Gadgetory

hey guys builds lloyd from actually hardcore overclocking here and today we're gonna be taking a look at the Intel nook the Hades Canyon one so this has the KB like CPU and the Vega M GPU along with one stack of HP m2 it does technically support overclocking it's not particularly overclockable because it's horrific Lee thermally limited and just really the this is basically a laptop without a screen and keyboard more than a sort of desktop PC and it's also over lit like really complicated in terms of how much power circuitry is on here so instead of doing the usual PCB breakdown where we talk about the various power capabilities of the various regulators on here and if that's good enough for overclocking or not which is in this scenario completely irrelevant we're just gonna be taking a look at well I'm just gonna sort of walk you through the kind of process that I go through for doing a PCB breakdown video before that this video is brought to you by thermal takes view 37 case the view 37 focuses on highlighting custom PC builds with its full panoramic window and tinted front acrylic and our thermal testing the view 37 performed reasonably well when considering its looks focused build which is partly thanks to the airflow design and the removal of a bottom power supply shroud for a balance of looks and performance check the link in the description below for the view 37 so here the first thing we got to do is identify sort of the different voltages that this thing needs to run and that's not very difficult so we have a KB like CPU on here and we have a Vega GPU I only have an HP m2 stack and we have some ddr4 and we have a chipset and these are these are like the big power hog devices obviously there's more stuff on here than that and actually we're not even gonna list all of the like the the KB like CPU and the Vega and even the HB m2 and the ddr4 like all of these have more voltages than what I'm gonna list but all of the ones that I'm not listing are very very low power rails that like the device won't work without it they're not super mission-critical and they don't really affect overclocking that much cutting costs on those doesn't really make sense when you have a lot of other stuff that could be like that that's more expensive to do anyway so let's go over the different voltages that these need the KB like CPU needs a v core and it needs a V GPU which we'll call VG t cuz that's what Intel calls it there's gonna be a VC CSA for the system agent so that's things like the PCIe and the DMI link and actually the DMI has its own voltage but again that one's on a not a buck converter that like the link itself has its own voltage the system agent has another voltage as well and then you have the i/o which is kind of the like the memory controller and part of the system agent as well like these these two are kinda these are very very heavily connected the both of them have an impact on memory overclocking again kinda relevant here but they do get their own buck converters generally speaking now the Vega GPU that has a v core and it has a VDD CI and it doesn't actually well there's some more rails but those are all like very very minor so we're not gonna go over those HBM - you've got a VH BM so the actual voltage that the HBM runs on and we're like it's not actually referred to as vh BM like there's a different term for it but it's easier to keep track of here so we'll just call it V H BM and then it's got a VPP rail and this may or may not be on a buck converter or at least may or may not be on a buck converter we can actually find I'm not sure like this this thing is very low-power even compared to like the actual main like this is the main rail and this this thing is even smaller than that the ddr4 is gonna have a V DD v DD q rail so that's that's what a lot of motherboards would call memory or VD RAM or VDD R or V damn you know lots and lots of names but the official term is VDD Q and actually you know what I prefer V dim or VDD are that just makes more sense like it's just neither easier to keep track of and then that also has a VPP except this one sits at 2.5 volts whereas the one for HP m sit in two sits at 1.8 volts so you do actually the intended kated voltage regulators for each of those and the PCH I've cleverly put over the okay we're just going to move that PCH will have V PCH and that should just be 1.0 5 volts and actually it might not right 4 KB like it actually might be 1 volt I might be remembering an older Intel chipset for 1.05 X 99 is 1.05 and its predecessor too so yeah that KB like I'm not sure I've not checked with the chipset voltages on those but it should be around 1 volts as well so yeah and that'll be on a buck converter as well because that's actually a pretty pretty significant amount of current that that needs so that covers the various voltages this this board needs to somehow produce because without those voltages this this isn't even turning on so let's look at this the first thing I see is controllers and then this thing is like I have no idea but we'll get well initially this is a big question mark so I already know what's on this board but so I'm kind of cheating the first thing is the voltage controllers now these are super convenient this is an international rectifier 35 67 and how do I know that well if you look at the chip it says IR which is that's international rectifier now Infineon that's their logo and then it says three five six seven B so that that's the chip work that that's the chip we're looking for here and this is a six plus two phase voltage controller very very popular on AMD GPUs in fact I'm 99% certain that well no this chip it actually entirely exists for AMD GPUs there's a three five six seven a which is basically a three five six seven B except it has a different power management standard implemented for it so yeah this thing this thing is AMD GPU specific it's never been used for anything else so how much you want to bet that this makes beat core for Vega so that's probably V chord G which did I do that let's just put a G on there for convenience because we have a different vehicle for the CPU as well so that's gonna be our V chord G there and that is a six plus two and well it's actually kind of easy to see that's kind of what it's doing so we have one two three four five inductors here that are all the same then we have this inductor over here but this one's not hanging off of the three five six seven be because this chip behind it is a that looks well that's a I know that logo that's an Peck electronics which means that's an a that's a P that's a W and I know that because that's a series of chips they make so that's an AP W and I'd say well that I don't know that looks like either an eight or a six seven one four so we're just gonna say six or eight seven one four and this is a integrated buck converter of some kind so this is gonna be a high side wall so at low side MOSFET driver and control circuitry all in one chip AMD likes using these but here it might actually be powering the chipset because this this is like I like you can use it for a lot of things like the it's not until it's not particularly intelligent it's generally used for fixed voltage rails so it'd be perfect for doing something like powering the chipset or providing VPP so you know it can sort of do those too it's going to be doing one of those and well it could also because don't forget the Vega core has VD DCI it could also be may be doing VD DCI though generally speaking v VL I don't know about HBM cards so don't measured it so can't rule out that it's VD DCI and we get this inductor up here which is also different but this one is actually hooked up to the three five six seven B and we know that because of this chip right here you see these right all of these look a lot like a well very specific driver chip these look a lot like that looks a lot like eight five ten on there I mean that last number looks kind of like a nine but I'm not aware of a eight five not eight five one nine so I'm just gonna for now for now I'm gonna go with this being an eight five ten and that is a CHL chip and CHL is a sub-brand or well sub company of international rectifier so that is controlled by that so is this and so is that and since this chip looks exactly the same as all of these well that too is gonna be hanging off of the three five six seven B so that means what we're looking at here is a 1 2 3 4 5 plus one cuz yeah so the core plus something cuz I don't know what that actually is it could be that this is either gonna be V HBM or it's gonna be the HBM or it's gonna be VDD see out one of those two it can't be like it's definitely not VPP because this is way too big for the VPP rail but it could be either V HBM or VD DCI since those might be just about the same current output both so yeah that does make that one kind of difficult and I don't know which one it is but that's a 5 plus 1 phase configuration right there because that's a single phase and this is 5 and the IR 3 5 6 7 B has problems supporting that so that still leaves the question of well what's this and that and if I had the board in hand then that would literally just be a matter of measuring stuff with a multimeter and that would very quickly while it's running and I would very quickly clear up any you know questions about what which of these actually does what now the MOSFETs used well I think you can read that I'm not sure how it'll deal with YouTube's compression but well there's this same chip elsewhere on this board and it looks much neater so this one right here you can clearly see that's a six that's a nine that's a nine that's a two and then there's this lovely scribble next to that and that scribble is supposed to be an A which the means this is an Alpha and Omega semiconductor chip and I know that because I've seen this logo before I hate this logo it was like this took me several hours to figure out who this belongs to because you can't like you can't even Google reverse image you search this thing it's really annoying because the manufacturers like logo for their own like company is actually very different from what they put on their MOSFETs so that's great isn't it but we can like so it's made by Alpha and Omega semiconductor it's a 69 92 and I can also tell you that it's a dual end FET and I can tell you it's a dual end FET because I don't see any high like there's no there's no two MOSFETs right each of these phases requires a high side and a low side MOSFET except we get one big chip which means that chips gotta have both both the high side law and low side MOSFET in it because even if we go to the other side of the board we can see that there's not it like there's not really that many MOSFETs here because there are some boards out there where they'll put like the high side MOSFET on the front and then a low side on the front and then another low side on the back or one like high side on the back or and then low side on the front or just low side MOSFET gets the heatsink because that one runs halt but basically a lot of boards like you might see that they actually put the MOSFETs on different sides but we can clearly see that's not what's going on here and you do only get one chip for each phase so these chips have to be dual and fats so that solves what those are and well at this point it's I guess it's as good as any point to tell you what kind of current capabilities have these have so I've looked up the datasheet for these they are Alpha and Omega semiconductor they do exist they are dual and FETs and for 1.2 volts output and I don't know how much power this means so I'm just gonna fire off a few different like current levels for 10 amps so 1.2 volts output 10 volts drive 10 vgs which is gate to source voltage 300 kilohertz switching frequency cuz that's sort of the happy medium for power efficiency and regulator and ripples of and like good ripple tolerance these are going to be looking at 10 amps at 0.9 watts heat output for the chip 20 amps at 2.7 watts is kind of getting toasty 30 amps if you have enough cooling you can still run this totally but I'm kind of starting to suspect like well we'll get to that later and then 40 amps you're gonna be looking at 9.2 watts so basically past this point now that's not gonna work but they would be viable up to the 2025 amp mark if you have enough cooling which let's address that at this point you notice how this vrm is kind of like it if you've noticed how like mother normal motherboards and like GPUs are usually laid out then you should have noticed that normally the inductor is closer to the thing the vrm is powering than the mosfet and the reason is really simple because you're gonna have high voltage on this side right and then the wire well the wiring basically looks something like this you're gonna have a high voltage there and I don't know what voltage that unlike a desktop computer it would normally be 12 volts but this is a nook it may well be 20 I have no idea oh and I'm assuming that conversion is 12 volts to 2 volts so yeah but anyway you're gonna have a high voltage on one side and then that's gonna go into the inductor and that is how it would end up float like that's your current flow for the board layout we have here and the reason Intel has gone with this because obviously this this is suboptimal but the reason why they've done this is because the heatsink that is in the nook covers all of these MOSFETs and actually I think it goes roughly like I don't have a pic like I don't have a picture of the heatsink on its own so I can't show you basically the heatsink covers this entire area so these MOSFETs are cooled by the same heatsink assembly that cools the CPU and the GPU so that's why this gets the funky layout because if if the well if these were switched around you'd have to have a heatsink which has like a cutout for the for the inductors and that like that makes the heatsink more complex to manufacture which makes it more expensive and well nobody wants to do that is just cheaper to do a oddball vrm layout and that's in our in this scenario especially because here it's like the this doesn't need to be you know some super high performance like the this vrm basically just needs to not overheat and stay within tolerances wear a cape be like quad-core at basically stock settings so it's not like they're concerned about building the best voltage regulator ever they just need a voltage regulator that fits in here and is easy enough to cool so that's why this gets them messed up layout now then let's keep going so we have more inductors over here we have one two three four five but so this may well be a five phase this inductor is not part of that group because that r-47 means this is a 40 like that or forty seven tells you that the inductance so all of these are a hundred and fifty nano Henry's while this one is 479 Oh Henry's and you don't like technically speaking it would probably be physical to design a buck converter that can run mixed mixed inductor like mixed inductances but generally speaking if you want something like you know off-the-shelf and normally functional all of your inductors in a in a multi-phase setup are going to be the same value so this is its own little single-phase here and we have a voltage controller right here and this one's really again easy enough to read so this is a inter sale as it says Intersil on it that's an ISL chip and that's gonna be a nine five eight to nine and so initially if you didn't have a datasheet for this you you can tell this is a single phase and this looks like a five phase but that causes some issues of well okay so so recore is like this this is big this is like medium and this is small and this is smaller in terms of pad like in terms of current draw requirements and well if this is if this is a five plus one then well that would have to be GPU power and then but that doesn't really like the layout stops kind of making sense because you'd have VCC i/o and VCC si somewhere in this area which is kind of far away I did find it on 2g key and digi-key lists this as a three plus two plus one so yeah I still don't know how that's actually split up like it could be like that it could be like this I don't think they'd put the phases in between each other just because that would make routing the power planes a nightmare so but I'm not sure how this is split into the 3 + 2 + 1 configuration but because we know that like 3 + 2 so that's gonna be you know vgt that's gonna be the GPU portion that's going to be your V core and this right here is gonna be almost certainly which I've run out of space that plus one is gonna be system agent let's just put VSA under it there that's that's gonna be your system agent voltage so that plus one is this thing right here and how do we know it's this thing well look at these driver chips they're all the same and so naturally that means all of these drivers are gonna be hooked up to the same well okay now if you had two voltage controllers from the same brand on the same PCB than that this would be a terrible assumption to make but there's no other inter-cell multi-phase like you know PWM based PWM output voltage regulator on here so it's safe to assume that since all of these are the same driver they all belong to the same chip so that's why the so this is gonna be system agent and then some combination of this is gonna be like VCC is going to be the GPU power and the V Corps so yeah this does have a three phase V core and considering the current capabilities of these MOSFETs that's not really great is it well considering the stock like you know if you replace the cooling system on this then shared though then then it's a problem but stock you can barely cool anything over like if the CPU starts kicking off much more than like a hundred watts is gonna be uncool Abul so I don't really find the three-phase a big problem because the CPU is gonna overheat before the MOSFETs start getting into serious issues so yeah now if you did swap out the cooling system and just completely defeated the entire purpose of the Knux form factor this vrm is in is inadequate you the problem like you would probably end up overloading it if you really really pushed it unless you put like some giant heatsink on it and a lot of airflow anyway moving on now we're stuck in this area of the board and we've pretty much so we've covered V core we've covered in GPU we've covered the road si si si we've covered that voltage and we've not covered the the chipset which I have a sneaking suspicion the chipset power might be this thing right here which I don't know like this kinda looks like it could be an act like that kinda looks like it could be from alpha anyway this might be chipset power it is far away but there's the problem is anything near the GPU should like I think the GPU would take priority for anything near it and there is actually something kinda in this area like you have this voltage regulator up here which we can see that's the same an Peck chip as before so that's another one of those AP W and actually this one looks like that is actually a straight ups eight and I know for a fact that it is an eight so that's an eight seven one four because I've already tried to look it up it's not a six seven one four but just you know illustrating the issue of like I don't even sometimes know the specific model number until I try to go look it up and one of them doesn't exist and if both of them exist then I have a problem that's when I go tell Steve that I need more photos closer up of various things but that that's that's another one of these you know fully integrated buck converters and that honestly looks like again it's just going to the GPU portion here or I'm yeah it does look like it's going to the GPU portion because you do have like that inductor seems to be dumping like seems to be connected into this power plane yeah I'm gonna go with this power plane and well that that's probably the GPU on the other side of all of these bypass capacitors so this is probably for the GPU which means they can't power the chipset and that would leave the chips out of hanging off of this because this is definitely not going to be pushing power all the way over there but yeah I'm not entirely sure this could also be for powering something completely different without the board in it's actually kind of impossible to tell so that this one this one annoys me but yeah the the best I can do in the with what I have here and moving on to this area now this area is a mess so first of all this chip right here is big it's easily legible and that is a TP s six five zero eight three zero TPS that is a Texas Instruments model like that's a Texas Instruments prefix for a model number let's call it that and so I did actually manage to look this thing up it's not hard to look up you just go to Texas Instruments website and you throw the model number into their search bar and this thing is crazy okay but before we get into that we do have what looks like one like we do seem to have a single phase right here another single phase right here and another single phase right here and another single phase right here and based on how these are all laid out I'm gonna work with the assump I'm gonna you know assume that this thing is a one plus one plus one plus one and turns out that's actually correct this thing is a crazy super integrated voltage regulator extraordinaire it's meant for old trouble book and like mobile like ultra mobile applications so fitting for it for it to be found in a nook and it does ink it does in it integrates for buck converter drives so actually you'll notice that there's no like like say the ISL nine five eight to nine right you have these drive chips and the three five six seven B has these drive chips well we don't have any of those chips here right like there's nothing before these MOSFETs and but what you will notice if you look at the PCB and this doesn't always work because sometimes you can't even see the traces but these traces going from that chip to these MOSFETs are fad like real like this is really fat if this was just a pwm line it would not need to be that thick so these are actually straight-up drive lines which is correct so this directly drives all of its own MOSFETs but it also integrates you see this cute little inductor over here that thing is there there's an integrated buck converter in this but wait there's more there's also three low dropout regulators in it so yeah this thing just does so many voltages and it just yeah it's really mental ultra ultra portable applications which we're you know any amount of like the more you integrate stuff into one chip the less space it takes up so the better so yeah this thing is this thing really surprised me that that thing's impressive and we do have this loose MOSFET right here but I'm not entirely sure what that's for it kind of looks like it goes to ground and I'm basing that off of the fact that these capacitors are hooked into what I assume is a power plane because these capacitors are you know - there's + here there's probably + there and that means that's probably ground this MOSFET is going from plus to ground I'm not really sure what's like what that the purpose of that is it might be - well no because if they wanted to just discharge the capacitors they could have a bleed resistor hmm ya know 100 percent certain why that's necessary and up here we have - well we have two of those buck converters for that and yeah that pretty much covers it and actually the only thing I haven't covered is what is this little MOSFET which is used a lot it's also up here as well as in you know all of these and all right I forgot - well okay so the this TPS six five zero eight three zero right with its four four full-size block converters and one little one well I know for a fact that this little one can't possibly do vc cio because vc cio by intel specification maxes out of 5.5 amps and this mini buck converter respect at a maximum of two so this is just not gonna work so I think one of these bigger ones is gonna be VC cio and it's probably this one because it's closer to the CPU it just doesn't make sense to pull power all the way like that when you could just pull the power like that right this I'm gonna suspect is VDD Q while VDD R so that's probably the the main power line for the memory sticks this looks like a stupid amount of overkill for that because ddr4 memory really doesn't pull that much power but it does pull more power than VC well it can it really shouldn't in this like in the Nook it really shouldn't use more than VCC AIA a VC C IO but it could so I'm not gonna rule it out again kind of like which one which one is which I'm not entirely sure one of these is good has got to be the VPP for the ddr4 actually this the mini integrated one could do that I guess it could also do vega's VDD CI or the VPP for the HBM or actually HP empower the thing is like all of these are like far away from all of the big power-hungry components so it makes these an absolute pain to place in terms of what they do but you know with all of these right here everything is basically covered the main problem is I still don't know which which vrm does what and I did mention that I would point out this MOSFET right here that is a you can actually read it off of the packaging that is AZ 340 and don't ask me how but apparently some time in the past I've seen a PCB where there was a chip with a Z something something something name and it turns out that I remember that those belong to vishay that's a vishay part number because if you throw this into google it might just come up with a car though I don't yeah it might really won't come up with a MOSFET you'd probably have to go like you know Z 340 dual and fat and we know this is another one of these dual and FETs because well there's one of these chips in each phase so but my life is even easier because I already know that this belongs to vishay on the basis that it has a Z in its name and these are like well the these are obviously less power than these because they're smaller and they're also used for all the really look like lower power rails here so these for the same you know same configuration as the AOS 6992 these have completely different current handling capabilities so for 10 amps well actually now let's start at 5 so 5 amps it'll produce about 0.4 watts of heat 10 amps it'll produce about 1.25 watts of heat at 15 amps it produces 2.5 5 watts of heat and at 20 amps it'll produce about 4.3 watts of heat these are like these are small there is no ATLA there's not really there's gonna be air flow over them but not really any active cooling these are probably only good in the Nook I'm gonna assume that they're probably they're probably loaded between 5 and 10 amps output and realistically I think you wouldn't really want to push them much past the 10 amps because if you go past that they they get very hot very quick but yeah I don't know like I don't think they're inadequate because again you can't really overclock this that much so that covers the Nook and kinda the the process I go through for PCB oh right there's this MOSFET that I don't know what it's like same situation as that other one you know this one down here which incidentally I do know who these belong to that that part number that's RA 18 and if I'm not mistaken that's vishay again because that's it yeah that is vishay that's vishay again so yeah and that's a Sarah 18 MOSFET and you can just go to their site and it'll come up with that but I have no idea what these are for cuz again the well actually I can't even tell what this one is wired up to or how so yeah but that other one looks like it just pulls a voltage to ground which is kinda like I've seen that done on boards but I'm not sure what the the purpose is for it I don't think it's used for just discharging capacitors because they I you could just use a resistor for that I think unless there's some critical timings that you like requirement for something or it needs to be done very quickly anyway that does cover everything on the NOC I don't know it if to tell you that this is a great PCV or not a great PC because honestly I don't know how much power you can push into this before it just completely becomes uncool Abul but this is kind of the process I go through for ID everything on a board I basically just look at things uh-huh and then and then google them so is really not that like you know rocket science II but well there are some equations that I like there's equations that you can use to calculate all the the heat dissipation for different current levels for the MOSFETs but other than that it's it's very much just start with a very high resolution image and look at all the part numbers so yeah I ideally I'd have the damn thing in hand and then actually be able to measure things but you know for GPUs that I don't have the problem of there's five different there's four different voltage regulators here of the same sort of power level which unlike a GPU there's gonna be like one of like there's gonna be one of any given power capability so I don't really need to wonder about why there's four of the same thing and what each of those four does so yeah anyway that's it for the video thank you for watching like share subscribe leave a comment down below or any questions if you'd like to support what we do here with gamers Nexus there's a patreon link down below and you can also buy shirts so yeah that's it for the video thanks for watching and good bye