Gadgetory

they run are back for another teardown I know a lot of you are waiting for the Vega hybrid results they're almost done as of shooting this video those will hopefully go up tomorrow but for now we are tearing down a 1080 TI lightning this is the new msi card we saw it at Computex it's an overclocking targeted card so it would be in the same class as the King 10 card where you really only buy this type of thing if you're actually going to be serious about trying to overclock it otherwise you might as well get something that's a bit lighter weight and this speaking of weight is quite large it is I believe it in direct competition with these O's hat card we just reviewed if not a little bit larger it has one of the biggest heat sinks we've seen on a card it's got a heat pipe on the back and then hopefully some cool overclocking features which we'll get to as we tear the thing down before that that coverage is brought to you by the core g21 enclosure from thermal take a $70 case with two four millimeters thick tempered glass side panels mesh ventilation in the front for breathability a rarity in cases these days and a power supply shroud with top mounted SSD sled learn more at the link in the description below so to refresh everyone on the card first a quick walk around it has three eight pin connectors which are probably unnecessary but we'll talk about that more in the review and then for the rest of it it has a few familiar features so the base plate which is this black plate right here is similar in some ways to the EVGA IC X cards where it has those EVGA calls them pin fins or in other words small cylindrical fins sticking up from the base plate made of aluminum it's got some of those on it so the MSI Lightning is one of the first MSI cards to adopt a more complex base plate and just looking down the side here I can already see it's got some ventilation grilling in the base plate so that's new and interesting as we tear through it and then it also I believe not a hundred percent sure on this but I believe it has some sensors on there some NTC s so we'll figure that out as we go otherwise three fan cooler large aluminum heatsink it's two and a half slots nearly three and we'll take apart the rest to figure that out so starting off with the backside I haven't taken this apart yet we're going to learn it together normally I just start with removing the cooler which is held on as it always is and because this card is so large I'm guessing we're also going to have to unscrew the other things in the back plate after we get through this warranty void sticker why a warranty void sticker on an overclocking card you ask I have no idea so once we get this pin off as it loose yet it's probably not loose yet now ok so that's it for this teardown I guess we can't get in right there so there's our stopper the screws on the backside that are holding the backplate n are actually going straight into the baseplate you can see it sticking up there so we're going to remove those screws as well yeah I mean you can you can see how far these things go through that is a large screw for a video card okay there's the backplate I feel thermal pads and also a cable get that really quickly okay here's what we've got so far there's copper heat pipe which looks like a six mil it's a six mile copper heat pipe or something like that anyway running clear across the backside this will be pretty interesting to test and really won't be that hard for us to test so we will do a/b testing on this I'm really genuinely curious about if that does anything not just on the lightning but in general because it's an interesting idea and because it is a copper heat pipe you'd think it has a bit more cooling potential than all the other stuff we've encountered for back plates like the tiny copper plate that gigabyte uses and also heat pipes tend to they're not very good at spiky heat loads they don't really have the the ability to deal with that kind of instant load but they're good at sustained loads at a fairly constant heat output so we'll give that a test that's the backlight though right here is part of the digital RGB LEDs you can see that this plate is a different material that's because it is in fact part of this so there's your RGB LEDs these are just dampers to probably space the back plate off the board and potentially provide some vibration damping the standoffs really do all of the space and off the board that you'll need to prevent contact so these aren't fully necessary but if they want them for vibration damping that's another story and we'll figure that out as we go for the back lick card two thermal pads on the backside of the GPU and we've got some caps back here some stray caps and then just the connector for the RGB LEDs alright let's separate the rest of this so this loose yet sort of maybe now one more screw there missed that one and we've got what going on alright these two screws are holding the base plate to the cooler so we're going to take those out all right cool let's put this aside for a second so here's the card with the base plate we'll get to the rest of the other cooler part in a moment that's pretty straightforward though throat pads and on pads thermal pads those are on inductors aka chokes and on caps right here this is partly for thermal transfer it may also help reduce coil wine by damping vibration and that's far better done with the thermal pad than another interface then we've got here a heat pipe which is also kind of reminiscent of EVGA new icx design so the heat pipe is routed over the MOSFETs which we haven't yet gotten to and next to that are these small thin stack protrusions so service area surface area here service area here that seems to be the theme of this card along with thermal transfer into the giant heatsink and then over here we have these fins now because this isn't really that visible part of the card I would imagine this is for more than just looks it probably does help actually ventilate the underside a little bit it wouldn't be hard to test I suppose you cover it up if it is in fact for airflow but covering it up you obviously can't do that with the same type of metal as this we've got some kind of tape here which let's figure out what that is let's remove this all right so as always missing one and that's just because a 1080i but all right so this is the base plate heat pipe all that stuff I just showed you got thrown pad contact going to the is actually really cool you can see the name imprinted on the thermal patch that's pretty neat dip switch over here Allen to switch is actually labeled so original is going to be your base BIOS and then that one is a special Ln two BIOS I'm not sure what changes that makes right now we'll figure it out it may be a case that they've modded it to actually have some tuning on it or it can just be an extra BIOS that you get to tune yourself that's three that's actually pretty stuck down pretty well okay so 14 phase it's doubled we've got doublers right one two three four five six seven we have seven pairs of two MOSFETs so two by seven is going to give us fourteen phases which is a doubled setup and for the components they are using IR which is the most common right now what IR is it 35 55 I think is what that is so the 35 55 power stages international rectifier more phases over here so this is your memory vrm right here so we've got another set of it looks like three phases right there for probably V mem ass level feature vram components voltage controller is an IR 3 5 9 5 a which i think is what we discussed with them at Computex so 35 70 be over here and this whatever I said that was 3 5 9 5 a is your shunt 1 2 3 shots right there I don't see a switch on here like on the kingpin card to toggle off any of the voltage or other limitations but you could hard mod it if you really wanted to then what do we have here voltage so these are voltage 10 outs these three here is a fan of the fan and then these are voltage pin outs and one of them is PLL and then mem is number two and then GPU is number three so you get a direct read on voltage with a DMM those are be checkpoints I was crazy interesting right now is that alright so we've seen that let's look at the cooler three pen setup the fans are routed through the sides as you'd expect we've got all three fan hunters go straight at the board I believe they are synchronously controlled but I'm not positive and then for the rest we have what looked to be this is an 8 ml heat pipe I think and actually let's just measure these can you go me there yeah 10 mil for the large one and then these others are going to be what four maybe six these are six through here through the cold plate which is a nickel plated copper cold plate into the larger section of the heatsink and then out the far side over here and then we've got another large heat pipe routed that way where the small ones go this smaller six mil is going through the cold plate and then into the GPU side exhausting it or exiting over here I should say and then the others are all feeding in to this side and then your GPU memory cooling is largely being handled by conduction through the base plate and then eventually into the larger heatsink so pretty straightforward layout the main thing here is just that this is very large I mean just what's actually out of curiosity let's go ahead and just measure this to 26 millimeters it's like a full inch plus that's pretty large so one of the biggest heat sinks we've seen it's got some interesting features we'll go ahead and do some AV testing with the back plate especially I'm I'm very interested in the back plate for a V test with that copper heat pipe on it and then the rest of the stuff will go through normal testing and see how it performs this and always have this about the EVGA hybrid and then we have that ZOTAC card coming from a reader on loan so your do that but I'll say it again here this is probably one of the last 10 agh for reviewing for the cycle we'll see though I have requested a kingdon and I do want to do some kind of LM to work with it if it comes through we'll look at that one too but we're really we're getting towards the end of the ten aut is in terms of I mean there's not a lot more to look at other than variance what we've already looked at that said there's still some really cool stuff to benchmark here particularly in the thermal department again like with this or was potentially closing off some of the ventilation ports to see if they actually do anything in terms of airflow but otherwise check back for the full review our Andy Vega hybrid coverage should be up tomorrow if not then then very shortly thereafter as always you can subscribe for more patreon.com slash gamers Nexus elves out directly or join the discord where I hand out and try to answer questions and then store that gamers Nexus tonight if you want to pick up a shirt like this one we have try blinds and cotton available and thank you all for watching I'll see you next time you