**Tearing Down the AMD RX 480**

We decided to tear down the AMD RX 480, one of the most popular graphics cards on the market. As we took apart the card, it became apparent that the design was quite straightforward, with a simple layout and minimal components. One thing that stood out immediately was the lack of thermal paste between the GPU die and the heat sink. This hole was already visible to the naked eye, and our initial thoughts were that it wouldn't provide sufficient cooling for the GPU.

Upon closer inspection, we realized that the thermal paste was not actually present in this particular instance. Instead, the heat sink seemed to be glued directly to the GPU die, which raised some concerns about breathability and airflow. We also noticed a small plastic bezel around the hole, which seemed to be a deliberate design choice rather than a manufacturing defect.

As we continued to examine the card, it became clear that the VRM (Voltage Regulator Module) components were not directly cooled by air. Instead, they relied on a separate cooling system that was powered by the fan. The fan itself was relatively small, but its airflow was sufficient to cool the VRM components. We also noticed that the card had a six-phase VRM setup, which was more efficient than some of the older designs.

One of the most interesting aspects of the RX 480 was the lack of any major secrets or hidden compartments. The solder points for the six-pin power header were exposed and easily accessible, but there were no super secret extra solder points that would have indicated a custom PCB design by AIB partners. This made it relatively easy to inspect the card's internal components without having to disassemble it further.

As we delved deeper into the card's layout, we discovered some interesting details about its design and functionality. The thermal pad was specifically designed to cool the VRM components, which were cooled entirely by air. This was in contrast to some of the older designs, which relied on liquid cooling or more complex heat sinks. We also noticed that the logic board had a small heatsink attached to it, which helped to dissipate heat away from the GPU.

The final part of our tear-down showed us what happened when we tried to clean off the thermal paste and examine the die closely. The results were interesting, with a shiny mirrored piece of silicon revealing no branding or markings on this particular model. However, the thermal pads were designed to cool both the VRM components and the logic board.

**Conclusion**

Our tear-down of the AMD RX 480 was a relatively straightforward process, with minimal surprises along the way. The card's design was efficient and well-optimized, with a focus on minimizing costs while maintaining performance. As we prepared to proceed with the next part of this series – which will involve installing these graphics cards in various systems – it became clear that we had our work cut out for us.

**Compatibility Issues Ahead**

As we moved on to the next phase of this project, we realized that compatibility issues would be a major challenge. The RX 480 used a unique mounting system that was designed specifically for its particular design and functionality. As such, it was unlikely to fit with other graphics cards or systems that had different mounting requirements.

This presented a problem, as some of the graphics cards we wanted to try were incompatible with the RX 480's mounting system. We would have to get creative in order to make them work together, which raised our expectations for this particular project. Would we be able to overcome these challenges and create something truly remarkable? Only time would tell.

**Next Steps**

With our understanding of the RX 480's design and functionality, we were now ready to proceed with the next phase of this series. We had a lot of work ahead of us, but we were confident that our skills and experience would serve us well in overcoming the challenges that lay ahead. As always, we will be documenting every step of this process, from the installation of the graphics cards to any noise testing or benchmarking we may do.

If you'd like to support our efforts directly, please consider visiting our Patreon page. We also have an article link in the description below for a review of the RX 480 on this channel – as well as a noise comparison test that will help us understand how well the VRM blower fan performs at different speeds.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone we're back with another hybrid project This Time starring the rx480 so we just reviewed this thing the review is already on the Channel I want to put it underw or at least under intense air and see if we can get it to overclock further or do something interesting anyway uh so first of all this coverage is brought to you by origin PC and their new origin Kronos which is a customizable and upgradeable PC now shipping with the rx480 so our original hybrid project star the GTX 1080 we put it with an EVGA hybrid cooler which is one of these and I actually I have a box of these now from ACH who makes them so I decided we're going to try and put another one of these on but this time the rx480 I don't think the mounting will fit actually I'm positive it won't fit but we're going to see if we can either make it fit or use one of these so I bought these out of pocket this is not a sponsorship uh I don't even know what these are actually they're this is the accelero mono plus so this is a single fan uh basically it mounts on top of the GPU kind of like that just straight on top of the GPU so it's it's effectively putting a CPU Cooler on a video card it's a little insane the one I want to try is this one which is the accelero hybrid uh that's for a 120 mm fan I bought these vrm copper heat sinks in case we need them or vram uh rather so we can put those on the memory modules if we need them if if none of this other Equipment Works then as a backup I bought one of these uh accelero twin turbos which is just a dual fan dual blower fan so the reason I got so many of these is because this is a new uh it's it's got a couple of new things first of all the GPU itself which is the Polaris 10 chip does have a smaller Z height than previous AMD chips I think it's 1.5 millim now and it used to be 1.9 mm so that difference does mean there may be some clearance issues also the actual mounting is very similar to the R9 380 and also very similar to the I think the 370 but it's not identical so hopefully one of these will work if not I also have an ndxt Kraken cooler uh if I wanted to use that um that's just a uh we've got the the G10 and a kraken cooler so if I wanted to go that route I would have to get a copper shim and put it between the C plate and the GPU itself so we're going to try and avoid that and hopefully the mounting for one of these kits will work but first we have to disable or disable but first we have to disassemble the video card so that's what we're going to do in this part one video is take it apart and I've got some tools for the job here so let's just uh let's start pulling it apart and see what we got uh so first off just looking at it briefly this is got a couple of it looks like Allen or hex heads uh so there Allen key screws holding this cover on and I think that's just a cover I I believe it will uh pull off with the rest of the the Shroud I don't think we have to actually remove that cover it's similar to The Fury X in that way we got a couple screws on the back which are obviously holding the Shroud to the PCB and then these screws over here are holding probably the heat sink with the cold plate on top of the GPU that's pretty standard anyway so first I'm going to try and take uh just the cover off and see if we can see under there so that's a 3.5 that's too small doesn't look like it's quite right no that's too small uh this is going to be way too big I've got these crappy tools some of you probably remember my terrible multi-tool that is used uh used for travel but we'll see it's like a middle finger that's too small obviously none of these uh metric ones fit I don't know if these are imperial or if it's just a proprietary size but it's not any metric size as I have so we're going to try and work around this cuz I don't have Imperial Allen keys that sides we're just going to go ahead and start removing the uh the Shroud from the PCB oh wait you know what I should do is okay so I'm actually going to Mark these because I just realized there's a lot of different screw sizes so we're going to do the uh classic quick and dirty video card BL fan one two okay all right so let's get back to pulling this thing apart okay all right so that was a lot simpler than the GTX 1080 already but we're not really anywhere yet so we haven't made progress yet uh I can see that the PCB is coming off a bit so that does mean that the screws we just took off were the ones securing the the Shroud at least if not the heat sink definitely the shroud to the PCB so what's holding us now is it looks like the expansion slot for sure there's some tiny screws here that I'm almost positive are holding in the blower fan to the socket which you can actually see through this cutout it's kind of unique I'm not sure what the sort of acoustic and temperature properties are of having this cutout I'm curious to find out I'll talk to AMD about that but these almost certainly hold that fan in uh so we're left with the expansion slot and then there's these tiny screws up here too which look like they may just hold an embellishment plate to the the base plate but we'll find out soon I suppose so let's go ahead and just take this expansion slot apart there's there's two screws here and there's obviously going to be screws coming through the PCB once we get in there but those are accessed from the other side oh there's one more tiny one these are all uh these are pretty much the same size Philips head but the screws themselves are different sizes so you will want to do what we're doing and separate these maybe draw it out on a paper first uh because it's there's a couple different screws and you don't want to have trouble figuring out which ones go wear later because if you've ever worked with laptops you know that there are are times when it looks like one screw will fit and then you find out later that it was supposed to be a different screw and it has to all come apart again so now we've got a lot of play developing in here in the Shroud itself you can see there's a lot of play in there uh which means that we should be pretty much ready to pull it apart I think this is a very flexible PCB by the way I don't know if you can see that I'm not really pushing that hard it's not a thick PCB but this is a $240 video card so it's not the uh of Beacon of quality that you might see with a higher end product but it does have something still holding it together let's see if maybe maybe we have to take the heat sink off now I'm going to do opposing Corners here before completely removing the screw to kind of ensure that the uh ensure that the pressure is about equal rather than just pop one off and what is warranty void if removed warranty void if removed okay so we won't remove it I don't think that counts uh so this is pretty good these are spring loaded screw spring tensioned screws excuse me uh so you can see that as you tighten this down the sprain will tension and that'll help prevent the uh possibility of over torquing it which is bad obviously put that there all the screws are out of the back uh and got the screws out of the expansion slot oh okay there we go that actually scared me for a second cuz if you haven't noticed this cooler or the the cooler and the Shroud exceed the length of the PCB see that and this is true with some other cards too where uh the PCB is pretty short on the reference pcbs so this is interesting for a few reasons one is aib partner models might build uh larger PCB cards and add more power phases or uh more power headers if they wanted an extra eight pin or six pin so that's one thing but the interesting point here this is so small that you could probably throw like a passive cooler on there and go with an alloy and copper passive cooling solution and have a pretty small and quiet card so we're attached to obviously the uh the vrm fan here which I I'll let you get a shot of that before we pull it apart okay that's this is this is difficult to uh let's try this I don't know if this is really okay there we go all right so the Fan's removed and now we have a look at the PCB and the cooler completely separated so obviously only point a few things out for you uh we've got the blower fan here three screws probably holding it in these are thermal pads they are adhesive you will want to try and uh get this back on as quickly as possible if you're going to be putting it back on these adhere to these so these are vram modules we have 1 two 3 four five six seven eight of them we have 8 GB of RAM so these are probably 1 GB modules and they are made by Samsung from the looks of it yeah that's Samsung and then the GPU itself is actually really similar to the renders that we have so that's kind of cool uh this is the GPU this whole thing right here is uh underneath is the substrate so the green is the substrate the Silicon is right there which has the thermal paste on it and uh then we've got some kind of Shield right here which probably is for strengthening for the most part we're going to clean this off I'll start with the heat sink here there's a lot of a lot of compound on there but I want to clean this off so that when we apply the new solution oh look at that thing move apply the new solution it'll actually be properly cleaned and have some good contact oh my God your thermal paste cleaning method is so bad when you clean thermal paste you should use water a p sized blob oh wait let me see if there's a way to pull this out okay so I just figured something out while cleaning this thing first very shiny yes we've got a copper cold plate here surrounded by aluminum a bit cheaper that way and then a kind of typical or actually even old school almost CPU Cooler style aluminum heat fins inside which would explain some of the issues we've had with thermals in the in the review uh because it doesn't look there's not even heat pipe Cooling in here so very simple cooler uh we're going to go ahead and take that out just so we can get a closer look at it so what I discovered by looking around is it looks like these hold in the plate that restricts us from removing that cooler so I'm going to take these tiny tiny screws out we're not going to lose these we can see what that what that cooler actually looks like uh up close and see if there's a good reason for why The Thermals are so high gu that's still held on I think oh know so there we have it this is out uh so we got all the thermal pads here before I lose any of these let's just look at where these go and then we'll look at the rest the vrm we've got chokes here these are our chokes our capacitors this is our vram a uh feels like an aluminum that's an aluminum base plate and then the aluminum base plate turns into these fins up here which honestly almost feel more gimmicky than real but I guess they do something because uh it's not thermally shutting down despite being pretty warm some more heat fins here I don't know really i' I'd love to see kind of a a wind tunnel example of how this fan interacts with these fins CU I'm sure there's some dissipation going on but as many of you know intakes on the side pulls air in side front bottom pushes it through the card this way so that will go through this heat sink and this part I believe goes up kind of against the fan like that and then uh this part is going to be towards the back of the card towards the expansion slot so that'll push air through the fins out the expansion slot these are not very close together uh so we don't have a ton of surface area to work with here in terms of thermals it is a cheap aluminum heat sink this is exactly why The Thermals are not great on the rx480 if you've seen our review it's hitting something like we were hitting something like 56 57 Celsius delta T with that which is basically in the 80s uh absolute temperature for this ambient environment and that is for the auto settings that's just what AMD had it set up Auto preconfigured in drivers Ron settings to stick to around 80 Celsius it can go up to 90 and we hit it in some cases but uh but this is exactly why The Thermals are a problem now in terms of overclocking with the GPU I was hitting 1340 MHz the maximum configurable setting and Radeon settings I think was 1350 vram I was hitting 2200 I think the max configurable was 2300 MHz I tried 2250 and it crash so maybe I don't know if a cooling thing or a stability thing but if it's cooling we can try and fix that with these things later on these are significantly better than this uh thermal pad to alloy base plate setup that's on there now but of course it doesn't really do anything if you just sink the heat cuz you got to dissipate it so that's either going to be a blower fan or whatever cooler we end up putting on here uh so this is the whole card we've got this wrapping part of the Shroud this is on the the the Nvidia cards as well the 98 and the 1080 this one's a particularly thin and cheap piece of plastic but that's fine because all they're trying to do is put this in there like that and all it does is direct the air flow so that all the air pretty much goes straight through the card through the alloy fins out the back and cools the GPU in the process the vrm uh is cooled by the thermal pads and some of the the wind as well effectively all right so now that we've got this shroud off if we wanted to take this off I'm not sure what size that is it might be mounted from uh no uh what it doesn't screw through so the the cover the thing that I thought was the cover because it is a cover on the R9 fu X is fake if you look at the backs side there's no uh mounting points it doesn't like actually screw through with these stupid propri this is why I couldn't take it off so it may not be an imperial driver thing it may just be that these are cosmetic fake bolts which are these even metal it's magnetized pretty strongly actually uh and so unless these are like aluminum well yeah unless they're uh I don't know titanium bolts or something non-magnetic I don't know if that's uh I know some alloy and titanium bolts aren't magnetic but I don't know specifically either way uh these are fake so it doesn't really matter what metal they're made out of if it's any at all or plastic even I think it is actually plastic uh so that doesn't come off it's obviously just Aesthetics thing these holes aren't holes which was already apparent if you even looked at it so it's not like it's helping with breathability or anything like that I am curious if we took a drill and drilled through a couple times if it would impact The Thermals I think it's like glued this looks like it's just bezel in see how it's like indented and I think this is glued to the surface of it um but if we tried to force it I think the uh there was like a star nut that was close right and that's that's pretty close but I'd have to put like a rubber band in there or something to to fill the the rest of the area those are definitely plastic actually here look see this I'm scratching it with the thing and look at that scratch I just put in the surface if you can pick that up on the camera that is obviously not metal that's plastic and I bet if I like sat here and really destroyed this shroud uh this thing is either molded with the rest of the Shroud or it's glued to the surface but let's let's look at our phasing here so for the vrm phasing it looks like looks like a six-phase vrm I believe uh either that or it's a a 5 plus one but uh pretty basic vrm not bad I suppose in terms of just raw phasing but I don't really know anything about these specific components how good they are how cheap they are or how expensive they are uh but that is what our our vrm setup is normal capacitors and uh let's clean off the the GPU and look at that and then we'll pretty much be done with this tear down I'm not going to worry about cleaning off every sing a bit of thermal paste here we just really want to see what the die looks like right now uh just to see what kind of The Branding is if there is any what the uh made in or diffused in sticker says stuff like that and it looks like there are no words on this one it's very simple just a shiny mirrored piece of silicon basically okay so actually the thermal pads uh the big thermal pad is cooling vrm components but it's not on top of the chokes or uh the chokes and the uh capacitors it's actually on top of this logic behind it which my hands are full here but this is where that pad goes so that's cooling that got the uh chokes being cooled it looks like entirely by air so if we kind of hold this together you'll see that this mounts about like that more or less and the wind comes through here so the air comes through lower fan spins it'll circulate through that plastic piece that we saw get pushed through the aluminum fins over the chokes and the capacitors and then through these fins for further dissipation what is that on top of that's on top of that logic back there so that'll cool our mosfets chokes and capacitors for the VM and then it goes out the card okay so I think that pretty much sums up the tear down of this card just uh for documenting reasons in the future the model we have is called d009 so if future iterations of this product are made either 4 GB models or uh updates to the existing 8 GB model we have that number may change and that is exposed already because there's no back plate on this card so that's something you could already see these 9 you can see we've got solder points for the six pin power header there are no super secret extra solder points uh that would be done on a custom PCB by aib Partners if they wanted to do them and that pretty much sums it up so that is the AMD rx480 torn down and the next part of this video we're going to try and put these on this is going to be the interesting part all right so I'm not sure if any of these will work I don't know uh I don't really know what the mounting hardware is inside of these I know these are compatible with the 380 with the 370 and some of the other Hardware that's got completely different mounting types so uh we will see if these fit if they don't I'm going to try and make him fit whether the rx480 likes it or not and if you've seen our GTX 1080 hybrid video you know that we'll we'll make it work all right so thank you for watching as always patreon link the postal video if you want to help us out directly article Link in the description below for the review of V rx480 on the channel we've got the review of the the card and we have a noise comparison test which shows this vrm blower fan at various speeds yeah so thanks for watching subscribe for the next part of this series it'll be two or three parts I'll see you all next timehey everyone we're back with another hybrid project This Time starring the rx480 so we just reviewed this thing the review is already on the Channel I want to put it underw or at least under intense air and see if we can get it to overclock further or do something interesting anyway uh so first of all this coverage is brought to you by origin PC and their new origin Kronos which is a customizable and upgradeable PC now shipping with the rx480 so our original hybrid project star the GTX 1080 we put it with an EVGA hybrid cooler which is one of these and I actually I have a box of these now from ACH who makes them so I decided we're going to try and put another one of these on but this time the rx480 I don't think the mounting will fit actually I'm positive it won't fit but we're going to see if we can either make it fit or use one of these so I bought these out of pocket this is not a sponsorship uh I don't even know what these are actually they're this is the accelero mono plus so this is a single fan uh basically it mounts on top of the GPU kind of like that just straight on top of the GPU so it's it's effectively putting a CPU Cooler on a video card it's a little insane the one I want to try is this one which is the accelero hybrid uh that's for a 120 mm fan I bought these vrm copper heat sinks in case we need them or vram uh rather so we can put those on the memory modules if we need them if if none of this other Equipment Works then as a backup I bought one of these uh accelero twin turbos which is just a dual fan dual blower fan so the reason I got so many of these is because this is a new uh it's it's got a couple of new things first of all the GPU itself which is the Polaris 10 chip does have a smaller Z height than previous AMD chips I think it's 1.5 millim now and it used to be 1.9 mm so that difference does mean there may be some clearance issues also the actual mounting is very similar to the R9 380 and also very similar to the I think the 370 but it's not identical so hopefully one of these will work if not I also have an ndxt Kraken cooler uh if I wanted to use that um that's just a uh we've got the the G10 and a kraken cooler so if I wanted to go that route I would have to get a copper shim and put it between the C plate and the GPU itself so we're going to try and avoid that and hopefully the mounting for one of these kits will work but first we have to disable or disable but first we have to disassemble the video card so that's what we're going to do in this part one video is take it apart and I've got some tools for the job here so let's just uh let's start pulling it apart and see what we got uh so first off just looking at it briefly this is got a couple of it looks like Allen or hex heads uh so there Allen key screws holding this cover on and I think that's just a cover I I believe it will uh pull off with the rest of the the Shroud I don't think we have to actually remove that cover it's similar to The Fury X in that way we got a couple screws on the back which are obviously holding the Shroud to the PCB and then these screws over here are holding probably the heat sink with the cold plate on top of the GPU that's pretty standard anyway so first I'm going to try and take uh just the cover off and see if we can see under there so that's a 3.5 that's too small doesn't look like it's quite right no that's too small uh this is going to be way too big I've got these crappy tools some of you probably remember my terrible multi-tool that is used uh used for travel but we'll see it's like a middle finger that's too small obviously none of these uh metric ones fit I don't know if these are imperial or if it's just a proprietary size but it's not any metric size as I have so we're going to try and work around this cuz I don't have Imperial Allen keys that sides we're just going to go ahead and start removing the uh the Shroud from the PCB oh wait you know what I should do is okay so I'm actually going to Mark these because I just realized there's a lot of different screw sizes so we're going to do the uh classic quick and dirty video card BL fan one two okay all right so let's get back to pulling this thing apart okay all right so that was a lot simpler than the GTX 1080 already but we're not really anywhere yet so we haven't made progress yet uh I can see that the PCB is coming off a bit so that does mean that the screws we just took off were the ones securing the the Shroud at least if not the heat sink definitely the shroud to the PCB so what's holding us now is it looks like the expansion slot for sure there's some tiny screws here that I'm almost positive are holding in the blower fan to the socket which you can actually see through this cutout it's kind of unique I'm not sure what the sort of acoustic and temperature properties are of having this cutout I'm curious to find out I'll talk to AMD about that but these almost certainly hold that fan in uh so we're left with the expansion slot and then there's these tiny screws up here too which look like they may just hold an embellishment plate to the the base plate but we'll find out soon I suppose so let's go ahead and just take this expansion slot apart there's there's two screws here and there's obviously going to be screws coming through the PCB once we get in there but those are accessed from the other side oh there's one more tiny one these are all uh these are pretty much the same size Philips head but the screws themselves are different sizes so you will want to do what we're doing and separate these maybe draw it out on a paper first uh because it's there's a couple different screws and you don't want to have trouble figuring out which ones go wear later because if you've ever worked with laptops you know that there are are times when it looks like one screw will fit and then you find out later that it was supposed to be a different screw and it has to all come apart again so now we've got a lot of play developing in here in the Shroud itself you can see there's a lot of play in there uh which means that we should be pretty much ready to pull it apart I think this is a very flexible PCB by the way I don't know if you can see that I'm not really pushing that hard it's not a thick PCB but this is a $240 video card so it's not the uh of Beacon of quality that you might see with a higher end product but it does have something still holding it together let's see if maybe maybe we have to take the heat sink off now I'm going to do opposing Corners here before completely removing the screw to kind of ensure that the uh ensure that the pressure is about equal rather than just pop one off and what is warranty void if removed warranty void if removed okay so we won't remove it I don't think that counts uh so this is pretty good these are spring loaded screw spring tensioned screws excuse me uh so you can see that as you tighten this down the sprain will tension and that'll help prevent the uh possibility of over torquing it which is bad obviously put that there all the screws are out of the back uh and got the screws out of the expansion slot oh okay there we go that actually scared me for a second cuz if you haven't noticed this cooler or the the cooler and the Shroud exceed the length of the PCB see that and this is true with some other cards too where uh the PCB is pretty short on the reference pcbs so this is interesting for a few reasons one is aib partner models might build uh larger PCB cards and add more power phases or uh more power headers if they wanted an extra eight pin or six pin so that's one thing but the interesting point here this is so small that you could probably throw like a passive cooler on there and go with an alloy and copper passive cooling solution and have a pretty small and quiet card so we're attached to obviously the uh the vrm fan here which I I'll let you get a shot of that before we pull it apart okay that's this is this is difficult to uh let's try this I don't know if this is really okay there we go all right so the Fan's removed and now we have a look at the PCB and the cooler completely separated so obviously only point a few things out for you uh we've got the blower fan here three screws probably holding it in these are thermal pads they are adhesive you will want to try and uh get this back on as quickly as possible if you're going to be putting it back on these adhere to these so these are vram modules we have 1 two 3 four five six seven eight of them we have 8 GB of RAM so these are probably 1 GB modules and they are made by Samsung from the looks of it yeah that's Samsung and then the GPU itself is actually really similar to the renders that we have so that's kind of cool uh this is the GPU this whole thing right here is uh underneath is the substrate so the green is the substrate the Silicon is right there which has the thermal paste on it and uh then we've got some kind of Shield right here which probably is for strengthening for the most part we're going to clean this off I'll start with the heat sink here there's a lot of a lot of compound on there but I want to clean this off so that when we apply the new solution oh look at that thing move apply the new solution it'll actually be properly cleaned and have some good contact oh my God your thermal paste cleaning method is so bad when you clean thermal paste you should use water a p sized blob oh wait let me see if there's a way to pull this out okay so I just figured something out while cleaning this thing first very shiny yes we've got a copper cold plate here surrounded by aluminum a bit cheaper that way and then a kind of typical or actually even old school almost CPU Cooler style aluminum heat fins inside which would explain some of the issues we've had with thermals in the in the review uh because it doesn't look there's not even heat pipe Cooling in here so very simple cooler uh we're going to go ahead and take that out just so we can get a closer look at it so what I discovered by looking around is it looks like these hold in the plate that restricts us from removing that cooler so I'm going to take these tiny tiny screws out we're not going to lose these we can see what that what that cooler actually looks like uh up close and see if there's a good reason for why The Thermals are so high gu that's still held on I think oh know so there we have it this is out uh so we got all the thermal pads here before I lose any of these let's just look at where these go and then we'll look at the rest the vrm we've got chokes here these are our chokes our capacitors this is our vram a uh feels like an aluminum that's an aluminum base plate and then the aluminum base plate turns into these fins up here which honestly almost feel more gimmicky than real but I guess they do something because uh it's not thermally shutting down despite being pretty warm some more heat fins here I don't know really i' I'd love to see kind of a a wind tunnel example of how this fan interacts with these fins CU I'm sure there's some dissipation going on but as many of you know intakes on the side pulls air in side front bottom pushes it through the card this way so that will go through this heat sink and this part I believe goes up kind of against the fan like that and then uh this part is going to be towards the back of the card towards the expansion slot so that'll push air through the fins out the expansion slot these are not very close together uh so we don't have a ton of surface area to work with here in terms of thermals it is a cheap aluminum heat sink this is exactly why The Thermals are not great on the rx480 if you've seen our review it's hitting something like we were hitting something like 56 57 Celsius delta T with that which is basically in the 80s uh absolute temperature for this ambient environment and that is for the auto settings that's just what AMD had it set up Auto preconfigured in drivers Ron settings to stick to around 80 Celsius it can go up to 90 and we hit it in some cases but uh but this is exactly why The Thermals are a problem now in terms of overclocking with the GPU I was hitting 1340 MHz the maximum configurable setting and Radeon settings I think was 1350 vram I was hitting 2200 I think the max configurable was 2300 MHz I tried 2250 and it crash so maybe I don't know if a cooling thing or a stability thing but if it's cooling we can try and fix that with these things later on these are significantly better than this uh thermal pad to alloy base plate setup that's on there now but of course it doesn't really do anything if you just sink the heat cuz you got to dissipate it so that's either going to be a blower fan or whatever cooler we end up putting on here uh so this is the whole card we've got this wrapping part of the Shroud this is on the the the Nvidia cards as well the 98 and the 1080 this one's a particularly thin and cheap piece of plastic but that's fine because all they're trying to do is put this in there like that and all it does is direct the air flow so that all the air pretty much goes straight through the card through the alloy fins out the back and cools the GPU in the process the vrm uh is cooled by the thermal pads and some of the the wind as well effectively all right so now that we've got this shroud off if we wanted to take this off I'm not sure what size that is it might be mounted from uh no uh what it doesn't screw through so the the cover the thing that I thought was the cover because it is a cover on the R9 fu X is fake if you look at the backs side there's no uh mounting points it doesn't like actually screw through with these stupid propri this is why I couldn't take it off so it may not be an imperial driver thing it may just be that these are cosmetic fake bolts which are these even metal it's magnetized pretty strongly actually uh and so unless these are like aluminum well yeah unless they're uh I don't know titanium bolts or something non-magnetic I don't know if that's uh I know some alloy and titanium bolts aren't magnetic but I don't know specifically either way uh these are fake so it doesn't really matter what metal they're made out of if it's any at all or plastic even I think it is actually plastic uh so that doesn't come off it's obviously just Aesthetics thing these holes aren't holes which was already apparent if you even looked at it so it's not like it's helping with breathability or anything like that I am curious if we took a drill and drilled through a couple times if it would impact The Thermals I think it's like glued this looks like it's just bezel in see how it's like indented and I think this is glued to the surface of it um but if we tried to force it I think the uh there was like a star nut that was close right and that's that's pretty close but I'd have to put like a rubber band in there or something to to fill the the rest of the area those are definitely plastic actually here look see this I'm scratching it with the thing and look at that scratch I just put in the surface if you can pick that up on the camera that is obviously not metal that's plastic and I bet if I like sat here and really destroyed this shroud uh this thing is either molded with the rest of the Shroud or it's glued to the surface but let's let's look at our phasing here so for the vrm phasing it looks like looks like a six-phase vrm I believe uh either that or it's a a 5 plus one but uh pretty basic vrm not bad I suppose in terms of just raw phasing but I don't really know anything about these specific components how good they are how cheap they are or how expensive they are uh but that is what our our vrm setup is normal capacitors and uh let's clean off the the GPU and look at that and then we'll pretty much be done with this tear down I'm not going to worry about cleaning off every sing a bit of thermal paste here we just really want to see what the die looks like right now uh just to see what kind of The Branding is if there is any what the uh made in or diffused in sticker says stuff like that and it looks like there are no words on this one it's very simple just a shiny mirrored piece of silicon basically okay so actually the thermal pads uh the big thermal pad is cooling vrm components but it's not on top of the chokes or uh the chokes and the uh capacitors it's actually on top of this logic behind it which my hands are full here but this is where that pad goes so that's cooling that got the uh chokes being cooled it looks like entirely by air so if we kind of hold this together you'll see that this mounts about like that more or less and the wind comes through here so the air comes through lower fan spins it'll circulate through that plastic piece that we saw get pushed through the aluminum fins over the chokes and the capacitors and then through these fins for further dissipation what is that on top of that's on top of that logic back there so that'll cool our mosfets chokes and capacitors for the VM and then it goes out the card okay so I think that pretty much sums up the tear down of this card just uh for documenting reasons in the future the model we have is called d009 so if future iterations of this product are made either 4 GB models or uh updates to the existing 8 GB model we have that number may change and that is exposed already because there's no back plate on this card so that's something you could already see these 9 you can see we've got solder points for the six pin power header there are no super secret extra solder points uh that would be done on a custom PCB by aib Partners if they wanted to do them and that pretty much sums it up so that is the AMD rx480 torn down and the next part of this video we're going to try and put these on this is going to be the interesting part all right so I'm not sure if any of these will work I don't know uh I don't really know what the mounting hardware is inside of these I know these are compatible with the 380 with the 370 and some of the other Hardware that's got completely different mounting types so uh we will see if these fit if they don't I'm going to try and make him fit whether the rx480 likes it or not and if you've seen our GTX 1080 hybrid video you know that we'll we'll make it work all right so thank you for watching as always patreon link the postal video if you want to help us out directly article Link in the description below for the review of V rx480 on the channel we've got the review of the the card and we have a noise comparison test which shows this vrm blower fan at various speeds yeah so thanks for watching subscribe for the next part of this series it'll be two or three parts I'll see you all next time\n"