The Unboxing and Analysis of the New GPU Card

As we carefully remove the packaging from our new GPU card, we can't help but feel a sense of excitement and curiosity about what's inside. The first thing that catches our eye is the VRAM modules, which are labeled as GDDR6X, indicating that they're based on Micron's latest technology. We notice that there are 12 gigabytes of memory, with each module listed at 1 GB in size or 8 gigabits. This confirms what we expect from a high-end GPU card.

The next part of the board to examine is the VRM (Voltage Regulator Module) section. Here, we find a complex setup with multiple phases, including a two-phase memory and a seven- or eight-phase core VRM. The rest of the board features an extensive cooling solution, including a fan and an LED header that's PWM-controlled by the GPU's temperature requirements. We also see a vapor chamber setup, which is designed to keep the card cool during intense gaming sessions.

The cooling system on this card is quite impressive, with multiple thermal pads and a fan that's screwed in through the underside of the board. There are also several copper shims visible, which suggest that the engineers have taken care to ensure proper airflow around the components. We can see the imprint of the mosfets, inductors, or chokes on the VRM section, indicating that these components are designed to withstand high temperatures.

Building a Hybrid Card: The Plan

After examining the card's design and features, we're now ready to start building our hybrid card. In this case, we'll be mounting a liquid cooler to the GPU, while keeping the base plate and attaching it to a recessed bracket on the back of the board. If this approach doesn't work, we'll have to fall back on using copper and other materials to create a makeshift solution.

The plan is to use our existing tools and components to create a custom cooling system that will help us achieve lower temperatures than those seen with the reference cooler. We expect the liquid coolant to reduce temperatures by several degrees Celsius, potentially bringing the card down to sub-20°C during intense gaming sessions.

The Implications of Lower Temperatures

One of the most significant benefits of using a liquid cooler on this GPU card is the potential for lower temperatures. In our previous experiments with reference coolers, we've seen temperature increases above 80°C, which can lead to thermal throttling and reduced performance. However, with a custom cooling system, we may be able to bring the temperatures down to around 40°C, depending on ambient conditions.

This reduction in temperature has significant implications for gaming performance. In our previous experiments, we've seen that temperatures above 85°C can cause the GPU to throttle its clock speeds, leading to reduced frame rates and slower performance. By bringing the temperatures down to below 20°C, we may be able to avoid this issue altogether.

Conclusion

As we continue our journey with the new GPU card, we're excited to see how it performs in our experiments. With a custom cooling system designed to bring temperatures down to sub-20°C, we expect significant improvements in gaming performance and reduced thermal throttling. We'll be sharing our results from these experiments in the next part of this article, so stay tuned for further updates on our progress.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone we're back with another hybrid build this time with the Titan X so we're going to be tearing this thing down I've already done the thermal tests in part three of this video we'll look at the thermal results of the non- torn down version that' be this one versus the hybrid version that we're creating ourselves using this EVGA hybrid kit we have a couple of these available and basically just try and mod them onto the cards ourselves if you haven't seen that before so the goal here is to see how much better we can make the thermals cuz they're pretty high as is stock and to that end can we further increase the overclock with the 1080 we got an extra 100 MHz out of this thing on the 1080 we'll see if we can replicate that here before getting to that this content is brought to you by iy power and their new element gaming PC which has Arc LED fans and underglow lighting with a large tempered glass side window and this video is also brought to you by Sam who's one of our viewers and Loan this to us while we were in England I was able to pick it up and bring it back home for about a week so we've got some time to do a hybrid build and see how it works and that's about it let's get into this thing so first of all this video we're going to take this apart after the tear down we'll build it back up into a hybrid card hopefully and uh then part three we'll have the results as normally so we can see the thermal impact and all that stuff this is a new toolkit this is not a sponsored toolkit just a new one uh so we've got a lot of things here I haven't quite used them yet but let's see okay just like the 1080 this uses a ton of really tiny annoying screws uh that are very easily broken at the shaft so we'll have to try and avoid that this time because it's not my card so I have to care more about it so last few cards gave us a FSE sense of hope and that the 1060 was a pretty easy hybrid build other than the actual building part but the the tear down was pretty easy and this one it looks like we've got a million screws to deal with uh so got to keep better track of them where they go not quite sure yet depends how this build goes uh will that will dictate whether or not this thing gets rebuilt as the original card or if it gets uh left as a hybrid card and Sam continues to use it that way it just depends on if if it's mountable in a case because as we've done in the past sometimes the hybrid versions have tubes running out where the expansion slot is that's fine for an open air bench just for testing and validation but obviously does not work for uh home use okay so there's part of the back plate that's the same as the 1080 nothing special here at all it look there's a thermal pad it looks like wow that's a very the hell is that it's like cloth anyway thermal pad uh covering up part of the card you can take that off if you wanted to the idea is to allow better air flow if you were to put these in s but we haven't really tested to see if that is how it works obviously power headers here six pin eight pin solder points here and then on this part we've got some solder points that are unused for an eight pin if you wanted out this side that's obviously not the case here though uh and then we can see the vrm is going to be where this is on the other side of the car uh and we'll we'll look at that once we take the full thing apart okay so there's the second half of the back plate really just it's just a cheap back plate it's really more meant for aesthetic reasons uh than anything else does does some level of structural support with all those screws but very tiny screws in some uh cases and those break easily when you're reassembling if not careful as we've shown in the previous video uh so expansion slot cover thing is still mounted that's got screws on that side this has loosened the heat sink which uses a vapor chamber on this particular card and a blower fan which is over here obviously see that right there so now we've got to get into the underside of the shroud and I'm remembering what a nightmare the 1080 was to take apart so we've got these tiny things which I believe believe this will fit over yeah so we can use this learn learn that from the 1080 video after uh trying to use pliers to take them off uh so we can use that to take those off I don't remember what order these come out uh but doesn't really doesn't really matter all that much uh let's let's get the rest of the expansion cover off we don't need that on there all right so that simplifies things I think it's time to start taking the Shroud apart okay this thing's not held on by adhesive I remember that from last time thought it was held on by adhesive and then snap ours in half okay so what will come apart and what won't all right there goes that there's the back half of the Shroud uh mostly no function except one important function these is actually pretty Advanced comparatively heat sink we'll talk about that in a minute but uh these things uh as you can see they go back in like that the windows under the Shroud obviously the main purpose of these functionally outside of the Aesthetics part is to guide air flow from this so the window keeps it trapped under there uh so you don't have you don't have air evacuating from the system before it fully goes through the entire what looks to be aluminum heat sink so aluminum heat sink here this is actually loose I can take it out in a minute the air comes in uh the front blows through comes out the back and that's exactly what you want it to do there's the cool it's a vapor chamber setup no heat pipes but Vapor chamber in this instance uh is going to be better than a heat pipe setup anyway just based on the the design of the heat sink and the cooler So that obviously now it's there your air comes in here this is the cold plate I'm not positive if it's uh just like a nickel plated copper or if it's just straight aluminum but um sometimes they they'll Nickel Plate it although that doesn't make a lot of sense for something you don't see because the main point of nickel plating is is for looks not for thermals and obviously there's no exposed copper under the paste so that instantly answers part of that okay so here's the part here's the GPU itself uh the GPU is the shiny bit that's branded as Nvidia made in Taiwan uh it is GPU GP 102-400 so GP just quick refresh gp102 that is the actual GPU Titan X is not the GPU Titan X is the video card gp102 is the GPU -400 is uh its version of that GPU just like 104 has and 106 have 400 200 variants depending on what you're looking at A1 is the revision uh a in the industry means that it is a consumer model as opposed to X which is an internal tested model and Nvidia branding around it you've got those super tiny capacitors on the substrate green bits the substrate and then this metal plate is probably just for for structural uh Integrity so that's the GPU ideally we leave the back plate or I should say the base plate not the back plate ideally we leave the base plate on here uh and then Mount the cooler to that as that would help us continue to cool the vram and vrm without requiring additional uh copper to be mounted to the the card which is kind of a pain to do and not always effective um but uh we'll see how this goes we'll take take apart the rest first and look at it so we're going to take apart the base plate just to at least look at the card if nothing else okay this is the other side of the Shroud goes over here helps direct air flow with this uh and then that is the LED power so this cable is covered in uh electrical tape here and connects to the LED and that's really it that's all that does so let's let's get all this out of the way if it were my card just pull on it pull on it until it comes off okay so let's go ahead and start taking apart the underside so again the the objective would be to leave this base plate on here for thermal reasons we are going to take it off just to look at the card and then uh hopefully it doesn't have too much complexity to just get back on there and leave it there with the cooler the only reason that wouldn't work is if the like with the uh what was it the 1060 if we have an issue where that's just not going to fit because it's too wide uh in that case then we we just take it off and run the tests and uh maybe put some aftermarket vrm and VM every when this happened last time oh oh as that seems to happen with the 1080 and Titan X specifically so that's that's good that's out that's out now we can we can ignore that to do like last time just unscrew most of the way and then leave okay that was a pain in the ass here we go we've got vram uh modules let's pull it this way so for the board some missing circuitry over here couple missing spots that have not been filled uh probably for cost reasons just didn't need it or something like that and GPU proper vram so 2 4 6 8 10 12 of those it is 12 gigabytes so that means they're 1 gbyte modules or 8 gigabits is normally how they are actually listed and sold and these are made by Micron as one would expect so this is gddr5x as with the 1080 and Micron is the only current known manufacturer of gddr5x so that's what the memory is this is the vrm mosfets uh capacitor bank and it looks like it is a is that a two-phase memory it's either a two or three-phase memory vrm and then uh seven or eight phase core vrm depending on what's going on the rest of the board um so pretty extensive vrm setup based on what we saw with the 1080 but still not sure how far you'd get on that if you were an extreme overclock or something like that but for our purposes this is just fine because we're not going to be bypassing any electrical restrictions or shorting shuns and things like that so that's the setup of the board I think that pretty much covers all the core stuff this is the fan or we've got a fan and an LED header that's what these are that's for the fan is pwm controlled by the needs of the GPU based on temperature LED header pretty simple so that's that's the basics of the board as far as cooling already talked about the vapor chamber setup that's what this is and this is the rest of the cooling solution so you've got the fan here that's screwed in through the underside that's what this screw is here and there's only only two more probably under this pad as well this pad is covering the vrm so you can even see the imprint there of the mosfets the inductors or the chokes which is what these things are these R22 lab abled inductors uh are what protrude through here those can withstand very high heat it's basically coiled wire in there and kind of like a fite core on a camera charger this is the thermal pad for the capacitor Bank vram thermal pads one's missing that's because it's still on the module and then these other thermal pads here for the rest of the components around the board including the uh vram vrm which was confusing to figure out the organization of letter in my head in part two we'll build this into a hybrid card that means we're going be mounting a liquid cooler to it again going to try and keep keep the back plate the base plate and mount this to the base plate if it does not work we'll go like this and and figure out a solution for the rest of it just with copper and things that we have around uh and then we've got some copper shims if we need them as well and the event that the GPU is not tall enough to exceed the height of the base plates sort of recessed bracket so that's it as always patreon link the postal video make sure you subscribe so you can see part two where we build it up as I've made clear in the past these videos are not tutorials don't tear down your card based on these videos or build one up necessarily now once we get to the results we can show you how well normally liquid works we'll see if that it Remains the case here it was the case with a 1080 the 1060 and the rx480 and I should imagine would remain the case here it's just depends on how difficult it is to mount the liquid cooler to it but when we see these reduced thermals which really should happen we normally go down to sub 20° C so you're somewhere in the uh 16 C to 20 C range that's a Delta value so you added in with ambient to maybe 20 Celsius you're in the 40s versus uh adding with ambient in the 80s with the reference cooler so pretty significant difference and it does remove the issue of thermal throttling at certain thresholds depending on the cards like 85 86 Celsius for this card it'll throttle its clock you lose some performance you have some frame uh reduction in the 1% .1% lows area but that's all stuff we'll talk about in the last video so thank you for watching as I said a moment ago links description below patreon link the postal video all that stuff and thank you to Sam for letting us borrow this card I'll see you all next time that'shey everyone we're back with another hybrid build this time with the Titan X so we're going to be tearing this thing down I've already done the thermal tests in part three of this video we'll look at the thermal results of the non- torn down version that' be this one versus the hybrid version that we're creating ourselves using this EVGA hybrid kit we have a couple of these available and basically just try and mod them onto the cards ourselves if you haven't seen that before so the goal here is to see how much better we can make the thermals cuz they're pretty high as is stock and to that end can we further increase the overclock with the 1080 we got an extra 100 MHz out of this thing on the 1080 we'll see if we can replicate that here before getting to that this content is brought to you by iy power and their new element gaming PC which has Arc LED fans and underglow lighting with a large tempered glass side window and this video is also brought to you by Sam who's one of our viewers and Loan this to us while we were in England I was able to pick it up and bring it back home for about a week so we've got some time to do a hybrid build and see how it works and that's about it let's get into this thing so first of all this video we're going to take this apart after the tear down we'll build it back up into a hybrid card hopefully and uh then part three we'll have the results as normally so we can see the thermal impact and all that stuff this is a new toolkit this is not a sponsored toolkit just a new one uh so we've got a lot of things here I haven't quite used them yet but let's see okay just like the 1080 this uses a ton of really tiny annoying screws uh that are very easily broken at the shaft so we'll have to try and avoid that this time because it's not my card so I have to care more about it so last few cards gave us a FSE sense of hope and that the 1060 was a pretty easy hybrid build other than the actual building part but the the tear down was pretty easy and this one it looks like we've got a million screws to deal with uh so got to keep better track of them where they go not quite sure yet depends how this build goes uh will that will dictate whether or not this thing gets rebuilt as the original card or if it gets uh left as a hybrid card and Sam continues to use it that way it just depends on if if it's mountable in a case because as we've done in the past sometimes the hybrid versions have tubes running out where the expansion slot is that's fine for an open air bench just for testing and validation but obviously does not work for uh home use okay so there's part of the back plate that's the same as the 1080 nothing special here at all it look there's a thermal pad it looks like wow that's a very the hell is that it's like cloth anyway thermal pad uh covering up part of the card you can take that off if you wanted to the idea is to allow better air flow if you were to put these in s but we haven't really tested to see if that is how it works obviously power headers here six pin eight pin solder points here and then on this part we've got some solder points that are unused for an eight pin if you wanted out this side that's obviously not the case here though uh and then we can see the vrm is going to be where this is on the other side of the car uh and we'll we'll look at that once we take the full thing apart okay so there's the second half of the back plate really just it's just a cheap back plate it's really more meant for aesthetic reasons uh than anything else does does some level of structural support with all those screws but very tiny screws in some uh cases and those break easily when you're reassembling if not careful as we've shown in the previous video uh so expansion slot cover thing is still mounted that's got screws on that side this has loosened the heat sink which uses a vapor chamber on this particular card and a blower fan which is over here obviously see that right there so now we've got to get into the underside of the shroud and I'm remembering what a nightmare the 1080 was to take apart so we've got these tiny things which I believe believe this will fit over yeah so we can use this learn learn that from the 1080 video after uh trying to use pliers to take them off uh so we can use that to take those off I don't remember what order these come out uh but doesn't really doesn't really matter all that much uh let's let's get the rest of the expansion cover off we don't need that on there all right so that simplifies things I think it's time to start taking the Shroud apart okay this thing's not held on by adhesive I remember that from last time thought it was held on by adhesive and then snap ours in half okay so what will come apart and what won't all right there goes that there's the back half of the Shroud uh mostly no function except one important function these is actually pretty Advanced comparatively heat sink we'll talk about that in a minute but uh these things uh as you can see they go back in like that the windows under the Shroud obviously the main purpose of these functionally outside of the Aesthetics part is to guide air flow from this so the window keeps it trapped under there uh so you don't have you don't have air evacuating from the system before it fully goes through the entire what looks to be aluminum heat sink so aluminum heat sink here this is actually loose I can take it out in a minute the air comes in uh the front blows through comes out the back and that's exactly what you want it to do there's the cool it's a vapor chamber setup no heat pipes but Vapor chamber in this instance uh is going to be better than a heat pipe setup anyway just based on the the design of the heat sink and the cooler So that obviously now it's there your air comes in here this is the cold plate I'm not positive if it's uh just like a nickel plated copper or if it's just straight aluminum but um sometimes they they'll Nickel Plate it although that doesn't make a lot of sense for something you don't see because the main point of nickel plating is is for looks not for thermals and obviously there's no exposed copper under the paste so that instantly answers part of that okay so here's the part here's the GPU itself uh the GPU is the shiny bit that's branded as Nvidia made in Taiwan uh it is GPU GP 102-400 so GP just quick refresh gp102 that is the actual GPU Titan X is not the GPU Titan X is the video card gp102 is the GPU -400 is uh its version of that GPU just like 104 has and 106 have 400 200 variants depending on what you're looking at A1 is the revision uh a in the industry means that it is a consumer model as opposed to X which is an internal tested model and Nvidia branding around it you've got those super tiny capacitors on the substrate green bits the substrate and then this metal plate is probably just for for structural uh Integrity so that's the GPU ideally we leave the back plate or I should say the base plate not the back plate ideally we leave the base plate on here uh and then Mount the cooler to that as that would help us continue to cool the vram and vrm without requiring additional uh copper to be mounted to the the card which is kind of a pain to do and not always effective um but uh we'll see how this goes we'll take take apart the rest first and look at it so we're going to take apart the base plate just to at least look at the card if nothing else okay this is the other side of the Shroud goes over here helps direct air flow with this uh and then that is the LED power so this cable is covered in uh electrical tape here and connects to the LED and that's really it that's all that does so let's let's get all this out of the way if it were my card just pull on it pull on it until it comes off okay so let's go ahead and start taking apart the underside so again the the objective would be to leave this base plate on here for thermal reasons we are going to take it off just to look at the card and then uh hopefully it doesn't have too much complexity to just get back on there and leave it there with the cooler the only reason that wouldn't work is if the like with the uh what was it the 1060 if we have an issue where that's just not going to fit because it's too wide uh in that case then we we just take it off and run the tests and uh maybe put some aftermarket vrm and VM every when this happened last time oh oh as that seems to happen with the 1080 and Titan X specifically so that's that's good that's out that's out now we can we can ignore that to do like last time just unscrew most of the way and then leave okay that was a pain in the ass here we go we've got vram uh modules let's pull it this way so for the board some missing circuitry over here couple missing spots that have not been filled uh probably for cost reasons just didn't need it or something like that and GPU proper vram so 2 4 6 8 10 12 of those it is 12 gigabytes so that means they're 1 gbyte modules or 8 gigabits is normally how they are actually listed and sold and these are made by Micron as one would expect so this is gddr5x as with the 1080 and Micron is the only current known manufacturer of gddr5x so that's what the memory is this is the vrm mosfets uh capacitor bank and it looks like it is a is that a two-phase memory it's either a two or three-phase memory vrm and then uh seven or eight phase core vrm depending on what's going on the rest of the board um so pretty extensive vrm setup based on what we saw with the 1080 but still not sure how far you'd get on that if you were an extreme overclock or something like that but for our purposes this is just fine because we're not going to be bypassing any electrical restrictions or shorting shuns and things like that so that's the setup of the board I think that pretty much covers all the core stuff this is the fan or we've got a fan and an LED header that's what these are that's for the fan is pwm controlled by the needs of the GPU based on temperature LED header pretty simple so that's that's the basics of the board as far as cooling already talked about the vapor chamber setup that's what this is and this is the rest of the cooling solution so you've got the fan here that's screwed in through the underside that's what this screw is here and there's only only two more probably under this pad as well this pad is covering the vrm so you can even see the imprint there of the mosfets the inductors or the chokes which is what these things are these R22 lab abled inductors uh are what protrude through here those can withstand very high heat it's basically coiled wire in there and kind of like a fite core on a camera charger this is the thermal pad for the capacitor Bank vram thermal pads one's missing that's because it's still on the module and then these other thermal pads here for the rest of the components around the board including the uh vram vrm which was confusing to figure out the organization of letter in my head in part two we'll build this into a hybrid card that means we're going be mounting a liquid cooler to it again going to try and keep keep the back plate the base plate and mount this to the base plate if it does not work we'll go like this and and figure out a solution for the rest of it just with copper and things that we have around uh and then we've got some copper shims if we need them as well and the event that the GPU is not tall enough to exceed the height of the base plates sort of recessed bracket so that's it as always patreon link the postal video make sure you subscribe so you can see part two where we build it up as I've made clear in the past these videos are not tutorials don't tear down your card based on these videos or build one up necessarily now once we get to the results we can show you how well normally liquid works we'll see if that it Remains the case here it was the case with a 1080 the 1060 and the rx480 and I should imagine would remain the case here it's just depends on how difficult it is to mount the liquid cooler to it but when we see these reduced thermals which really should happen we normally go down to sub 20° C so you're somewhere in the uh 16 C to 20 C range that's a Delta value so you added in with ambient to maybe 20 Celsius you're in the 40s versus uh adding with ambient in the 80s with the reference cooler so pretty significant difference and it does remove the issue of thermal throttling at certain thresholds depending on the cards like 85 86 Celsius for this card it'll throttle its clock you lose some performance you have some frame uh reduction in the 1% .1% lows area but that's all stuff we'll talk about in the last video so thank you for watching as I said a moment ago links description below patreon link the postal video all that stuff and thank you to Sam for letting us borrow this card I'll see you all next time that's\n"