Gadgetory

today we're taking apart the ACS 28 ET ice tricks video card and for that we will need some tweezers a Philips screwdriver and an anti-static wrist strap but this is just so it doesn't get lost just to clarify those are the new tips and tricks I learned from The Verge so anyway this is the first teardown we've done in a long time this is an ACS 20 80 TI Strix finally getting back into the swing of things with video cards really looking forward to it we'll have a lot of these coming up soon so this card today is is one of the first that we'll be working on it just arrived and they have several changes to it over the 10 atti Strix which actually was one of the best performing cards in our benchmarks for the 1080 is primarily for noise normalize thermals and we'll see if they can keep that crown with this card and the first step of that is taking a look at what's inside before that this video is brought to you by thermal Grizzly's high-end thermal paste and liquid metal thermal Grizzly's cryo knot is an affordable high quality thermal compound that doesn't face some of the aging limitations of other pastes on the market cryo knot has a thermal conductivity of 12.5 watts per meter Kelvin focuses on endurance is easy to spread and isn't electrically conductive making it safe to use on GPU dies thermal grizzly also makes conductor not liquid metal which we've used to drop 20 degrees off some temperatures than our dee-lighted test by a tube at the link in the description below so here are the two cards this is the 1080 TI Strix on my right and the 28 e TI Strix on my left they are overall the same for ID but different in some of their other things here like the fans so the fans now have flow straighteners around the perimeter on the 28 80 TI Strix which and I think the 20 80 as well so if flow is straightener in theory it'll keep the air a bit more directed straight down so there's less turbulent airflow out to the sides as it spins how well that works will see in testing we don't actually know yet of course wait till we can test it to buy anything but that's one of the the primary differences in the cooling design other than the fact that the 2080 Ti and the 2080 are significantly fatter than the 10 80 TI version and that is because they moved to a 2.7 slot design on the twenty series cards with a much more substantial aluminum thin stack and that is to deal with the more substantial power output of the 20 Series card so that's a big change as well other than that some small things so Asus used to have this trick of putting a sticker a card so that they could comply with Nvidia's rules of getting nvidia branding on there but also allow the user to remove it if they wanted to and nvidia caught on so that rule no longer broken or bypassed by issues unfortunately if you wanted to get rid of the Nvidia branding this support beam has also been strengthened quite a bit so it should help reduce sag of course this isn't something we'll actually know about for quite a while because it takes a while for cards to to slowly sag in tone apart but it is structurally resilient to it and that's something we'll look at later and then other than that we'll start taking apart in a moment but a couple of things on the outside there is a performance and a quiet mode toggle right here and we have some stats on where the fan speeds will probably fall for that but we'll save that for the review and going towards the back side is going to be performance just if you're wondering has to eight pin connectors NVIDIA has new power balancing that should draw more even power out of each of these rather than leaning more heavily on one and that's something that happened with Pascal and has changed with touring in general for all the Turing cards and then on the back they've got an LED on/off switch which I think the marketing word for that is stealth switch if you wanted to use their marketing language so that's the outside of the card let's start taking it apart this one should be pretty easy it's got a total of six screws on the backside so first four screws just go straight into the large aluminum block and the fin stack rather it should still have a copper nickel plated copper cold plate on it we'll find out in a moment but otherwise all the fins are aluminum then we have these two just for support structure screwing into the base plate on the other side and we'll look at that in a moment too and in the back all of these can stay in for now but we do need to take out probably that one moment there actually we'll have to take out that one once we remove the base plate but we can leave all these in for now those are for the base plate removal at this point it should be a process just pulling this thing up probably yes so some thermal paste tension but we got it and this is something I do like about the card already so some of the cards like EVGA is taking them apart this isn't a big deal it's not to cite in fact when you buy stuff but fan headers that are vertical into the board and also have really short cables or kind of problematic because you get it a quarter of an inch off the card and then have to disconnect cables this one it just flips open which is really nice and the power connectors have an actual push release latch on it which is not standard so we have broken these in the past not the push release ones but the more standardized power connectors and that's not a problem here okay so for the card itself we'll go over the power design in a moment but for now you can see the base plate setup is pretty plain and simple it's just a big structural bar on the sides to help with sag that screws in separately through the rear i/o and with screws all around the top plate so that will be the next to be removed we have a direct contact aluminum base plate with the memory modules here that's connected via thermal pads and then the GPU itself contacting of course the cold plate which is nickel plated copper if you were wondering and that has several these are they look to be six millimeter heat pipes that will double check in a second and those are going through the body so one two three four five six six six millimeter heat pipes going through not all of them emerge the other side to go to the the rest of the fins but some of them do and you can see it splits between the different fin stacks which are isolated in the center so then we have contact with the MOSFETs and small parts around the MOSFETs one thing you'll notice in a moment there are actually no doublers on this card so that's different for this generation and something you'll see a lot more from Nvidia EVGA and other vendors they are moving away from traditional doublers and going with just a different pwm approach to the power phases and power stages for the cool other than having a flow straightener around the sides of the fans which it's gonna be difficult to test how much that does what we can try it is fatter so you can see it's pretty hefty at 2.7 slots this is going to be the new trend for a lot of these turning cards at least in the TI series just for dealing with that 280 ish watts of heat coming off the card so that is something we'll see more of including from EVGA it's time to take the base plate off though so we can start with the screws in the base plate there are one two three four five six seven eight nine ten it looks like if you're keeping track so four screw tracking just to keep it simple make sure it's all the screws go back where they should we're just gonna move them over to our grid on the mod mat if you haven't seen one of these before it's on store that game was Nexus dotnet you can pick one up they should be on backorder but they're coming back in to us this week so they'll be back in stock soon for anyone who back orders them and we only have a few left here oh there's one more 11 so there's a hidden screw in the bottom left over here my bottom left orientation okay so we've got all those out the back plates free and next we have to loosen the i/o screws but let's get this led off first so for the back plate there is no no contact via thermal pads it's actually no contact really at all it is primarily aesthetic for this one although it is aluminum but it has a bit of a plating on it so know if they're on pad contact not really doing any work for you in terms of cooling it does have that LED strip on there if that's what you're interested in and now we just need a couple more screws to get the base plate free okay so we've got two more in here smaller screwdriver for this one down near the USB type-c VR port that's never going to be used and then one that's kind of stuck and free spinning because it doesn't seem like it's fully caught on threads so we'll just start pulling it apart see if there we go okay some pressure helps okay so some outward force got that one free and suppose it was free spinning because it was just caught on the part that's not threaded there but not a big deal okay baseplate should be free and so is the IO cover okay there we go pretty clean pretty clean card to take apart alright so here's what we have for the PCB we'll talk about all the power components in a moment but let's go with the layout first for layout the vrm is split between two sides which is actually a bit it's really their only option here because they have such a large vrm it wouldn't fit on a PCB otherwise so they have part of the vcore VR I'm over here part of the vcore vrm over here and then a memory VR em up here there's a three phase memory it is these top three MOSFETs and chokes going for the V mm v RM we'll talk about V core momentarily for memory layout you'll see that there are 11 modules so we have 2 4 6 8 10 11 and that is because we have an 11 gigabyte card so you end up with one gigabyte per module there's a missing module and part of this will explain once we get the throw and paste off here the name on the GPU actually indicates which died which memory or memory module rather is missing from the card because it's not the same on all of them but it will be the same for each identifier so let's clean that off and figure out which one it is so we had some spill over here some of these cards are hand done to pay on when they well the cards aren't hand done but some parts of the cards are hand applied like potentially thermal paste depending on when they came out of the factory and that's just because it's still so early but we've cleaned off enough to reveal the GPU text and can do some more cleanup later before reassembly but we also know what they're all pasted internal pads asus is using so the thermal pads at least for the primary vrm thermal pad it is a 3 watt per meter Kelvin thermal pad if they're all pay is TC 502 6 Dow Corning and that is the same vendor that Intel and other companies use a lot of them use Dow Corning for their thermal paste supplies that's what that is so this thermal paste is a non curing compound it should last for a long time even with exposure to high heat and dust potentially it is also a two point eight seven or roughly three watt per meter Kelvin thermal paste not too abnormal for this kind of component either we see a lot of 3 watt per meter Kelvin thermal paste on CPU coolers from a stack as well there's a closer to for Intel uses closer to four or something like that so that's what they were working with now the GPU itself let's look at the labeling this is a tu 102 it's the first production tu 102 that we've worked with everything else is done pre production so this one is tu 102 300 a that's the name of the GPU there maybe later a 280 or something like that because this is actually not the biggest touring GPU they can make it's it's the biggest in terms of dye size but there's an additional four SMS that are disabled on here so they could have another 256 cores 4 times 64 would you get you 256 more floating-point units so we may see a 200 a or a 400 a later but maybe 400 a for some smaller card typically go down a number for a larger card so tu 100 to 300 a k1 is the signifier for which of these is missing as we understand it now we don't have enough samples to confirm that but there is the one missing memory module here and as I understand it today that corresponds to the k1 part of the name if you're wondering what that means so we might see a k2 or maybe that one's missing instead or something like that we don't know why they do that we don't know if it has to do with the memory controller or what but that's how that's what the name means then a1 is just the revision so this is the first revision that's all that is the vrm asus is using an MP 2 8 8 8 pwm controller with a switching frequency of 1600 kilohertz the PWM mode they are using they're using PWM 10 mode for 16 phase there no doublers here typically they would be in this line between these caps and the MOSFETs no doublers so sick teen phase via the PWM controller and on the power stages and here are CSD nine five four eight zeros they are seventy amp power stages in total they're looking at 1120 amps which is quite high and then the I think builds I'd might called overkill but we'll throw that to him for his analysis later you'll find it on our channel hopefully and then the memory so they've stepped down they're using 60 amp per phase on memory and it is a three-phase and that's these three up here and then for the other phases for the core you'll find those in this line and this line over here one thing you might be asking about is why the chokes are sideways so we're not exactly sure why Asus decided to rotate these two chokes all we know is that it's potentially going to be useful for a future design but we don't know anything about what that design will be or why it needs them rotated maybe an ln2 card or something like that maybe it's some kind of ellentube pot clearance we don't know we're not sure but they rotated these specifically for a future design so this PCB will probably be used again you'll probably see this vrm again we just don't know what it'll be for yet for the rest they are using s AP chokes and they're using a u p9 v 1/2 buck controller it has four three two and one phase modes available they've got a u p 765 one for RTD and vin power balancing and current steering with a block of four SMDs indicating that let me find that for you so that would be this over here this block of these small for service mount devices right there that's going to be part of the VIN Power Balance and current steering this small cluster here and then the rest we'll talk about hopefully in a builds IDE video if we can get one for the rest of the CRM layout on the back side of the PCB there's not a whole lot going on but we have some capacitors rear of the GPU of course capacitors on/off switch for the LEDs LED plug and that just goes into the ACS I logo so stuff we've all seen before for the most part and that more or less sums it up we've gotten pretty much everything couple small SMDs over here so that's the HTS card that takes care of the PCB the GPU itself which we haven't formally shown a production sample and the cooler which is significantly larger they're all testing more or less done at this point but we can't share the data yet so well we'll let you know as soon as we're allowed to what the thermal performance looks like we're testing all the cards and we'll have that data out pretty much in the immediate future he'll you'll know soon how well does we've also gone through most of the testing we needed to go through four cards leading up to today so we have enough to start taking things apart and seeing how they're built at this point and then finally the base plate I didn't really talk much about when we were in the teardown mode but it's got thermal pads of course for the memory and then throne pads for some of the erm components on the other side and that I think takes care of the base plate it's really pretty straightforward a lot of it is structural at this point we're holding the card together and reducing sag small fins over here always curious what that does because it seems like such a small thing that it is right above some MOSFETs and it's above where some MOSFETs contact the base plate and there's even a small stand off of the aluminium for those MOSFETs that the thermal pad is on top of so it would help a bit in theory it's just how much in practice does it really help but that's the ACS card we already have data on some of it we'll have data for a lot of other cards coming up soon check back subscribe if you're not already you can go to stored on cameras axis dotnet to pick up one of the mod mats we used in this video or patreon.com/scishow and exit selves out directly and thank you for holding out while we finish the office move where we're back up and running now so we have a lot of technical content coming up very shortly this was the first of many and make sure you come back for the rest thank you for watching I'll see you all next time