Gadgetory

we posted our EVGA SC to 1080i review a few days ago but for some of you that was not enough you wanted to know where is the FT w3 well we didn't have one then but we have one now this is the FT w3 that just came in it is a three fan cooler using the icx sensor placement we've detailed previously and it is a two slot cooler which in this current generation of 10 ATI cards is not all that common so we're going to taking this apart today and I've been told it is not easy to reassemble so not looking forward to that but we're going to try and document the teardown process so that you can follow it yourself if for some reason you needed to before getting to the teardown this coverage is brought to you by ifixit.com who provided the tool kits for the job you can go to ifixit.com slash gamers Nexus and use code gamers Nexus for $5 off at checkout and I have been told that they have a tool kit that is called the PC essentials toolkit it's a bit cheaper than this one we're using the pro Tech tool kit but it has fewer screwdrivers and things like that and you can save a bit of money more of the essential stuff so let's get into the teardown here we will be starting with probably the backplate because that's where these things normally start and although the founders edition cards use a very tiny Phillips screws for everything this one looks like there what size is this in the kit is called a 10 so we've got a 10 size 10 screwdriver first of all Phillips screws for the back plate strictly those feed into other screws that kind of bolt through the PCB and connect to the base plate on the other side these four screws are spring retention which spring retains they go to the cooler proper and then you can see there are some hex or allen key screws in here for the faceplate and that secures strictly the faceplate I believe to the cooler proper along with these spring retention screws that are going to the base plate so these screws actually keep the base plate attached to the shroud and the cooler which depending how you look at it is either really nice or really annoyed I tend to actually like it if you're only trying to get to the card underneath and not trying to dismantle the entire thing because it's a bit more work to do that there's a lot of screws actually and these are very tight start in the middle okay so three six 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 I think there are 22 total screws is just for the back plate little excessive EVGA just like the force required to remove them under the tamper seal alright this should be free now this is held on by thermal pads I'm sure they've gone a bit bit crazy with the thermal pads lately which isn't necessarily a bad thing alright so we're going to pull the spudger and slice that okay I already met with a cable one cable number one so this is attached to the led there's the back side of your chokes and MOSFETs these things will stretch if you're not careful so I try to guide them as I remove them and we're going to put this that side down so backside cable that'll be easy to remember something I could have taken out of that one this last one goes into a knot on the other side so you have to hold that while you remove it okay the world's most screws for a back plate award goes to EVGA all right cool there's your back plate making contact the EVGA back plates are among the few we've tested that actually make an impact on cooling that impact can be both positive and negative without the thermal pads we were seeing somewhat of a heat trapping effect previously with them we see that they actually do they don't help with GP diode temperature but they help with temperatures elsewhere on the board or if they do help with GPU diodes it's very minimal and one of the EVGA icx sensors is right there by the way not the most useful place to take a measurement but doesn't hurt to have the extra sensor it does at least tell you if the back plates causing problems or not so that's nice to have a diagnostics tool so this is ready to go free I think we're going to remove the ones from the back or the expansion area first two three Phillips and then two of the DVI hex heads which I think are slide maybe a size four millimeter just that three point eight five five millimeter so on the magnetic mat we've got the left side partitioned for the i/o I just put all the bottom stuff down here because I know where it goes I'm going to save this space for anything underneath because that's the stuff that is going to throw me so now we're at a place where we can pull this cooler off try and pull with the PCB down so we can leave as many thermal pads well actually not let's do it this way so I think I could rather have the throne beds come off and stay on the cooler see a lot of cables holding us in place okay so one bottom left to right there but they don't build it for you to take apart so I'm not going to fault them it's just more more stuff to keep track of okay first ones free second one says lon what two more all right so we've got what is this over here power power fans fans of three fans and then a couple LED cables LED cable on the back side which where's that part of the backplate this one right here that goes to the EVGA logo I think this is all RGB LED if it if it weren't then it wouldn't be 2017 so I think that's our DB LED that's probably controllable through software of some kind we'll look into that later and then we've got if you're curious to eight pin for the power okay so for the cooler we've got the cold plate here that you can see I've lined it with the card so cold plate GPU we've seen that before don't need to clean it off to show you again it looks like these are 8 ml heat pipes under here which is a bit bigger than some of the manufacturers to you sometimes it do 10 but that's pretty rare these days sapphire attempts to do that the most so heat pipes they're all pads for each the DRAM modules including the missing on which the I've been keeping an eye on this the same vram module is missing on every single 1080 TI card we've opened so far I was just curious if it's based on anything they've disabled on the GPU or why but same 1s so far for the Corby RM there are a whole bunch of the e6 nine-30 packages which are dual end MOSFETs they combine high and low side sets diode and a whole bunch of stuff in one package but because of the thermal solution which is actually like we saw that c2 a topper heat pipe routed into the inductor and MOSFET area specifically actually this is you can tell this is where the inductors go one because the imprint and tube has been dented the FETs go here and drive rice these are in there as well so heat pipe copper plate for pulling the heat away and then capacitor banks right here capacitor banks right here and then your beer em so you six nine two zeros for the feds if we count them up there and we've got another VR em up here as well if you didn't notice that one already for shunts I've got sons here here and here if you want to do a shunt mod and short those that is where they are located and the rest of it would be visible by taking the base plate off separately from the cooler so we can we can try and do that it looks like it's going to be held on just by these screws in the corners here okay one two three okay got it so for this here's our base plate oriental this way clearly and we'll just go ahead and put that down for a second so basically if I repeal this up you would see more of the copper plate that's what we looked at on the other side if you remember heat pipe there and that carries through to the right side of the cooler which we can show here yep carries all the way through so heat pipe goes all the way through over to here which really just helps spread the heat out over a bigger service area utilize some more of that aluminum base plate which does actually pull a significant amount of heat off we show that with the founders Edition cards as well these these do a lot for you and as long as there's an airflow of some kind over them you'll keep the vram cold we show that with our upcoming final Titan XP hybrid mod these are the so-called thin pins that's what EVGA names them they are just aluminum standoffs that add more surface area some wicking over there would help you cool that as well very tiny stacks here now how much do these help I am Not sure that's not a whole lot more surface area it's kinda like Braille in terms of height it's not a lot of surface area but in theory it helps so that's what we have for the base plate pretty straightforward for the cooler we've got really everything we already saw the only new that new information here well there's a few things actually the heat pipes going from the GPU cold plate to the vrm side of the cooler so that's a significant amount this five heat pipes right there of varying thicknesses the two main ones here for the vram and the GPU and then you can also see these are those closed-off fins while these are there's open ones these are the new l-shaped fins that EVGA has been doing actually right here as well for the FET coin it improves service area a bit when you're contacting with a thermal pad as you can see here there's actually a grill in the thermal pad where those were contacting so the idea is to leave them open enough that air still gets through while improving contact area to your transfer medium which is a thermal pad because without these if you're just going straight fins which is what these ones are in the middle straight fins a clearly less surface area yes it does still work we've tested it in the past with last year's FTW they don't add testing does still work but these work a whole lot better and still allow for air flow so I think that pretty much sums up the cooler other than the three fans which posture if I even mentioned those so that's the EVGA FTW three we will be testing this separately as always thermal pads everywhere as is the trend with EVGA lately here's the PCB one last time so it is a 2 slot cooler it's a bit skinnier than some of the other stuff we've tested like the extreme Oris and the gaming ex same thickness as the SC 2 which we already reviewed the price on the SC 2 when we originally reviewed it was $720 it's gone up to 750 so kind of along with everyone else now not as special as it was originally this I'm not 100% sure of the final price I think it's going to be 780 in that case it is one of the most expensive 1080i cards that will be on the market perhaps alongside some of the liquid cooled ones like the Seahawk and theoretically a hybrid when he when and if EVGA makes one of those so it is an expensive card now will it really do a whole lot for you we'll find out in testing we'll have a full review for you separately as always subscribe for that to make sure you don't miss it you can you can help us out directly on patreon.com slash gamers and access links in the description below for more information as always and also we've 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