Gadgetory

so we got an these rx 590 and about 24 hours before embargo lifts and we're not not gonna pull another all-nighter twice in one week to review the card so what we're going to do today is a teardown got to put some thermocouples on it on you for the review and the card we're working with for this teardown is the XFX rx 590 Fatboy which honestly isn't even all that fat so marketing making up for substance I guess or they've named it after the nuke but either way we're gonna take it apart and see what they new rx 590 looks like underneath on the XFX Fatboy card before that this video is brought to you by the EVGA supernova g3 power supplies unlike other power supplies on the market that get easily tangled the EVGA g3 power supplies are modular and you sleeved cables so the PCIe connectors won't get caught in your hair when building system the supernova comes in several options including popular 650 watt and 750 watt units and it's fully modular with a noise focused fan profile learn more at the link in the description below very basics first the RX 590 we're gonna review it shortly but the card the GPU the RX 590 is an RX 580 which is in our it's 480 it's just been pre overclocked on the RX 580 which was a pre overclocked RX 4 80 so it is a pre pre overclocked RX 4 80 the voltage required for given frequency is a bit lower on the 590 so that absolutely has some value and the price proposition may play out differently we'll see how it works in the review but again we need to start with taking it apart because I need to put thermocouples on this so we're gonna work with this XFX card primarily it is honestly despite its name not all that fat so this is a little more than two slots it's about 50 millimeters the EVGA card only has maybe 4 millimeters on the XFX card but the EVGA card has a significantly fatter heatsink so XFX is an entire fatness on the fat boy is consumed by the distance between the backplate and the PCB which doesn't count and the distance between the shroud and the cooler which doesn't count so the actual cooler substance is significantly less than something like this that said there's a 20 atti it produces a lot more heat and it's $1,200 so it's not really a fair comparison the point though is to say that the name Fat Boy is it's just it's just kind of dumb okay so so we got that over with let's move on to taking the card apart okay so we're gonna start this teardown we're using just an iFixit bit kit and they're not not a current advertiser but we like to plug the kit that we use it's a pro tech toolkit if you want to pick it up and we're just gonna start by taking out the screws for the heatsink itself and see if removing the heatsink as possible with only removing three screws first problem I have that sticker says avoid if removed that is not enforceable in the United States you can't do that here so XFX there's what I think your warranty seriously this is this is bad and this is not this is a problem void if removed stickers on screws are a way to try and intimidate end-users out of repairing and maintaining their own devices which we are strongly opposed to that kind of action but they probably wouldn't enforce it anyway and a good luck tine if most people took it apart to begin with you just say I don't know anything about computers so this didn't immediately fall apart sometimes it's only four screws holding the heat sink in so we're gonna take the rest of them out this time there it is they're hiding okay so two more screws that are hiding here so we take out that one and then that one and now the XFX rx 590 Fatboy should have its back plate boy or Shroud boy removable and the back plate is not here you go that's so the back plate you look down the middle here there's the screw going through for that and for that and those screws are on the top side so we gotta take those out if we want to remove the back plate but typically something else should come off first there is cable okay so warning warning number one on this card it would be really easy to rip this entire connector off this board the way they've mounted this so if you pull on the cable the the connector the housing on the board side will start separating from the pins that it's on and it'll pull up with the cable if you aren't careful so if there's a 7-way in this card probably just leave it connected if you're just redoing the paste but otherwise be really careful with it I'm gonna take some time to get it off properly otherwise it will rip things out of the board that's so tempted to just leave it along I see that pin there's a secret pen there's like a little plastic button in there under the housing that's hooking into the bottom of the housing I don't know if it's a manufacturing defect or if it's an intentional way to try and block people from removing the fan but I'm just grinding it off with a screwdriver until there's no more plastic bump there the right side is already free the left side it's a little more work there it goes sorry okay I have not had that problem before I've taken apart dozens of video cards over the last few months actually that's not true I've taken apart dozens of video cards in the last 48 hours and and this one so it's I mean it's pretty standard fan header this is not unique but it just had like a little plastic bump that was stuck and it's supposed to be a hook to prevent it from coming out of the housing there's still I left part of one on there this one down here you probably can't really see it but one of them had like bonded with the plastic housing so I don't know if that's manufacturing defect or what was going on but I just kind of chiseled the head until it was unstuck and I could separate them so all right well look at the cooler in a second this is the card and for the PCB I mean I'll remind you it's an rx 580 which is a 480 so this isn't really anything tremendous and new that you haven't seen before but there is still new silicon and that's because it's a new process new fabrication process for this piece so nothing on the die Andy typically doesn't put text with die on like Nvidia you can still see I ain't got there tangent plate everything about it's pretty much the same the the dye sighs I guess we'll go ahead and measure that the best of our abilities so external dye package which is not the exact same as dye size roughly 17.5 by roughly 14 and that's an external measurement but you get the idea so there's dye size memory same as before so this memory is micron it has 2 4 6 8 gigabytes of it as you would expect on an RX 5 80 or 90 in this case they are not going to be making a 4 gigabyte version to my knowledge so this should be the only version there is and then we also need to take apart the take the back plate off so let's get that off of there that's gonna be done by removing the screws on now the front side with PCB is you can also see a multi BIOS which we'll go over that in a second and I'm gonna track the screws on the mod mat over here so stored I guarantee excess net if you want to pick up a mod mat like the work service that I am on right now and the next round will come in we'll be shipping out in the first half of December so if you're in the u.s. you definitely have a chance to get anyone before the holidays if you order soon and then will be sold out again probably shortly after that so not too many screws here we've got for the back plate one two three four five and then one here one here for the i/o so it puts us up to seven screws underneath the cooler and then we have one two three four or five six screws for the back side of the card that we're already removed so really not that many which is good you want to do more with less with screws and those were not necessary moves for me the back plate but we're gonna get rid of the rid of the i/o potentially in a minute so okay back plate it's a back plate it's made out of metal it's aluminum back plate and connects actually does not connect to the card anywhere so it is utterly pointless this is not a functional object it's got some like just a protective coating there so there's no direct contact shorts between the board components and the backplate but no thermal pads connected anything so that is non-functional it does not do anything in fact it may trap some radiative heat that radiates off the backside now it doesn't matter now or not really but it's there is no reason this can't be functional other than they didn't want to spend a couple of pennies literally pennies on a thermal pad between like the inductor line on the backplate that would pull some heat off of the card again not going to affect the core temperatures but also if you're going to go through the effort of making a big metal backplate at least go through the effort of binds and when I was as thrown pad and sticking it on there so that's the back plate the front side for the vrm it is using some familiar design let's see one looks like a six plus one will confirm with build Zoid and then it's an ir so international rectifier three five two one seven which is actually a really common controller and you can see that piece right there so that's the IR thirty five to 17 this is on really most motherboards right now and on lots of video cards as well so that is a common component we've spoken about it a lot the MOSFETs are also IR and those are thirty five seventy eight and I just double-check yes thirty five seventy eight is that component and those are used for all for the both the memory and the core vrm as for the rest of the board there's a v bios switch up here so that's probably your typical performance mode and quiet mode that will check marketing language on that and then just as a reference for everybody it is in the front position default so that is how we will test it but we'll double check what the two switches are okay so that's the PCB here's the cooler for the cooler it you've got throne for contacting the memory we're gonna put a thermocouple on one of those memory modules probably the hottest one which would most likely be this one so we typically try to put thermocouples on the hottest modules this is likely to be the hottest because regardless of where the fans are positioned it is next to two of the hottest parts so you've got the mosfet and the inductors right there there's a line of capacitors between them but it's still gonna be dealing with a lot of radiative heat and then yes remember these are all like the same power planes it's on the same PCB PCB is made of copper and fiberglass so naturally you're gonna conduct heat from everywhere on the board especially if things are adjacent so we will probably test that module first the cooler so the red red line of throne pads is going on the MOSFETs which is apparent from the indentation in them the gap here is over the inductors so there's no direct contact between the inductors or the capacitors but that's fine they they they're hot but if you hit it with airflow which will happen then that is sufficient so we're actually we have no problems with leaving inductors without a thermal pad as long as there's air flow and there is this fan is right over them it's gonna go through fins there straight fins they're not l-shaped fins so that air will go straight through hit the inductors and they'll be just fine they don't need direct contact the memory module were likely testing has that won't that pad the other straight module on the bottom of the cards got that one and now that you're oriented with this at the bottom of the card you can see the heat pipe orientation and that's got a copper cold plate to the bottom that is soldered to the heat pipes and then the heat pipes do not appear to be soldered together between them note there is some solder in there so some solder in between the heat pipes solder to hold the cold plate to the heat pipes and then there's a nickel plated plate and this is kind of or aluminum it might be aluminum not one high percent sure actually wow that's a mounting plate I don't know what that is not clear on the material for this this shiny material not clear on that let's just rule out that it's steel though no okay it's not aluminum so that that is not aluminum aluminum is not magnetic as you can see here because that's that's an aluminum set of sheets that's a aluminum heatsink and then aluminum here copper here so that looks to be a stainless steel which is actually a terrible conductor of heat depending what kind of stainless steel are using it's like 70 watts per meter Kelvin whereas if you're talking aluminum you're at 205 watts per meter Kelvin at 25 C copper is if it's good copper is like 405 watts per meter Kelvin at 25 C depends on the grade of material of course there is bad copper there's bad aluminum and there's good stainless steel or good steel but this is typically not a great service also a shiny surface is bad at dealing with heat you have reflective heat that you also have concerns with the pan what kind of components are being cooled so not a great solution for the memory will test it and we'll see how it does in testing but it's kind of odd this thing is screwed in let's actually let's just take that out and just see what happens like why is this screwed in probably just to secure it because it's not manufactured as part of the aluminum plate under it then the question is why didn't they manufacture the aluminum plate under it to meet the memory modules instead of requiring an additional plate to sit in between them okay Wow interesting that's so weird so they have two perfectly good materials here for conducting heat why what is copper heat pipes you can't get much better than other than being not direct touch contact not direct contact copper is the suboptimal but it's still good especially with like they're all pasted in between the gaps or a thermal pad would be potentially okay with enough mounting pressure then you have aluminum that's kind of messy aluminum but it's aluminum nonetheless clearly and the only reason really not to just do a oh let's see no that's not a reason okay so why is why does this exist spacing mounting pressure something along those lines it might be a mounting pressure thing maybe they're trying to avoid crushing the die of the memory or of the GPU if if there's not this dense material in between the the plate and the silicon I don't know I don't know if it's a mounting pressure concern or if it's a contact distance concern because mine clay inclination here is if I take this thing off assuming it doesn't like crack the die or something when I remount the cooler and I shouldn't suspect it would although the screws would have to be tight in a different mount but if I take this thing off my inclination is that putting a sufficiently thick thrown pad here that would account for the loss of this steel plates were probably steel anyway and also add the same surface area or the same thickness as that pad I would think that this direct contact of the memory would be superior but part of the memory modules would be over this gap right here so you've got that gap in there there wouldn't be any contact there there wouldn't be any contact there so that's a bit worse in that regard but really this whole thing should just be widened and flattened why it was built this way not sure what the design decisions were but this is a inefficient use of metal because they've got two perfectly good conductors here it's just not complete so you can't directly contact in a way that would make sense and perhaps that's why they went with the plate now it doesn't matter well no the memory is probably still going to be in spec so in that regard it'll work it's just that whenever you see sort of waste by way of poor design or poorly thought-out design like this cooler solution it's I mean it's really you want the best product you can get for your money and this is a poor design choice but one that we can test and we will test to see if our approach will be better I mean even if they don't pad here might be better even though you've got less surface area we've seen it in the past where it's sometimes a pigeon or even decent so that's the bottom end of the cooler and then the top they've got a bit of the Gigabyte design approach which it's not a it's not great thing so a screws here on a bar holding aluminum bar I believe yes likely aluminum bar that doesn't do anything it's not a not a heat sink it just holds everything into the shroud that's on both sides they've got four screws for that so we don't need to take these four screws out there's really no point but you get heat pipes running through over the area on the right half the board and that's really just so that they can run through where the fans are pushing there it's not to connect with anything on the board because there's nothing hot on the board in that area so we're not going to take the shroud off because there's no point it's just more more view more visibility to the cooler and that's really it I mean that's the RX 590 by XFX the Fatboy and backplate doesn't have any functional purpose they might say it's structural it's not doesn't do anything for thermals in a positive fashion probably not anything really exceptionally negative either this is a weird and efficient approach to design and the cooler otherwise seems pretty standard so there's your rx 590 slightly different different configuration and that it's lower voltage for given clock it's higher clocks and natively out of the box this is a partner only launched there will not be rx5 90s from AMD so there's no reference cards for this one there you have it them the RX 590 Fatboy maybe they'll make a slim addition later and the 590 here is really what we need to look at not actually just cooller so the 590 we'll be testing shortly like I said had a disassembly cat the probes on it for thermal testing and there's clearly a lot of things we can do in addition to normal thermal test here so might play around with that not sure if it'll go on the initial review or later but we'll be working on benchmarking the 590 shortly it is an these refreshed R X 480 and the rear e refresh no yes this is the rear e fresh the previous one with the Refresh I think that's accurate the RX 580 actually did pretty decently it's held on pretty well - and value proposition so the five - idea has a place in the market we'll see how it does though just to be clear so very critical of the cooler design here it doesn't mean the cards bad doesn't mean the coolers bad it just means they could have made it better but we'll be testing it to validate those statements and by the time you see this video likely a lot of those tests will have been done so check back shortly make sure you subscribed if you're not so you can catch the rx 590 review and go to stored on campus access net to pick up a mod mat like the one I was working on here and you can also go to patreon.com/scishow cameras Nexus to help there - thank you for watching I'll see you all next time you see me