Gadgetory

this is it this is the cheapest of the r-tx 2070 cards out there $500 invidious requirement to send $500 cards to media was discussed in our review and this is the one we wanted to take apart because the $500 cards are almost certainly always going to use a reference PCB and video did not sample austin fe card and to our understand they didn't sample really anyone in fe card but this has the same PCB so we can still look at what you would get from an MP card if you wanted to liquid cooler or something like that and also it's 500 bucks is about the price point the 2070 should be anyway so we're gonna take it apart and see what the EVGA r-tx 2070 non-branded edition looks like because that's how cheap it is it doesn't even doesn't say what it is anywhere on there other than our TX 2070 so they don't have a special name for it this time before that this video is brought to you by the Corsair strafe RGB mark to mechanical gaming keyboard the strafe mark 2 uses Cherry MX which is available in MX red and MX silent and uses the elevated key cap design that has become part of course there's keyboard identity elevated key caps make the keyboard much easier to clean with a blast of compressed air and limit dirt build up the keyboard use a metal body design of have received praise from us in the past in old reviews for high build quality learn more about the Corsair strafe mark 2 at the link in the description below technically evj does have a name for this they call it the RT x 2070 black but there's there's really no way to know that unless you talk to their PR rep and then you figure out that's the name so this is the 27 t blacks 500 are card there are more expensive models they have been ultra silent that I think's 550 or 600 but at that point you start exiting the value argument of the 2070 so 500 to bat where it should be and you get basically a reference card with theoretically a less bad cooler but we'll have to I don't know if we ever get the FE card we can test it out but based on previous experience probably this is going to be less bad than the FE and we do have thermal data on this in our review so we're going to take this thing apart it's pretty straightforward it's gonna be a lot of Phillips drivers and that's about it so reasons you would want to do this of course for so we want to see what the PCB and the vrm look like are they quality what kind of ER mr is nvidia using because this is a reference model so even though evj is buying the reference board or the design from nvidia we still need to know if it's any good and we're gonna be using our mod mat here to track the screw placement so you can pick one of those up on store documents accessing that if you want a work surface a PC building and modding work surface and we're using it's not they're not advertised but we're using the iFixit toolkit and we just like to know that because we do think it's one of the better one so this is the protec toolkit well link both those below so this thing so far it's pretty straightforward we've got just a lot of Phillips head screws it's trivial compared to the founders edition card the one difference being that the back plates kind of odd so being a $500 card and this is a really interesting problem that partners face it's really not possible to put just a straight good cooler on here a lot of the really good coolers costs about $50 or up depending on what kind of cool you are talking about when we're talking about let's say 1080i class cards if you were talking about a card that was sort of like icx class something like that icx high-end windforce Strix any of those you're looking at 50 bucks plus or minus maybe 10 for the coolers and these there's really not a lot of room for any manufacturers to price out of cooler because they're spending so much on the GPU itself of course and then they're trying to keep a $500 price point so for the backplate going back to what I was saying you know with this thing where it's like it's helling really haired it doesn't need to be there at all you just blow air straight through it I suppose it looks a bit better but that's all you end up with for the place so it's not really a backplate it's just a back of heatsink that hangs over PCB plate at this point and the PCB as you've likely noticed by now is short Oh interesting okay good miss misread the screws for a second so PCB is short which places the the power pin out right in the middle there like we've seen on Vega cards and some other cards I think Polaris cards do that in the past the GTX 1060 did that as well so this is not uncommon the only way to really push the power headed over here and NVIDIA did this with a 1060 reference card or Founders edition card is to stick it over there and then wire just run some lawn wires over to the PCB which is really obnoxious to take apart and completely pointless so we're glad that EVGA didn't opt to do that here because this this makes more sense it's easier to maintain this sticker I'll just note so this is not a warranty void to remove sticker we've asked the EVGA about these in the past even though it says EVGA everywhere they're not going to void your warranty if you have clearly tampered with it well you could remove it easily if you wanted to that's not gonna avoid it just because there's a hole in that if you for example stuck a water cooler on this PCB it's a tamper seal so they can figure out what you've changed and what they do with that data I don't know I would if we're hoping they're only doing good things with it then it would be that they are trying to figure out where to troubleshoot problems but it could also be used to figure out if there's reason to void a warranty I suppose we just we don't actually know how to resell trees they're doing so yeah screw nuttin screw on the iOS plate which is pretty common practice by a there's not one here but just screw there at this point we can probably separate them without removing the screws from that weird backplate and it's got a base plate that's separating as well we have a combined power cable and here that you can see so I need to disconnect that and the safest way possible which is going to be avoiding pulling on the cables there we go looks clean cool so we did not break anything that's good toys a goal so for this if you do take one of these apart just stick a fingernail under the corner here and Paul don't pull the cables it's very easy to rip them out so here's the card we've already done thermal testing on this on mind you we have testing with stock pastes and testing with aftermarket solutions in the main review if you want to see those and then we also tested with well in the future with thermocouples under the base plate because I mean that's why we're taking this apart right now so okay baseplate can come off at this point let's remove that and then look at it further okay pretty straightforward so what we end up with is a flat base plate there's no real surface area there and the base plate is aluminum it's got that going for it it is conductive it's just not dissipative in any meaningful way and that's sitting with it's got a hole for the inductor line right here to look at and this now look at the PCB this explains partly why we're limited in power target 214 percent it's a very weak power target and it's not the strongest beer around but we'll have builds I'd look at it as well and let's pull some of the pads off so should be how much one two three four five six oh yeah eight memory modules as expected let's just remove these for now I need a spudger so this is iFixit spudger that they actually include on with the pro tect toolkit to you but we like these removing thermal pads it's a good way to kind of prevent them from tearing apart as you remove them or stretching that's the bigger problem if you pull at it it'll stretch and if you need to reapply it that becomes increasingly difficult as it stretches out so I'm just gonna put this over here so I can kind of remember where it goes and I might as well reveal the die we haven't seen this die yet so that'll be new typically EVGA uses shin-etsu paste for some of their cards we don't know what they're using on this one it is a lower end model but they did change their paste for the twenty series it's normally a non or well fairly non-hearing compound but time will tell how it holds up we don't know what the reason on this one there that's the 20 70 die first time we've we've seen this in person this is the tu 106 - 400 - a1 and normally the a1 is just a revision numbers that's really insignificant at this point so tu 106 - 400 is the GPU or the silicon just going to clean off the base plate of a cold plate as well this is a nickel plated copper cold plate so for the heat pipes here going into the plate the most important thing with heat pipes is not how many there are despite what manufacturers like to use for marketing its where do they contact and in this instance there are large heat pipes we can measure those those look like probably ten millimeter that's ten so those are ten millimeter heat pipes there are three of them of course for the GPU and actually for the whole card the whole card they're three and they do go right down the center so you've got good contact on one and then maybe half of each of these two here you end up with a bit of a radius issue or the chamfered edge you lose all of your contact there so hopefully it's soldered to the cold plate at that point to increase the thermal transfer but that's why sometimes you'll see a bunch of four or six typically six millimeter pipes instead of larger fewer larger pipes just because it's better overall contact the pan and how it's built but they've got three of those on here adding thermal paste to the mod mat with all the other if they're home paste needs a cleaning stains been through like probably a year of use at this point including my literal blood on the mat and also lots of water cooling spills so it's durable it'll hold up to a lot you should buy one on stored I hear as excess that net so that's the cooler what we end up with is aluminum fins as always some of these are l-shaped fins on the bottom which is a blockage to airflow depend on what is sitting over so what is that sitting over that's gonna be sitting over the inductors which are probably the hottest part of the vrm with the MOSFETs very close second and having those L shaped fins although it blocks air flow will allow for direct contact between the thermal pad and the fin stack with the inductors and that is actually more valuable than allowing air flow to get down there for the most part although air flow is just fine if you take the cooler off and blast it there and then let's just go ahead and remove this backplate just out of curiosity now after that we can look at the BRM and this requires a smaller bit you're keeping track at home that's plastic this is actually a plastic backplate with rubber bumpers on it probably for vibration or spacing so this actually does nothing highly then brands the cars and maybe looks cool to some people so there's the rest the cooler then pretty basics got two fans on it and a couple of 10 millimeter heat pipes as for the cold plate so it's a copper cold plate nickel plated copper heat pipes are copper nickel plated as well and that's important this time because of cheap cards so you never know might go aluminum these are indeed copper and then they also have this gate they've added on to hide the cable a bit and they tape the cable down so just some level of detail notes for you cables not using all the pins either so I believe they could fit either led functionality or maybe another fan into this header if they wanted to you can see they're only using about two thirds 60% of the cable of the header I should say this card has no LEDs so that may be what it was originally intended for in higher-end models or something so that's all I have on the cooler it's really very basic the base plate also very basic just but just an aluminum plate the vrm is using on semi NCP 302 155 MOSFETs and some cheap and doctors and that's for the vcore vrm so no doubling scheme or anything here I don't think let's just double check ok so here's some of the controllers on the back so for the controllers we've got a u p9 v 1 2 R right there that's what that one is and build xored will talk about this stuff in his PCB analysis if he does one for us talk about the capabilities of this then current wise and there's also a non semi brick over here which is a four or five four nine one on semi on the back for shunt resistors there's this shunt resistor here this is a five million shot and there's probably only one except for the one for the PCIe slot there's another one this shunt resistor right here the R zero zero five that almost certainly goes to the PCIe slot and then the one on the back probably goes to the pin out but let's just validate that so this is pretty simple we're just gonna do a continuity check and the purpose of this is if you want to do a shunt mod you could do it with liquid metal we've never really advised that approach you gain a bit from it in terms of lifting the power target the shunt resistors and this stuff most you probably know at this point but these little things the shunt resistors right there those are used to control the cards power consumption and if you short it to a certain degree you can trick the card into draw in a bit more power the trouble is if you short it too directly like with a short wire just bridging it then what will happen is the card will enter a safety mode go into 2d clocks and run about 300 megahertz but you put liquid metal on it which again we don't necessarily advise the liquid metal will we'll provide that that short you need in order to draw a bit more power it's just better ways to do it there Bower and build we'd have both talked about those if you're interested for example on some cards you could piggyback another chunk resistor on top of it but there Roman de Brouwer did run into trouble with that with this generation so let's see resistance check we're gonna check versus we have an EP PCIe power pin out here on our mod mat so it's a 6 pin that sort of tracking against although eight pins really not any different we have one of those there too it's just adds a sense and a ground line that's what the plus two are for no 12 volt is added so we're gonna check the you probably do this the easy way on the back of the board check the shunt resistor versus one of the 12 volt lines is what we're interested in so what we're gonna do because this card just upside down and we're measuring the back the top becomes the bottom for the pin out typically if you're measuring the top you kind of get in there between the pins and you're checking the ones on the inside line not the outside line flip it over though and what we're measuring is going to be at the top instead so that we're taking a 12 volt line here and if you look at our mod Mak over here you can see the PCIe 6 pin pin out it's the same as the 8 pin so it doesn't matter which one it is 8 pin just adds a ground and a sense pin and we're measuring against 12 volt so on the card we take a 12 volt here and measure that versus the shrunk resistor and we should get continuity so you see 0.1 ohms on the multimeter that means we're continuous and that means that this shunt resistor corresponds to this power header so if you wanted to short the shot on your 20 70 this would be the one to do just to give me an example of what you'd see if it's not continuous imma probic the completely unrelated pin and you'll get a very different number that generally just keeps climbing or fluctuating so those would not be continuous which is what you would see if you measured the wrong shunt resistor and then this one if I had the patience to do it and we had a pin out that was easier to work with you could measure this shunt resistor versus the aligned 12 volt line on the PCIe slot and you would see the same thing so do not don't short that one that would be bad you'll pour you'll they'll pull too much power through your motherboard and that would be an advisable so that's what we have for the card as for the vrm layout we'll have built so I'd look at that but we've got six power stages here and then these two would be for the memory so it's got a two phase memory VRM and that is using what looks to be fdpc part so it's using an FD g for one c e is the part or while 55 zero one eight five zero eight five zero 185 G I really wish my eyes can zoom in so yeah two phase memory vrm and then we'll have build to look at the rest but that is all the parts on the card so that's the card it's really very simple it's a small PCB we're not gonna bother water cooling this one or liquid cooling it because we kind of learned about that with the 2080 Ti and with this generation on like previous generations thermal limitations aren't really the main concern its power limitations and if you open up or some other monitoring application while you're running this card constantly the perv calf is going to be a perfect cap reason will be power and at 114 percent maximum offset when overclocked you know you don't offset the clock speeds and you just do the power percent increase it's still perfect app of power not even VL on this one so it is very power limited but we'll talk about the vrm separately and the the cooler itself we would have talked that we'll have talked about by now in our reviews check the review for cooler performance notes how this thing does versus the vrn versus the GPU we have all that stuff how EVGA stock paste is versus aftermarket we've got all of it check the review for that as always you can get a store like Aaron's axis Don that supports directly find one of our mod mats for example that was featured in this video or will link the iFixit kit below not in advertiser but we do like the protec toolkit so check that out and then patreon.com slash gamers nexus helps out directly there as well thank you for watching I'll see you all next time