Gadgetory

this is though tax first time back on our bench since the thorough lashing we gave it about two years ago with one of the 980 extreme cards and it's thanks to a reader who has loaned us his card for testing the zotac 1080i app Xtreme is a full quarter inch larger than one of the next largest cards out the asus strix and it's a nearly an inch larger than a two slot card so the amp Xtreme is one of the biggest cards out there that you can get and you would hope that that is somehow affording a benefit to cooling so we'll be testing that shortly but first we're doing a teardown of the card to see how it's constructed how the transfer is from the fetch the vram all that to the actual massive aluminum heatsink and ultimately looking at the quality of design as a whole and seeing if buying a bigger card is in fact better and in the past that's not always the case before getting to that this coverage is brought to you by EVGA and their 1080p is c2 which we've recommended fairly highly for its build quality and the icx sensors which are kind of fun to play with you can check our full sc2 review for the 1080i if you're curious to learn more or you can click the link in the description below to find the product page for the 1080p is c2 though tag has taken the brute-force approach to pretty much everything on the amp extreme 1080i especially in the cooling dept by using a massive cooler they've taken a brute-force approach to the VRM by using a 16 phase vrm that we'll talk about that more later and they even got to eight pins and then a three fan setup so we're going to take it apart and see how everything looks internally and before making any further judgments and then we'll have the full review separately probably one to two days after this goes up but let's start with the teardown first so the back side of the card standard layout here there are four spring tension screws that are the standard ones youth and all of the 10a TTI's for the most parts on them are a bit special but so far not too different these hold the coldplay and probably the entire large aluminum mass to the PCB and then we've got an extra screw up here just probably just for extra support because again really heavy card I mean I haven't waited but it's the heaviest one that we've had in hand I think that's it it's five screws and then these are all on the other side so these you can see that they are screw points or the opposite side of the card probably under the PCB or on the PCB side so let's see if this is loose yet it is okay let's hold them me down alright got it okay so we're cleaning the thermal paste off first there's your copper cold plate and let's take a look at let's start with the thermal pad ignoring the thermal paste that's on there so we've got the green thermal pads for vram contact and this is the first 1080i for those who have been keeping track that we've taken apart that is missing a different module so that's kind of interesting every other 1080i we've seen has been missing this vram module which seems more it seemed like a a constant but now we've got the bottom-left one missing instead so that's just kind of interesting but not actually functionally that different so for the throne pads we've got contact here on those and we have contact on the memory vrm so here's your memory vrm this block right here with the indentation being used for the chokes and let me disconnect the rest of this so that we have more freedom to move it around these are RGB and power headers this one's for the backplate it looks like yes those for the backplate this one's going to be a little more difficult to remove safely okay there we go so you just pull it out by the white header rather than the cables and we've got it separated now let's take a look at the vrm coin so there's a an aluminum plate here that's thinned for vrm cool and this is on top of the MOSFETs we'll look at those in a moment a minute ignoring the thermal paste all over my hand so that's covering the MOSFETs the doublers which there are definitely doublers in there and then this is contacting the underlying components by a green thermal pad which isn't too visible but maybe you can see that so there's a green thermal pad in there contacting the core vrm components let's flip that around and then for this one we have a a not thermal pad this looks like a rubber damper and or bumper if I push on it yeah check that out can we get this can you see that if I push on it you'll see the service kind of deform but return to where it is that shows you this is Robert this is not a thermal pad and I mean I can feel it by pushing on it you can feel what a thermal pad is very clearly and let's just show on one of these the different so if you look at this one over here we can push down on this in a corner see how it leaves an indentation so that's not happening here on this this is rubber the reason this would exist I suppose is if they are trying to damp the vibration of which there would be none really I mean we've got a massive three fan cooler if you have vibration at this point there's a serious flaw in the design so that's my guess that's probably too damp vibration between the thin stack and the vrm heat sink if they were to rub against one another now the reason this is potentially very dumb I'm just confirming here yeah even if I pick up the edges it doesn't move so it is actually just glued on rubber and is there a metal plate in there no no it's actually just Robert it's not like a plate under it so the reason this doesn't make a lot of sense what we'll see in testing once we get to it is because you've got it completely isolated vrm heatsink and that's kind of okay it works sometimes especially when you have a plate that's split in half for example completely isolated BRM heatsink stuck between the hottest component on the board the chokes are the inductors and on top of the next hottest components the BAS fads with no transfer whatsoever to the heatsink this giant piece of aluminum and copper is not being leveraged here to cool the VXR it's not there's no contact so the only way you get any cooling is really from the air getting pushed down from these fans into the fin stack for the vrm and that is somewhat blocked by this not a lot but this happens to be exactly where the vrm heatsink is and it's blocking any kind of air penetration through the larger fin stack and further for some reason they just didn't do a thermal pad there and that's something that maybe we can test in our review is to Navy remove this thing put a thermal pad on there and see if it improves I bet you it probably would but we've tested that with the AC X cards in the past and saw that even a thermal pad connecting fins like this with no base plate just the small amount of surface area you get there a thermal pad contacting those fins to another part of the heatsink was actually an improvement on the AC X card so that doesn't mean it'll be an improvement here but it's worth trying and this will be very interesting to see how it unfolds in testing but there's no real functional reason to have this year as a vibration damping pad assuming they designed their card correctly because it's so huge and it's a three fan cooler anyway so it shouldn't really vibration should not be a concern you're not spinning fast enough and you're not putting enough torque at weird angles to cause vibration but no thermal has a very odd choice so we'll look into that for the rest of the cooler though we have a copper plate as expected for the GPU and then we have one two three four five six heat pipes that let's see where they're going these look like sixes maybe eight yes I think we have a few of each in here so we've got three coming through the coldplay area and going into the that would be the right half of the heatsink which is going over the chokes and the vrm without any contact whatsoever to either of those things not that you need to contact the inductors because they're kind of self-contained heat sinks anyway and then the other three heat pipes one of them comes through wraps around here and uses the left half of the heat sink and then the other to wrap under it and come through to this half the heat sink so a fairly standard design in that regard you can see the edges of them there nothing too special with that design so that's the bulk of the cooler then moving on to the rest of the card let's get the get the backplate off so backplate is held on by the cables which have been disconnected and then by some screws that go through as we showed earlier okay is it loose yes there's a video card there's our backplate so let's let's start with the backplate and get to the PCB last for the backplate we have what appears to be a metal or metal like material but I think this might be metal this part here the part that confuses me about this is if you flip it and look here we have very clearly a strong difference a stark contrast between these two materials so what's going on well this looks like a metal and this does not this is glossy so it's either the thickest paint in the world or it's a different material and I bet if we look at the edges yet so if you can see this I don't know how let's try and get a the overhang so if you look down here there's a bit of an overhang between the backing material which is clearly deeper and kind of the depth buffer so to speak the adhesive back there and the rest of the plate now if we flip it back over we can show probably that yes you could in fact peel this material up if you wanted to you see that I'm not going to peel it off it's not my card to do so with but you can see that it's it's a nut adhesive I don't know why it's there I'm I am genuinely uncertain as to why that exists you're never going to see that side of card maybe it's like to prevent I don't know it doesn't make contact with the back anyway because got these standoffs so even if they were concerned about bridging contacts it looks like kind of a non-issue especially if they use like a proper design anyway but yeah so we've got a weird plastic coating here that's not going to help with cooling certainly it might act as a bit of a hotbox we'll test it this cable goes to an LED right here so that is an RGB digital LED and we might have b-roll of that in review but that's a digital LED now let's get back to the PCB see if there's anything on the backside first not really some capacitors behind the GPU all normal stuff but we've got two screws for the vrm heatsink two screws okay and two more screws for that one but let's start here okay so again by the way talking about the indentations earlier on that rubber one another clear sign that something's not a thermal pad is you can see all the indents for all the components on it and we can see that on the other one but that's the there's review vrm heatsink and let's look at this insane setup now so this is the actual vrm there's your core via ramage mm v RM so going by what we know of these these are according to build Zoid it's impossible or at least very hard to find data sheets for the fats that they're using and that means it's hard to do a full in-depth analysis what we do know is that ZOTAC is using what looks to be a rebrand of the qn 3100 series so qm 3107 and qn 3103 and they're using a voltage controller the u p 951 one an eight phase-- mode going into eight doublers for sixteen phases so one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen you know maybe he means 14 plus two what's under here none more so having pulled this heatsink off which was a bit of a hidden grouping of two more phases if I understand this correctly what I'm seeing with the with the help of build Zoid is the QN 3:103 is this line here and on the Q + 3 107 3100 series is this line here and also this one and then we have more we have two more sets of 3 103 s and 3 107's here and what it looks like it amounts to is a 16 phase vrm that's being doubled just as he said through the u p9 v 1 1 controller in a phase mode we end up with this huge thing and you've got your memory RM over here and that more or less wraps off what we know of the board today I don't think there will be a further vrm analysis of this one or anything like that normally we do those but speaking with builds why he does our v RM and PCP analysis of these boards normally it sounds like it's hard to get the data sheets because of the fats are rebranded this discrete fat so I'm not sure we'll be able to go further than that but we can do testing overclocking thermals and maybe gaming performance so it will focus on thermals and overclocking and see how this card does and then hopefully do some cool a B or ABC test where we remove things like the back plate see if this is actually just a hot box and maybe test removing that rubber atrocity I love here M heat sink or a top it anyway so these two are supposed to sandwich together and actually we noticed separately that they don't even make full contact so even as a vibration damping thing it doesn't do a whole lot we have a photo of that that shows it better than the video can but when the card is together in a single piece it doesn't make contact with that plate anyway it's not there all bad but it's awesome doing anything other than maybe obstructing airflow and it could be a thermal pad so we'll pass that we'll see how it is before committing too much further to a commentary on it thank you for watching as always you can go to patreon.com/scishow sexist - helps out directly or you can go to store that game Razak to sign out to pick up a shirt make sure you subscribe for more thank you to Josh for the loaner and we'll see you all next time you