Gadgetory

everyone today we're finishing what we started at the PAX West EBG a live stream I was trying to take this apart ended up taking apart an older card instead because this one ended up having a very severe case of screw stripping which tends to be what happens when you have no tools to work with other than whatever we can scrounge at a booth so I've gotten that screw out so now we can finish the teardown this is an EVGA 1080i FTW hybrid I think it's technically an FCW 3 and it has the icx stuff in it but it is supposed to be a bit different underneath from what we've seen with the sc2 hybrid so very curious about that I think we'll see some new stuff here that you all haven't seen in previous hybrid products so it should be an interesting one to tear down before getting to that this video is brought to you by synergy the software that lets you share a keyboard and mouse between multiple systems if you have limited desk space and multiple computers to command synergy removes the need for separate peripherals or a KVM and works as over the network software use our link below to get 50% off the home or provision with SSL so going over the basics on this one the shroud is their new black plastic very plain shroud personally speaking I don't really talk about visual as much on products especially video cards but I did prefer the one that felt more like a metal shroud I don't know if it actually was but the gray one that was very similar to the reference foundered Edition design thought that one looked a bit better but not really an important aspect of a video card anyway so no big deal so let's take this part same process as with all the others except we've got one screw pretty removed actually two or three moves because there are problems so we're going to start with taking out the backplate and it's in two pieces it's diecast they are separated at the center primarily because from a die casting standpoint what I've been told it's just easier to manufacture that way they've also told us that there might be some thermal benefit by having that divider down there and I don't know how significant that is probably probably mostly because it was easier to make this way I think more so the thermal benefit may have just been something where they said oh this is we can say this is a good reason to do this but reality manufacturing is hard and die-casting sometimes requires things like that for a large plate so that's it for this first one I think we're about to reveal the you know one more under the sticker we're about to reveal the usual million EVGA thermal pads which is a pretty good response considering the complaints about a CX we're not enough thermal pads like I was I was talking to them about this at PAX and yeah it's better to be accused of spending too many pennies on something like if they're all pad because ultimately it is it does come down to pennies then be accused of not spending enough pennies it sounds a whole lot worse if you're cheaping out on pennies than it does if you have to increase the price of the product a little bit to accommodate all the pads this one does genuinely help when we tested it with a CX that was actually pretty big support this one should as well and then we've got an LED plate here with foam on it probably four I don't really where does that even go so the foams over here I don't know how much that house it might be like a vibration damping thing that's probably what the intent is but again you know you're talking about something like an FTW three hybrid looking at what it's priced where it's positioned in the market I think this one approaches 800 I haven't checked though talking about something like that why would you why would just get a piece of foam if you think it'll help these screws by the way there are two different types of screws in the back plate I've heard I think through EVGA that this might change in the future for the next design they might be changing screws out which would be nice because these types of screws I don't know how visible this is on camera but if we put both them over here one's got a a wider a different thread count-- fatter threads than the other so they do at it does actually matter where you put them back into the card some of them won't fit in other places I think the ones with the fatter thread count go all the way through to the shroud and the base plate because I screw into plastic and then the ones with the thinner thread count-- go into other elements on the other side of the PCB okay so that comes off there's all your thermal pads for that one I don't we're going to Vegas so much lately I've forgotten what gddr5 looks like and it's variants which is what we're gonna get here okay I think we can separate the yes we can separate the Shroud but we're stuck so this one has a new whatever you want to call that hose clamp I guess previously this was rubber you just pull it out and this one is actually screwed in all right cool so here we start getting into the interesting stuff there we go okay it's not a white PCB these are a little more expensive than most the other colors just because they're less produced and this is for the LEDs so that cables for the LEDs I think this cable is for the one of these is for the GPM LEDs which are right here so those are responsive to the MC use there are two or three MC use on this board and those are used for temperature monitoring and things like that so those LEDs follow the MCU instructions what next let's get rid of this small thermal pad for what to fetes i'll pad for two FETs this aluminum and how about this thing so this plate is new I think I don't think I've seen that before this is what those four screws on the back Center are screwing into now previously previously they had screwed straight into the plate and the plates a little different now so first of all huh there's foam on the top that's to theoretically help with noise damping EB J's had some Pumped noise complaints in the past that'll help some of it most of it would just be lowering the pump speed to like 90% PWM which you can do if you plug it into a an adapter and then plug that into your motherboard so if you've ever had that problem that's how you can fix it but that's new so I mean obviously it's covered up anyway kind of funny that they've still cut out the hook-up for their name considering it's hidden under this but yeah that's different what's really different is how it's mounted diagonally which I guess would would be part of why you wouldn't want to show you you know you cover it up with a shroud direct vram contact this means that you don't have to worry about air getting to it it's just gonna sink into a copper plate copper plates connected by a lot of thermal paste probably you can see it coming out around the edges here to the CLC cold plate which is also copper and protruded and these some reason these have tamper seals on them something about so about these tamper seals talked to EVGA about this on their live stream and just like the one on the back they were saying that these seals are not warranty void of removed seals that's I guess misunderstood they are actually just there to help EVGA know they need to inspect the card a little extra when they get it back to make sure everything is put back together properly by the user but it doesn't void your warranty it's it's just like a notice for them there you go so that's what I was talking about there's all the thermal paste that connects the vram plate to the GPU plate this actually does help and reason it helps is because you're sharing the liquid cooling solution with the vram and you only really need the GPU to be so cool anyway after that after that point once you're in the 30 to 50 range it's fine to share some of the cooling solution with the memory which can make more use of it whereas all right yeah there's there's no reason not to really so that's the cooling plate that's a little bit new this elbow bracket at the end is new and this thing's new let's pull off the vrm heatsink that is a gigantic VR I'm I can't remember if that's the same as the FTW 3 or not but there's your fan back swept fan blade design and pretty pretty densely packed set of aluminum fins this should be a pretty good they're all performer will test it but at some point anyway not anytime immediately cap cutouts and everything else is directly contacted by a ton of thermal pads as EVGA has done lately somewhat of an overcompensation yes but again given what they just went through the in terms of controversy with a tac-x it's it's probably better to do that kind of response to show that they did listen so can't really blame them there for making a better product for their high-end okay so these are the same as the FTW three so yeah all these components these are the 69 30s which we saw them FTW three as well so this BRM i think is identical i haven't looked at that tw3 one in a little while but we have videos about it from the air-cooled version of the card looks the same it's just it's an MT w3 PCB it's have CW 3 BRM it's a new cooler it's a different cooler that's the only major change same BIOS switch up here same board layout in fact I think you could take an FTW three air cooler and just mount it here and it would work so let me peel this off the table so that's the FTW three the hybrid one anyway and it's a good layout I mean we've seen what we've taken apart a lot of these now I'm not sure how expensive is this one exactly I know the previous ones were like nearing the $800 range 850 850 Newegg 850 jet 850 850 850 850 850 dollars pretty much everywhere so yeah a little steep you can get 1080i is cheaper than that obviously in terms of core performance like what you get out of box they're not going to be that different the advantage of liquid cooled cards is generally that if you're willing to manually tune it you and and you would want to remove the fan on the radiator or remove where it's plugged in and plug it into your motherboard instead you manually tune it to be better cooling and better noise levels than the air coolers that's the advantage out of box it's it's a waste of your money for most people to spend $850 on this it's a very well-built card it has a great cooling solution but you don't need it so if you don't want to spend 850 bucks there are 10 and 80 is from plenty of brands EVGA included like their sc2 gaming or sc2 black cards which are not the icx ones but they're I think 720 MSRP those will get you plenty far but this kind of thing is basically if you're willing to tune the cooler the fan and things like that then you can get a pretty good noise and temperature performance it's just it does require effort and it is pretty damn expensive so not something we'd recommend for most P people but it's out there it's well-built if you do want to buy one I guess the main reason would be if you start getting into overclocking whereas we've shown with Pascal Pascal is really responsive to temperature so short of going with more exotic cooling solutions if you are dealing with temperatures or if you're dealing with overclocking where every couple of megahertz matters keeping the core colder will actually impact performance every five to ten Celsius tends to show up in frequency so might get a bit more Headroom there but it's probably not worth the extra money for that extra bit of headroom for 99% of people if you're the people who care then great good there's a solution for you I guess you have so that's the teardown we might look into this more I don't know if we'll do a full review or when we've got plenty of other stuff to work on but thank you for watching patreon.com slash gamers next to stop us out directly gamers next inside square space com2 pick up a shirt like this one and i'll see you all next time you