Gadgetory

hey everyone we're back with another hybrid project this time star in the RX 480 so we just reviewed this thing the reviews already on the channel I'm going to put it under water or at least under intense air and see if we can get it to overclock further or do something interesting anyway so first of all this coverage is brought to you by Origin PC and their new Origin Chronos which is a customizable and upgradable PC now shipping with the RX 480 so our original hybrid projects starred the GTX 1080 we put it with an EVGA hybrid cooler which is one of these and I actually I have a box of these now from ace tech makes them so I decided we're gonna try and put another one of these on but this time the arts for ID I don't think the mounting will fit actually I'm positive it won't fit but we're gonna see if we can either make it fit or use one of these so I bought these out of pockets this is not a sponsorship I don't even know these are actually there this is the Exelero mono plus this is a single fan basically it mounts on top of the GPU kind of like that just straight on top of the GPU so it's effectively putting a CPU cooler on a video card it's a little insane the one I want to try is this one which is the accelerated that's for a 120 millimeter fan I bought these vrm copper heat sinks in case we need them or vram rather so we can put those on the memory modules if we need them if none of this other equipment works then I was a backup I bought one of these Exelero twin turbos which is just a dual fan and do a blower fan so the reason I got so many of these is because this is a new it's got a couple of new things first of all the GPU itself which is the Polaris 10 chip does have a smaller Z height than previous AMD chips I think it's 1.5 millimeters now it used to be one point nine millimeters so that difference does mean there may be some clearance issues also the actual mounting is very similar to the r9 380 and also very similar to the I think the 370 and but it's not identical so hopefully one of these will work if not I also have an end exe Kraken cooler if I wanted to use that that's just a we've got the the g10 crack and cooler so if I wanted to go that route I would have to get a copper shim and put it between the cold plate and the GP itself so we're gonna try and avoid that and hopefully the mounting for one of these kits will work but first we have to disable or disable but first we have to disassemble the video card so that's what we're gonna do in this part one video is take it apart and I've got some tools for the job here so let's just let's start pulling it apart and see what we got so first off just looking at it briefly this is got a couple of it looks like Allen or hex heads so this allen key screws holding this cover on and I think that's just a cover I believe it will pull off with the rest of the shroud I don't think we have to actually remove that covered someone to the fury X and that way we've got a couple screws on the back which are obviously holding the shroud to the PCB and then these screws over here are holding probably the heatsink with the cold plate on top of the GPU that's pretty standard anyway so first I'm gonna try and take just the cover off and see if we can see under there that's a 3.5 that's too small doesn't look like it's quite right now that's too small this is gonna be way too big I've got these crappy tools some of you probably remembers my terrible multi-tool that is used used for travel but we'll see it's like a middle finger it's too small obviously none of these metric ones fit I don't know if these are Imperial or if it's just a proprietary size but it's not any metric sizes I have so we're gonna try and work around this I don't have Imperial allen keys that side we're just gonna go ahead and start removing the the shroud from the PCB oh wait you know what I should do is okay so I'm actually gonna mark these because I just realized there's a lot of different screwed sizes so we're gonna do the classic quick and dirty video card Blair fan 1/2 okay all right so let's get back to pulling this thing apart all right so that was a lot simpler than the GTX 1080 already but we're not really anywhere yet so we haven't made progress yet I can see that the PCB is coming off a bit so that does mean that the screws we just took off we're the ones securing the the shroud at least if not the heatsink definitely the shroud to the PCB so what's holding us now is it looks like the expansion slot for sure there's some tiny screws here that I'm almost positive are holding in the blower fan to the socket which you can actually see through this cutout it's kind of unique I'm not sure what the sort of acoustic and temperature properties are of having this cutout and curious to find out I'll talk to AMD about that but these almost certainly hold that fan in so we're left with the expansion slot and then there's these tiny screws up here to which look like they may just hold an embellishment plate to the the base plate but we'll find out soon I suppose so let's go ahead and just take this expansion slot apart there's there's two screws here and there's obviously gonna be screws coming through the PCB once we get in there but those are access from the other side there's one more tiny one these are all uh they're pretty much the same size Phillips head but the screws themselves are different sizes so you will want to do what we're doing and separate these maybe draw it out on a paper first because there's a couple different screws and you don't want to have trouble figuring out which ones go where later because you've ever worked with laptops you know that there are times when it looks like one screw will fit and then you find out later that it was supposed to be a different screw and it has to all come apart again so now we've got a lot of play developing in here and the shroud itself you can see there's a lot of play in there which means that we should be pretty much ready to pull it apart I think this is a very flexible PCB by I don't know if you can see that I'm not really pushing that hard it's not a thick PCB but this is a $240 video card so it's not the sort of beacon of quality that you might see with a higher-end product but it does have something still holding it together let's see if maybe maybe we have to take the heatsink off now I'm gonna do opposing corners here before completely removing the screw to kind of ensure that the I'm sure that the pressure is about equal rather than just pop one off and what does warranty void if removed warranty void if removes okay so we won't remove it I don't think that counts so this is pretty good these are spring-loaded screws spring tension two screws excuse me so you can see that as you tighten this down the spring will tension and that will help prevent the possibility of over torque unit which is bad obviously for that there all the screws are out of the back and got the screws out of the expansion slide oh okay there we go that actually scared me for a second because if you haven't noticed this cooler or the the cooler and the shroud exceed the length of the PCB see that and this is true with some other cards to where the PCB is pretty short on the reference PCBs so this is interesting for a few reasons one is AIB partner models might build larger PCB cards and add more power phases or more power headers if they wanted an extra eight pen or six pin so that's one thing but the interesting point here this is so small that you could probably throw like a passive cooler on there and go with an alloy and copper passive cooling solution and have a pretty small and quiet card so we're attached to obviously the the vrm fan here which I'll let you get a shot of that before we pull it apart this is this is difficult to try this this is really okay there we go all right so the fans removed and now we have a look at the PCB and the cooler completely separated so obviously they point a few things out for you we've got the blower fan here three screws probably holding it in these are thermal pads they are adhesive you will want to try and get this back on as quickly as possible if you're going to be putting it back on these adhere to these so these are vram modules we have one two three four five six seven eight of them we have eight gigabytes of RAM so these are probably one gigabyte modules and they are made by Samsung from the looks of it yeah that's Samsung and then the GPU itself is actually really similar to the renders that we have so that's kind of cool this is the GPU this whole thing right here is underneath is the substrate so that green is the substrate that silicon is right there which has the if they don't paste on it and then we've got some kind of shield right here which probably is restrain thinning for the most part we're gonna clean this off I'll start with the heatsink here there's a lot of a lot of compound on there but I want to clean this off so that when we apply the new solution I like that they move apply the new solution it will actually be properly clean and have some good contact oh my god drift they're all paste cleaning method is so bad and you clean they're all paste you should use water a pea-sized blob oh wait let me see if there's a way that I pull this out okay so I just figured something out while cleaning this thing first of all very shiny yes we've got a copper cold plate here surrounded by aluminium a bit cheaper that way and then I kind of typical or actually even old school almost CPU cooler style aluminum heat fins inside which would explain some of the issues we've had with thermals in the in the review because it doesn't look there's not even heat pipe cooling in here so very simple cooler we're gonna go ahead and take that out just so we can get a closer got it so what I discovered by looking around is it looks like these hold in the plate that restricts us from removing that cooler so I'm gonna take these tiny tiny screws that we're not gonna lose these we can see what that what that cooler actually looks like up close and see if there's a good reason for why the thermals are so high that's still held on I think high so there we have it this is out so you've got all the thermal pads here before I lose any of these let's just look at where these go and then we'll look at the rest the vrm we've got chokes here these are our chokes so our capacitors this is our vram a feels like an aluminum that's an aluminum base plate and then the aluminum base plate turns into these fins up here which honestly almost feel more gimmicky than real but I guess they do something because it's not thermally shutting down despite being pretty warm some more heat fins here I don't know really I'd love to see kind of a Windtunnel example of how this fan interacts with these fins because I'm sure there's some dissipation going on but as many of you know intakes on the side pulls air in side front bottom pushes it through the card this way so that will go through this heat sink and this part I believe goes up kind of against the fan like that and then this part is going to be towards the back of the car towards the expansion slot so that'll push air through the fins out the expansion slot these are not very close together so we don't have a ton of surface area to work with here in terms of thermals it is a cheap aluminum heatsink this is exactly why the thermals are not great on the RX 4 idea if you've seen our review it's something like we were hitting something like 56 57 Celsius delta-t with that which is basically in the 80s absolute temperature for this ambient environment and that is for the auto setting so that's just what AMD had it set up Auto pre-configured in drivers radio settings to stick to around 80 Celsius it can go up to 90 and we hit it in some cases but but this is exactly why the thermals are a problem now in terms of overclocking with the GPU I was hitting 13 40 megahertz the maximum configurable setting in Radeon settings I think was 1350 vram I was hitting 2200 I think the max configurable was 20 300 megahertz I tried 2250 in a crash so maybe I don't know if that's a cool and thin or stability thing but if it's cooling we can try and fix that with these things later on these are significantly better than this thermal pad to alloy base plate setup that's on there now but of course it doesn't really do anything if you just sync the heat because you got to dissipate it so let's see there gonna be a blower fan or whatever cooler we end up putting on here so this is the whole card we've got this wrapping part of the shroud this is on the video cards as well than mine ATI and a 1080 this one's particularly thin and cheap piece of plastic but that's fine because all they're trying to do is put this in there like that and all it does is direct the airflow so that all the air pretty much goes straight through the card through the alloy fins out of the back and cools the GPU in the process the vrm is cooled by the thermal pads and some of the wind as well effectively alright so now that we've got this shroud off if we wanted to take this off I'm not sure what size that is it might be mounted from now what it doesn't screw through so the the cover the thing that I thought was the cover because it is a cover on the are nine fury X is fake if you look in the back side if there's no mounting points it doesn't like actually screw through with these stupid propriety this is why I couldn't take it off so it may not be an Imperial driver thing it may just be that these are cosmetic fake bolts which are these even metal it's magnetized pretty strongly actually and so unless these are like aluminum well yeah unless they're I don't know titanium bolts or something non-magnetic I don't know if that's a there's some alloy and titanium bolts aren't magnetic but I don't know it specifically either way these are fake so it doesn't really matter what metal they're made out of if it's any at all or plastic even I think it is actually plastic so that doesn't come off it's obviously just an aesthetics thing these holes aren't holes which was already apparent if you even looked at it so it's not like it's helping with breathability or anything like that but I'm curious if we took a drill and drilled through a couple times that would impact the thermals I think it's like glued so this looks like it's just bezel in see how it's like indented and I think this is glued to the surface of it but if we tried to force it I think the there's like a star nut that was closed right and that's that's pretty close but I'd have to put like a rubber band in there or something to to fill the rest of the area those are definitely plastic actually you're like see this I'm scratching it with the thing and look at that scratch I just put in the service if you can pick that up on my camera that is obviously not metal that's plastic and I bet if I like sat here and really destroyed this shroud this thing is either molded with the rest of the shroud or it's glued to the surface but let's let's look at our phase in here so for the viewer I'm phasing it looks like looks like a six phase vrm I believe either that or it's a five plus one but pretty basic VR I'm not bad I suppose in terms of just raw phasing but I don't really know anything about these specific components how good they are how chief they are or how expensive they are but that is what our vrm setup is normal capacitors and let's clean off the the GPU and look at that and then will pretty much be done with this teardown I'm not gonna worry about cleaning off every single bit of thermal paste here we just really want to see what the die looks like right now it's just to see what kind of the branding is if there is any what the maiden or diffused and sticker says stuff like that it looks like there are no words on this one it's very simple just a shiny mirrored piece of silicon basically okay so actually the thermal pads the big throne pad is coin VR M components but it's not on top of the chokes or the chokes and the capacitors it's actually on top of this logic behind it which my hands are full here but this is where that pad goes so that's cooling that got the chokes being cold it looks like entirely by air so if we kind of hold this together you'll see that this mount about like that more or less and the wind comes through here so the air comes through blower fan spins it'll circulate through that plastic piece that we saw get pushed through the aluminum fins over the chokes and the capacitors and then through these fins for further dissipation what is that on top of that's on top of that logic back there so that will cool our MOSFETs chokes and capacitors for the vrm and then it goes out the card okay so I think that pretty much sums up the teardown of this card just for documenting reasons in the future the model we have is called D zero zero nine so if future iterations of this product are made either for gigabyte models or updates to the existing eight gigabyte model we have that number may change and that is exposed already because there's no backplate on this card so that's something you could already see these here zero nine you can see we've got solder points for the six pin power header there are no super-secret extra solder points that would be done on a custom PCB by aib partners if they wanted to do them and that pretty much sums it up so that is the am the rx 480 torn down and the next part of this video we're gonna try and put these on this is gonna be the interesting part all right so I'm not sure if any of these will work I don't know I don't really know what the mounting hardware is inside of these I know these are compatible with the 380 with a 370 and some of the other hardware that's got completely different mounting types so we will see if these fit if they don't I'm gonna try and make them fit whether there are X 480 likes it or not and if you've seen our GT X 1080 hybrid video you know that will will make it work alright so thank you for watching as always page howlings in hotel video if you wanna helps out directly article in the description below for the review of the our X 480 on the channel we've got the review of the the card and we have a noise comparison test which shows this vrm blower fan at various speeds yeah so thanks for watching that subscribe for the next part of this series will be two or three parts I'll see you all next time