PCB Analysis of Gigabyte 1080 Xtreme WaterForce (w_ Buildzoid)

The Core Voltage VRM: A Detailed Analysis

Let's move over to the other major VRM on this card and that's the memory voltage VRM right here. This is a two-phase VRM we have two chokes here, uh it's controlled by the UP 1665, uh this is a two-phase voltage controller with integrated drivers. So basically there's no driver ICs anywhere around this area because this can actually drive the mosfets directly.

Speaking of the mosfets, these are Fairchild power trench power stages, so these are not regular mosfets. These are high side fat and a low side fat integrated into one. I see so each of these is actually enough to make up its own single phase, and there's two of them in each phase because Gigabyte wanted even more current capability, so they put two of them in parallel to get more current throughput. The end result of this is that each of these has a 13 amp high side and that's a continuous rating. So obviously in a VRM you can expect it to do quite a bit more than that.

The Continuous rating is still very conservative because the high side mosfet is basically being turned on and off hundreds of thousands of times a second, it doesn't stay on continuously so you can actually expect it to do quite a bit more than the 13 amps continuous rating even in this terribly cooled scenario that it's in. The high the low side fat is 23 amps, uh continuous and that rating is actually realistically what it will actually be able to handle in this application because the lows side fat is turned on for most of the time when in AVRM.

So we have 13 amps well not even 13 let's say you know 15 or 16 amps per per IC in each phase, so that gives us about 30 amps for each given phase two phases total. You have 60 amps if you don't go by the absolute worst case scenario and if you go by worst case possible scenario then it's 50-2 amps because that's the high side mosfet's continuous rating for no proper cooling scenarios.

This is again ridiculously overkill, the GDDR5X on a 1080 pulls around 30 Watts which with the voltage it runs at works out to around 22 amps. So we have a 52 amp memory VRM here, and Gigabyte went ridiculously over and I suspect it's again because there's no proper air flow in this area due to the lack of a fan. So yeah does mean that if you actually try to get some air flow into the shroud of the card this VRM is just going to be amazing like perform amazingly and in its stock configuration it's also perfectly good.

Because Gigabyte really did go insanely overkill on everything just to make sure that it can function in the less than optimal cooling environment that they've decided to go with on the Water Force, whereas the Gaming Extreme, the while know the extreme gaming so that's the air cooled version of this card. That one would actually have a heat sink here with proper air flow over the entire VRM section.

So that's that for the PCB breakdown.