Gadgetory

hey guys build Zoid here and today we're going to be taking a look at the 1080 TI gaming X from MSI so just at the PCV and the make up of the different VR of the really important V RMS for overclocking so the ones that will actually be put under more load if you increase core frequency and core voltage as well as the ones that are the ones actually you would want to actually increase the voltages on before that this coverage is brought to you by the Computex conference which runs from May 30th to June 3rd in Taipei Taiwan this year Computex is the biggest event of the year for PC hardware and technology where we preview the newest prototypes before they come to market we highly recommend attending or following this event online for industry professionals and enthusiasts learn more at the link in the description below before we get to the details of those VRMs we'll go over all the different VR atoms that power the card that I can identify please understand I'm only ever given pictures so the card is on the other side of the Atlantic and a lot of the time I just have to rely on my ability to read component numbers and sometimes that's just not enough to tell what a certain set of components actually does on the card so with that out of the way let's get started with the identification of the different component r-e first of all up here we have this which is a LDO low dropout regulator this thing outputs 1.8 volts this is a voltage that the NVIDIA eep ROM and some internal PLL's of the GPU require so this right here under it is actually the bios chip so that explains the proximity there under that we find this erm right here and this is the pump voltage for the gddr5 X chips this is also 1.8 volts however you don't like it you just don't want to be powering two completely separate systems with the same vrm for basically safety reasons so this is a necessary voltage for the gddr5 X chips to function however this voltage will not there is no reason to tweak this voltage even well you don't have access to controlling this voltage through software and secondly even if you did a hardware mod on this voltage it really doesn't do very much for if you raise it or lower it for your ability to overclock the gddr5 X any further now that moving down here we find the one volt px or PLL voltage whichever you prefer to call it this powers some of the GPUs internal PLL and is necessary for the GPU to function on air cooling and water cooling messing with this voltage does nothing again you can't access it through software you would have to do a physical model on the card to get control over this voltage and that's only really worth it if you want to take the card on ln2 as there because this voltage can help with the behavior of the card at very low temperatures however again it's not it it's not super important now then moving on further behind that we find the vcore VRM so the one that takes up the most PCB space and is generally the one that you'll see SPECT in most marketing materials this supplies the bulk of the power for the GPU core this one you do have some very limited software voltage control over as 1080 TI's chip with a stock voltage of around 1.06 volts and nvidia does allow you to tweak the voltage up to 1.09 1.09 3 volts so you can actually increase this one a little bit and that does help you with overclocking now then sort of to the left of that vrm we find the memory vrm so this power is the gddr5 X memory chips outputs 1.3 5 volts and this one you don't have software access you can't control this voltage through the software however you if you were to actually do a physical mod to the card tweaking this voltage should increase gddr5 X overclocking range not a whole lot mind you but it will give you a few extra mega while massively increasing power draw so you know not really worth doing and finally on the very end of the card we find this little this looks to be a buck converter and I'm going to assume that this is the phase drive erm because I really like every other voltage that is necessary for the GPU core and the vram function is already here however V RMS actually need separate voltages other than what the PCIe slot and the eight pin supply so these are 12 volts power supply and this down here is plus 12 volts and plus 3.3 volts MOSFETs do not run on either of them so this right here should be a 5 volt or maybe 5 to 10 volt of erm that then powers all the actual switching capabilities of them all set so that's what that there is this has no impact on overclocking in the slightest as it literally this goes straight to the VR ends and the doesn't affect the GPU directly in any way shape or form so with all of the little VRMs on the card out of the way let's start taking a closer look at the actual V RMS then at the two big ones which would be the V Corps and the memory v RM so starting with the V Corps v RM we can clearly see we have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 inductors and 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 dual fat packages so one of these is actually a so I'll actually go over what these are so these right here are FD PC 5 0 1 8 s GS from Fairchild Semiconductor who are now part of on semiconductor so they've been bought by own semiconductor now this is 2 MOSFETs in a single chip so this one chip right here has both a high side Massa and a low side MOSFET the high-tide masa is 6.5 million of resistance and I'm going to try get that same bolt there 6.5 million at 4.5 volts and the high side and the low side MOSFET is 2.2 million ohms at the same 4.5 volts drive voltage so this is actually a slightly higher resistance and what the card will be running because vrm that powers the actual yeah the vrm that powers the view main the main vrm will actually be outputting something between 5 and 10 volts which is higher than the 4.5 volt that this is spectat so the resistance of these MOSFETs will be slightly lower and they'll be a little bit more efficient however for the purpose of making sure that my calculations don't overestimate the capabilities of the rme I always use the lowest voltage rating available for the RDS on so the drain to source drain to source on resistance yeah so we have 16 of these and then for actual control of them vrm we have 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 driver IC so what this tells us is this is a 8 phase vrm and it is a true a phase just to based off the fact that we have eight driver i sees there's no doublers or quadruplet on the back of the PCB and also this chip right here is a that is an NCP 8 1 2 7 4 so that's an on semiconductor of 8 phase voltage controller this does eight phases up to 1.2 megahertz switching frequency which is twice the switching frequency that you will find on any of the cards using the u p95 eleven voltage controller which is standard for most nad t is as that is the voltage controller that nvidia uses on their founders edition asus uses a gigabyte uses it as well so this card actually has the like most complex voltage controller out of all the 10 atti available while not necessarily having the largest CRM so in terms of regulation capabilities this vrm should be one of the cleanest running for voltage regulation not that that will make a huge difference in terms of actual overclocking as you've probably already seen from all the Rabia from reviews of the card speaking of reviews the full review for this card will actually be coming out in a few days so you know stay tuned for that later now then with the voltage controller out of the way let's talk about actual current capability for the CRM now the fdpc 50 18 SGS are slightly worse in terms of efficiency compared to the FPPC 80 16 sg8 yeah 80 16 SGS used on the founders Edition 10 atti however for MOSFETs per phase because there's two there you know you have one high side MOSFET and one low side MOSFET in each of the in each of these chips and there's two of those chips for each phase so you can total you have four more set a hard to keep track of sometimes so this does actually have more MOSFETs and if you have more MOSFETs then it spreads the load across them evenly which means overall this VR I'm even using slightly worse in terms of spec MOSFETs matches the founders Edition founders Edition card in terms of efficiency and powered throughput capabilities so at 250 amps you can expect this erm so 125 degrees operating temperature that's because you don't really want to push up your and past that 125 degrees and assuming 300 colored switching frequency and 1 volt operating voltage so core getting one point one volts this erm at 250 amps of load would output 15 watts of heat so that's pretty much the same as the ref the founders Edition at 400 amps load it would put out 40 watts of heat and if you had some ridiculous amount of cooling the RM would fail at seven hundred amps assuming you could dissipate the hundred and twenty watts of heat that it outputs and when it fails the low-side mole sets of the the low side MOSFETs would be actually what goes not the high side though considering that they're both in the same package if the low side MOSFET goes it's going to destroy the high side mall set along with it since they are sharing silicon so well sharing space I'm not entirely sure how the internals are arranged but generally dual n sets will be one piece of silicon inside the packaging so if the lows I'm also blows you have to replace the whole thing which you know that that's sort of predictable so in terms of power capability this vrm is has the same kind of capability that the foundries addition is not more efficient or less efficient however this vrm due to its layout will be easier to cool as it's much more spread out than what you find in the founders edition and also unlike the founders edition the 10 is the gaming axis stock heatsink is a lot better so yeah if you want actual detailed thermals for the vrm you will find that in the review coming out very soon now then moving on to the memory the RM the memory of URM using the exact same dual end fats so again the FT PC 50:18 from Fairchild this is a two-phase erm controlled by a UPI u P 1658 this goes up to 300 kilohertz on its two phase output so this is actually one of the slower vrm controllers on a memory of erm amongst the 1080 T eyes however if it really doesn't matter as nobody actually runs their voltage controllers at maximum frequency output because it ruins vrm efficiency generally you will find all the RMS running around 300 to 500 kilohertz on GPUs so this is not really a disadvantage even though it just does it does me that you can actually see that switching frequency if you forever for whatever reason wanted to do that because as I said it won't really do like it does shouldn't really do anything for overclocking on the memory as that doesn't seem to scale from extra voltage now then the actual current capability of the memory VRM is it maxes out at 88 amps and I'll need to figure out where to put this so it maxes out at 88 amps assuming that you can dissipate 15 watts of heat however under normal operating conditions this vrm should only ever be handling about maximum of 3 30 amps to the memory chips which leads to about 2 watts of heat output so this vrm right here is going to run very very cool just because the gddr5 X really doesn't need that much power and that 30 amp figure is actually like very much the top end of what gddr5 X could pull so yeah this VR M is plenty overkill for what it's trying to do here so with that all covered pretty much sums up all of the vrm the memory of URM is not the strongest one I've seen on a 1080 TI some of the other cards have stronger memory of erm however it is certainly not underpowered it's perfectly capable powering the gddr5 X it would be perfectly capable of taking a significant over volt if you you know were inclined to mod your cards to do that the vcore vrm again it's the it's the same right around the same current handling capability and efficiency as the founders edition but due to the layout this one will run cooler so generally you should be able to push more current through the core of erm on this card then on like a founders Edition because the founders edition will run into the RM autre just because of how its laid out and how its cold 10 ADC eyes won't really even approach that 400 amp figure under light first of all you're going to hit the power limit before you get anywhere near that but more importantly if you disable your power limit which I will show you how to do very soon well mostly disable it you would still not be able to hit that 400 amp figure because the car just does not need that much power even on liquid nitrogen or dry ice cooling or any kind of extreme cooling you really don't need such a ridiculous amount of current so mostly this really nice vrm we have here is a nice boost to efficiency and doesn't really do much for like it's not like the vrm was going to be limiting you for overclocking but then again so would none of the other cards now then about disabling the power limit if you want to disable the power limit on this card you would want to short out this shunt that shunt and this shunt so this mod works is basically these are very very low resistance resistors if current goes through them there is a very small amount of voltage drop across them and that is unmeasured by a chip on the card which is located right here that measures that and based on how much voltage drop there is across the shunt the card can calculate how much power is going into it now if you want to mod the power limit you can either you know try do it the proper way and get like a custom bias well you would need like the proper way would be to get a bias with a higher power limit unfortunately those don't exist and aren't going to exist any time soon due to the restrictions and video puts on BIOS making so your next best option is to just mess with the circuits that actually measure input current like the amount of power the card is drawing so for that to do that you would basically locate these three resistors this one is for the PCIe slot so if you don't want to put extra load on your PCIe slot for whatever reason I've never actually seen a PCI you thought burn up yet but if you don't want to risk you know over drawing your PCIe slot or over drawing your motherboards 24 pin that's usually the bigger concern there just ignore this one and only short out the two for the a pin and to short them out you have the option of either soul during another shunt of the same value on top of them or using a liquid metal thermal paste a very small amount of it don't put too much if you put too much then you'll run into an issue but you can use a very small amount of liquid metal thermal paste to basically short the shunt from like this end to this and you just cover it up like that and you want a thin layer because if you put too much then the the power reading will go too low and the Nvidia drivers will pick up that there's something wrong with the power reading and they'll get your card stuck in safety mode in which case you'll have to go and take like a isopropanol or acetone or some other alcohol and remove all the liquid metal thermal paste you just put on the shunt which you can also do it for whatever reason the card dies like if you want to disable if you want to take the mod off again you know you can just wipe it off with some kind of alcohol yeah that's how you can mod the power limit and you just do that on all the shunts you want to change the readings on which I would recommend only doing the two eight pins but if you really want more power you can also do this one down here so that's it for this PCB breakdown MSI has done a you know it's not the most powerful ten atti PCB I've seen it's not worse than the founders edition it's certainly not going to limit you when overclocking in any way shape or form it should run cooler than a founders Edition card for sure so this should at least have an extended lifespan even if it doesn't really do anything for your overclocking capabilities so with that all said and done thank you for watching like share subscribe do consider donating to the gamers Nexus patreon to support what we do here if you would like the full performance review of this card as well as thermal review of this card will be coming up very soon in a day or two I've been told and if you would like to see more content like more PCB breakdowns like this except done in a more less professional manner you could head over to my channel which is actually hardcore overclocking where I basically do overclocking stuff and lots of PCB breakdowns thank you for watching and see you next time you