Gadgetory

everyone so we're back from pax and I got this in the mail this is not something I requested this is an MSI Seahawk X I believe yes it is a Seahawk ek card so the ek part is because it is an ek it water blocks water block on here that's very reflective so try to point at the camera too much but basically we don't have a wet bench right now we don't have an open-loop bench to test this thing and frankly just don't have the time budget to do that right now so we're going to tear it down just kind of look at it and see what it looks like internally because I haven't seen that done a lot yet and then it will probably go back to MSI because I'd just there's a million other things to test post pax so this is the card it is clocked at 1847 megahertz it's a custom PCB MSI board for the 1080 and then it's using an ek kit so you've got the sort of acrylic housing here the liquid goes in on this side out on this side if you want to set it up that way that's kind of the recommended setup so it goes in through this channel around here and out and it is a full-coverage block which means it's actually covering all of the hotspots on the board that includes the GPU itself which is sort of under this area here and then the vrm which will be more over here the PWM is also covered with this block so this is a bit different than an a IO solution so an a IO solution like the EVGA hybrid or the hydro graphics or seahawk liquid cooled card without an open-loop solution those use a CLC that just covers the GPU in the one exception being the EVGA hybrid where they have that copper plate on the vram and stuff like that which we talked about in our review and our teardown of that card but the idea on the hole is that this solution will cover the whole card and so you get a bit better potentially bit better thermal dissipation but of course because more of the card is covered the temperature shown for the GPU will actually appear they're somewhat higher and that's because the liquid temperature is higher then if you're just cooling the GPU only in nothing else almost okay so eleven screws to take off the backplate there's your backplate really nothing nothing special there so a backplate held by eleven screws I think we just used an a.1 head to remove those we don't need these on here so let's get rid of that so there's the back of the PCB GPU is obviously right there and the GPU the actual part that's mounting over it right is secured by these four screws so that's your sort of core heatsink mounting a tension right there and then the rest of it is going to be secured through these allen key heads I think we can kind of just take these out not sure cool so four screws for tensioning the block itself just put my hand right on a thermal pad four screws for tensioning the block itself to the unit this is the liquid cooling block completely separated from the PCB obviously this is the part that's going contacting the GPU directly so there's your silicon contact pretty much perfect with the thermal paste spread a couple of these thermal pads to get left on the board but that doesn't really matter so the thermal pads for covering the vram modules these are actually high-quality conductive thermal pads big pad right here for the MOSFETs and the capacitor bank and you may notice that there's actually a very slight inward sort of bezel right here and that's where the chokes go so the chokes don't need to be directly cooled there is a bit of air channeling over here there's not really air flow but because chokes or inductors are sort of cooled by default just by these little heat sinks they have on them and because they can go up to 120 Plus Celsius there's no real reason to put them under liquid they'll just kind of increase the liquid temperature without an actual benefit other than increasing the temperature of the rest of the component all right so the benefit here is basically that they've given you everything pre applied so you don't have to install this yourself which is often the case EK has done some QC here you can see they've done leak testing already I'm not sure that's showing up but it says leak tested quality control passed so theory should not leak out of the box certainly not something you want but that's the block moving to the card we can look at the PCB now we've got the GPU here so this is the GP 104 GPU for GT X 1080 cards and the RAM modules here as provided by micron these are ggr 5x as all GTX 1080s will be this is actually covered by the block so it's really not something not accessible not something you'll use but that that's just either it's a header for either a debug jumper or for a fan that we've got more over here there's an LED header as well but that's just probably left it mostly leftovers on the card because it is a reused PCB chokes also known as inductors right here high-quality SFC chokes capacitor bank and then the fats are all right here let's see are these so for the MOSFETs very small text can't really see it but it's using m38 1 6 n MOSFETs which you can learn more about these in our EVGA fftw PCB analysis we're building talks a bit about different types of MOSFETs so we do cover some of that there but that's what it's using for this card and it is set up as a yes 10 phase setup on the PCB and the rest is pretty standard but very large PCB with a large block to go on it the liquid if you wanted to buy one of these see the problem we have is that we just don't have a wet bench setup right now and that's because to use one of these if you're not familiar with them you would need an open-loop liquid cooling solution set up on your system so this connects to your open-loop solution that's already in the computer one thing we are looking at is the new EK predator so i do actually have one of those we will be testing it thermally and FPS and all that but the way that set up is it's an EK radiator with sort of a qrc valve for the the tube so it's Tec it's sort of an a io a sort of a closed loop system but it's got these quick disconnects that we've shown with PNY several years ago and with EVGA at CES this year so those qrc valves they can be disconnected and they don't leak because they've got a spring tension in there to basically close a sort of closed a trap door and prevent leakage and that can be connected to other quick release valve radiators so you could actually create a sort of fake open-loop cooling solution for the CPU and the GPU you would use a block similar to this but not quite the same but the idea is similar except it's pre filled with liquid this does not have any liquid in it if you have not noticed that's because the idea of this is you're meant to fill it with your own with your own open-loop but the ek predator setup is actually pretty new the way it's set up it could either be completely pointless or pretty cool so we will be testing that one but I did want to take this one apart just because it was kind of a different card we won't be testing it MSI sent it I said hey we don't have a wet bench can you give me a shipping label I'll send it back to and they're like can you take it apart so that's what we did it was it was worth pulling apart but very easy to do obviously so if you wanted to do this it's 11 screws to the back plate and then for for the block you don't have to take off the back plate to get the block off you can just take off the four if you wanted to expose the PCB for whatever reason maybe it's a shunt short the shunts for a mod for overclocking or something like that those are all very rapidly exposed we've got a couple shunts here very easy to do so that's all for this video as always patreon like the post well video to help us out directly link to the description below for more information stay tuned for our gigabyte coverage of the liquid-cooled gigabyte card and i am still sick from pax so thanks for watching this far I'll see you all next time