Gadgetory

hey guys build lloyd here and today we're going to be taking a look at a very special GTX ten atti PCB this is EVGA Kingston edition named after the extreme overclockers kingpin who works at EVGA and whoa does it show that this card was designed with full intentions of running on liquid nitrogen and smashing world records especially 3d mark well we'll go into why you know this card is so very ELINT like extreme overclocking centric we'll start with the usual the VR ends before getting to that this video is brought to you by ifixit.com and the pc essentials toolkit which can be had for $20 making it one of their cheapest yet most complete toolkits use code gamers nexus for five dollars off to bring that to 15 you can go to ifixit.com slash gamers Nexus or click the link below for more information starting with the largest the vcore vrm located right over here so that's V core that supplies the power used by the GPU core and it is the most important we are em when overclocking on liquid nitrogen and while other sub ambient cooling methods so that's one behind that we find the memory of erm and the memory of erm powers all of the gddr5 X chips around the GPU core and those are basically the two largest VRMs on the card all the other ones from here on our minor ones that you don't really have to care about that much starting off with this one down here this is one way to describe this is the vrm that powers the V RMS so this is known as the variable gate Drive basically its job is to convert 12 volts into a voltage between five and ten volts though it theoretically could go lower but you wouldn't do that because this VRM produces basically produces the voltage that the vcore vrm and the memory vrm used to switch their MOSFETs on and off then this over here is the other another one of the minor of erm this is the one volt PLL /alright /px voltage this voltage is like you don't actually need to run this one on liquid nitrogen it is however very very helpful but you can get away without it of course this card right here has voltage control available for that we'll go into more detail later in the video about that and then up here we finally find the 1.8 volts VPP for the gddr5 X so this is a supporting voltage for the gddr5 X memory basically this voltage used to be in internal to previous memory systems except it became external on gddr5 X as having it external improves efficiency so yeah and this voltage doesn't actually do anything for overclocking so you don't have to worry about it so one thing before we get into the details of the PCB here this is a engineering sample PCB first of all you can tell because it's a revision zero point zero the other thing is there's lovely things like this hand soul during right here and the this right here as well as all of the debug headers right over here so basically there might be some very minor changes from this PC via from this PCB to what you end up seeing retail but the V RMS in the feature set will not be changing so let's start off with the largest one the V Corps v RM it is a one two three four five six seven eight nine ten phase based on the inductor count which if you've watched past videos of mine on you know looking at PCBs you would know that you can't actually buy a 10 phase voltage controller so this card is running a doubling scheme and it's doubling up five phases from the voltage controller right here and those are doubled up through international rectifier ir35 99s which you have one here one here one here another one there and another one there so that's five of them in total and ir $35.99 our our doublers and or quadruple errs they can do either of those two functions as a trade-off these are one of the more basic doubler types they're not they don't have some of the advanced features you can get on some other doublers out there which do actual like current balancing between the two phases that they're hooked up to so as far as the actual voltage controller right over here is concerned which that is a IR 3595 as far as that is concerned this vrm is a five phase it cannot individually there's no individual regulation for the actual separate you know ten phases that the vrm ends up with however these phases are interleaved so you do get some of the benefits of a ten phase just not all of them that's that's sort of the thing for example you do get the increased power throughput the better thermals you get slightly better voltage regulation because there's less current going through each phase and since it's interleaved even even if it's badly you know not super accurately interleaved you still get interleaved inter leaving over the phases and that leads to basically the VR I'm putting less strain on the power supply as well as as a side effect you get better voltage regulation so you know it's better than any any five phase it should be better than a six and then if it's better than a seven phase or an eight say that really depends on the details of the implementation so the our error 3595 is a six plus two phase voltage controller EVGA is not using the part plus two part at all and the six is downgraded to the five which then gets multiplied by two by the ir 3599 and then that you know gets you your ten phases so that's how the vrm is controlled i've already said you know what the doubling scheme that EVGA is running here does the 3595 has a switching frequency range of 200 kilohertz all the way to to megahertz however the $35.99 over here only goes up to 800 kilohertz output and the stock switching frequency on this vrm is 400 kilohertz so alright a bit is a higher switching frequencies and some uh than many of the other cards as typically you'll see cards shipping with sort of 300 colored switching frequency however to be absolutely certain I would have to have to have cards in hand to check what their actual switching frequency is with like a Scylla scope or because most of the existing ten ADT eyes use analog voltage controllers based on how those are wired because the frequency is set by a circuit so you can basically check that circuit to figure out the switching frequency oh yeah that's the control scheme I in terms of power quality especially considering that you know the capacitor selection and capacitor positioning and that kind of thing also plays a very large role in getting a good stable voltage level is really hard to say how this vrm would compare to other V RMS also with the 1080 Ti not being exactly a huge power-hungry monstrosity like say the 980ti and other previous architectures where own liquid nitrogen you could easily see a single GPU pulling as much as a thousand watts under load so I don't see a problem with running a ten phase yes did a higher phase counts could possibly deliver a better voltage stability however on a 1080 Ti I don't really think it would actually have any meaningful impact on overclocking even on liquid nitrogen so yeah that's sort of so I don't really have a problem with the control scheme that EVGA has going for here obviously it could have more phases that could also be a waste of PC board space at this point now for the actual power throughput we're looking at international excess power of fire power stages and these are IR 3575 these things are pretty much the best power stage International rectifier makes these are 60 amps rated 11 lots of heat output at that current level and a operating temperature of 125 degrees to achieve this rating so this V R M right here has a theoretical maximum current throughput of 600 amps with a heat output of 110 watts and that would be like an overload scenario so this would blow up the vrm pretty much instantly but you're not going to hit that so the V R M is plenty powerful for feeding a 1080 Ti and under normal operating conditions this v RM will actually be in it's sort of P in well just past the peak of its efficiency curve as at 220 amps power draw this erm will be just about just around 21 watts of heat dissipation and that includes driver IC losses because these are power stages so all losses are calculated like in that power power loss value is complete whereas for other V RMS I usually just look at how much power is lost on the MOSFETs themselves not on the actual driving circuitry of the V R M as well which won't be a huge amount but you know it also pulls power and you can't really ignore it especially considering how most 1080 T eyes have pretty good V RMS to start with so the differences aren't you know tens of watts it's a couple was here a couple watts there but this is by far one of the most efficient 1080 TI V RMS I remember looking at anyway so yeah the other cool feature of the 35 75 ignoring it's ridiculous power draw and it's a power capability and efficiency is the fact that it has this metal heatsink piece on the outer casing so basically this is a metal bit of metal that goes straight to the actual silicon inside the MOSFET and this really improves with keeping internal temperatures on these down which improves lifespan and reliability so yeah there is a reason why these are International rectifier is best and since these are power you know power I our power stages from international rectifier these also feature body braking mode as well as a diode emulation mode which are both well body braking mode is a really cool feature for load release voltage stability so basically when the card goes from very high load to very low load body braking mode can be used to really mitigate any kind of big spikes in voltage very very well and the 3595 here supports that the 3575 support that the 3599 also supports the body braking mode as well so basically the vrm can use it and the other thing is diode emulation mode is basically just a super high power like it's for super low power usage the vrm will basically stop charges stop using power to turn on the low side mosa if you ever pull that little current to it which won't actually happen because the vrm here instead of having multiple phases turned on at the same time the 3595 can switch phases off on and off dynamically so if you're at idle it won't actually need to run the entire vrm so it probably won't ever enter body braking mode because as long as it like the voltage controller can pretty much keep the vrm at peak efficiency under any kind of load conditions so that's you know yeah it's a very nicely curved erm as you would expect of a card with the king pin name on it so yeah moving on to the memory vrm this thing is ridiculous overkill for memory but it is nice to see so and it also has some weird things so the memory of erm right here is a 1 2 3 phase design it is controlled by this voltage controller because if you remember this was a plus 2 and we're not even using that and this voltage controller right here is an ir35 7d and this goes again 200 kilohertz to 1 a 2 mega but this is a three plus two phase voltage controller and EVGA is not using the plus two part they're using the plus the three part because they want three phase memory power this can actually like three phase memory power is really overkill but it can actually help with overclocking range on memory so I don't think it's needless what is kind of needless is that EVGA has opted to yet again use ir35 75s end result is this memory vrm has a theoretical maximum current throughput of a hundred and eighty amps assuming you have you know ridiculous cooling capabilities the side-effect of that however is that the memory vrm under normal load conditions and even overclock you won't really see the memory of erm really ever exceed 30 amps of current throughput this thing will only ever put out about two to three watts of heat so this thing will run ice-cold the memory of erm on this card will run absolutely ice-cold even without the heatsink and you know EVGA with their new IC x coolers are just going absolutely insane with heat sinks so the view memory of erm has a you know it is heat sinks anyway even though I honestly wouldn't bother because these are overkill really really overkill for the application you see here there's you know there's 1080p is out there with single-phase memory VR ends with no active cooling on the memory of erm at all so yeah really really overkill the three phases improve you know voltage regulation on the memory as well so yeah it's a really nice memory VR I'm interesting little thing to note is that the memory of erm is main capacitor bank is actually located all the way over here which is just kind of cool and worth pointing out because it is kind of interesting because this right here is the ground plane and then you can see that you have the memory power plane sort of going around all the memory chips like that so yeah these capacitors right here are for the memory of erm and it makes sense that they're located over here because generally with decoupling capacitors and filtering capacitors you want to put them as close to your load as possible and the load for the memory of erm is of course the memory chips themselves so putting them right here makes sense a lot of other manufacturers to basically get the capacitors close enough to the memory chips what they'll do is they'll like crams of memory VR em up here or in this area or they'll mess up like they'll split some of the phases off of the vcore vrm shifted down into this area so that the vcore vrm is sort of longer in its layout but EVGA opted for a kind of interesting layout with having the capacitors really far away from the actual chokes of the core of memory vrm right here so yeah now let's move on to the minor of erm the cool thing about all of the minor of erm the VPP the PLL and the Varg variable gate drive erm all three of these are using a fully integrated buck converter which is an IR 38 99 this thing has a maximum current throughput of 9 amps and 9 amps 10 volts yeah 9 amps 10 volts output it's going to produce about 2.4 watts to 3 watts of heat so basically this thing is plenty powerful not nothing to worry about in terms of you know powering the PLL or the VPP or or the you know actual vrm itself so the vrm selection that EVGA has gone for here is excellent which you know you wouldn't expect anything less of a Kingston branded card so now let's get on to the actual sort of cool lnto overclocking features because it's one thing to make a GPU that doesn't blow up like well one thing to make a card a PCV that doesn't catch on fire when you put it under liquid nitrogen as in you make the VR I'm strong enough to not get destroyed when you really really push the card the thing about that is is that's relatively easy basically anyone can make a really large massive erm strap big eats ink on it and get a good current rating now admittedly the better manufacturers will actually do that while maintaining good efficiency levels and that kind of thing but generally anybody can achieve that the harder part is making a card that isn't a massive pain to work with and that's a lot of what EVGA sort of like that's what makes the kingston cards really special for extreme overclockers because the kingpin cards are one of the few lines of cards if not the only line of cards where you can buy one of these and assuming you have faith that the card didn't arrived it wasn't dead on arrival you can buy insulate and run on ln2 without doing anything else to the card because you have software and hardware support for everything you could need and that is achieved by the basically voltage controller selection as well as all of the extra headers you have around this area of the card so the 3595 3570 these are both fully digital international rectifier voltage controllers so they can be controlled through software and both of them are controllable through this USB header that USB header gives you voltage control LLC settings yeah I can't write that fast fault also you get temperature monitoring for the many sensors scattered around the card and you also get well for the voltage controls you actually get you get obviously both of ecore in memory you also get the 1 volt PLL which I did say earlier is kind of optional for ln2 like you can totally get away with running a card with just v core control I've done that I have a 1070 that I ran on ln2 that you know I only had a voltage control for recore because I could not be bothered doing all the other mods around the cards so like I would need to physically modify and basically if you buy most other cards you end up having to modify a ton of things and that just takes forever it's risky it's a pain sometimes you can't find data sheets you know it really makes everything a lot harder for for extreme overclocking like you have even very basic things like for example clearance component clearance for example this card right here there's note all components anywhere in this area which you know you might think oh not really that special where well it actually is because if I try to mount a most ln2 pots have only a few millimeters of clearance in this entire area right here so you basically have a rectangle where nothing taller than a couple millimeters can be or the ln2 pot won't fit on the card well it just so happens that a lot of manufacturers like to put memory VRMs right over here and those memory VRMs end up with capacitors sorta in this area so if you're an extreme overclockers you basically end up in a situation where you either have to move components already on the card around remove them and figure out someplace else to mount them because you need to have them you know usually it's capacitors and like chokes so you'll have to like be sold or joke and resold or hit on the back of the card and you better pray that your card is a through-hole at that point because some you know these are surface mount chokes you can't actually move them they have to be on the side of the card where they were intended to be mounted so in situations where you can't move the components elsewhere onto the card you're stuck running something known as a base extension for an ln2 part which is essentially just a chunk of copper that sits between the ln2 pot and the GPU core to give you extra height extra clearance from the PCB for the lm-2 pot and those ruin your thermal performance like absolutely ruin it because that extra block of copper includes an extra layer of thermal paste to connect it to the base of the pot and there's a thermal place connecting the extension to the GPU core so two extra layers of thermal paste thermal paste at very low negative temperatures doesn't really like the less of you you the less of it there is the better the less layers of thermal paste the better like it's a massive thermal insulator at very low temperatures even the high-end thermal pastes are the centimeter or so of copper is a massive thermal barrier it is so bad in fact that if you go from like say for example my GTX 970 idol I can have the card as cold as minus 170 degrees centigrade once the card goes under load it very quickly climbs back up to minus 120 degrees and that's entirely because of that block of copper just sitting in there acting like a thermal insulator between the GPU core and the ln2 Paul so you know that's like a really basic design thing for a manufacturer to take care of you just don't put components that are that tall in this area of the car but a lot of cards don't actually do that and then if you're an extreme overclocker they're just not an option for you this being a kingpin card designed to run on ln2 only has this and this which are like the only potential clearance concerns and those are both very low profile chokes so pretty much any ln2 pot is going to fit on this card which is really really nice if you're an extreme overclocker so yeah so you get the voltage controls the LLC the temperature monitoring and then up here you get more voltage control this time through the evbot header this is a USB as a USB header down there this is the evbot header and the thing about the ez ball is it's basically a dongle that EVGA used to make for their cards which you can plug in and get voltage control and LLC settings and that kind of things so basically it does everything the USB port does except the evie ball is unavailable you can't buy it it hasn't been available for several years now so that's kind of unfortunate but I don't really see that as a problem since the USB header kind of does everything that you v-ball header does but for guys who like using the EZ bought you know yeah they can next to that we find these three to channel dip switches which are actually a permanent feature of the card these disable various protections like over temperature over current any kind of limitations you can switch them off with physical switches on the card so no more limits next to that you find some very basic troubleshooting LEDs so you have a le indicating 12 volts 3.3 volts PLL memory GPU 12 volts 3.3 volts is basically check your PCIe slot check your power cables PLL memory and GPU if one of those is not lighting up you have a very very serious problem because it basically means you're not getting décor or PLL or GPU power I mean core power memory power or PLL power and if one of those is missing if your own ln2 there's a good chance some part of the card is really really wet and something it's not working because of that if you're not on lnto the card is probably dead so yeah but it does save some time with troubleshooting because if you're trying to post and you're not getting any display output for no apparent reason you know you can just quickly check if the card is even getting power properly so these are kind of useful for troubleshooting that then up here we find the probit belt basically this is a there's a little header that goes into that with a bunch of wires coming out of it those are terminated in a it's not an alligator clip but it's basically a terminal that you can plug digital multimeter probes into really really snug I have a few motherboards that come with something very very similar these are awesome I love these and these are extremely useful because when you're running cards on eloquent nitrogen you can't really afford title you can't really run monitoring software on the system you're doing your extreme overclocking on so you can't monitor voltages in with software so you have to rely on digital multimeters and for most cards that means you're going to be soldiering on your own probe points because after you've insulated a car you can't exactly go and stab the legs of a capacitor while the card is running 3d mark with a hunt with ln2 needing to be poured so this is very very handy and again it just saves time from the usual ritual by the card test the card mod everything on the card and then finally run it so yeah this is a very nice feature then we have what looks to be a third SLI connector it's not a third SLI connector it's some super-secret feature that EVGA won't currently won't reveal what it actually does and next of that we find a three channel switch there's a regular bowels a backup of the regular bowels and an Ln two bottles I'm not entirely sure what the Ln two bottles does but I imagine it disables any limitations that you would normally run into like like the actual G Nvidia power limit would be listed and that kind of thing so yeah the card is fully you know it is very much one of those cards where you can just buy it test that it works insulate it and run it on ln2 that's is really what makes one of these cards so very very special for for extreme overclockers because most of the time you need to do a ton of modding and you know sometimes you just can't even do the mods because oh look this component doesn't actually have a datasheet that I can look up on the Internet so for extreme overclockers this card is an absolute tree for for gamers and you know normal people I feel like the the ridiculous just design and are like design and engineering that went into this card is is really really wasted but uh yeah you know if you if you want like a formula one that you're gonna drive daily this is the card for you this is pretty much a formula one because this thing it was built to break you know but overclocking records first and then everything else was like well it can technically play games so yeah I I don't really have any complaints except maybe I smarter doublers or more phases maybe like it's not you know if they don't want to do a twelve or fourteen or sixteen phase why not just do an eight phase-- that could have been another option but I totally understand why putting a fourteen phase or a sixteen phase on a ten a DTI is just a complete waste of space because a 1080 TI will never pull that much power even on liquid nitrogen so yeah this is a very very impressive card and it's a Kingston addition it completely lives up to the name that the you know the to the legacy that the previous kingpin Edition cards have established so that's it for this video thank you for watching like share subscribe leave a comment down below and if you would like to support what we do here at gamers Nexus then you can donate to our patreon down in the description below and if you would like to see more videos like this as well as other extreme overclocking stuff then you could head over to my channel called actually hardcore overclocking thank you and goodbye you