Gadgetory

hey everyone today we're gonna be tearing apart and rx 470 so this is the sapphire one it is the card that we just reviewed the Platinum Edition sapphire card which you look at it is basically an RX 480 and I can see a fierce reflection on the camera so I don't know that's doing but this is basically a 480 reference design cooler with a back plate from sapphire and then it's been painted silver so this is basically an identical cooler to what we saw in our our X 480 teardown and hybrid build this video is not going to be the beginning of a hybrid build for the 470 I'm not gonna do one of those just like with the 1070 we're skipping this because it's basically the same card in that aspect with regard to cooling and things like that and we're gonna be looking at mostly the same parts but I want to take this apart because I wanna see the PCB and I'm curious to see if it's the same as what we had with the 480 and so we're just gonna tear it down look over the PCB and that will pretty much be it for for this video so basically same process as with the RX 480 you can see that they've removed the fake screws there were fake screws here on the 480 reference cooler or shroud those have been removed with this half fire version and now we are left just with the usual back plate screws so so this if it's not obvious the cooler the fan part of the cooler extends past the PCB just like with the 480 so we've got this part here with obviously no PCB attached I'm like what Nvidia decided to do this card and the 480 do not have the PCIe header at the end of the board which means that we're not going to be dealing with the same sort of soldered wire setup where there's an extender wire that's been soldered to the PCB to put the power header at the end of the board so we're not gonna be looking at that here there's a pretty simple design anymore of these are there these are very small so for these I'm just gonna do opposing corners as as we normally do the back pleat I think is actually loose and looks like looks like it can come off there's something hanging on to it what is it guys oh thermal pad was hanging onto it so the thermal pad sits right here this looks like this is where the the vrm is you can see the chokes or the inductors are planted here on the other side of the card and then we've probably got a capacitor bank on the opposite side of this and then the MOSFETs are probably on the opposite or actually the MOSFETs are probably right there that is almost certainly why the thermal pad was sitting there so there's our back plate pretty standard stuff piece of metal with a thermal pad and actually what is that over touch it's a window it's just a window so let's get this retention off now we just got to get the card away get the PCB away from the shroud and the cooler we're still attached over here and these two screw points which is for the expansion yeah that's actually not a necessary to come out but we're gonna do it anyway all right there we go well these fans these fans really suck to disconnect hey guys so you've got the PCB and the shroud it should be a very familiar sight if you saw our X 480 tear down we'll look at this in just a moment and looks like I'll have to look at the footage I don't remember that was a copper I'm pretty sure that was a copper plate on the original so the vrm has been lightened up a bit which if you look at the board you see these two blank spots right here so what we end up with is a four-phase vrm instead of these six of the original our X 480 so it's been trimmed down which will probably explain some of our overclocking limitations that I'm not positive on that if that's if you see our review you'll see we're pretty limited on the overclock this time around perhaps actually a hardcore overclock and we'll explain that better he's got a good channel on that but for phase capacitor bank and the MOSFETs which also have been slimmed down you can see a couple of missing MOSFETs here save some money for AMD and other than that we've got the usual V RAM modules one two three four five six seven eight modules that's interesting wait a minute four two four eight bits in a byte 4 gigabits one gigabyte two gigabytes three gigabytes four gigabytes okay cool there are eight modules here obviously this is a 4 gigabyte card so knowing that they're obviously either gonna be one gigabyte chips that are locked down like the rx 480 or they're gonna be half that density 512 megabyte chips and you end up with 1 gigabyte for every 2 so we look this model number up for reference the number is SK Hynix hynek's and it's let's see I've it on my phone h 5g c for h2 for aj r and looking at their website that is for gigabit density 16 banks so gddr5 obviously for gigabit density so what you end up with is with eight bits in a byte you have four Giga bits 8 Giga bits that's one gigabyte one two three four so four gigabytes total vram so this card is not one where like the RX 480 you were able to unlock from 4 to 8 with the v bios or a hack this isn't something that that'll work for because these chips are physically not one gigabyte chips so they can't unlocked anything else other than obviously what their native density is so that's that's what we've got for VRAM for the vrm kind of described that a little bit and the rest extra phase over here for memory 6 pin power header plug for the fan and that's it that's everything we've got for the PCB itself let's pull this thing out and look at that if I can see there's a what's holding it in the way yeah nothing thermal pads obviously connector for the vrm blower fan or just the blower fan general I guess does more than vrm cooling and we've got this sink for the MOSFETs this sink on the other side of the capacitors and then this for vram cooling so that's the cooling set up very simple exactly the same as the 480 this block should look pretty similar as well same block looks like identical block of just aluminum fins there's no heat pipes in here nothing special it's just an old-school aluminum fin style heatsink and then you've got your plate your cold plate here that touches the GPU silicon directly so they've gotten rid of the copper circle you know it would be really interesting test is taking that one and putting it on here and seeing how it's actually different yeah same thing other than the original cooler or the heatsink had a copper circle in the middle so this actually we wanted to we could take the original are X 480 sync and drop it right there and test the thermals on that as well and we even have a thermal paste applicator that would make sure that their own paste is applied exactly the same on each surface so there would be no variance and application but I don't think we're gonna have time to do that but maybe maybe in the future so that's it that's everything that the RX 470 has to offer at least this version of it yes this is a partner card just as a reminder this isn't there's there's no reference rx 470 so to speak is only partner card so that means they'll vary a little bit anyway some of the vendors have custom PCBs some of them are insane and are selling their card at $240 which really makes no sense at all don't buy those but those one certainly would have well hopefully would have custom PCBs they definitely have custom coolers now this however is a reference arts 480 cooler on a card that is pre overclocked by 10 megahertz netting zero difference and the cooler is the same cooler that was on the rx for any reference card so there you have it this is this is basically here's here's something that we didn't talk about in the review because I didn't have the prices of these tins when the review on live the rx 470 has an MSRP of $180 which as we said that in the review is pretty good this card is selling at $200 and I suppose the defense they're for buying one of these as opposed to a $200 or 4 gigabyte rx 480 which would give you about a 10% performance difference I think the argument is well it's pre overclocked so it's worth an extra $20 and also I guess it's silver I'm not really I'm not really sure if there's an argument for the cooler I think the argument is that it's pre overclocked here's the thing as we show in the frequency overtime charts it's still going like crazy frequency it's not huge swings it's less than 100 megahertz swings but the point is you're not actually sustaining that 12 16 mega Hertz at Tai's boost its peaking there maybe a couple times per test that we did the average is still closer to the 1200 1206 range of the sort of advertised AMD spec so the ten megahertz overclocked first of all ten megahertz is not something to brag about or charge $20 for secondly it's not really sustaining it anyway because the cooler is throttling at 78 degrees Celsius every time it hits 78 the frequency drops until the cooler hits 77 or 76 and then it maintains at that point so the point of this sort of junction at the end here is that the platinum edition of the rx 470 at $200 which is what it's signed for with four gigabytes of locked vram mean you can't unlock it to eight a reference are X 480 cooler and a pre overclock that is frankly irrelevant in the scheme of things it makes no sense to buy this it would make more sense to buy an RX 480 four gigabyte card even though in the review I said skip that one because they're the same price when they're the same price the original argument becomes a little bit less valid now in terms of the rx 470 is a product the reviews still stands conclusion still stands there are $180 versions out there the power color one is the one I would point you toward and it has a better cooler and will hopefully be reviewing that soon so that's the one to look at right now I know a couple other vendors have models out we have an MSI one that just came in not sure what it costs but some some extra thoughts that add on to the review that we didn't publish originally because we didn't have all the pricing data at that time $180 goodbye $200 it's I'm almost offended that the cooler is what it is but I mean thermal is a lot of what we do so it's easy for me to get offended at thermal but as always pay Charlie commercial video if you want to see more information subscribe see more content like this the Rx for 60s coming up next we'll see you all next time you you