EVGA RTX 3080 FTW3 Tear-Down & Cooler Disassembly

hey everyone today we are tearing down the evga rtx 3080 ftw3 so we're gonna disassemble this card this one should be much more straightforward than the founders edition card for which we have a separate teardown on the channel already that one was actually not as complex as previous generations but for the first time disassembling it it took several hours it became a three to five minute job though after that after getting some experience with it this though is a very standard assembly at least externally so we're gonna take a look at it we'll get some pcb shots and uh potentially send those along to build and see if we can get analysis assuming there's anything worth talking about underneath and this is also the card we're going to be using for overclocking streams by the time this teardown goes up there should already be stream recaps and stream archives for you to watch so let's get started before that this video is brought to you by the team t-force cardea ceramic c440 m.2 ssd available in one terabyte and two terabyte capacities with pcie gen4 support for high transfer speeds team claims that its ssd can do sequential speeds up to five gigabytes per second read and 4.4 gigabytes per second right or 750 000 iops for random reads and writes team rates its ssd for 3 600 total terabytes written and the ceramic heat spreader directly conducts from the controller to help manage ssd temperatures under high loads learn more at the link in the description below so this card we've already done baseline testing on it and the other than getting a video out of the disassembly to show people how it goes together we also need to put thermocouples on the card for additional thermal testing for the final review so we've got baseline numbers but we do have to disassemble it anyway and the card is the one that performed the highest in our full stock overclocking stream we already have a recap up for that if you're interested and that's because it has a higher power target uh out of the box than the other see that said joe staponzi and i have already changed this vbios there's a v bio switch right there you have an oc mode and a normal mode where oc mode is the higher power target and should be the higher clocks out of the box and normal mode is is the lower of them and quieter so we've already flashed the ocv bios with a special v bios that has a fully unlocked 900 watt power target and i'm not sure if that's gonna be made available to the public at any point but our plan is to basically put a liquid nitrogen pod on it and then get a voltage controller on or modify the the um voltage provided to the card so that we can overclock it further so this is our baseline for liquid nitrogen overclocking because it was performing the best for that so far but it doesn't mean it's the best card necessarily you'll have to check the review obviously to see that especially for stock performance for non-overclocking there are headers on it there's an auxiliary fan header here where you can control a case fan via gpu temperature if you prefer uh there's an rgb header there for i guess synchronization and then we've got three different colored fan headers here for the fans hooked up to the card this is new normally all they just go with all black all gray are all white but we'll take a look into it see where they're routed my assumption is that changing the color on these probably helps with rmas and repair so they can more easily help a customer identify if a particular fan has gone wrong i do like that they're accessible externally that's good it does not look like you'll be able to replace the fan completely externally unfortunately but we'll take a look at that too for the rest of the car this one has gotten the most attention for its looks and not for good reasons but evga is doing a change where they're gonna have a swap out plate here so you can get a gray black or some other color in the future so they they definitely got a ton of criticism for this probably rightfully so frankly and uh there's gonna be a swap out piece for that so maybe we'll look into into how easy that is to remove in case you're one of the early buyers who wants to swap it there's also one on the back although that's not going to be particularly visible in most cases okay let's take it apart so we are working on the gm media modmat there are not many of these left in stock we have a couple dozen left right now they've been selling through fast but they're on store.camerasnexus.net if you want to pick one up i like to use them for tracking screws on the grid in case it's a complex card and then it's also got some other diagrams on it it's just an anti-static work surface we've got a common ground point hooked up over here to a grounding strap if you want to exercise more caution with the more expensive cards and it is available on the store now we're also going to use our tool kit for this one uh which is also on store camerasnexus.net but recently sold through okay so this is a leaf spring it's the one on video used uh but same retention mechanism and bracket as nvidia's using they're probably selling it to the partners i this i don't know if this is a reference pcb yet i need to get into it but basically there's a reference there's a founder's edition and the board partners who are getting into into cards early typically will use a reference pcb provided by nvidia so that they can uh get a card done quickly so we're going to track these screws this one goes about in the middle with the card oriented that direction this one's got both silhouettes on it i'm going to remove the back plate first let's screw a different size no okay there's a nut on the other side of this one that i'm holding and there it goes i think there might be a nut on the other side of this one too but i can't access it from here so we'll come back to that this one does have one as well okay so there's one more hidden under here so this technically is not a warranty void if removed sticker which is good because those are actually not enforceable in the u.s anymore it is a tamper seal evga has told us in the past that they don't use it to enforce any kind of warranty if they did you'd have a legal ability to refute it but that's just allegedly for them to be able to tell if the user has modified the card at all they say it's the help expedite warranties but it could also be to help deny them we don't really have a good way of checking at least not on mass so i did remove this one it did have a nut on the other side of it but it was inside the card and inaccessible to me so the best way to get it out is to just pull the plate up after you remove all the others and provide some upwards force to the screw and then it'll come off just keep in mind that there is now a piece of metal floating around in the card uh from the other side of this from the nut so we're gonna have to get in there and remove it obviously before reassembly but we're taking it apart anyway so back plate i am sad to say is not being leveraged at all despite being uh a pretty good amount of surface area good amount of aluminum there so this is not contacted to the back what you'd like to see we've done a lot of testing over the years many years of different gpu launches always the same thing where actually evga has been through this before specifically with the acx series it is what birthed the icx series and was a good change and unfortunately not present here uh doesn't matter a ton well depends on the card generally no but it doesn't hurt to have better cooling and when you spend more for a higher end card we do like to see the extra couple pennies per thermal pad so ideally they'd have pads here you can actually see the blocks where the memory modules are it's just gonna be memory modules pretty much on each one of these on the other side of the board uh two of them will be missing but you can see like it's about one finger width size that's a block that's a memory module that's memory module that's memory module and ideally there's a thermal pad here that connects to the plate because despite not being finned it's still surface area even though it's just flat and inefficient and it's also uh depending on your cpu cooler it's it's in a position where it will radiate heat up and into a tower cooler which will then wick it away or if you have a top mounted rod that'll deal with it too so we would like to see thermal pads there ideally this is probably a simple mod you could do to improve performance maybe we'll look into that in the the review after i get the thermocouples on here only other stuff on the backside this is very interesting so there's a cutout here it looks like i can see a cutout in a copper plate too if we orient the card oh there's the screw in there you can see or you should be able to see that there's a copper plate up there and this is sort of an interesting design decision where they're trying to exhaust some heat through the card and this is a better spot to do it too it'll exhaust behind a tower cooler and straight into your rear exhaust fan if you have a standard atx case setup so let's just see if that actually lines up with it mostly lines up this is a so hexagonal hole patterns are more efficient than slots but it's still not really the most efficient use of space but it is better than we've seen in previous generations so they're trying to push some air through there via these fans now they're not quite aligned with it but the fans they don't blow straight down there's going to be some air shooting out the side so it'll make its way out rest of the back side we've got some up controllers here and then this is an led for the evga logo we're going to disconnect that never pull on the wires obviously you want to disconnect at the header this one doesn't have anything on the other side securing it so you just pull that out i'm just disconnecting this because as i work on the card i don't want to have this get caught on anything but it doesn't actually it's not actually required to be disconnected and now we can remove the leaf spraying so let's do that like i said we're using our own tool kit here that we specially designed for gpu disassembly on the store out of stock but we'll be kind of opening and closing back orders depending on our current status with orders and for when you remove these you want to do i i do about 50 30 to 50 percent loose for each screw before i remove it completely that way they're all releasing tension at the same time where they're about and we're just going to drop that right here on the grid so we can keep track that the screws are retained and they're captive screws on the other side you can see the uh the sort of washer to contain them okay now we need to remove the i o plate unfortunately this card doesn't stand up on its own so everything so far has been a phillips one screwdriver including the larger leaf springs screws those are still phillips one this is going to be a phillips zero there's a phillips zero we're going to use that now did it come out oh there it is that's what we've had rolling around in there from that one screw don't forget that if you are doing a disassembly and reassembly don't leave that floating and there you short something so there's three screws here that i can see right now anyway okay i o plates removed this card has a vertical fin orientation not horizontal so the air is going to actually go into the board and into the glass this is standard there's really only two ways to orient this okay yeah some of the air will come out through these pin holes and the fin stack they're going horizontally for the most part though you've got vertical uh exhaust into the board and into the glass and um the only other way to do this is with angular fins like the fe design so they are not wasting a ton of space with the shroud it's not containing the fins that's good we've seen a lot of manufacturers screw that up let's remove the board from the cooler this just takes some care where you have to [Music] release it from the thermal paste so now that we've loosened this keep in mind there are at least three cables plugged in so what i'm going to do is lift it up slightly look inside to make sure i know what i'm working with before i pull out anything i can see where the thermal pads are now so i don't want to pull too hard because one of them's one of them is coming down and we don't want to stretch out the pad and reduce its thickness by doing so so what i'm going to do is shove in a jimmy and then we can push the thermal pad off without stretching it in a way that will damage it and i'm going to disconnect these three fan cables these are just clipped in very easy to remove just push the clip okay should be oh there's one more cable on the top over here so disconnect that before we go any further this is why you always want to look into the card at eye level with it so you don't pull on a cable that you are unaware of okay so let's look at the cooler for pcb is very interesting with all the holes in it it's amazing the reduction of space this generation on pcb usage this helps as we get higher and higher current capability mosfets too so we have this large header we've got these three for the fans i'm confident of that these are fan cables this is a what you would call a thermal putty we actually have some of this so we can replace it as needed thermal putty is is so thermal pads generally are sticky they tend to stay together uh you tend for some of them to get multiple uses they're all putty you don't always get multiple uses and um you just smear it on with like a spreader and it's kind of like a paste except it will fill larger gaps so in the sense of spreading like this and being a little bit uh almost liquidy when you first apply it it's like a paste but a paste can't fill a gap this large so that's why they've got that there that's for the inductors inductors don't get uh aren't as thermally sensitive as a lot of components a lot of them can go to like 150c but doesn't hurt to leverage this huge heatsink to pull down the vrm also you got to figure even if the inductor itself doesn't really care because just a copper coil inside of a metal housing it's still going to heat up the board and the nearby components so sinking it will get it away from the pcb and into something else so then for the cold plate there's a copper cold plate here you can see the vr the memory contact and we've got memory modules there there's one here they're missing memory modules for a potential higher ski card later not uncommon to have missing modules that is intentional and then thermal the thermal paste application for the gpus dead center as expected pretty good spread on it one thing to talk about here too is the gpu conducts into the same plate as the memory uh they are sharing a cooling solution and sinking into the heat pipes and then the heat pipe says normally go into the fins so typically when you share a thermal solution a cold plate with like a liquid cooler which is a bit of a different scenario than today but if we were looking at a hybrid card with a water cooler on it typically when you sync the memory into the same plate as the gpu if it's like a 120 or 140 ml clc then you are going to increase the effective temperature of the gpu because you're cooling more power with the same solution so the water temperature is higher in this instance it's an air cooler works a little bit differently and uh you'll see in our review how things perform okay so we'll come back to the cooler in a second now we're going to take a look at the pcb though so for the pcb joe joe joe joe okay so pcb wise uh the interesting part again is all the holes they've cut in it where it's not like that nvidia approach where they and videos got like like they sent a bolt of lightning down it and split it at the end it's very interesting but this one's got the power connectors in a traditional spot there are three eight pins for shunt resistors we've got one shunt resistor up here shunt resistor down here next to actually that's a that's a fuse right there that red piece so this shunt resistor is going to correspond with the pcie slot if you're doing a shunt resistor mod and shorting things you generally don't want to short that one it's the ones associated with the power connectors you want to short and shorting them just allows you to trick the card into drawing more power if you these are very power limited by the way when we overclocked this one full stock without a special view bios it was extremely power limited could do more with more power but some of that tvga so that's on video so this one though you would want to skip you don't generally want to force more power through the the board so the motherboard that is so let's take a look back at the other side there should probably be a few more of these yes two more shunt resistors right here and then two more right here so we've got five in this block alone and you take a basically if you wanted to check which corresponds to which header if you want to split which ones you're shorting or something you would just take a continuity check from the leg of one of these doesn't matter which leg to one of the 12 volt legs on these pcie blocks and actually we have on our mod map very conveniently a pcie pinout diagram here you've got eight and four these are eight and you can see clip side so then you would just match and you could pull up a diagram online too you'd match the yellow the 12 volt and then you do a continuity check and that'll tell you where to where you short the shunts this is another fuse right there there's actually a fuse here a fuse here generally speaking these don't actually protect your card from a failure they're not fast enough to respond as we understand it but they're useful in troubleshooting a defect especially for or primarily for the rma department so if you send in a card that's had something blow up they'll look at the fuses where they exist they may be able to repair it and send it back faster or send you a new one and then they'll try and fix it for another for a b stock release so that covers the small components for the shunt resistors and the fuses let's see what else there is that we can point out joe is what do you think this is this uh controller i don't know i can barely see it i'm blind i need to go get my uh eyes checked okay let's pull up some of the pads here i'm not going to completely remove these because i want to make it a little easier for myself when i reassemble but we'll at least expose some of the mosfets here so let me try and get a read on this one we'll have a probably have a separate board analysis oh this is interesting actually that's that's new to me the gpu is marked so you'll see a blue dot and a black dot the last time i saw this was when tin pen was marking kp gpus for a contest and he was doing it so that he could look up the quality of the gpu but i'm not sure what their reasoning is here so i'm actually going to call our evga rep and he's gonna tell me he doesn't know that and then he'll say that's weird really and then he'll call someone and then he'll tell me the answer all right you there yeah hello hey i'm uh i'm recording a video right now on the ftw3 doing a teardown um there is a on the you know the metal frame around the substrate there's a blue dot and a black dot in the top left corner do you know what that is i need to check can you send me a picture of it yeah yeah okay cool let me i'll send you a picture and then you can let me know if you know anything about it yeah so we're getting a check on that but it could be qc it could also be uh potentially bending for different cards so sometimes actually a lot of the time board partners will have pcbs that they use for multiple uh lines for multiple product lines where they actually use the the same components overall or most the same components but change things like the gpu bin so for example evj in the past has had like a 1080 black and a 1080 gaming or a 1080 gaming oc and a lot of those will be the same board and even the same cooler but they just swap the gpus on them based on the quality of the silicon for frequency so that could be what that is if you're wondering how that's checked we have a video of msi's factory actually where they swap the gpus in and out of a socketable video card to check the silicone quality i actually just got a text back from him after i sent the photo of this and he said weird okay let me check so definitely called the response all right let's clean off the gpu the paste application is good give them credit for that oh wow wow okay well the spread is even just go for removing the paste on the gpu and observe how tried it is we call that junk that's bad that's super dry gpu identifier ga102-200-kd-a1 so it's the same identifier as i recall right now as the fe card will put them next to each other on the screen in case but there's your gpu terms of liquid nitrogen pot clearance i think we'll just barely escape by here the caps are far enough out so we should be okay there and the rest of the board will save for further analysis and our overclocking streams to tell you how it performs how it holds up for the controllers on the back side we've got a up9511r and then a u 56 5 6 500 i think is what that says so let's take a look at the rest of the cooler in terms of heat pipes they've got some it looks like those are either 8 or 10 ml let me check some larger heat pipes in there there are the round varieties as i put to the flat one those are about eight mil heat pipes at least that one was eight point seven eight so heat pipes uh going mostly over the gpu as a reminder heat pipes are most effective when directly over the source of heat you can actually still see the imprint of the gpu it's approximately here and at least i can see it from the camera angle where i wiped off the thermal paste so that's going to align with there's a heat pipe there six that's an eight mil there's an eight mil there's an eight mil so we've got three eight mils directly contacting where the gpu would be contacting and then remember we're also cooling memory with these so these are also going through you've got a six mil going through memory module here memory module here eight mil through memory memory same for these so there's pretty good contact everywhere the only thing missing the heat pipes up here so when i do vr when i do vram uh thermal testing i'll probably test some of these because these look like they will be cooled the worst uh so we'll check those for the thermal performance for the vrm we've got contact here uh for that's just an aluminum plate contacts the inductors that's a mosfet line right there there's more over here so it's a vr this is a huge vrm inductors here mosfets here and for the rest of the cooling solution well if you wanted to take the shroud off to replace the fans what you would do is you'd pull these screws and then you'd pull these fans are are unfortunately not pin to pad contact they're wired directly to the fan so there's one two three looks like four screws there's also a screw inside in the blade up here for the the shroud so you need to take the screw way up here out to remove the shroud as well and keep in mind you've also got an led cable running for this and that's going to be this cable right here you can see it's got a red red and a ground and i don't know what the other one is i don't know the pin out exactly but that might be a 5 volt or 12 volt in the ground depending on how they color code it so anyway that's the rgb leds and um the fans you just take a bunch of screws out and swap them but not particularly not particularly easy to access compared to some other vendors you know the amd board partners honestly do a much better job with replaceable fans i'm not sure why that that technological advancement split between the two companies like that but you see sapphire and xfx in the past have done a much better job where they have a socketable fan that's pen to pad customer can replace it without even taking a single screw out of the card maybe one single screw that holds the fan in but other than that the rest of it can stay the same so i'd really like to see that applied to some of these nvidia cards obviously i haven't taken them all apart yet it's possible some do but that's an improvement that they could do on the customer accessibility side so i said we would look at how hard it is to replace this red thin i thought i could maybe just pry it out with a screwdriver but that wasn't working too well so we're gonna take these out this is a 1.5 mill which we also have so this card everything you need is actually in our toolkit to take it apart there's a phillips those are phelps one okay i'm removing the screws for the shroud right now technically not for the fans these don't hold the fans in at all actually all right there's the shroud that's at least a little bit easier than expected because we didn't have to deal with any stupid cables except for this one which is easy to route out okay there's the shroud if you hate leds you could go in here to completely kill them but it seems not necessary now we can get more appreciation for the amount of metal on this heatsink there's a lot of fins so let's move this aside and take a look at the as one of our viewers called it taylor swift lipstick to see how hard it is to remove this red stuff yeah that's not that's not coming out without breaking it i don't think uh i'll follow up with ebg on this but i i this might be like a whole shroud replacement because i don't see an easy way to remove this without maybe without scratching the hell out of parts of it so for the red shroud i just checked with evga and it is molded in there you can't remove it but if you have a red card and you don't want it they'll have a way for you to either swap cards or remove the shroud and replace it they're going to have a black front and back for that instead of red but the back plate will retain its red line so that's the evga card overall very easy to disassemble it's about 16 screws the same as the founder's edition card but they are easier in that uh it's basically just phillips and then if you want to take the shroud out it's a 1.5 mil allen so that's that gets you to more than 16 at that point because now you're taking the fan assembly apart and all that stuff but to get to the pace it's about 16. pretty easy overall and there's a few places we'd like to see improved thermal pads between the back plate and the pcb so that they can actually leverage that back plate for more than just structure it should do a little bit a lot of the time depending on the card that might be one or two degrees but it's also like you start spending so much money on a card and it's one of those if you can make it perform a little better then why wouldn't you uh cost savings normally is the answer but anyway cooler design's interesting we'll talk about the performance in the review uh the shifting one thing i didn't mention the fan here in the middle has shifted down 10 millimeters evga claims this helps with performance perhaps it does uh there's not a great way to test because we'd have to do a b testing so you'd have to move it back up and redesign the shroud and we'd we'd basically need their prototypes to verify that claim either way though i kind of doubt that it has a huge difference just like the thermal pads on the back don't but if you're arguing over every couple degrees then it doesn't hurt unless it looks like a carnival distortion mirror then then it might hurt a little bit so that's it for this one thanks for watching subscribe for more as always check back for the full review of this card we already have baseline testing in but uh now it's time to do some more advanced testing including liquid nitrogen with it and you can go to store.camerasnexus.net if you'd like to pick up one of our mod maps the toolkits are out of stock they're in and out of back order depending on what is going on at the time so keep an eye out for that otherwise patreon.com camerasnexus if you like this content thank you for watching we'll see you all next time [Music] i

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 337,589

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, evga rtx 3080 ftw3 review, evga rtx 3080 ftw3 tear down, evga rtx 3080 ftw3 disassembly, evga rtx 3080 ftw3 worth it, evga rtx 3080 ftw3 benchmarks, best rtx 3080, rtx 3080 benchmarks

Id: mX1spw5_IX0

Length: 29min 26sec (1766 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

The thumbnail looks like an alternate Biblical story where Jesus tried turning computer parts into wine.

[u/bobasaurus]

Interesting pcb routing for air pass through. That heat sink is a monster too. Any reason not to shove some thermal pads under the backplate like they mention?

[u/Cory123125]

One of the few without that really ugly cut out for the sli thats not even on the 3080 that almost no one will use on the 3090

[u/DarkoneReddits]

was it discovered yet why the gpu die was marked? makes me think they marked and handpicked gpus for the reviewers, which is shady if it comes out being the case.

[u/ElectroLuminescence]

My god that is the ugliest looking GPU shroud I have ever seen. Looks like the back-end of the batmobile. Who thought the red accent piece was good lookin? I would take the FE any day over this

[u/Dereference_operator]

not worth paying for the extra in special model in my view the base 3080 is soooo good as it is already so

[u/[deleted]]

Did your nitrogen just vent through the pressure relief????

[u/[deleted]]

Since it's EVGA, are the fans gonna clip the power cable like the 2000s?