Gadgetory

everyone just in case you thought this was over it was past and behind us Vegas back so yeah we just did coffee like that's kind of cool but also Vegas still a thing and it will remain a thing for a while because these cards the partner cards are taking forever to ship so we got one of the first Asus ones one of the first partner models at all off the line and we're gonna tear it down today it's not quite ready for benchmarking yet waiting for a few more driver tweaks and things like that and someone out there is supremely lucky because they got our stolen or lost first shipment of this card so congratulations I hope you enjoy having one of the only Vega units out there that's an AI V partner model but I wish that we had it earlier so yeah we're gonna tear this apart today I'll be looking at the VR I'm a bit but the plan it's a forward all the information to build Zoid he's gonna do a video for us analyzing the vrm and then I'll be analyzing the cooler in this teardown we'll get to the cooling benchmarks and all that stuff sometime next week probably after we're done with coffee like before we get into that this content is brought to you by the thermal take flow RGB closed-loop liquid cooler which is a three hundred sixty millimeter radiator plus three 120 fans that are RGB illuminated if they're on we'll take it ring fans at that this is a 4.5 done a stack pump which is one of the faster pumps you can learn more at the link in the description below alright so the basics of this one pretty straightforward this looks pretty similar to the other Strix coolers like the 1080i one just a bit smaller and the 1080i cooler just to remind everyone the Strix ROG 1080i be reviewed remains one of the best in terms of noise normalized performance that we've tested by which I mean at 40 DBA it has the best cooling performance of all the air-cooled cards we've benchmarked and we've tested like 10 or 11 1080 t eyes so it's got some serious critical acclaim there at the 1080i Strix rog is a good card we'll see if Asus is able to transfer that design to this Vega 64 card now our opinions on Vega 64 are pretty well known generally speak you should just buy 56 if Vega at all but the cooler it's gonna be worth testing for sure to see how ACS has improved over the reference blower design with its 60 to 70 DB a fan and unlimitedly bad cooling potential so I'm sure they've improved on it but let's take it apart so this thing I don't know if Asus is gonna ship a 56 model of this exact cooler because I don't know if that'll fit their price targets I don't even know what this is gonna cost to be honest with you but we can at least take it apart look at the cooler see what Asus has done we already kind of know what Andy's done with these cards quite well at this point so you got a tamper seal it doesn't say warranty void if removed that doesn't mean they won't void your warranty but some of these companies like EVGA and even so attack actually although you do need to open though tax cards to fix the thermal so it makes sense they would allow it but some of these companies do allow the user to access the back side of the card or even the inside the card without voiding the warranty they just put the seal on there so that they know you've done it that way they can see a little more diligent when checking what you've done and I haven't taken this apart yet so I'm not positive what all needs to come off but clearly that's gotten the bulk of it okay so I think we're gonna have to go through all these or actually it's just - isn't it so for for the cooler mounting to the PCB through the backside - over here any other screws on this side that's gonna be the shortest teardown ever there's a yellow thermal pad that's a bit different anyway so base plate clearly if you're not familiar with these there's no gddr5 the HBM is right there on top of the substrate and this is oh that's kind of cool this is a bit different this is a non molded version I'm gonna need I will test contact pressure with this I have I have contact paper to test with so notice how next to the HBM right here notice how that is actually like a different height so this this interposer that's what that is is a different height from the HBM the dye that's because there's a difference in how the package is put together and some of them have a sort of mold over them where this actually interposer has a layer on top of it that comes up to meet the HBM and some of them don't this one clearly doesn't want to valorize others does and that's part of one of the earlier concerns when talking with AV partners about Vega where that was a difference you know you lose some of the potential support there and then also I'll check this as well but the height of the HBM on some devices is different than the height of the GPU by like 40 I don't know micrometers or something very very tiny like that not gonna be able to see it with my eyes almost certainly but we can measure it I have I bought tools for all that stuff when I heard about it so we'll be able to do all that that'll be kind of cool but the review will wait till after the rest of the coffee lake stuff so anyway to get this apart we are once you're under the shroud you just go through and remove screws going through to the back plate I will let us get the back plate off also little pin fin thing not really pin fins I guess but a little heatsink that looks like it's on the memory of erm actually what's how is our house our core VR and being cooled so first of all they put a lot of thermal paste on there which is great some companies cheap out on it core vrm is being cooled through what's that that's seriously packing materials in here I don't know about a one millimeter they're all pad into a solid base plate looks like an aluminum base plate and then that is just going into the fin stack as you would expect right here at which point the air is taking care of the rest from the three fan cooler as for heat heat pipes we have a total of one two three four five five coming through to this side which is the vrm side and then we've got a couple extras one two over here three I think that covers all of them I think that's all and then what else was of note okay so of note now as we showed with the reference PCB the reverends PCB is really damn good it's gonna be hard for these companies to do a better job than AMD already did and part of what AMD did was they had an l-shaped vrm that actually flanked the GPU like this which helps in a few ways it's an ideal vrm setup it gets all components as close to the GPU as possible rather than over here where they are where it's obviously some of its a bit further than others so you get some propagation delays at this layout how relevant is that I'm not really sure but speaking ideally when you get rid of gddr5 memory you do free up space on the PCB that allows for more optimized BRM layout into the shape of an L where you minimize things like propagation delays so is this loose yet it's one more no one more again not one more again at some point it stops being one more all right get out of there so as you can see clearly it's just it's a normal vrm so it is synced into a thermal pad that goes into an aluminum base plate this aluminum yes that's gonna be right here on the PCB this thing is pretty uninteresting it's basically a retention kit more than a base plate at this point so for the other components and check the voltage controller over here we have an IR three five two one seven that's a film familiar apart and for the rest of the pin outs we had what one that was power for RGB one that's a emerged fan header which I believe is right is this RGB element or what is this that is RGB actually you can see that like a light tube in there that's kind of neat so light pipe in there that's that clear pipe that looks like hot glue glue stick that pipes down and that's on both sides that's how they're doing their RGB LEDs which connect through this PCB in here so you got a four pin that plugs into the board this is a PCB that connects to the LED light pipes which again are kind of hard to see on the camera but they're down there near the screw driver and those pipe down the sides the fans come through this header so this has got power and everything for the fans that's merging three different fan cables from the three fans into one and that one cable plugs into the PCB where we also have two four pin fan headers so you could get some case fans to slave or work with the GPU so you plug those in there and under that is an RGB header that's what that is you can plug that into compatible RGB kits if you want to synchronize the video card with everything else at the expense of adding more cables oh and then we've also got a dual BIOS up here that's what that switches note to self it defaults to the forward position but it does have two positions so it's already pretty nice card I'll leave to build Zoid whether the vrm is better than am DS I'm not actually sure that's his domain but the things I want to point out here dual BIOS is great good to see that they continue that trend from AMD despite having a custom PCB as evidenced by the fact that it's taller and has different vrm the silicon down here this difference as I was saying where the inner poseur is that a different it's got different molding on it than other models that's not an Asus thing that's an AMD thin it depends on where which factory comes out of when it's packaged and then let's go ahead and just take out the backplate just in case there's anything special back there but I don't think there is it's worth looking like I said IR 217 which are 35 to 17 the voltage controller 35:55 for the FETs of which there are I think I said 13 of them on two three four yeah 13 13 bets okay cool that's an LED plate on the back got some caps but that's really about it it looks like there's your back LED plate with the digital LED and all we have back here is just some caps so nothing special there so ever the cooler setup this is a nickel plated copper cold plate contacting GPU and the HBM synched into a multi six millimeter heat pipe solution I think I think I said six of them and synced into two radiators which is what these fin stacks are and then we've got over here direct contact to the MOSFETs and then not direct contact I don't think - yeah - the inductors so the inductors aren't directly touching this heatsink they're close to it but they're gonna be more cooled by air than by metal and the inductors can handle it these things right here the chokes as they're called so these chokes are inductors it inside of this if you were to break one apart it's a copper coil wrapped around in circles it can take 120 well more than that take 150 C in a lot of cases and be just fine 125 150 C so those don't need the direct cooling but I mean sometimes companies like EVGA will do it anyway out of paranoia we are not cooling the cap line over here the capacitor bank and then the rest is just kind of hanging over so all this stuff just hangs over the card here there's no nothing really hot there to speak of the voltage controller is not gonna get that hot so all the core actually hot stuff right here and right here is all taken care of and then we'll test that how effective it is in the review so I think that wraps us up that is the Asus Strix gaming ROG card I don't know what it's gonna cost I don't know if they're gonna have a Vega 56 model there are a lot of things I don't know about this card right now but we know about the cooler and we know a bit about the vrm so check back for build Zoids full vrm analysis where he'll be talking about if it's actually good and if it actually beats the one Andy has on the reference design and then also if it's worth the money by then we should know a price subscribe for more as always you can go to patreon.com/scishow us at directly or I were an appropriate shirt for this show this is our teardown logo shirt the anniversary logo you go to store that gamers Nexus dotnet to pick up this shirt thank you for watching I'll see you all next time hello and welcome to tech deals asus strix ROG Radeon rx Vega 64 graphics card