**Analyzing the MSI 1080 TI PCB**

The MSI 1080 TI PCB is an interesting piece of hardware that requires careful analysis to understand its design and functionality. As we begin our examination, it becomes clear that this card is no ordinary GPU. The first notable feature is the presence of a slight indent on the surface, which makes contact with the mosfets. This suggests that the designers have taken care to ensure a secure connection between these components.

Upon closer inspection, we notice that the pads on either side of the PCB are in contact with each other. These pads make contact with the components on the opposite side of the board, indicating that the designers have chosen a design that allows for maximum airflow and heat dissipation. The lack of any additional components or thermal pads on this side of the board is particularly noteworthy, as it suggests that the designers have prioritized simplicity and efficiency.

Moving on to the base plate, we find an interesting design feature - a thick aluminum plate that separates the VRM from the rest of the board. This isolation is likely intended to mitigate the high temperatures generated by the mosfets, which are known for their ability to handle high voltages and heat loads. The use of nickel-plated fins on the backside of this plate suggests an effort to improve thermal conductivity and reduce the risk of overheating.

The other side of the base plate is where things get really interesting. A piece of aluminum with a large, open area makes contact with the VRAM module. This design choice appears to be inspired by the MSI Titan XP card, which features a similar aluminum backplate with a thermal pad. The absence of this pad on the 1080 TI PCB suggests that the designers have opted for a simpler solution, while still maintaining the desired thermal performance.

**GPU and RAM**

Underneath the base plate, we find the GPU - a standard GP102-350 part, similar to those used in Founders Edition cards. The absence of any unusual components or design features makes this clear. Moving on to the RAM, we see a pair of DDR5 modules, which are likely intended for memory bandwidth and latency optimization.

**Thermal Testing**

As part of our testing process, we'll be performing thermal measurements to evaluate the performance of this card under various load conditions. This will involve installing thermal couples on both the GPU and VRM, as well as measuring temperatures in other key areas of the board. We're particularly interested in comparing these results to those from our existing testing protocols, which should provide valuable insights into the design's thermal characteristics.

**Comparative Metrics**

Our goal is to gather comprehensive data on this card's performance, including FPS, temperature, and power consumption. To achieve this, we'll be performing extensive testing, including running benchmarking software and measuring temperatures using specialized equipment. We're also interested in collecting comparative metrics from other cards, such as the EVJ and Asus models, to provide a more nuanced understanding of the design's strengths and weaknesses.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, our analysis of the MSI 1080 TI PCB has revealed a complex design with both innovative features and questionable choices. The isolation of the base plate and use of thermal pads on either side are particularly noteworthy, while the simplification of the VRM design may raise questions about the card's overall performance under load conditions. As we continue our testing process, we'll be working to uncover more answers about this intriguing piece of hardware.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone today we're tearing down an MSI 1080 TI gaming X which I have right here so this is the new TI model it's still a twin frozer cooler but there's a difference here versus the 1080 gaming X the non-ti this heat sink is a whole lot fatter so the aluminum fins here are a lot wider in both directions and it is a uh it will consume more space on the board and in the expansion slots now for comparison I have here A 390x version uh of msi's cooler from a couple Generations ago in design it's a bit different on the face of things but it is similarly fat so this is not the first time MSI has gone this direction we're going to be taking the gaming X apart the 1080 TI I should say uh and a few things are going to be done with this one how good is the cooler implementation and two we're going to be sending over PCB shots to build Zoid who will be doing a PCB and vrm Analysis for us then we'll be uploading that on our Channel shortly so stay tuned for that uh so let's get started the gaming X I should say 108ti gaming X cuz they're all gaming X is when it'si uh the 1080 TI gaming a is the same setup as all the other ones screws in the back plate for in the center for securing the heat sink these are spring tension screws uh and then we shouldn't really have to mess with a whole lot else before getting to the tear down this is brought to you by our patreon backers you can go to patreon.com Gamers Nexus if you'd like to help us out with video videos like this one and build zoids and all the others because that funding helps us produce more content so patreon.com Gamers Nexus if you'd like to help out there and a side note there we have a new merch store and anyone who is a current patreon backer of the dollar amounts to find on the page I have probably reached out to you with a shirt offer if you don't already have one so keep an eye on your inboxes or message me if not let's get to it so this thing Philip screws all over the backside we have stupid star screws in the Shroud fortunately these are not relevant to what we're doing today we do not need to remove these I don't think anyway I believe removing these will basically pull out that led plate so those aren't important not Mission critical but they are there so it's worth pointing out if you wanted to take the entire thing apart to paint it or something you would need those uh also of note GeForce GTX is on all these cards now so I'm not sure if that's an Nvidia agreement of some kind um let's go ahead and start with the dismantling process I have enough to loosen things no okay so with this card in order to sometimes you can just loosen these four and get the heat sink off and then the rest are just for retention on the back plate this one we will actually have to remove all of these as well because uh actually this screw down straights it pretty clearly that uh that longer screw length means we're going through the back plate which is fairly thick actually this time through the PCB and then into to the base plate and the base plate is of course what actually is cooling things like the vrms and uh and the mosfets and all that stuff all the different parts of the vrm now one thing here part of this project is so we can do thermal analysis because we're going to be mounting thermal couples to the mosfets and the PCB backside again like we've been doing the last couple of cards now that will allow us to see not only how well does the GPU cool because that's kind of important but not as much as it used to be but how well does the vrm cool uh which is something we've become very interested in in the last uh year or so two four 5 7 9 11 plus four so 15 15 screws for the backside 11 of them are retention screws all right does it have thermal pads on it question number one no it has bumpers on it these are rubber bumpers to offset height does it actually contact anything that is the question no the answer is no there's no contact so that's questionable yeah uh so this back plate is for looks um fortunately there's a bit of dissipation area here to get rid of some of the heat on the backside and the backside does get really hot on these things for the most part so depending on how efficiently the front side is cooled which we'll soon find out um we've even got some caps on the back side over here so depending on how things go over on the front side this could potentially trap heat and increase temperature on the back side of the PCB but that's not always the case depends on the rest of the coolant solution so we will find that out for our full review and uh not spec further just keep in mind you'll want to check back for the full review to see how the back plate Works cuz I'll do AB testing with it on and with it off and we'll have a probe on the backside to actually measure the backside temperatures CU a back plate for a GPU doesn't really affect a GPU core temperature that's not the point of it it would affect if anything the backside temperature cuz that's where it is now we have to take out the screws for the I/O the expansion mount and put those in the bottom right corner there are three of these Phillips and then two for DVID oh excuse me four Phillips and two for DVID these are 5 mm what I miss oh the top side screws that's different okay so this is a little different from what we normally see they have decided to retain the iio cover with screws on the top side oops that's a little too small rather than the uh the backside which is what we normally see okay that's really interesting okay so this swings out like a door iio or expansion cover there and interestingly this thing sweeps over for a support bar which just seems really like a whole lot of of material to hold this thing on so that's it's a bit different from normally but I suppose it's partly because of how massive this card is they probably need the support anywhere they can get it to make sure it's not going to rip things off the board when you mount it um I'm going to leave the card flat and see if we can pull this off we can and we're going to get caught by the cables which there's one over here for the LED it looks like I'll know in a second and then there are two over here no that was a well we'll see I'll find out okay so I got that off now that the PCB is exposed uh do a tap on the wrist strap over here um so what we've got actually this is kind of interesting looking I'm I'm excited to test this one thermally um couple things here one we have two fan headers I believe we'll find out and a uh a power header over here which is probably for the LEDs and actually how this would not be hard to verify where's this going this cable is H is it going to the LED this cable goes to the LED okay so easily verified so this cable here right there uh that four pin despite being a four pin is going to the LEDs right here the MSI name plate and then this cable definitely goes to the fans that connects over here this is another power cable it's only black and red so where does that go might be another LED or something not too important right now um so for the the cooling design clearly we have a massive aluminum heat sink there's your cold plate I would guess uh with 99% confidence this is nickel plated copper and and interestingly that's screwed in to what looks like a retention bracket for the rest of the heat sink let's see let's see what that actually does if this is held on by screws I'm not going to be impressed but I don't think it is okay so it's more than screws the hell are those for it is soldered to the heat pipes so that's good and it's it looks like it's soldered which is why I'm confused it looks like it's soldered to the uh aluminum FS as well what's the point of that yeah not sure what the point of that is but okay we've got our thermal pads which are actually clearly making contact here so a few things here this is your set of inductors or your chokes has a really fat thermal pad on it it looks like a maybe a 2 mm one of the biggest ones I've seen on a video card looks like 2 mm I think that is a 2 mm theral pad it looks like so 2 millim for jokes and inductors uh or same thing uh capacitor Banks right here that is not I believe that is not receiving direct contact instead they have a channel here Mill out of the heat sink fins so you can see this this part right here is actually taller than this part nothing special with the fins they're not uh L-shaped or anything like that just fins so these are cooled by air exclusively does that contact what is actually we can just look at it and see yes does it yeah that makes contact so there's a slight indent so those make contact to this that would be kind of dumb if they didn't but it would also not be the first time we've seen that in the past year uh these pads contact the mosfets which there are a million of them build Zoid again will analyze for us and then these two over here are contacting uh the components on this side with anything else nothing else special going on so I throw these two screws back in and then we'll pull off the rest of the base plate okay so base Plate's pretty interesting on this we have this piece which is contacting the vram and so actually will go like Orient like that didn't do what I wanted as you can see pads pads pads pads with the one missing vram module for uh uh Titan XP did they put a pad in that slot come on look at this MSI what are you doing I don't know if they do they make a Titan XP card with this design if they do then what they've done is pull the design uh without replacing a piece that's possible actually do they let's look it up no I don't think they make one I don't think they make one of these for a uh Titan X card so what that means is is they've stuck an extra thermal pad on there which is not detrimental to your performance but is pointless so it just seems kind of silly um well anyway extra Thal pad not withstanding what we have is a set of DDR or gddr5x as you would expect we'll clean that off but it is the same GPU as all the other 1080 TI and some blank board space up here it is a larger board most of that size is not for components as much as it is for the massive fans which I think are 90mm fans actually we can find that out really quickly too 100 mm fans so they're using 100 mm fans which does require extra height that's really the main reason for it um we'll uncover these components for build Zoid shortly and other than that it is what you would expect for a 108ti PCB um so the interesting points here this is interesting they have decided to make a thick what looks like aluminum back or base plate that is separated physically from the vrms now this I would suspect would isolate to some extent the temperature generated by this half of the board and this half of the board this half being much much higher potential to generate a whole hell of a lot of heat because that's what mosfets do and they can also tolerate a lot more heat so that's interesting this side then is uh taken care of by this part of the base plate which is nickel plated and this part of the base plate contacts VI have thermal pads for the most part and then is soldered it looks like to the aluminum fins on the heat sink at which point you know how the cooling Works uh so that's for the final piece here just clean this off and then we'll uh we be able to close up shop liquidy thermal paste okay good enough there's your GPU clean it up more later maybe same GP 102 350 part as on the founders Edition card that should not surprise anyone at this point but it's worth showing it uh so all right that's the MSI card now at this point what's left is basically just doing the the testing so we got to do all the FPS testing stuff like that but uh of import here we've got some thermal testing to do without the stock setup so that would be with our thermal couples installed we have a standardized set of everything we do for that one addition here I'm probably going to try mounting a thermal couple to one of these uh vram modules not sure if I'm going to do that yet but that's something I want to do because this is really interesting to me how they've isolated it of course we need comparative metrics and I wanted to do this anyway so I'll probably start running these uh retroactively on a couple cards or maybe just work on it with the evj and the Asus cards coming in going forward either way I'm hoping to have some vrm measurements this time in addition to fet temperature measurements for the mosfets and the vrm and backside PCB measurements which are really just to validate that the the back plate is not complete garbage so we'll have all of that sending this photos of this off to build Zoid he'll do the vrm and power analysis so we should have pretty full coverage of this card for you if you're interested in that subscribe for more as always you can go to patreon.com Gamers Nexus to help us out directly or Gamers nexus.net for the site and full coverage as always thank you for watching I'll see you all next timehey everyone today we're tearing down an MSI 1080 TI gaming X which I have right here so this is the new TI model it's still a twin frozer cooler but there's a difference here versus the 1080 gaming X the non-ti this heat sink is a whole lot fatter so the aluminum fins here are a lot wider in both directions and it is a uh it will consume more space on the board and in the expansion slots now for comparison I have here A 390x version uh of msi's cooler from a couple Generations ago in design it's a bit different on the face of things but it is similarly fat so this is not the first time MSI has gone this direction we're going to be taking the gaming X apart the 1080 TI I should say uh and a few things are going to be done with this one how good is the cooler implementation and two we're going to be sending over PCB shots to build Zoid who will be doing a PCB and vrm Analysis for us then we'll be uploading that on our Channel shortly so stay tuned for that uh so let's get started the gaming X I should say 108ti gaming X cuz they're all gaming X is when it'si uh the 1080 TI gaming a is the same setup as all the other ones screws in the back plate for in the center for securing the heat sink these are spring tension screws uh and then we shouldn't really have to mess with a whole lot else before getting to the tear down this is brought to you by our patreon backers you can go to patreon.com Gamers Nexus if you'd like to help us out with video videos like this one and build zoids and all the others because that funding helps us produce more content so patreon.com Gamers Nexus if you'd like to help out there and a side note there we have a new merch store and anyone who is a current patreon backer of the dollar amounts to find on the page I have probably reached out to you with a shirt offer if you don't already have one so keep an eye on your inboxes or message me if not let's get to it so this thing Philip screws all over the backside we have stupid star screws in the Shroud fortunately these are not relevant to what we're doing today we do not need to remove these I don't think anyway I believe removing these will basically pull out that led plate so those aren't important not Mission critical but they are there so it's worth pointing out if you wanted to take the entire thing apart to paint it or something you would need those uh also of note GeForce GTX is on all these cards now so I'm not sure if that's an Nvidia agreement of some kind um let's go ahead and start with the dismantling process I have enough to loosen things no okay so with this card in order to sometimes you can just loosen these four and get the heat sink off and then the rest are just for retention on the back plate this one we will actually have to remove all of these as well because uh actually this screw down straights it pretty clearly that uh that longer screw length means we're going through the back plate which is fairly thick actually this time through the PCB and then into to the base plate and the base plate is of course what actually is cooling things like the vrms and uh and the mosfets and all that stuff all the different parts of the vrm now one thing here part of this project is so we can do thermal analysis because we're going to be mounting thermal couples to the mosfets and the PCB backside again like we've been doing the last couple of cards now that will allow us to see not only how well does the GPU cool because that's kind of important but not as much as it used to be but how well does the vrm cool uh which is something we've become very interested in in the last uh year or so two four 5 7 9 11 plus four so 15 15 screws for the backside 11 of them are retention screws all right does it have thermal pads on it question number one no it has bumpers on it these are rubber bumpers to offset height does it actually contact anything that is the question no the answer is no there's no contact so that's questionable yeah uh so this back plate is for looks um fortunately there's a bit of dissipation area here to get rid of some of the heat on the backside and the backside does get really hot on these things for the most part so depending on how efficiently the front side is cooled which we'll soon find out um we've even got some caps on the back side over here so depending on how things go over on the front side this could potentially trap heat and increase temperature on the back side of the PCB but that's not always the case depends on the rest of the coolant solution so we will find that out for our full review and uh not spec further just keep in mind you'll want to check back for the full review to see how the back plate Works cuz I'll do AB testing with it on and with it off and we'll have a probe on the backside to actually measure the backside temperatures CU a back plate for a GPU doesn't really affect a GPU core temperature that's not the point of it it would affect if anything the backside temperature cuz that's where it is now we have to take out the screws for the I/O the expansion mount and put those in the bottom right corner there are three of these Phillips and then two for DVID oh excuse me four Phillips and two for DVID these are 5 mm what I miss oh the top side screws that's different okay so this is a little different from what we normally see they have decided to retain the iio cover with screws on the top side oops that's a little too small rather than the uh the backside which is what we normally see okay that's really interesting okay so this swings out like a door iio or expansion cover there and interestingly this thing sweeps over for a support bar which just seems really like a whole lot of of material to hold this thing on so that's it's a bit different from normally but I suppose it's partly because of how massive this card is they probably need the support anywhere they can get it to make sure it's not going to rip things off the board when you mount it um I'm going to leave the card flat and see if we can pull this off we can and we're going to get caught by the cables which there's one over here for the LED it looks like I'll know in a second and then there are two over here no that was a well we'll see I'll find out okay so I got that off now that the PCB is exposed uh do a tap on the wrist strap over here um so what we've got actually this is kind of interesting looking I'm I'm excited to test this one thermally um couple things here one we have two fan headers I believe we'll find out and a uh a power header over here which is probably for the LEDs and actually how this would not be hard to verify where's this going this cable is H is it going to the LED this cable goes to the LED okay so easily verified so this cable here right there uh that four pin despite being a four pin is going to the LEDs right here the MSI name plate and then this cable definitely goes to the fans that connects over here this is another power cable it's only black and red so where does that go might be another LED or something not too important right now um so for the the cooling design clearly we have a massive aluminum heat sink there's your cold plate I would guess uh with 99% confidence this is nickel plated copper and and interestingly that's screwed in to what looks like a retention bracket for the rest of the heat sink let's see let's see what that actually does if this is held on by screws I'm not going to be impressed but I don't think it is okay so it's more than screws the hell are those for it is soldered to the heat pipes so that's good and it's it looks like it's soldered which is why I'm confused it looks like it's soldered to the uh aluminum FS as well what's the point of that yeah not sure what the point of that is but okay we've got our thermal pads which are actually clearly making contact here so a few things here this is your set of inductors or your chokes has a really fat thermal pad on it it looks like a maybe a 2 mm one of the biggest ones I've seen on a video card looks like 2 mm I think that is a 2 mm theral pad it looks like so 2 millim for jokes and inductors uh or same thing uh capacitor Banks right here that is not I believe that is not receiving direct contact instead they have a channel here Mill out of the heat sink fins so you can see this this part right here is actually taller than this part nothing special with the fins they're not uh L-shaped or anything like that just fins so these are cooled by air exclusively does that contact what is actually we can just look at it and see yes does it yeah that makes contact so there's a slight indent so those make contact to this that would be kind of dumb if they didn't but it would also not be the first time we've seen that in the past year uh these pads contact the mosfets which there are a million of them build Zoid again will analyze for us and then these two over here are contacting uh the components on this side with anything else nothing else special going on so I throw these two screws back in and then we'll pull off the rest of the base plate okay so base Plate's pretty interesting on this we have this piece which is contacting the vram and so actually will go like Orient like that didn't do what I wanted as you can see pads pads pads pads with the one missing vram module for uh uh Titan XP did they put a pad in that slot come on look at this MSI what are you doing I don't know if they do they make a Titan XP card with this design if they do then what they've done is pull the design uh without replacing a piece that's possible actually do they let's look it up no I don't think they make one I don't think they make one of these for a uh Titan X card so what that means is is they've stuck an extra thermal pad on there which is not detrimental to your performance but is pointless so it just seems kind of silly um well anyway extra Thal pad not withstanding what we have is a set of DDR or gddr5x as you would expect we'll clean that off but it is the same GPU as all the other 1080 TI and some blank board space up here it is a larger board most of that size is not for components as much as it is for the massive fans which I think are 90mm fans actually we can find that out really quickly too 100 mm fans so they're using 100 mm fans which does require extra height that's really the main reason for it um we'll uncover these components for build Zoid shortly and other than that it is what you would expect for a 108ti PCB um so the interesting points here this is interesting they have decided to make a thick what looks like aluminum back or base plate that is separated physically from the vrms now this I would suspect would isolate to some extent the temperature generated by this half of the board and this half of the board this half being much much higher potential to generate a whole hell of a lot of heat because that's what mosfets do and they can also tolerate a lot more heat so that's interesting this side then is uh taken care of by this part of the base plate which is nickel plated and this part of the base plate contacts VI have thermal pads for the most part and then is soldered it looks like to the aluminum fins on the heat sink at which point you know how the cooling Works uh so that's for the final piece here just clean this off and then we'll uh we be able to close up shop liquidy thermal paste okay good enough there's your GPU clean it up more later maybe same GP 102 350 part as on the founders Edition card that should not surprise anyone at this point but it's worth showing it uh so all right that's the MSI card now at this point what's left is basically just doing the the testing so we got to do all the FPS testing stuff like that but uh of import here we've got some thermal testing to do without the stock setup so that would be with our thermal couples installed we have a standardized set of everything we do for that one addition here I'm probably going to try mounting a thermal couple to one of these uh vram modules not sure if I'm going to do that yet but that's something I want to do because this is really interesting to me how they've isolated it of course we need comparative metrics and I wanted to do this anyway so I'll probably start running these uh retroactively on a couple cards or maybe just work on it with the evj and the Asus cards coming in going forward either way I'm hoping to have some vrm measurements this time in addition to fet temperature measurements for the mosfets and the vrm and backside PCB measurements which are really just to validate that the the back plate is not complete garbage so we'll have all of that sending this photos of this off to build Zoid he'll do the vrm and power analysis so we should have pretty full coverage of this card for you if you're interested in that subscribe for more as always you can go to patreon.com Gamers Nexus to help us out directly or Gamers nexus.net for the site and full coverage as always thank you for watching I'll see you all next time\n"