Gadgetory

so we're back for another hybrid build project this time with the gtx 1060 you might be asking why would you put that under liquid it's a gtx 1060 and the reason is because I want to so there's a few things here first of all taking this apart will be a good opportunity to learn more about the board itself beyond what we can just see by looking at the back of it of course so we're going to take it apart look at the board that's what this part of the video is for is really just learning about the PCB itself and then the second part we'll build up a hybrid card and run through some tests look at thermals things like that so in terms of the thermals we ran pretty extensive endurance tests with the GTX 1060 before we get into the build this coverage is brought to you by MSI and the new msi gtx 1060 gaming X which comes pre overclocked and has a twin frozer six heatsink so we ran pretty extensive endurance tests on the GTX 1060 and the MSI gaming X version of the 1060 in those endurance tests in the article and in the review video to some extent I show a couple of interesting data points so one is over the period of hour to plus hour burnin we see that the founders Edition card this one has some spiky performance like that it's a small spike but it is a spike and that does actually very slightly impact clock rate where it impacts clock rate more heavily is when there's these sudden really hard drops and we can put the graphs on screen for that but the those hard drops with the efi card fall down to 150 ish megahertz from the original clock rate of whatever it happened to be at a time 1700 plus in some instances so when you follow more than a thousand megahertz has one gigahertz fall in the operating clock there's a pretty sudden and observable spike and frame rate that'll be a stutter or frame drop or whatever colloquialism you want to use so that was somewhat resolved with the aftermarket coolers in the past when we did these hybrid mods we were able to eliminate those hard drops completely but if you look at the msi card's performance which we also endurance tested you'll see that it does not have these smaller spikes at the front of the chart it's actually almost perfectly flat and it does have the hard falls but it gets rid of the smaller ones and so that I think is partly because of the thermal solution even though this one is pretty decent comparatively to the other Effie cards that's just because GP 106 is a lot lower TDP and not quite as a hot of a chip so two reasons for doing this one is because we want to look at it and and it's fun and two is because it might actually improve things in some regard we might be able to get rid of some of those those drops I do not think we're going to see a huge change in overclocking but in the past with the MDR x4 81 we did this end with whatever card we just did before that the 1080 we did actually see some legitimately sizable increases in the overclocking ability and that was mostly in the form of an extra 100 mega Hertz with 1080 and an extra 50 mega Hertz with the rx 480 and even look at this so like the previous cards I haven't taken this apart yet that means I'm not 100% sure of how it goes together or what we're getting into with this card but the one thing we do know is that the backplate here is if you look right here at these four screws these larger ones these are going through the PCB and holding the heatsink in place so the heatsink is going to be an alloy / copper heat pipe amalgam that's used to cool the GPU of course and then flanking that will be whatever's used to cool the vrm the vram likely the base plate of the card there's a screw there much normally there's not two sets of screws like that student Pokemon themes on oh let's take these at it didn't change the screw oh there goes something separating there's a screw right here I didn't see that one need that two more up top so it looks like it's about to separate yeah it goes so there's the Shroud let's disconnect the LEDs as some reports out there did say that there were no LEDs on the 1060 I've seen both LEDs and non LEDs reported ours for whatever it's worth does have an LED for the gtx text there at the top which is just powered by this cable simple to pin cable that goes into the board and powers that so we're going to set that aside that's the shroud it looks like this did not necessarily need to be unscrewed but I think when we install the liquid cooler might be helpful to have them separated anyway and at this point it looks like there's just a Philips head right there that I can take out to separate them completely but we'll leave that out two more down here leave that there for now we've got a very similar heatsink to the 1080 and 1070 where it's got this sort of arched out look to it and that conforms with the vrm fan this pattern right here this plastic moulding is helping guide the airflow into the heatsink and through where it's ejected out the back of the card and that's very standard blower design cooling solution this is just some kind of cheap it's not a knot of plastic but that top is just a covering it doesn't actually I don't think it's actually functional it's the stuff underneath that matters and we'll get there in a moment if you look at all this that's ketchup and mustard wiring in here that is what allows the six pin to be located off of the PCB so you see the six pins right there but if you look at this this is the PCB the PCB terminates right there I think this card is almost 10 inches fully across and that is I believe like six point seven five or something so it terminates early but Nvidia didn't want to put a PCI header in the middle of their card so you can see these solder points to solder points here then the wires for those points are here and they're extending out this way which allows the pass-through effectively for power to come into the card what's this for doesn't even have intake I'm curious about what this does to well we'll see when we get in there I guess there's really no components down there because the PCB doesn't exist so maybe it's a maybe just cooling for the power I'm not sure how hot that stuff gets but if you look here this gives the appearance that and it's correct that these are fins so these are aluminum fins so it gives the appearance that air can come in through here and then get pushed through the vrm fan that's how you would think it would work and in a case like that origen Chronos where we had some thermal issues on the GPU I thought that this exposure would have benefited because it was closer to the ventilation but if you look here this a sort of ridge line that I'm pointing out right now this ridge line is actually solid so down in the card there's a wall there's no way for any wind effectively to get through there it looks like anyway so maybe cooling something it might be functional it might be mostly cosmetic but if it's cooling anything that's probably the the PCIe connector which is probably one of the hottest parts of the card of course is cuz that's where all the power is going in for the most part so cool stuff let's take the heatsink off and look at the rest I guess we want the plate off so that's secure that is secured by these screws do we have to take this off yeah we do have to take this off to get the heatsink out so I want to leave the base plate intact this time to make things a little easier I don't I don't think we need the extra vram cooling and in theory it'll be a more efficient vrm cooler anyway but we're still going to take it off completely just to look at what the card looks like metal I'll put it back on before we build the hybrid model completely all right there we go there are no heat pipes in here so I someone said there were heat pipes but that appears that appears to be incorrect I don't know if the camera will be able to see down there but if you kind of look down the fins you'll see that there are actually there's nothing in there so that let go is clean through is just aluminum fins copper cold plate there are no copper heat pipes and that's our cooling solution really not great but obviously it's doing the job just fine because this is a low TDP chip 120 watt TDP the heat generation is pretty low we're hitting 70 something Celsius Mac 71 C with the auto pre-configured settings this is plainly a cooling solution for the vrm components and we've got chokes MOSFETs things like that and then underneath will be the vram I'm going to grab something to clean off that that module though first are the silicon rather it's just as many of you know just rubbing alcohol well it pretty much instantly remove compound won't cause any damage and it dries almost instantly this is GP 106 - 400 as an FYI the GTX 1080 is GP 104 and the 1070 is GP 104 but they also have a suffix - 200 and - 400 so this is GP 106 400 there may be in the future a GP 106 to 100 if such a thing exists it would probably be maybe a gtx 1050 or something like that but that's the the silicon that is the GPU this is the substrate that green thing right there that's what you call a substrate let's get this cold plate off - look at the rest of it though or the the base plate might be just held on by this at this point the expansion slot okay Oh backside okay so I'm going to use some anti-static tape for very simple purpose one it's anti-static so we don't have to worry about it causing damage to these screws are slightly different size and the other ones you don't want to forget where they go so I'm just going to tape them in to their location where they belong that way they won't they will leave it when I'm ready to reassemble this thing later okay that's the expansion cover with the tessellation and all that uselessness so did that actually do anything for us or was it a waste of time oh it did do it okay so there is a separation what are we stuck to we are stuck by the wires I think that's annoying I think this is where we can detach this part of the syste heatsink all right there's the heatsink or something anyway oh that's going to be fun to put back together as that this that goes in here something like that like not exactly but you get the idea and then this has now separated we've got a huge connector soldered straight to the the pins you can see the black ones are ground so we've got to ground or sense pins and the rest are hot so that has allowed us to separate these I think except for the fan we can we got to detach the fan first to be looking here you'll see that this twisted pair cable is actually going to the fan connected by a header that's kind of Sokka didn't latched in there so we're going to just kind of push it and then see if it pulls up you really do not don't pull by the cables if you can avoid it I'm trying to pull by the bass here now that you should be copying on any of this to be honest I'm sure this is far better ways to do this once the teardown is a more known process I guess this goes in there I know what that does it's my phone hold code anywhere on screen to focus there's just an inventory number what we've got here is of VRAM thermal pads which are connecting with a little piece of aluminum or something under under each pad which is actually pretty good design it's a little plate under each one of these you can actually kind of see it there if I expose the corner the vram is making that or the thermal pad is making that contact to the vram obviously a GP goes here these just got stuck on but you can see where there were more of them and those are still on the board as these are attached to parts of the power phasing set up the VRM MOSFETs things like that and what else do we have it's of interest because we can point out the vram itself of course so one two three four five six gigabytes one gigabyte chips and just as a reference they are Samsung and they are actually the same chips used in the RX 4 80 the - HC - five i think is what that number says same more or less the same chips if not the same exact chips as in the RX 480 you can see there's two spots here that were kind of discussed by another vendor those two slots do not have chips in them that does not really mean anything it just means that the same PCB was used and they didn't want to redesign it they just left those blank so that's what we got let's kind of weird being tethered like this you can see ground soldered in electrical electrical and 2k caps with I forget what the other one is I remember if that's five or ten but we've got two K caps for sure and I think that's I mean that's really it this board is pretty simple and small so at this point we can start getting ready to mount a liquid cooler to it so that's the teardown that's what we got in there for the card the way this is going to go back together in the next segment we are just going to reassemble this part I think I've got everything figured out word jokes again so reassemble that this will help dissipate the heat on the VRM so hopefully that will be beneficial to us so we don't have to mount a thousand tiny aluminum and copper heat sinks like we did on the rx 480 and it should theoretically work pretty well because we already have seen this cooler performs pretty well so mount that if it will support this if it doesn't then I'm going to go with probably probably the Arctic cooling solution again this thing but no matter what I'm going to mount one it actually let's just check right now before we sign off on this video and see whether this will fit these are the best possible solutions for closed-loop liquid cooling that I've tested right now because that protrusion I just show you again even though we've done it in every video that protrusion down there really helps with the flat surface of a GPU as opposed to the more curved surface of a CPU which has different hot spots you want that flat surface the protrusion will help sink the heat so that it's actually sinking a significant amount of heat saturating across the surface before the pump pushes the liquid in here through the micro fins on the other side of the cold plate we'll take one of these apart sometimes here and show you what that looks like but that's the idea let's see if the Pens will fit yeah that might actually work maybe we'll see it could work find out in the next video so that's it that's it for the teardown now you know what the gtx 1060 looks like see this correctly so don't ruin the thermal paste either what the 1060 looks like on the PCB and the chip itself next video will be the build up will work on testing and things like that see if there's any elimination of those spiky clock rates and the temperature should fall to I would think 18 Celsius or lower for the delta T value load which is pre pretty damn low the reason I picked that number is because that's what our 1080 hybrid hit was about 18 Celsius delta T and this is a much cooler chip so I'm curious to see how low it goes but pay challeng the postal video if you want to helps out directly you can hit the channel name below if you want to see our GTX 1060 review our X 480 hybrid build 1080 hybrid build things like that subscribe for more content so you get the next part of the series and I'll see you all next time