at about 48 watts of heat which is just like insane like that that is like very little heat output for how much current this vrm would be pushing and still we're doing in like the high night like you know close to that 95% efficiency figure because yeah these power stages are ridiculous and then so 500 amps you know 1.8 volts 48 watts I won't point two volts you'd be looking at more like 39 watts 600 amps output they're gonna be looking at about 69 watts of heat at 1.8 volts in about 55 watts of heat at 1.2 volts and this is what basically I expect for like extreme overclocking so dry ice or liquid nitrogen you know especially a liquid nitrogen towards the the bottom end of that so and then for finally at seven hundred amps you'd be looking at about 96 watts of heat for 1.8 volts and about 77 watts of heat at 1.2 volts so the crazy thing is the founders edition addition at 700 amps is actually around 125 watts of heat output so there that's where you start like seeing a pretty major drop in actual vrm Heat each output and the end result is just like honestly like up to around like 500 amps output this vrm should be perfectly fine if you just give it air flow in terms of like cooling concerns so running this thing like this card on like right the founder's addition already I think you could totally run that on liquid nitrogen and not run into any major issues as long as you give it enough airflow this you know you might be even able to just like run benchmarks for it for like you could potentially finish like stress tests on on liquid nitrogen like the vrm here is insane and especially if you still like if you especially if you actually had some kind of like heatsink on top of the RM and had airflow going through that then yeah this is gonna handle absolutely ridiculous amounts of power and you know it just it's not gonna get hot this is it's so so damn out there like this is this is one of the most powerful VRMs on a GPU ever this right here like even if you compare it to like a 980 TI hall-of-fame or a or a 1080 TI hall-of-fame which both of those had 16 phase v rms those were on 60 amp hour stages these are 70 amps and those power stages I think were actually like not even capable of hitting that 95% efficiency figure that these can do in the lower current ranges basically at all so these are like this VR M is amazing it's just really unfortunate that you know in in this in the stock to the normal overclocking power draw ranges you're not really gonna notice that there's much of a difference with it but yeah Asus has just gone above and beyond and I really really hope that you know we we see some extreme overclocking results from them on this thing because they have the voltage mod points it's like hopefully it's just a matter of time before somebody Isis decides to take one of these I'll - because it's equipped for it like definitely really well equipped for that now then let's move on to the memory the RM for the memory of erm the controller is a up9 512 and it's some kind of weird variant of the 9 512 because this is not the 8 phase version so there's a 95 12 that's an eight phase-- there's not this one right here is actually only up to four phases it's not the 8 phase flavor and that's because it's been controlling the memory of erm which is a 1 2 3 phase and again we're seeing the same you know ridiculously overkill CSD 95 480 power stages so this this memory of erm basically ends up in the same situation as the founders Edition even if it was pushing 40 amps which it won't the GDD are 6 really shouldn't pull that much current you're gonna be looking at about 3.5 watts of heat on that and this straight up doesn't need a heatsink at all like this really shouldn't need a heatsink whatsoever under basically any conditions so yeah asus basically took everything the founders edition was and and they just made it better so though there's not that they've not really worked on the memory VR I'm much more than only what you saw in the founders Edition but yeah this is absolutely freaking ridiculous compared to the while compared to really any card ever I can't actually think of a card that has a more powerful VR I'm off the top of my head right now and I've looked at a lot of graphics cards and I can't think of it like yeah I straight-up can't think of a stronger vrm so yeah and I think the for a lot of the custom cards were like what when the custom cards start rolling out this we will be seeing more 16 phase VRMs for definitely we're gonna be seeing more 16 phase VRMs we might even see some higher phase counts but I think at that point they're gonna start running it like straight up running out of space all in the PCB and Asus already ran into that because they had to extend the PCB a bunch just to cram that 16 phase on there so the this might be the limit and you what if this is the limit I'd say the limit is is great this is a very good limit to run into so yeah absolutely no complaints for me for the Strix card it's just a straight upgrade over the founders edition though it is worth noting you're probably not gonna notice now then what to do if you don't like in videos overly strict power limit while Asus makes this really easy because you're freaking shunt resistors for the eight pins are right next to the actual eight pins unlike the founders Edition where the shunts are somewhere in this corner of the card for no apparent reason I think it's actually to accommodate blower fans that they do that well no that doesn't make sense shunts are low-profile they could have stuck them anywhere so yeah if you want to lift the power limit lift it off of the eight pins don't lift it with this shunt down here that one's hooked up to the PCIe slot these are five milli ohm shunt resistors you can't actually read it but it says are zero zero five on them and that basically tells you there's zero point zero zero zero five ohms and in my the best way to lift the power limit on the 20 like if you want a permanent solution for lifting the power limit on a twenty series and you don't want to do the liquid metal thing because it may or may not dissolve your solder and cause other issues as well as just being a liquid metal on liquid metal being kind of a pain to clean up in some scenarios actually in all scenarios it's a pain to clean up if you actually really like one to do your power limit drop properly my recommendation would be to just solder a 0.003 milli ohm resistor right on top of the existing shunts and if you do that you're gonna end up with a power limit that's about 2.6 times higher well now we're like 2.7 times higher than stock if you want even more of a power limit increase then you're gonna want to go with like a what 0.001 5 ohm resistor and then you're gonna get something like a 4.4 X increase in power limit at which point you really shouldn't be hitting the power limit at all even on like liquid nitrogen you shouldn't be hitting the power limit for the power monitoring actual chips if you want to do your power limit modifications the hard way as in like disconnecting the stock power limit monitoring circuitry and rewiring it you're gonna have to deal with these guys right here and those are the same chips as on the founders edition these are NCP four five four nine ones I would not recommend this because these have much smaller SMD components around them than what you would find on like a 10 series card with the eye on a 3-2 to one it's much easier to just deal with the shunts directly so yeah that covers the the 20 atti Strix I really really like this card it's just really unfortunate that you know Asus I mean Nvidia won't allow the board partners to let the cards uh stretch the vrm so to speak because yeah this is gonna be some stuck around like somewhere in this current range just because of the power limits well hey if you want to you can lift it and at least you know that if you do lift it you're don't have to worry about the vrm here at that point you might have to worry about your power supply and possibly if you I also wouldn't recommend like if you do lift the power limit to that two point seven times level I would recommend not using a daisy-chained eight pin like if you don't use one of those cables that is like one cable to the PSU and then to eight pins on the end because at that point you're gonna run the risk of actually melting the cables because the card could actually go as far as pulling something like you know 500 Watts down the down the daisy chain and that can end very badly so yeah that's it for the end said for the board analysis here and thank you for watching like share subscribe leave comments questions suggestions down in the comment section below and if you'd like to support what we do here at gamers Nexus then there's the patreon and there's also store gamers not store gamers nexus dot net I say that correctly I tend to put extra dots in there you can find a link to that in the description below as well as in the comments section you can pick up one of the the mod maps which is actually what this card is sitting on and the one you'll be getting won't be as dirty as this one so yeah check that out and if you'd like to see more of my stuff I have a channel called actually hardcore overclocking where I do a lot of hardcore overclocking so yeah thank you for watching and good bye