Gadgetory

you guys build lloyd here and today we're gonna be taking a look at EVGA s 1080 FTW gaming hybrid PCD damn that names along yeah this PCB actually gets reused on the regular 1080 FTW as well as the 1070 FTW and the 1070 FTW gaming hybrid I'm not sure if it includes the gaming either way the water-cooled 1070 FTW from EVGA also uses this PCB before getting to build Zoids PCB analysis this content is brought to you by iBUYPOWER and their new element gaming pc with a full tempered glass side window tempered glass front LED is in the front and bottom and it is basically a modified s340 there is some slight slight alterations for the 1070 s and we'll cover those right after we cover all the major VRMs on this card so first things first core voltage is right here and second so that there is the core voltage erm above that we find the memory the RM then down here you get the 1 1 volt PLL so this is basically a miner rail that goes to the GPU core and it's necessary for some non calculation related non compute related functionality inside the GPU core so the GPU won't work without it but it's not important enough to you know have variable voltage control or anything it just needs to be ever-present you can access it via software it is not affected by overclocking in any way shape or form and raising the voltage on this really doesn't affect overclocking either so you don't have to worry about it it is however copy pasted right off the founders Edition like literally even the component layout right here is the same as on the founders Edition and so you really don't have to be work like if Nvidia thinks this will last the lifetime of a GTX 1080 then there's no reason to think you know to think that you need a stronger vrm here so this is perfectly fine and you can forget about it then over here we get the last vrm that's located on this card this is the 1.8 volts for the gddr5 X so this goes to the gddr5 X chips 1.8 volts functions similar to this vrm right here it has no impact on overclocking it is not an important vrm and does not need to produce a lot of power however the gddr5 X won't work without it on the other hand gddr5 does work without this and so the 1070 FTW s don't have this vrm this is just cut off on the 10 17 s because they run gddr5 and this is only required for gddr5 X so that covers all the major VRMs on the card now let's actually look at the details of the V RMS so this is our core voltage v RM and it has 10 phases 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 and of course we have also 10 power stage things to accompany them right so there that's 10 as well now I call them power stage things so let's talk about these ICS here these are NCP 8 1 3 8 2 's and I call them power stage things because they're almost everything you need to make a power stage except they lack some of the more advanced features that a power stage usually has these things are a high side MOSFET low side MOSFET and a driver IC put into one chip so basically it saves cost it saves PCB space it improves efficiency because there's you know all over the ice like all of your different MOSFETs are all integrated really close together so that obviously improves their efficiency there's really no downside to this design so array for integrating everything either way these things are rated to do 35 amps average current and 70 amps keek so you know that basically means this vrm right here can provide 350 amps continuous current with ease the GT X 1080 FTW you know a GT X 1080 at stock clocks requires about 160 M so this V R M this one right here is extremely overkill right because it feeds the GPU core which means about 160 amps at stop clocks the typical overclocking range on the 10 series cards is about 15% soo and you can't raise voltage on them so 160 times you know you know let's just slap on 20% onto that so that's what 20% of that is 32 so that gets us to just under 200 amps average power draw this is built for 350 you really don't have to worry about this about breaking this vrm because you don't you can't control the voltage and the GTX 1080 is incredibly power efficient so yep this is extremely overbuilt extremely extremely over built so yeah but before we move on to the memory of erm I would like to address one thing you can't make 10 phases which is weird cuz I just said we have 10 phases here right but you can't make 10 phases well I mean you can make 10 phases worth of components but you can't run them like you actually have 10 phases so the thing is they're they're the current like if you're going to go shopping for a voltage controller right the highest phase count you can get from the voltage controller is going to be 8 nobody makes a 10 phase voltage controller there is a very good reason for this because 10 phases have basically no performance improvement over eight phases and they are a hell of a lot more expensive to do just because of the the complexity required to do more and more phases is actually not linear it gets worse and worse as you try to add more and more phases so this has ten phases and nobody makes a ten phase a voltage controller so how does EVGA get ten phases so they use doubler ICS which are right here and if you know to something one two three four five so there's five of them right and they're doublers so obviously five goes in times two you get ten and these are NCP eight one one 62s they do offer like they're not completely brain-dead but with how VR M's work they basically offer no real advantage over brain-dead doublers and by brain-dead doublers I mean so usually what you have is you have the control signal from the voltage controller it goes into like if you have an eight phase voltage controller what right you get eight control signals but here we have a five phase voltage controller well I actually don't know how many phases the controller has because I never found a datasheet for it but it has at least five so you have five control signals right and so the controller know will control the fly will feed the five doublers and what the doublers do is they take that control signal and they pass it between the two phases they don't actually you know they don't do anything miraculous to improve your control over the two different phases so usually one of these control signals will be like 400 kilohertz and the control signal is literally pwm that's literally how phases get controlled by PWM so you have a 400 kilohertz PWM signal going into the doubler and basically what these doublers will do is they will give that PWM pulse to whichever phase currently has the least current going through it so that is some you know more advanced functionality but just because of how VR M's work the the the phase that has the least current through it will almost always be the phase that wasn't charged the last PWM impulse so these don't really offer any kinds of control advantages and so essentially you have the same control over your phases as if you had a five phase because the voltage controller is doing you know it's putting out 400 kilohertz of PLM signals but the actual phase is C 200 kilohertz so yeah this is pretty much the same power quality as a five phase EVGA could have very easily opted to build a five phase vrm with much much higher power phases right so these are 35 amp phases EVGA could have gone and built a five phase with 70 M phases and for all intents and purposes it should like if they didn't really mess up with any of the components too much it would get the exact same performance as this here 10 phase VRM so the 10 phases are very much a marketing stunt from my point of view like I see it as a marketing stunt now ten phases is not a complete waste of time and money and energy and effort okay they do have some benefits having lots of phases first of all you spread your heat load so the vrm will run cooler because well you have ten phases which you know are putting out heat instead of having five phases putting out heat because even five high-power phases are still relatively small and so you get really high heat density with a low phase count which makes the vrm run hotter than if you have a lot more phases doing less work you know and sharing the work more so this does have better thermals but it doesn't really perform any better than a five phase running at 400 kilo hertz would so mostly a marketing thing here as far as I'm concerned now you know a 10 phase does actually have a benefit because if you want to you can crank up the frequency on the voltage controller well on some of them if you have control over them you can actually crank up the frequency and then you actually can get you know you can put like a megahertz into the doublers and then the actual phases see 500 kilohertz and then it would actually perform better than a five phase unless you also took the 5mm phase to a megahertz except that would lower your efficiency because switching phases really really really quickly lowers your efficiency so yeah this will be more efficient and it'll have better thermals but it will not deliver better power quality well it's not even power quality voltage quality then a five phase properly designed five phase but still you know I think better efficiency and better thermals are probably enough to make this a justified use of ten phases even though I personally think they really didn't have to go ten they could have done an eight or six or so many other vrm yeah you know it's just yeah oh well at least they have one of the GTX 1080s with the most phases because that's kind of what I think was the decision behind choosing the number ten because it's more than most of the other ten 80s as far as I know I think only ZOTAC has a sixteen phase card so yeah mostly a marketing thing it does have some benefits but that that could be argued then above that we have the memory vrm this is a two phase using 4c 85n you know 4c 85n on semiconductor MOSFETs again well normal sets the these right here are a high side and the low side MOSFET integrated into one chip so that's why we have two phases and only two two ICS instead of two phases and for ICS the drivers for these aren't present because the voltage controller for these integrates the light has powerful enough PWM signals to actually fully power these on its own so yeah each of these can do about 30 amps at 125 degrees that's worst case scenario so that's 30 amps continuous if not running them continuous then they can do a lot more since they're in a vrm you know in a two-phase vrm then they're not gonna and even if they were in a 1 phase they're not gonna run continuous in a vrm like this producing low voltage out of 12 volts so yeah no concerns here so you have 30 amps in each of those so the whole vrm is 60 amps and incredibly overkill because gddr5 x usually pulls around less than 20 so yeah these chips all together pull less than 20 amps so yeah very very overkill again and really no complaints about any of the power quality on the card I mean the 10 phase is a marketing stunt but hey it's still a good vrm so you know there's no reason to match EVGA for it it's just it's just I'm trying to make sure that you understand that just because you have ten phases doesn't mean that they're better than eight phases or six phases or five phases right they are better than four because you because of four is worse controlled than than of five but a five a six and an eight can actually rival this here vrm just fine for everything except maybe efficiency depending on how it's driven so yeah so that's the vrm is covered and over here nice little detail EVGA gives you a BIOS which so you know if you're interested in BIOS loading this card will have you covered if you screw up or if somebody puts out a unlocked BIOS for the FTW that actually gets you voltage control and higher power limits or whatever you can go to town on the card because this vrm will definitely hold you know survive pretty much anything you can throw at it and this BIOS which will make sure that when you flash the BIOS you're not screwed if something goes wrong so yeah this PCB here is you know really really nice I'm gonna stop ripping on the ten phases now but yeah it's a nice PCB there is really no nothing wrong with it you know you can yeah you can definitely overclock it to on air coat like on the stock cooler so you know this comes with an air cooler or the or a closed-loop AIO for the hybrid model on either of those you don't have to worry about ever you know getting anywhere near the limits of what this VP CV can actually power of what this VR I'm can power and this vrm can power even on ln2 I'd be pretty I'd feel pretty safe running this card on it lnto my only complaint for trying to run this on ln2 is that voltage controller doesn't have a public data sheet so I wouldn't be able to go anywhere with it and that about yeah that covers everything there is to know about well everything worth knowing about the 1080 FTW gaming hybrid PCB from EVGA as well as the you know the 1070 FTW and the 1080 FTW regular air-cooled card so yeah thank you for watching like share subscribe and if you would like to support gamers Nexus there is a patreon link somewhere maybe on the video definitely down in the description below so you can go and support us there thank you very much for watching and good bye