Gadgetory

everyone today we're tearing down a gigabyte GT X 1080 extreme water forest card or something like that it's cut a lot of a lot of words the name so this is another liquid cool that GT X 1080 you sometimes call them GT X 1080 hybrids this one is really not true to that name so when we use the word hybrid with this site anyway it's generally referring to the idea of having a vrm or a VRAM blower fan here and cooling the VRAM VRAM that way and then using the liquid for the rest for the GPU this card is different you can see that without even tearing it down through the window because the CLC is outfitted here atop the GPU as one would expect and then just like the EVGA hybrid that we tore apart we should have b-roll of that there's a copper plate underneath the CL see that communicates of the CLC cold plate and the vram so the vram heat is synced by the copper plate and the copper plate touches the cold plate there's probably on this one but definitely on the EVGA one thermal paste between the point of contact and that helps sync the heat from the vram copper plate into the cold plate through the CLC and the idea there is that your GPU diode temperature will look like it's higher than maybe a Seahawk and that's because the GPU is sharing its cooling solution with the vram and there's only so much cooling potential in one of these something like an ek predator would be better and we do have one of those to look at but this one's even different still it's got a heat pipe in here heat pipe probably goes down over the v-ray or the the vrm the actual voltage regulator module not just the vram or the memory so we're gonna tear it apart and look at it we've got a full review as well that'll go live very soon so subscribe if you want to see that but let's take it apart today first of all I want to thank Sean one of our viewers for sending this over to us this is now the second car we've worked on from a viewer first is from Sam that was the Titan X thank you again for that Sam and Sean thank you for sending this so let's take it apart and be a bit more careful with it than with my own cards because it does actually need to be used at the end of all the so so we're gonna start with the shroud screws take those out these are just phillips head a one or a two it looks like you're both fine very large screw okay that's I need to remember this okay so a few seconds into this we already have like three or four different sizes of screws I wasn't planning to use the magnetic sheet thing but we're going to use it and that's because these are unexpectedly different sizes okay so shrouds ready to come off pretty easy got some connections in here let me see what all these are first so this one is the extreme gaming LED which how does this held in okay so this is held in by these three screws and these actually don't need to come out to remove the shroud so those are only used for this and that would be why they're different sizes one of them I guess let's this one theoretically goes into the board sort of thank you yeah yeah it does go it's right there that I don't know if you can see that under my pinky there's a on this aluminum heatsink there is a screw hole so that's where that really long one goes through through the nameplate and then into the heatsink and then the power this cable at the top is going to the LED on the nameplate and then these are in there pretty good okay there we go just required some pressure on the pin so that goes to the nameplate and then we've got the LED here so there's your diodes your light emitting diodes you can see RGB RGB so there's two sets of RGB le and then this is the actual nameplate diffuser all that stuff so that's that part of the board and then these these go to more LEDs it looks like let's get those disconnected so we get the shroud separated okay all right so there's your shroud really nothing special the only cool thing I guess is that see-through plastic but we'll put that aside and let's start looking at the board I'll probably take I might take the backplate off we're definitely take the cooler off of the the GPU though some of the cables we've disconnected here this is for the fan we can see that's clearly the fan and then this connects the pump to the same power so these connect and that communicates with the motherboard directly and that's what powers are pumping our fan so that's what that is and then looking at the cooler I was talking about same setup as EVGA but even still a bit more sophisticated from what they were doing gigabytes got a copper plate here that's touching the vram the memory we can see very clearly there's a thermal pad between the copper and the vram and then that has a heat pipe attached to the copper plate over here on one set of the vram so this sets gonna be pretty darn cold and the copper heat pipe is communicating down this channel we actually have an animation of how heat pipes work from our CPU coolers work video same thing as with CPU coolers so this is connected to an aluminum heatsink which might be copper under there we'll find out this raised part is where the MOSFETs and the inductors kind of are and doctors don't really need this much cooling but it's smack in the middle of the MOSFETs and the capacitor bank so I guess they decided well we'll just cool it anyway because it's easier than not cooling it so this sinks the MOSFETs faster bank and the inductors and then the heat pipe pulls all that heat away transfers it to this copper plate and then that transfers to the pump eventually so it's pretty inefficient process in that regard versus something like an open loop where you have one block from maybe ek that's just filled with liquid and cools everything but that is how this one works we have thermal charts that we'll look at in the review and talk about more specifically if it's good or not but that's how it works that's what we're interested in right now let's pause the backplate but first the the actual cooler oh this is actually going to stay on there until all of these are taken out this time because they are mounting other parts of the cooler not just the CPU cooler itself okay there's a couple screws on the top side which you can see we're connecting right here so these there screws right there on the top side and probably over here as well where you can see the back and the nut so let's take this out let's take off the IO shield then progress from there okay so shields off and those screws are done this I just want to point out I'm not sure if gay goodbye it advertises these as gold-plated HDMI for VR I'll to check their marketing language the review but it's still stupid gold-plated any connector well any connector in computing USB mostly does nothing for you we've done a video on that it genuinely does nothing for you in this case the gold plating so to speak is the actual housing of the connector but the pins themselves are still normal pins this is just housing it doesn't communicate anything all the pins do all the work on USB especially that's true when you see keyboards advertising gold-plated whatever for faster response and therefore better for eSports it's all BS so these would perform the same if they were silver is what I'm saying and the one in the back are these gold-plated as well or gold shiny I think they are they are these are also gold-plated though the camera light makes them look a little silver so that's dumb and pointless and does nothing so is this loose yet what's the deal here that's also loose okay there we go it's got a thermal pad holding it on or something yes okay it's all come apart now alright so here's what we've got this is the VRM you can see that some of the thermal pad has remained on the cooler that's fine we'll reapply it once we rebuild this thing later thermal paste obviously applied by a machine or by hand with the silkscreen or something with decent coverage and good contact - you can tell by the pattern that's good contact it was definitely on there tight mounting standoffs a whole bunch of screws that are triangle-shaped okay you know we don't have that size for the triangles but that's what the underside looks like this communicates with vram this communicates with vram and this communicates of VRAM there are eight memory modules there's eight memory modules on a gtx 980 are all gddr5 x by micron and then this is four right here is the mosfet cooling you can see it's an aluminum plate which is about two hundred five watts per meter Kelvin so our thermal conductivity at 25 C this is contacting the inductors which can handle upwards of 120 C so they don't need this plate but it's here anyway and we'll now and adductors basically a copper wire so it's sort of a heatsink at its own and then this right here is for the capacitor bank and that pretty much covers the solution so here's what's going on it's it's actually pretty clever this is contacting the vram directly and it's through here under my finger which we read enough I'm not gonna take this completely apart because I have to send it back and I don't want liquid to get out of the system but under here is the copper plate for part of the liquid cooler the pump which is what we have right here that's the pump in this solution so if we look at it from this angle that's the best thing yes this is the best angle if you look at it here where my finger is you'll see that it's got its own copper plate and that's sandwiched hard against this one for the vram and that plate is what's pulling the heat off of this plate which is pulling the heat off the vram and the vrm and if I flip it over you will see that through the middle they've cut out a hole in the surface of the vram cooling plate where a protrusion from the GPU pump cold plate is sticking out so this is connected directly to a cold plate at the bottom of the pump that is part of the hold play of the pump and it's protruded like we've seen in other models that talks to the GPU directly and want to add some copper mass which helps with sinking the heat and - it means that the GPU is directly connected to the pump so there's no efficiency loss there by communicating through multiple layers of copper which is what the vram and the BRM are both doing but they are much lower heat devices that can tolerate the temperature they're producing so they don't need quite as efficient cooling as the GPU gets so that's the solution heat pipe is connected to the copper copper soldered to the aluminum and the aluminum is talking to the VRM completely and I believe we can probably now take this off as well yes there's one more screw right there that one was hidden under that was hidden under the heatsink I think or I just missed it okay so that's gone falls off perfect alright so back sides actually got some hardware on it - it's not like every other PCB we've looked at I have to have I have build so I'd analyze this for us if he hasn't already done it on his own channel you can see more of the vrm components continuing on this back side right here and that's where the VAR the vram is mounted this you can see to hear three or three here three here and two here so that's eight which obviously you see it on the other side as well some kind of logic on the back side some of these ICS are not my specialty so we will have build Zoid look at those for us but you can definitely see continuation of veer at or the vrm excuse me over here and then the rest of it it's all pretty straightforward so I'll see if I can have him look at that if he hasn't already but that is the PCB itself you've seen the front and the back of the PCB these connections are basically leds leds power for the fan lots of LEDs though and the cooler itself over here we just talked about all this so I won't do that again this is the radiator obviously the radiator has rigid tubing this is not the same rubberized to the tubing that you'll see with a Sutekh or more most coal IT those types of products necessarily but you can kind of hear the noise it makes that's because it's rigid I'm doing that because you probably can't really see it on the camera so it is the bendy straw style tubing if you think of what that looks like and then you've got the barbs here as always with the tube connecting to the barbed tank for the radiator tank on the other side so it's just it's every other radiator you've ever seen and then the fan is a gigabyte branded fan not special for any particular reason though I'm sure they will find many reasons to tell you that it is special and then what else is there of note nothing really the these tubes like every other one you'll pretty much want to mount them like that to minimize the amount of air getting sucked through the pump and it doesn't really damage performance but it creates a noise so this this card is fairly loud with gurgling noises and things like that from the liquid if you mount it with the tubes up so don't do that we'll talk about that all that in the review so that's the teardown that is the gigabytes 1080 extreme with no e at the front and the capital X water force graphics card and uh it's really it's a lot of thermal pads it's so like it's making fun of the name or not this is actually pretty well built thermally especially thermal solutions pretty unique and cool the only card out that we've looked at that does something similar to this is EVGA is hybrid and EVGA hybrid was a big experiment because we're trying to figure out why does this card produce higher temperatures than the Seahawk when it really shouldn't it should be cooler for many reasons and answer was voltage and was because they're cooling most importantly the vram with the same liquid coolant solution just like gigabytes doing here and so that means you're sharing the solution between multiple components that increases the liquid temperature the small 120 radiator same on gigabyte is only capable of dissipating so much heat it's not necessarily a bad thing for the GPU because that can certainly run even at 30 C Delta it's still pretty happy so there's there's a point where the efficacy becomes questionable when you're cooling to G people or 20 C Delta because it's just what's the what's the point to some regard but we I do have some coverage about that we'll talk about that more in the future but this same thing here you're gonna see higher GP diode temperatures because you're cooling multiple things with a 120 radiator 120 fan limited amount of liquid liquid temperature goes up dissipation potential goes down well potential stays the same but it's being shared by more devices so that's the card as always links in the description below for photos things like that our review is forthcoming and you can subscribe to the channel to find the review of this card when it goes live patreon link the post well video to help us out directly we will be in California for a week so the videos we're shooting from here on will either be scheduled to upload or you'll be watching stuff from our California coverage at different manufacturers and at an eye buy power eSports Arena opening at UCI so tune in for all that stuff I'll see you all next time