The Sapphire Nitro+ Teardown: A Look at the Easy-to-Maintain Cooler

As we began disassembling the Sapphire Nitro+, one thing became clear: this cooler was designed with ease of maintenance in mind. The first step in our teardown process was to remove the screws that held the card together, and as we did so, we noticed a fan that would need to be replaced at some point. Fortunately, this particular model came with an NT K HK limited fan, which is a common specification found on other Pulse models.

We were able to get a shot of the fan's specifications, including its model number: FD 1 0 0 1 5 m 1 2 d. This information will be helpful for anyone who needs to replace this fan in the future, as it provides a clear indication of what to look for when purchasing a replacement. The fan cables were also visible, with multiple bridging connections that would need to be addressed before installation.

One of the most appealing aspects of this cooler is its ease of maintenance, which is made possible by the use of standard fan sockets. This makes it simple to replace the fan without having to deal with complex electrical connections. We found a mixture of fan cables all bridging together, but fortunately, they were easy to sort out and connect properly.

We also noticed that some fans can be purchased separately from Sapphire, although this comes at an additional cost of around $30. This is not uncommon in the world of computer components, where users may choose to upgrade or customize their systems without having to purchase a complete new card. In any case, the process of installing these separate fans would be similar to that of replacing the standard fan.

As we continued our teardown, we found that the Sapphire Nitro+ had a simple and straightforward design. The PCB was relatively easy to access, with only a few screws holding it in place. This made it a breeze to remove and inspect, allowing us to get a closer look at the components that make up this cooler.

One of the most important aspects of any computer component is its ability to be maintained over time. As cards age, they may begin to fail or require repairs, which can be a significant hassle. However, when manufacturers include features like fuses and other protections in their designs, it can greatly simplify the repair process. In this case, we were pleased to see that the Sapphire Nitro+ included several of these features, making it easier for users to keep their card running smoothly.

The Sapphire Nitro+ is also notable for its price point, which places it at $440. While this may seem steep compared to some other mid-range cards on the market, it's worth considering in terms of performance. As we noted earlier, the card's specifications are extremely close to those of the 2070 Super, making it a formidable competitor in terms of raw power.

Overall, our teardown of the Sapphire Nitro+ has given us a glimpse into the design and engineering that goes into creating this cooler. From its ease of maintenance to its impressive performance, this card is well worth considering for anyone in the market for a new graphics card. Be sure to check out our full review for more information on its performance, as well as some tips on how to upgrade or maintain your own card.

As we wrap up our teardown, it's worth noting that we'll be using one of the GN tear-down toolkits used in this video for future reviews. This toolkit is equipped with a wide range of screwdrivers, including many different sizes and types, making it an essential tool for any serious computer enthusiast or modder. Whether you're working on your own PC or simply want to stay up-to-date on the latest components and technologies, we encourage you to check out this toolkit and explore the world of custom PC building.

In conclusion, our teardown of the Sapphire Nitro+ has shown us that this cooler is designed with ease of maintenance in mind. With its standard fan sockets, simple design, and impressive performance, it's an excellent choice for anyone looking for a reliable graphics card solution. Whether you're a seasoned modder or just starting out, we hope that our review has been informative and helpful. As always, thank you for watching, and we'll see you in the next video.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: eneveryone today we're tearing down this this is the sapphire rx 5700 XT Nitro+ OC it's the full name of the card and we're gonna be taking it apart talking about some of the stuff I have a quick update as well on the BIOS positions the V bios positions from the review so a lot of this is going to be looking at the cooler specifically I really am personally interested and if there's clearance for a liquid nitrogen pod on there as well I know that's a very non mainstream in consideration but we'll look at it and for the review we have a video up already it performed exceptionally well in thermals the auto settings were not aggressive enough but that's nothing that can't be solved with manual fan curve tuning on your end and the noise normalised thermals were the best on the charts hands down by quite a lot in some instances when you power normalize as well so the reviews up today we're gonna take it apart see how the internal build quality of the cooler is why it's as good as it was and then see if we can learn anything about the vrm as well before that this video is brought to you by Thermal Grizzlies conduct a not liquid metal conductor not as what we've used in all of our liquid metal and delayed thermal tests capable of dropping CV thermals significantly and replacing the stock thermal interface over CPU thermals don't just allow better overclocks but also lower noise levels because the transfer efficiency is increased the mix of gallium and indium makes for a thermal conductivity of 73 watts per meter Kelvin outclassing traditional pastes significantly learn more at the link in the description below okay so we're gonna use the gamers Nexus teardown toolkit for this you can pick it up on store doc gamers nexus net if you would like to grab one of these we expect them specifically for your video card tear downs so these are gonna be like a pH 0 or so size pretty simple ones just loosen them on each corner first and then remove them completely it's a four point retention bracket and he uses these on theirs it's a bit different from what NVIDIA does ok alright so set this aside this I'm not sure how many screws this coolers gonna have if you ever taken apart a card that's more complex like the Nvidia reference designs something like this is really helpful for remember in where to put everything all the different size screws so we the retention played off and then these screws are going straight through backplate through the PCB and then into a base plate here that's going to connect to probably the vrm and maybe the memory components so we'll have to take these out as well sometimes it's just for the four here but this is gonna require more of them to be removed and also I do want to mention this before we get too far into it so as stated before in the review of obviously triple axial cooler these are interesting fans because they're different sizes so if you look kind of not too closely to notice it but these two outer fans are larger Center ones smaller the reason for that is if they did this phantom sizes these then the cooler gets a bit wider still and right now it's already pretty close to about the limits of what an acceptable cooler size would be because you're at about almost a foot or roughly thirty centimeters if you prefer so that's the the reasoning for that and I was for the sizes of the fans just out of interest these should be roughly a 93 is the kind of standard size so that's a 93 on the outside and that's gonna be a an 80 something actually not sure what the standard 80 mil sizes but that's about 85 so whatever standard is close to that to me plus or minus couple millimeters that's the size and then the switches it's a correction on this from the review I thought this was a triple v bios but actually it's a dual V bios and it has three switch positions and the reason for having three switch positions is just that one of these positions is enabling software control of which be BIOS profile is active so you can use their try X acts or tricks which thing is try xx software and use that offset switch position the one that allows softer control and then it can switch between the other two so anyway that was the update on it otherwise two of these are ones a 220 watt ones a 200 watt or roughly 195 power limit and then the other one is a software enabling so it's not actually a triple V bios but just wanted to update that and let's take apart the rest of it these are actually all spring tension screws and as noted they go all the way through and into a baseplate so that's all the screws securing the backlight it's pretty simple two three four five plus your standard four and then over here these two are gonna have to come out for disconnecting the cooler from itself the upper and the lower part of the cooler so we'll separate these these are actually different size screws yes yeah so careful if you disassemble this don't mix up the screws you'll see that those are two different sizes so we'll track these out at the outer edge and if you want that the mod mats on store that gamers Nexus as well along with the toolkit so we have two small ones up here that looks like it probably just holds in this LED plate at the top so I thinking we don't need to remove those to get the cooler part but we might have to come back to that and it is separating where are we stuck let's take out this one here maybe that's just for the IO plate that might not need to come out Oh interest in once I get this apart we'll be able to see some interesting design choices okay so I found the point where it's stuck the this is kind of common on the the fatter r-tx cards especially there's three slot ones but there's a set of two screws here you can see and these two screws are securing just for some extra support helps probably reduce sag marginally although most the sags on the other side of the card but those go in here into the shroud and that's it they just go straight into the shroud so we gotta take those two out as well even though the plate can probably stay on nice okay now it's gonna be fan headers as always don't pull the cables I'm actually taking my fingernail I'm putting it under the edge here if you pull on the cables you can actually rip the header off the PCB I've done that before and it's you can reattach it but it's not really fun okay so it is a part it's actually pretty simple to disassemble compared to the reference designs of see this is what I was interested in so we've actually got a really significant portion of the heatsink that's attached the base plate this is not too dissimilar from the pulse design for the xt model it's just that well in concept it's not dissimilar in execution it is it's quite different but yeah really big heat sink here that's over the memory and part of the VR at one of the rails another heatsink here over memory and this would explain why the GDD are thermals were as good as they were and just to recap some previous content from the gigabyte teardown and the pulse teardown if you look at the cooler here the reason this design works so well is because Sapphire is and it doesn't always work well sometimes it can be worse to play on execution but Sapphire is isolating the GPU cold plate from the memory and the part of the vrm cooling although most of the arms over here but because of that isolation we learned this with hybrid mods where if you're sharing the same cooler with more of the hard more components on the card than the amount of heat and watts that the cooler is soaking will obviously go up and so your GPU temperatures and Junction temperatures will go up with that but you're cooling more devices so there's a plus side to in this instance sapphire is cooling just the GPU with the copper cold plate and then the rest of it you're gonna have a big fin stack here that's not attached to any other part of this solution coincident they're gonna have another section of fins right in here socketing and they're pretty cleanly so the reason this works there's plenty of ways it wouldn't work as well if you executed poorly the reason I work specifically here is because those fins have enough surface area to spread the heat and then the fans having to push the air straight through and there's actually plenty of air paths in here and even in here where the air can get down past the main part of the cooler and it's the lesser component cooling and especially over here it's got plenty of fan coverage with that larger fan blade so that's why that design works so well you're not sharing a single plate to sync everything and the airflow is coming down here anyway so might as well use it to an advantageous configuration and just split up the two cooling units a pretty simple stuff but sometimes we get new people checking out these videos of them more the higher end card so it's always worth pointing out so let's before we talk more about the cooling pull this plate off and expose the rest of the PCB this is going to have four screws in it it's aluminum sometimes companies Lea stainless steel XFX has done that it's not great when they do most the time it's it can be an effective enough solution but better tees aluminum which is not magnetic so it's the easiest check I guess the screwdrivers magnetic side of known anyway and this paste job is actually not too bad but it is a little uneven so you can kind of look here at the edges how much spread there is on the outside and how even the pea spread is here when you you learn this doing L onto overclocking where you're mounting and unmounting an Allen teapot repeatedly but same idea and pay spread is not bad it could have been a little more even on this side biased this direction but it's not bad for a factory pace job and thermals were fine so it doesn't really matter anyway okay actually was just really take keep there all pads not more screws okay so some rubber washers in there some came off here but actually those are plastic spacers and this vrm is pretty big I'm actually sending this PCB to build Zoid he's gonna do an analysis for us on our channel so you can check back to get his PCB analysis of the vrm i'll mention the component names in here but we're gonna let him do the expert analysis we'll be focusing for this video more on the thermal solution in the assembly he's got the electrical solution so thermal solution you have a big plate here base plate contacting the memory obviously sapphire uses full size memory thermal pads and then also has these three smaller thermal pads up here contacting if we associate it to the PCB contacting part of the vrm NCP three zero two one five five would be the component and again bills would we'll go through the specs of that NCP eight one zero two two on semi over here controller of of significance that again filtered will hit in the electoral analysis let's see if we can pull this plate oh there's a screw right here so screw it down in the bottom corner I missed sometimes it helps sometimes they're all pads between the backplate and the PCB are totally irrelevant is just gonna depend card to card but it is a big piece of aluminum that can help spread heat it's more effective when you have a fan over the back cooling it like maybe if you have a tower cool you get some additional airflow draft you know over the backside of the PCB and the backplate Wow I was very clean disassembly a lot of the time we'll have cables back there for all the LEDs but it looks like they had a better solution for that so taking a look at the back we got one of our plastic washers don't lose those backs pretty straightforward there is a big throw pad strip looks like that's about a to mell depth if you wanted to replace one of these for some reason it's actually measuring out at 2.5 if that is an accurate reading so kind of tricky to measure because they can form a little bit but that's actually looking like a 2.5 which makes it very thick they're all pad not not necessarily better it just means it probably needed to make contact because these standoffs but yeah so you have a direct contact strip there for the vrm no contact for the memory this is all coded anyway with a plastic so that it doesn't shorten anything if it came into contract contact with the components sometimes the memory point is benefited in this instance it's totally irrelevant because the memory did so well anyway the reason that benefits though if you sink the memory into a backplate occasionally is because these are flip chip packages so that means the silicon is actually closer to the backside to the PCB layer than it is to the level I should say than it is to the topside we have the black module so anyway that's the breakdown on that and then we have LEDs down here is this lighting something I was just lighting the Nitro logo there so LED is for that not really surprising cards these days LEDs dotted along the edges up here gives you that actually we didn't show it in the video but there is a kind of more tasteful LED implementation on this card where it's accenting along the top of the card through a light a light pipe we'll call even though it's just standalone LEDs there's a rail of some kind back here we'll send to build Zoid so there's a bit of contact a RGB LED header here if you want to synchronize it with some other stuff and then additional information there's a a very common so this is an ir international rectifier three five two one seven that controller is found on pretty much all of the 5700 series cards very common right now so for the MOSFETs of the vcore vrm it's a on semi again NCP three zero two one five five now let's check out who the memory supplied by because our memory clock on this is actually pretty insane compared to some of the others I really want to get the power play tables on this to see if we can push it a little further and this does look like it would have Alan teapot clearance by the way so we could probably take it under Alan - if anyone actually cares that's gonna be micron actually that's micron memory so we got lucky with the bin on this memory or with the probably more likely the I am see on the GPU so no problems hitting 950 on the memory and want to put under like power play tables and stuff like that see if we can go further again if people care content interest is gonna die down eventually on these cards but up here we have actually some fuses so this is something interesting sapphires been doing this generation I'm sure they've done it before but first time I've opened sapphire cards in a while a couple generations and fuses here so something blows up it should blow the fuse first as discussed with Joe on his channel bearded hardware and different teardown this is beneficial to the RMA process makes a little faster or cheaper for them they can replace a fuse hopefully and get it going again and protect the actual circuitry behind it and I think that's gonna cover most of this section the rest of that I'm leaving to build Zoid and then over here we got most of the discussion on this already but the heat pipes are probably that looks like about a six mil that's a six Bell heat pipe really standard as always what you really care about here is not it's not more is more better because you're really looking for a contact area so in this one we can see that there's pretty basically full coverage of this heat pipe too the GPO full-coverage here pretty full coverage here it's probably about 70% coverage and then the rest is is not wasted but not as directly contacted and then this one and then the top of this one don't get quite as much coverage so it's not about fat or heat pipes or more heat pipes it's about coverage area of the die and making it as as direct as possible not actually necessarily smooth but but direct and heat pipe count there is gonna be one going it looks like out this direction up here through top half we should terminate in one two three four five heat pipes think so five heat pipes yep five six Mel's we can go ahead and take these out as well just do a fold this assembly get the shroud off of there and these have plastic washers on them as well so if you take this out be careful not to lose that Earl actually there's two rubber you got the mixed up last time to don't let those fall off and it's gonna be for noise damping and vibration so you don't get a like that metal rattling oice on the fans are spinning so as your heat sink as noted sapphires done a good job with this it's it's not like it's a particularly hard science to do a heat sink compared to some of the other stuff that they're doing on these cards like the electrical but big isolated block for GPU and then you split out over here to spread the heat of course and vrm heat sinking over here for the MOSFETs and a separate base plate for the memory and part of the BRM the fins for what it's worth are vertical so this doesn't really matter a whole lot because the fans are gonna overpower everything else all the resistances but if you are using a case where this is right up against the glass on the topside maybe you're a couple millimeters away then it will be definitely warmer than if they were going the other direction because you're ejecting all of that air into the glass on one side and that will insulate the heat a bit but for the most part is totally irrelevant with a card like this because it can overcome those types of limitations with just brute force so that's that part we'll leave that alone the fans if you ever have to replace one of these I'm sure sapphire would be happy to RMA it for you but if maybe it's out of warranty or you can't get support some reason let's look at what fan it is and how hard it is to replace it's the the most common failure on a video card is going to be the fan I'm gonna separate these on the mat as well so it looks like this just one contact point oh nice of these that's what I think it is oh yeah these are awesome so this is a sapphire he's been doing this XFX has done it as well but these are always nice to see instead of a full cabled fan they're actually terminating in pins and on a contact point and I just sockets so if you need to arm a this yourself you might even be able to just ask sapphire for the fan and not have to send the card out for weeks at a time and if you can't get a fan from them for some reason not a warranty whatever this particular model is an NT k HK limited fan they've used these on some of the pulse models I think or at least of the brand anyway and or some of the 5700 xt models outside of this one the model is FD 1 0 0 1 5 m 1 2 d that's good we can get a shot of that so if you ever need to replace the fan on your own that's what you would buy hopefully you can find it with this same spec some of them might be cabled depending on how they're made so that sockets here one screw a very easy to replace love seeing that stuff for ease of maintenance where we're big fans of keeping stuff going even as parts of it die because you can normally fix them pretty easily this is just gonna be your mixture of fan cables all bridging to each other contacting the board you can technically get RGB fans separately from sapphire for I think it's 30 extra dollars and clearly if you wanted to install them that's like say you buy them separately there they don't come installed whatever and you want to add them later it's that same process we just went through you take one screw at you remove the fan and then you socket it in and you have the screw back in trivial anyone can do that and as a reminder you wouldn't have to do all this other stuff we did you can leave the card 100% assembled don't have three paste it because all you're doing is replacing a fan so good to see that stuff from sapphire ease of maintenance is always good and I think that's gonna wrap pretty much all this all we have up here is just a PCB with LEDs in it for the sapphire nameplate and I'm gonna just a plastic shroud so that's the Sapphire Nitro+ teardown really straightforward stuff in terms of disassembly one of the things we look for in these so first of all we're looking for why is the cooler performing the way it is maybe it's bad maybe it's good look that Messiah VOC we had some anomalous performance there it's looking apart under stood why part of its quality assembly quality part of its get PCB photos for build Zoid let him handle the electrical will handle the thermal and split the workload that way and then another part of it and a really important one that we don't talk about too much is how easy is the product to maintain on your own as it ages it'll exit warranty you'll have trouble getting parts from the manufacturer or getting support and there's no reason each company's gonna have a different policy obviously so I'm not saying anything specifically about sapphire here but as video cards die in quotes there there's no reason to get rid of it only because a fan stops spinning and so a lot of what we're looking for is how hard is it to replace the most common component failure on the video card or does it have simple protections like fuses that can blow to protect the other circuitry so that you can pretty easily get an RMA on it and all of that's really important to maintaining the car just maintenance overall we use the phrase quality of life features a lot when we're talking about video card coolers because the GPU is ultimately they're not too different once you're on a specific SKU they don't deviate that much from each other so that starts to change a little bit with things like the kingpin cards where the performance does jump more but also not proportionate the price that's obviously made for something else so anyway maintenance is a major fashion what we look at this one's very easy to maintain it is more expensive so it's not like that's a free feature that Sapphire just threw in you do pay for it it's $440 card the extra fans are 470 once you're going that far into it you're extremely close to 2070 super territory so you really have to consider that side of the argument you can check our review for more of that if you want to see more about this card and how it performs thermally acoustically or in games or in power targets and that'll wrap this one thank you for watching as always you can subscribe for more or if you want to help us out directly pick up one of the GN tear down toolkits that I used for this video this is kitted out with all the screwdrivers you need for the easy cards like this one which is mostly different sizes of Phillips or for the more advanced cards like the RT X series which uses a lot of different types of screws and about 70 plus of them I think there's as many screws in the RT X pounders edition cards as there are RT X ops or whatever they called it on the card thank you for watching check back for more we'll see you all next timeeveryone today we're tearing down this this is the sapphire rx 5700 XT Nitro+ OC it's the full name of the card and we're gonna be taking it apart talking about some of the stuff I have a quick update as well on the BIOS positions the V bios positions from the review so a lot of this is going to be looking at the cooler specifically I really am personally interested and if there's clearance for a liquid nitrogen pod on there as well I know that's a very non mainstream in consideration but we'll look at it and for the review we have a video up already it performed exceptionally well in thermals the auto settings were not aggressive enough but that's nothing that can't be solved with manual fan curve tuning on your end and the noise normalised thermals were the best on the charts hands down by quite a lot in some instances when you power normalize as well so the reviews up today we're gonna take it apart see how the internal build quality of the cooler is why it's as good as it was and then see if we can learn anything about the vrm as well before that this video is brought to you by Thermal Grizzlies conduct a not liquid metal conductor not as what we've used in all of our liquid metal and delayed thermal tests capable of dropping CV thermals significantly and replacing the stock thermal interface over CPU thermals don't just allow better overclocks but also lower noise levels because the transfer efficiency is increased the mix of gallium and indium makes for a thermal conductivity of 73 watts per meter Kelvin outclassing traditional pastes significantly learn more at the link in the description below okay so we're gonna use the gamers Nexus teardown toolkit for this you can pick it up on store doc gamers nexus net if you would like to grab one of these we expect them specifically for your video card tear downs so these are gonna be like a pH 0 or so size pretty simple ones just loosen them on each corner first and then remove them completely it's a four point retention bracket and he uses these on theirs it's a bit different from what NVIDIA does ok alright so set this aside this I'm not sure how many screws this coolers gonna have if you ever taken apart a card that's more complex like the Nvidia reference designs something like this is really helpful for remember in where to put everything all the different size screws so we the retention played off and then these screws are going straight through backplate through the PCB and then into a base plate here that's going to connect to probably the vrm and maybe the memory components so we'll have to take these out as well sometimes it's just for the four here but this is gonna require more of them to be removed and also I do want to mention this before we get too far into it so as stated before in the review of obviously triple axial cooler these are interesting fans because they're different sizes so if you look kind of not too closely to notice it but these two outer fans are larger Center ones smaller the reason for that is if they did this phantom sizes these then the cooler gets a bit wider still and right now it's already pretty close to about the limits of what an acceptable cooler size would be because you're at about almost a foot or roughly thirty centimeters if you prefer so that's the the reasoning for that and I was for the sizes of the fans just out of interest these should be roughly a 93 is the kind of standard size so that's a 93 on the outside and that's gonna be a an 80 something actually not sure what the standard 80 mil sizes but that's about 85 so whatever standard is close to that to me plus or minus couple millimeters that's the size and then the switches it's a correction on this from the review I thought this was a triple v bios but actually it's a dual V bios and it has three switch positions and the reason for having three switch positions is just that one of these positions is enabling software control of which be BIOS profile is active so you can use their try X acts or tricks which thing is try xx software and use that offset switch position the one that allows softer control and then it can switch between the other two so anyway that was the update on it otherwise two of these are ones a 220 watt ones a 200 watt or roughly 195 power limit and then the other one is a software enabling so it's not actually a triple V bios but just wanted to update that and let's take apart the rest of it these are actually all spring tension screws and as noted they go all the way through and into a baseplate so that's all the screws securing the backlight it's pretty simple two three four five plus your standard four and then over here these two are gonna have to come out for disconnecting the cooler from itself the upper and the lower part of the cooler so we'll separate these these are actually different size screws yes yeah so careful if you disassemble this don't mix up the screws you'll see that those are two different sizes so we'll track these out at the outer edge and if you want that the mod mats on store that gamers Nexus as well along with the toolkit so we have two small ones up here that looks like it probably just holds in this LED plate at the top so I thinking we don't need to remove those to get the cooler part but we might have to come back to that and it is separating where are we stuck let's take out this one here maybe that's just for the IO plate that might not need to come out Oh interest in once I get this apart we'll be able to see some interesting design choices okay so I found the point where it's stuck the this is kind of common on the the fatter r-tx cards especially there's three slot ones but there's a set of two screws here you can see and these two screws are securing just for some extra support helps probably reduce sag marginally although most the sags on the other side of the card but those go in here into the shroud and that's it they just go straight into the shroud so we gotta take those two out as well even though the plate can probably stay on nice okay now it's gonna be fan headers as always don't pull the cables I'm actually taking my fingernail I'm putting it under the edge here if you pull on the cables you can actually rip the header off the PCB I've done that before and it's you can reattach it but it's not really fun okay so it is a part it's actually pretty simple to disassemble compared to the reference designs of see this is what I was interested in so we've actually got a really significant portion of the heatsink that's attached the base plate this is not too dissimilar from the pulse design for the xt model it's just that well in concept it's not dissimilar in execution it is it's quite different but yeah really big heat sink here that's over the memory and part of the VR at one of the rails another heatsink here over memory and this would explain why the GDD are thermals were as good as they were and just to recap some previous content from the gigabyte teardown and the pulse teardown if you look at the cooler here the reason this design works so well is because Sapphire is and it doesn't always work well sometimes it can be worse to play on execution but Sapphire is isolating the GPU cold plate from the memory and the part of the vrm cooling although most of the arms over here but because of that isolation we learned this with hybrid mods where if you're sharing the same cooler with more of the hard more components on the card than the amount of heat and watts that the cooler is soaking will obviously go up and so your GPU temperatures and Junction temperatures will go up with that but you're cooling more devices so there's a plus side to in this instance sapphire is cooling just the GPU with the copper cold plate and then the rest of it you're gonna have a big fin stack here that's not attached to any other part of this solution coincident they're gonna have another section of fins right in here socketing and they're pretty cleanly so the reason this works there's plenty of ways it wouldn't work as well if you executed poorly the reason I work specifically here is because those fins have enough surface area to spread the heat and then the fans having to push the air straight through and there's actually plenty of air paths in here and even in here where the air can get down past the main part of the cooler and it's the lesser component cooling and especially over here it's got plenty of fan coverage with that larger fan blade so that's why that design works so well you're not sharing a single plate to sync everything and the airflow is coming down here anyway so might as well use it to an advantageous configuration and just split up the two cooling units a pretty simple stuff but sometimes we get new people checking out these videos of them more the higher end card so it's always worth pointing out so let's before we talk more about the cooling pull this plate off and expose the rest of the PCB this is going to have four screws in it it's aluminum sometimes companies Lea stainless steel XFX has done that it's not great when they do most the time it's it can be an effective enough solution but better tees aluminum which is not magnetic so it's the easiest check I guess the screwdrivers magnetic side of known anyway and this paste job is actually not too bad but it is a little uneven so you can kind of look here at the edges how much spread there is on the outside and how even the pea spread is here when you you learn this doing L onto overclocking where you're mounting and unmounting an Allen teapot repeatedly but same idea and pay spread is not bad it could have been a little more even on this side biased this direction but it's not bad for a factory pace job and thermals were fine so it doesn't really matter anyway okay actually was just really take keep there all pads not more screws okay so some rubber washers in there some came off here but actually those are plastic spacers and this vrm is pretty big I'm actually sending this PCB to build Zoid he's gonna do an analysis for us on our channel so you can check back to get his PCB analysis of the vrm i'll mention the component names in here but we're gonna let him do the expert analysis we'll be focusing for this video more on the thermal solution in the assembly he's got the electrical solution so thermal solution you have a big plate here base plate contacting the memory obviously sapphire uses full size memory thermal pads and then also has these three smaller thermal pads up here contacting if we associate it to the PCB contacting part of the vrm NCP three zero two one five five would be the component and again bills would we'll go through the specs of that NCP eight one zero two two on semi over here controller of of significance that again filtered will hit in the electoral analysis let's see if we can pull this plate oh there's a screw right here so screw it down in the bottom corner I missed sometimes it helps sometimes they're all pads between the backplate and the PCB are totally irrelevant is just gonna depend card to card but it is a big piece of aluminum that can help spread heat it's more effective when you have a fan over the back cooling it like maybe if you have a tower cool you get some additional airflow draft you know over the backside of the PCB and the backplate Wow I was very clean disassembly a lot of the time we'll have cables back there for all the LEDs but it looks like they had a better solution for that so taking a look at the back we got one of our plastic washers don't lose those backs pretty straightforward there is a big throw pad strip looks like that's about a to mell depth if you wanted to replace one of these for some reason it's actually measuring out at 2.5 if that is an accurate reading so kind of tricky to measure because they can form a little bit but that's actually looking like a 2.5 which makes it very thick they're all pad not not necessarily better it just means it probably needed to make contact because these standoffs but yeah so you have a direct contact strip there for the vrm no contact for the memory this is all coded anyway with a plastic so that it doesn't shorten anything if it came into contract contact with the components sometimes the memory point is benefited in this instance it's totally irrelevant because the memory did so well anyway the reason that benefits though if you sink the memory into a backplate occasionally is because these are flip chip packages so that means the silicon is actually closer to the backside to the PCB layer than it is to the level I should say than it is to the topside we have the black module so anyway that's the breakdown on that and then we have LEDs down here is this lighting something I was just lighting the Nitro logo there so LED is for that not really surprising cards these days LEDs dotted along the edges up here gives you that actually we didn't show it in the video but there is a kind of more tasteful LED implementation on this card where it's accenting along the top of the card through a light a light pipe we'll call even though it's just standalone LEDs there's a rail of some kind back here we'll send to build Zoid so there's a bit of contact a RGB LED header here if you want to synchronize it with some other stuff and then additional information there's a a very common so this is an ir international rectifier three five two one seven that controller is found on pretty much all of the 5700 series cards very common right now so for the MOSFETs of the vcore vrm it's a on semi again NCP three zero two one five five now let's check out who the memory supplied by because our memory clock on this is actually pretty insane compared to some of the others I really want to get the power play tables on this to see if we can push it a little further and this does look like it would have Alan teapot clearance by the way so we could probably take it under Alan - if anyone actually cares that's gonna be micron actually that's micron memory so we got lucky with the bin on this memory or with the probably more likely the I am see on the GPU so no problems hitting 950 on the memory and want to put under like power play tables and stuff like that see if we can go further again if people care content interest is gonna die down eventually on these cards but up here we have actually some fuses so this is something interesting sapphires been doing this generation I'm sure they've done it before but first time I've opened sapphire cards in a while a couple generations and fuses here so something blows up it should blow the fuse first as discussed with Joe on his channel bearded hardware and different teardown this is beneficial to the RMA process makes a little faster or cheaper for them they can replace a fuse hopefully and get it going again and protect the actual circuitry behind it and I think that's gonna cover most of this section the rest of that I'm leaving to build Zoid and then over here we got most of the discussion on this already but the heat pipes are probably that looks like about a six mil that's a six Bell heat pipe really standard as always what you really care about here is not it's not more is more better because you're really looking for a contact area so in this one we can see that there's pretty basically full coverage of this heat pipe too the GPO full-coverage here pretty full coverage here it's probably about 70% coverage and then the rest is is not wasted but not as directly contacted and then this one and then the top of this one don't get quite as much coverage so it's not about fat or heat pipes or more heat pipes it's about coverage area of the die and making it as as direct as possible not actually necessarily smooth but but direct and heat pipe count there is gonna be one going it looks like out this direction up here through top half we should terminate in one two three four five heat pipes think so five heat pipes yep five six Mel's we can go ahead and take these out as well just do a fold this assembly get the shroud off of there and these have plastic washers on them as well so if you take this out be careful not to lose that Earl actually there's two rubber you got the mixed up last time to don't let those fall off and it's gonna be for noise damping and vibration so you don't get a like that metal rattling oice on the fans are spinning so as your heat sink as noted sapphires done a good job with this it's it's not like it's a particularly hard science to do a heat sink compared to some of the other stuff that they're doing on these cards like the electrical but big isolated block for GPU and then you split out over here to spread the heat of course and vrm heat sinking over here for the MOSFETs and a separate base plate for the memory and part of the BRM the fins for what it's worth are vertical so this doesn't really matter a whole lot because the fans are gonna overpower everything else all the resistances but if you are using a case where this is right up against the glass on the topside maybe you're a couple millimeters away then it will be definitely warmer than if they were going the other direction because you're ejecting all of that air into the glass on one side and that will insulate the heat a bit but for the most part is totally irrelevant with a card like this because it can overcome those types of limitations with just brute force so that's that part we'll leave that alone the fans if you ever have to replace one of these I'm sure sapphire would be happy to RMA it for you but if maybe it's out of warranty or you can't get support some reason let's look at what fan it is and how hard it is to replace it's the the most common failure on a video card is going to be the fan I'm gonna separate these on the mat as well so it looks like this just one contact point oh nice of these that's what I think it is oh yeah these are awesome so this is a sapphire he's been doing this XFX has done it as well but these are always nice to see instead of a full cabled fan they're actually terminating in pins and on a contact point and I just sockets so if you need to arm a this yourself you might even be able to just ask sapphire for the fan and not have to send the card out for weeks at a time and if you can't get a fan from them for some reason not a warranty whatever this particular model is an NT k HK limited fan they've used these on some of the pulse models I think or at least of the brand anyway and or some of the 5700 xt models outside of this one the model is FD 1 0 0 1 5 m 1 2 d that's good we can get a shot of that so if you ever need to replace the fan on your own that's what you would buy hopefully you can find it with this same spec some of them might be cabled depending on how they're made so that sockets here one screw a very easy to replace love seeing that stuff for ease of maintenance where we're big fans of keeping stuff going even as parts of it die because you can normally fix them pretty easily this is just gonna be your mixture of fan cables all bridging to each other contacting the board you can technically get RGB fans separately from sapphire for I think it's 30 extra dollars and clearly if you wanted to install them that's like say you buy them separately there they don't come installed whatever and you want to add them later it's that same process we just went through you take one screw at you remove the fan and then you socket it in and you have the screw back in trivial anyone can do that and as a reminder you wouldn't have to do all this other stuff we did you can leave the card 100% assembled don't have three paste it because all you're doing is replacing a fan so good to see that stuff from sapphire ease of maintenance is always good and I think that's gonna wrap pretty much all this all we have up here is just a PCB with LEDs in it for the sapphire nameplate and I'm gonna just a plastic shroud so that's the Sapphire Nitro+ teardown really straightforward stuff in terms of disassembly one of the things we look for in these so first of all we're looking for why is the cooler performing the way it is maybe it's bad maybe it's good look that Messiah VOC we had some anomalous performance there it's looking apart under stood why part of its quality assembly quality part of its get PCB photos for build Zoid let him handle the electrical will handle the thermal and split the workload that way and then another part of it and a really important one that we don't talk about too much is how easy is the product to maintain on your own as it ages it'll exit warranty you'll have trouble getting parts from the manufacturer or getting support and there's no reason each company's gonna have a different policy obviously so I'm not saying anything specifically about sapphire here but as video cards die in quotes there there's no reason to get rid of it only because a fan stops spinning and so a lot of what we're looking for is how hard is it to replace the most common component failure on the video card or does it have simple protections like fuses that can blow to protect the other circuitry so that you can pretty easily get an RMA on it and all of that's really important to maintaining the car just maintenance overall we use the phrase quality of life features a lot when we're talking about video card coolers because the GPU is ultimately they're not too different once you're on a specific SKU they don't deviate that much from each other so that starts to change a little bit with things like the kingpin cards where the performance does jump more but also not proportionate the price that's obviously made for something else so anyway maintenance is a major fashion what we look at this one's very easy to maintain it is more expensive so it's not like that's a free feature that Sapphire just threw in you do pay for it it's $440 card the extra fans are 470 once you're going that far into it you're extremely close to 2070 super territory so you really have to consider that side of the argument you can check our review for more of that if you want to see more about this card and how it performs thermally acoustically or in games or in power targets and that'll wrap this one thank you for watching as always you can subscribe for more or if you want to help us out directly pick up one of the GN tear down toolkits that I used for this video this is kitted out with all the screwdrivers you need for the easy cards like this one which is mostly different sizes of Phillips or for the more advanced cards like the RT X series which uses a lot of different types of screws and about 70 plus of them I think there's as many screws in the RT X pounders edition cards as there are RT X ops or whatever they called it on the card thank you for watching check back for more we'll see you all next time\n"