Gadgetory

today we have a teardown of something that is almost as rare as good case reviews its average not worth buying why this is the red devil power color rx Vegas 64 card so this is the second of the partner cards that we've gotten the first is the Strix which is still not out this isn't out yet either but the fact that it came in should hopefully be indicative of a wave of incoming Vega partner cards we will see for the meantime we can tear it down look at the internals a bit and then hopefully it'll come to market but either way we've got one to work on for now before we get into that this content is brought to you by the Thermaltake flow RGB closed-loop liquid cooler which is a 360 millimeter radiator plus 3 120 fans that are RGB illuminated if then we'll take it ringg fans at that this is a 4.5 done a stack pump which is one of the faster pumps you can learn more at the link in the description below so starting out with the basics this is a three fan cooler obviously and those fans are how big these are about 85 millimeter fans and around them we have I think this is a this red as a plastic so it's just a plastic faceplate with what feels like a metal sort of shroud around that back side we have the back plate which is aluminum and then it looks like it's all Phillips heads so I'm not seeing anything except for Phillips heads for this teardown which will make it easy this is a 2.5 slot card so it's one of the larger ones and then for your i/o you've got 2 DisplayPort to HDMI and also 2 8 pins for the power connectors which are inset ever-so-slightly it looks like into the card except the cooler protrudes past the PCB quite a bit so it is one of the larger cards that we've worked with lately this isn't big enough to measure it so I won't bother let's start with the teardown this is mostly gonna be Phillips heads on the back side the way this assembles is you can see the red the red support beams here so these red beams are feeding through the screws going through the back plate total more over here and then this middle one does not this connect to the cooler in the middle so there's only one screw that's not connected directly to the base plate this is also connected directly into the heatsink so the two spring-loaded screws go into that another one three there might be more still under the back plate yep so that back plate did have to separate and now we got a disconnect the fans I'm just probably going to LEDs wait what oh no where's the contact on the HBM that is very bad okay so a turn of events we have a video where we tested limited contact on HBM caused by different mounting or a different height than the GPU is that what's going on here because there would be thermal paste residue on the HBM you actually see a little bit of it in the corner I didn't touch that that's yeah you can see it here too there's a very slight indent right there that shows the contact the limited contact to the HBM so what forty micrometers so the question is is that the height difference of the GPU and the HBM how can we show this on camera the best hey everyone we are pausing the teardown for a second so this is about a week later now the time that I'm doing this voiceover we spoke with power color after the tear down immediately and brought the thermal paste lack of contact to their attention and they had a pretty quick response so fortunately the unit they sent us was pre-production which meant that they were able to according to them make changes in time for production so power color made the changes as they told me they sent an image of them taking apart the new card off the line and the mass production cards should have the throne face contact you're seen here they basically solved for the problem by putting a whole lot more on there which is fine because the access will just squish out and then the gap will hopefully be filled so that should solve some of the concern that we had initially and a definitely good job by power color for catching it in time or for listening to us catching it in time to make a change so we'll see hopefully it comes out the way they've said for the production models but it looks like problem has been solved at this point oh and just before anyone asks yes we tested this before the teardown so in our review when it comes out we'll have numbers for the pre thermal paste fixed version and the post their own paste fixed version so you can see what the actual differences in HBM temperatures will be kind of cool and that review is coming soon not 100% sure yet we're waiting on drivers but shouldn't be too long at this point so this explains a few things in terms of the height difference and the thermals with some of the earlier reports Vega it was noted by Tom's hardware that the HBM height could potentially be different from the GPU height now we actually did some contact pressure paper testing of this that will be visible in a separate video that already went live by the time this went up but just to kind of recap this for anyone who missed that content the very short of it is that with this is a recessed package so with a recessed package you would expect coverage something like this or like this this is also recessed this is the strict so the Strix has the same package type as this power color card as opposed to raised which would be this one where you can see the foal like you can't even really make out the HBM versus the GPU because the inner poseur has an epoxy resin layer on top of it that comes up and meets the surface of the cooler so it looks like there's full coverage with the recessed packages although there's not much of a thermal difference normally you can see a difference in the contact area but what you always see and this is without thermal paste by the way so big difference here these ones do not have they're all pasted on them but when you apply thermal paste to them it does make contact to the HBM that's what thermal paste is ultimately forged to fill in these gaps and what we don't see on the power color one is it is a card with thermal paste applied on like those pressure tests we did and yet you don't see anything all paste on the HBM so what this says to me is that this is an issue of the HBM being lower than the GPU on the package and this meter this feeler gauge which was recommended by a reader is 0.0 well roughly zero for zero point zero three eight millimeters thick the difference in GPU package two HBM height as reported earlier was 40 micrometers so this is basically 40 micrometers so that explains quite a few things and thermally is is is why things are not you're going to be so good when you look at the charts for this card versus the others but anyway that's that's problem we'll have to explore further when you see the other content but as for now let's go over the rest of this this is a recessed package as stated power color has no selection choice over this and he kind of sells them as they come in and it's just distributed evenly so what we have here's a doubled 12 face or something like that anyway HBM phase down here watch our reference PCB teardown for more on this and they've sized up the PCB so it is a bit different and they've sized it up to accommodate that larger cooler three BIOS or another switch over here alright so other stuff here giant giant horrible thermal pad on this side if you ever see if they're all pads of this thick it's not a good thing that's just more insulating layer for the heat to try and get through when it gets into the the heatsink so that's bad okay so why do these channels exist this these mill the channels that is to accommodate capacitor so raised these are raised or look I guess protruding blocks you can see coming out down here with thermal pads on top of them that sinks it into the heatsink at least they didn't make the throw up had that entire thickness that's an upside this is our MOSFET contact where you have the high side and the low side FETs you see the large and the small MOSFETs those are highside and low-side they are exposed copper MOSFETs so they actually cool extremely well and they're heat transfers a lot more readily into these heat sinks than some of the other MOSFETs we look at here's where you can see the clear disconnect between the HBM and the cold plate the cold plate is actually raised up so now the question becomes is this power colors fault or and these fault who do you blame I'm just using this as a gauge right now the plate is the same height across the whole thing so the plates the same raised height so then the question is is it am these fault for having HBM that's lower than the GPU or is it power colors fault for not accounting for that I think that's that's kind of what we need to come to a and I'm sure they would each point the finger at the other one so yeah well I mean that's very revealing what we saw here it I think I I am so hung up on this that I don't even really know what else to talk about because this baffles me how much of an oversight that is by somebody heat pipes so cold plate for direct ish contact we have one two three four five pipes without six six pipes for actually direct well it's not that direct but sort of inset we have one two three four pipes that are inset into the metal that have sort of in direct contact with the cold plate I say indirect because it's raised and they're not going straight through that area this pipe primarily goes through the top part of the L shape of the vrm and this one goes through where the chokes are so you can see some chokes right here and you can see the other side of the V R mm the L shape the capacitor bank is actually not cooled it's in here underneath the heat pipes with no direct contact anything it doesn't really need to be cooled though to be fair so yeah the L shape gives us an ideal vrm it reduces the propagation delays because everything's closer to the GPU and the HBM so that's a good thing that Andy did as for this this is where's our C okay so this contacts or this this is where the pin outs are that's why that dents in there and otherwise just a large heatsink and air cooler yep just just a big heat sink that's all three fans pre connected to one wire so that's nice at least some bumpers here just to prevent warping from the heatsink and then okay together this is so so bad some bumpers not thermal pads just bumpers controller which is controller is an IR 35 to 17 so that would be the same one as used on the a.m. the reference card the IR thirty five to seventeen and again you can watch our reference PCB tear down by builds I'd for info on that I mean there's nothing that's really it oh that's interesting I wonder if this has to do with the GPU unmolded G two nine five two with actually a pencil mark on it this is unmolding this one is not erased epoxy resin like interposer cover it's on molded so it looks like they've at least flagged that presumably that would mean they're doing so I mean if you're gonna flag it it's normally because you're trying to do something about it so I would assume that would mean another heatsink that makes contact but I guess that is not the case so yeah that's all for this one really if there's nothing left you can subscribe for more as always and go to patreon.com/scishow stuff is out directly or stored on Cameron's nexus net it's bigger of a shirt like this one or one of our stickers thank you for watching I'll see you all next time