Gadgetory

every one today we are taking apart the most expensive thing I've ever taken apart which is a Titan V that we bought ourselves for review the testing is all done at this point we just need to film that but we're gonna do a teardown here look at the PCB which is quite interesting and see what we can learn about the inner workings of the Titan v card by Nvidia this is a three thousand dollar graphics card and hopefully we get ROI and it doesn't die in the process but before we get into that this coverage is brought to you by ifixit.com and their protec toolkit i fix it as refreshing they're pro tect toolkit in time for the holidays you can find a link in the description below to the protec toolkit and other toolkits that iFixit sells we find the protec and essentials kits to be the most useful for DIY enthusiasts for the exterior of the card you can see that it's got this sort of off beige like like if you took if you took this box if we took this white box and maybe left it in the back of a car for about two or three years I'd probably look about the color of the Titan V's shroud so that's why the color the shroud I guess they're going for like a champagne color also reminds me of an old NES so that's what we've got for the Hat side for the rest of it though this is just the standard cooler that nvidia does so we've got the titan XP and a titan v here next to each other and it's the same cooler it should be the same heat sink as well we'll find out when we take it apart and other than that I mean yeah all the specs are in our news video it's no point going over those let's just take it apart and see what it looks like underneath so we need some Phillips heads and I think that's about all we're gonna need I'll take a moment here and mention our new mod mat that I'm using right now this is an anti-static mat we're pretty excited about it you can find a link in the description below for pre-orders and it's going to help us protect the card I'll put the ESD strap so once we get into the card I'll switch over to the anti-static strap just because it's 3,000 bucks so no point and killing it over something really easy to control like that this backplates held on by a bunch of tiny screws we've shown these before the trick to these when you put them back on is to be very gentle you do not need much force at all tighten these back on as soon as you face resistance stop immediately if you keep going it will snap the screw at the stem at the screw head so we don't want that we've done it before actually alright so this is the same as all the founders edition cards in front they were well founders addition up front to your addition all the founders different cards are built this way underneath here we're gonna have some hex heads that hold the base plate into the the back of the card the back of the PCB that secures those together so here's our back plate and if we bring the counter back over here you can already see the back side of the PCB is pretty dense so front sides can be very dense I think this is a 16 phase vrm so this is going to be a pretty healthy size to be our rabbit I'll take up most the board height vertically and there's our hex heads so I need to take those off let's secure the vapor chamber which I'm assuming there's a vapor chamber so let's let's get these use these hold the base plate in if you've ever wondered what I think about well taking out a thousand screws it's not only things like what thumbnail would be successful but not over-the-top an example of over-the-top but successful would be something like what could go wrong with a picture of the card and maybe some fire some crazy facial expressions as much as I would love to do that for the for the views it goes against sort of what we do here so we will not have what could go wrong on the thumbnail but we do have two larger screws here as a standard on all the founders edition does and then three the smaller ones for the expansion shields we can take those out these don't really need to necessarily come off generally I can't remember exactly but you normally you don't have to take all of these out it does allow you to take the rest of the vapor chamber out though if we end up wanting to do that so we may do that anyway but it's not a requirement if you're just redoing the thermal paste or something for example okay cool so what's holding us on their own pads and all pads are holding us on at this point holy crap that is so much thermal paste so yeah fan connector over here is what we just disconnected we have 1 by 8 1 by 6 connectors there will only be this version of the card there's not going to be board partner versions so this is everything you'll see and let's clean off the insane amount of thermal paste and just get an idea for what the HBM and the dialect like together so we were doing some thermals earlier and this cooler is not the best in the world we've talked about this cooler on all the founders edition cards and this particular GPU does not only draw a lot of power but it's got HBM around it drawing power and the thermal paste here just to kind of be clear it's not bad that there's a lot of it there's just a lot of it because there's a lot of surface area to cover because you've got HBM and the GPU and hopefully we can illustrate that once we clean it off so like Vega this card and like the V 100 which came out first and had HBM this card also has HP M so the V 100 was a an enterprise solution $10,000 developer kit that came with the first of Alta GPU and this is a $3,000 variant the goal of this card is not Gaming Volta will probably go that direction soon but it is actually things like machine learning and so HBM is beneficial in that space particularly and the extra cost really doesn't matter when you're dealing with people who have a lot of money to do things like machine learning because getting it done faster of course will help pay it off whereas just gaming you don't really don't really care he just needed to be affordable so you can see the four HBM modules on there all four of them flank the GPU proper the GPU and the HBM modules are all on the substrate together so they have a very short distance to communicate which is one of the benefits of HBM it's also got a 30 72 bit wide memory bus if memory serves and that's another part of the reason bandwidth on this card is pretty high compared to what we typically see with NVIDIA GPUs that should be clean enough for now we don't really need to get this stuff out of the corners and risk scratching capacitors or things like that but that's a so that's the Titan v GP you the proper GPU this is a taiwan made one is called GV 100 so that's known - 400 that's new and it's an a.1 rev which means it's one of the first production rev basically and the spacing you see between the HBM is effectively an epoxy resin that brings the surface of the inner pose are all level up with the HBM and the GPU so we actually can't see the enterprise right now it's underneath that epoxy resin it's a protecting layer if you ate interposers are actually very fragile if I were to do what I'm doing right now just with my fingernail cleaning paste out you do that to an inner poser that's exposed you cannot actually kill it and that kills your GPU but this has the epoxy resin layer that should help out a bit and prevent any concerns on that front so there's our GPU all shiny this is about a truckload of throwing fit you could do multiple I nine CPUs with this man look at that again that's not like it's not a bad thing it's a lot of surface area to cover but it's just kind of amusing actually with with GPUs it with CPUs there's kind of a limit on the IHS - how much compound you can put before you're actually making performance worse with GPUs that's not really the case it's not it's just exposed there's no IHS to worry about the more pastes you get in there like the if there's access it'll come out of the side so it's okay so let's get a look at the PCB we'll come back to the cooler the PCB is gonna be a bit of work here because there's a lot of thermal pads and we need to kind of be careful removing them I have spares I can put back on in their place but that's working surprisingly very well actually these are kind of like a cloth they're all pad I remove them by hand before and they're very easy to destroy they just kind of fray if you use your fingernails so you need a really thin tool to get in there and get those off we've successfully remove that let's just put that to the side right now that back on there later might as well get some of these others off oh actually is this more of ER I'm over here this is more of ER I'm over here so we have erm over here and we have part of the VR I'm over here it's pretty interesting this is what you would it's getting pretty close to optimal vrm design because if you think of the Vega cards the reference Vega boards those had that l-shaped VR on that came like this and that's also a very good design they get the vrm components closer to the core it allows for a more consistent voltage and power throughput across the entire GPU and it also reduces propagation delays so this would be a continuation of that idea of getting a more optimal vrm layout now the reason they can do this on both and the and the new Nvidia test or Titan v100 or Titan B rather with a V 100 is because there's no G DDR so we're not surrounding the GPU with all that stuff we can surround with the vrm instead so we've got that uncovered we'll look at the of the names in a moment let's see if we can find the voltage controller make sure it's not on the back first it's where you can really see that fabric the sort of almost canvas weave coming out of the sides of these they're all pads these are really thin they're woven they because they are pretty thin you have less concern of thermal resistivity sort of optimization issues that you would have with thicker pads as long as they still contact what they're trying to contact you're good all right it's pretty much everything so first of all what are we leaving room for here that's just just cutouts that's all we're seeing here now this sort of gloss this plate although it is aluminum it's not gonna do a lot for you we've got a gloss sort of vinyl coating type thing here and that's to prevent any electrical shorts to the plate or to any other objects in the vicinity so that's not helping us with thermals at all and it's not really necessarily meant to you get some direct contact in these channels here but it doesn't do a whole lot it's primarily cosmetic and we've tested that before with thermocouples on the backside and everything so let's look at the vrm core components so we have a 16 phase as advertised it's gonna be doubled in some capacity we'll have build Zoid analyze the specifics actually we've got a couple more phases over here probably from memory so we'll have builds way to analyze the specifics of the vrm but layout core layout is 16 phase and then we've got another setup another one over here another phase over there so let's take a look at the cooler something I know more about build toy's got the PCB I'll take the cooler so cooler this is the base baseplate mounts directly to the PCB you can see individual standoffs these are raised from the aluminum base plate that connect directly with the MOSFETs and with other board components we have some raised elements over here as well connecting with various inductors and MOSFETs and a couple of caps are connected to this plate as well so that's the base plate let's get this off and take a look at the actual cooler and the fan this these screws are for mounting the fan so if we remove that the fan will come loose but we can't get at it right now anyway so might as well wait for that what size is that 2.5 over here so that's a 2.5 that's a 2 ok so a 2.5 minute - all right so we've gotten that loose we need to pull these embellishments off as well and that for sure needs to come out okay there's your Titan V plate nothing special it's the same as all the others there's the window and this looks actually a little bit revised at least yeah this is definitely revised actually okay so the cooler is not 100% the same as the previous founders Edition coolers it is actually a little bit different are we still screwed in somewhere or can i just sort of work this out okay there we go so differences from memory from the last time these little flanges are new over here and the bumps in here are new the channels that are sort of chamfered other than that some of the stuff that's the same as previously this border over here with the foam damper for noise reasons and it's just a standard aluminum thin stack you can see straight down the center no heat pipes because it is in fact a vapor chamber cooler which you can kind of tell and it's partly obvious but also well I just say partly obvious because there's no heat pipes there's no density down the fins of anything other than just air channels and this plate here has this sort of what you might think as a mini copper heat pipe so that's an indicator of vapor chamber so that's our cooling block it is a little revised from previously but not a whole lot and other than that you're left with this which is the blower fan standard radial fan and I guess we could get the ratings on that if we wanted to take that apart too but that would require removing all this stuff and it's going to be the same as all the previous fans from Nvidia so so that's basically the Titan V there's not much left to take apart here so I think what we are left with at this point is a PCB that needs analysis so this will be looked at by build Zoid on our channel you can subscribe to make sure you catch that content when it goes up bill joy is gonna be doing a full analysis of the vrm and its capabilities he has quite a few curiosities about the power potential limitations on this board and GPU or at least on the GPU and we've got some notes on that as well so make sure you check back our game benchmarks will be up first after the game benchmarks we intend to be posting some production level benchmarks thermals power noise all that stuff so that's all for this time if you like the mod map that we made you can pre-order it if you go to store documents Nexis dotnet slash mod matte one word or if you want to help us out directly you go to patreon.com/scishow stake you for watching I'll see you all next time