Gadgetory

hey everyone today we are looking at the Vega frontier edition liquid-cooled card and I'm going to be doing a cool unit breakdown for you talking about some of the decisions OMD maybe have some theories on why they made those decisions these photos were sent to us by a reader thank you to the reader who sent them we're going to break it down because we just bought the Vega frontier - an air-cooled card and frankly that was enough money spent on graphics cards right now so looking to spin over we have an inlet and an outlet going into the pump blog let's label everything first this is the pump block and then we'll talk about this bit in a moment but let's just go ahead and label this as pump so we can get this started pump there's your pump block and this part is what's mounted directly to the cold blade so there's a copper cold plate under there the HBM the GPU are both under there and if we look at the lines for the cooling we can see that it actually hits the block first so what we think is happening right now is it looks like the liquid comes in here there's your inlet and then on the other end it'll go out but there's an interesting twist of this so let's just label these inlet and then we think this is the outlet so out that goes down this follow this very carefully goes down this tube and this is a cooler master cooler which you can actually see by looking at the tubing that this is their a Teflon inner Teflon coating tubing which is the kind that if you bend it too far and kink it it'll crack that teflon coating and you get a lot of permeation but up until that point it's actually really good for resisting the effects of permeation but it's not the rubber style AC on for example an ace attack so liquid goes that direction comes back out into this blue anodized plate this is an aluminum plate it covers the V RMS and if you saw our breakdown of the air cooled card it's the exact same card and that layout is the exact same so this is the V RM right here and on the right side of the card does nothing it's just a blank PCB with the air-cooled card you needed that space for the blower fan but you don't need it this time so they've allocated something else to it so liquid goes this direction now and at some point it will come back out right here and that goes back to the hex or the heat exchanger the hex on this one is a bit different from the fury acts I'll get to that photo in a minute but the heat exchanger here we go radiator is a bit different so on the fury acts there's a tank that extends and it's right here and that tank contains an extra liquid the tank for the fury acts theoretically gave it a bit more lifespan because you hopefully bypass some of the issues of permeation over a long period like five years by adding that additional liquid so that the pump doesn't die quite as soon from the liquid running out and permeating the tubes it's not here on this card instead we'll show you where it is in a minute but the heat exchanger is a 38 millimeter wide radiator so that's more similar to Intel DIY closed-loop cooler which is 38 millimeters wide as well rather than some of the smaller stuff that you see on a lot of the 120 millimeter CPU coolers and even a bit different from the P react the fan however is about the same it's very similar to a gentle typhoon this is basically a gentle typhoon copy acceptance by cooler master it looks like the same fan that's on the P react and that was actually a somewhat decent fan so that's the heat exchanger and then you can see the top of the card over here the tach and then over here getting back to this one so liquid flow like I said comes in this way into the inlet it cycles through the inner micro fins and a cold plate this is just a housing that doesn't actually do anything that's just housing for the cabling which is over here and this cabling is for the pump control so it's a PWM plus some extras so it's got four pins for PWM and then an extra pen or two for what we think are thermal sensors but we're not positive this is the the other header which routes over this way and that's your fan power you can actually see it's makeup over here and that eventually leads to the fan down one of these tubes over here so that's what's going on there at the interesting bit so the liquid comes in goes out over here for the BRM colon comes back out what we didn't talk about is this bit and this arrow is pointed the wrong direction but this part here if you look at it it only has one tube going into this tank so this is a what we think is a reservoir because it is an aluminum die cast tank on the right side with only one possible way of entry or exit there is not an inlet and an outlet there's only what appears to be an outlet the liquid can only go that direction why would that exist well what we think is happening is rather than doing a tank on the radiator this time it looks like what AMD has done is they've used their extra space or rather I should say Coolermaster they've used the extra space on the PCB for a tank and what's probably happening is when there is an atmosphere drop in this part over here in the main chamber and the cooling loop when there's an atmosphere drop and a pressure drop probably just like a ballpoint pen what happens is the liquid will feed from where it can it'll feed from the higher pressure area which is going to be over here so that'll go down that tube and eventually pipe into here theoretically you would do this to help stave off the dropping pressure and the permeation of liquid into the tubes over time that's going to happen eventually this housing here is actually not aluminum it's a plastic I've been told by the reader who sent this but that doesn't mean it can't be some kind of metal inside however the aluminum shell of this one will help with the one resistance of permeation over time and potentially some kind of cooling benefit we're not really positive on that either way when there's not no drop here we get some pressure change forces the liquid over into the main chamber theoretically extending the lifespan of the cooler as a whole because these things don't last forever the liquid permeates eventually your pump can't pull enough liquid through and it dies so that's what we think now part of the reason we think this is because we go back to this picture you can see something interesting which is these circles over here and these if we hide this layer and look at another angle they kind of look like alan keyes if you really look down into them and we have a photo here but they're actually not they're just straight cylinders their circles holes and we think this might be part of the pressure change where that will allow the movement of the liquid from this tank which is a pretty phat radiate or a reservoir into the other tank over there for use of lengthening the lifespan of the cooler because ultimately these things only really last like five years anyway before the liquid permeates and it starts getting beyond use so it is basically a venting for pressure if you lose water it drops the atmosphere on the inside over here and it pulls from where it can get it that's what we think that's for the chamber that has two cylindrical holes is interesting because we're curious why the pump isn't over here it may just be because this was the best way to do the extra water reservoir but the pump is here that means two pumps on the Coldplay's which means it's potentially in the area where is that called the patent and coolermaster and the other companies for a while now I've been trying to claim that the pump is not on the cold plate so they can dodge that patent issue so we're we're interested in if there's a thermal difference having the pump here where traditionally atop the GPU and the HBM rather than here where clearly this isn't the pump because one it's not powered there is zero power going to it all of this is going to the other chamber and then - there's only one way for the liquid to flow so that's reservoir and it feeds over pretty interesting stuff now what other thing you can also see that there is some glycol on right here there's actually some glycol residue you see this kind of gross hardened chemical around the side that's pretty standard for liquid coolers where it's a bit of a sloppy job but basically there's some glycol around the edges and that's hardened and become dry and so that's how we know that that's got liquid in it because the liquid contains and liquid coolers is actually a distilled water plus propylene glycol mix and you tend to do a mix that allows whatever storage temperature minimum that you want negative 20 negative 40 C something like that but there's some leakage over there so this because it gives us a different angle of the card we can also look at it this way and you can see kind of how big these tanks are compared to the rest of the device the base plate is a little bit different from the air-cooled car they're actually making tooling to different base plates and that is just because the other one simply would fit here it's got like a diecast thin stack over here for the display out and then it has a circle around the shroud there so that there's a block for the fans force all the air through the radiator so that's not present on this card instead we get this aluminum plate liquid plate for the V RMS and this design is very expensive so the design that Andy has gone with and Coolermaster is gone with here cost them a good bit more than just a traditional pump on block on core design so they've really spent a lot of extra money on the tank and on this piping system and all this stuff rather than just doing a CLC on the GPU core and then cooling the memory with a via REM fan for example and doing a traditional hybrid where you have the blower over here a blower goes that direction and then you cool the rest with the CLC on the block and on the GPU so very interesting decision here this explains some of why the card is six hundred dollars more than the air-cooled card is it worth it probably not you could probably and we did do your own liquid cooling mod for a whole hell of a lot cheaper and the performance will be just fine is it going to be pretty No so if pretty is worth $600 for you this is your solution but from what we've seen so far it's just it's a very expensive extravagant cooling solution that does not necessarily beget the value of having such an extravagant solution but there's your other view of it with a bit better color balance and that's really all there is to this card we pretty much some of these things are informed speculation but this is really a pretty much all there is to it they're aluminum base plate and overall design it kind of looks familiar to the Radeon pro duo it's not it's a different solution they didn't really reuse a whole lot of parts from that card so this is somewhat new the header on the efi air-cooled card for the pump is actually present this header right here except it's unoccupied so if you look at a PCB shot that we took of the air-cooled card there is one there theoretically you can even solder one on if you really wanted to but the real point in that so that's present but now we know what it's used for PWM plus probably time sensors the bios switch on this card from what we understand it from ryan shrouds tweets defaults to i don't think i have an angle of it defaults to the it's up here right up there that switch bios which defaults to the lower TDP mode so if you buy this card make sure you're aware of that and put it into the higher TDP commode otherwise you bought it for really no reason and I think that gets us through pretty much everything that's all my notes I have so that is the Vega frontier Edition liquid cooled card as always if you like this type of coverage you can help us out on patreon.com slash cameras nexus and then you can go to games Nexus pot and that's for the articles on the website store that gamers Nexus dotnet for a brand new shirt design that we have and then thank you to our patreon backers who help out and making this content possible because really it's a it's a big help at this point to make sure we have some extra guaranteed incomes that we can pay for all of these extra videos because it takes a lot of time this one however not as much as the last one if you're interested in our version of a liquid-cooled card it's on the channel otherwise subscribe for more I will see you all next time hey guys still good hit wait that's not right