EVGA's Final GPU Secrets: Engineering Lab Tour ft. KINGPIN

how is this connected to the board is it it's hot glue man tape this lab is the EVGA engineering lab for high-end video cards and after the tragic loss of evj's GPU Development Division earlier this year our lab tour today might be the last opportunity to see it and it's fully operational State The Man Behind it is this guy Vince Kingpin lucido who's been doing engineering work and world record-breaking overclocks for nearly 15 years at the company Vince has kept a lot of secrets in those 15 years to keep both competitors and Nvidia at Bay from clamping down on engineering hacks to make higher clock and gpus and better quality products okay I've always wanted to show this but I've never actually showed it okay nobody knows I've ever used this but I think it's time to tell but now he's ready to share those secrets with the world we flew out to Taipei Taiwan to hang out with Kingpin and learn about everything from a secret RTX 4090 modded card the process that would have turned it into a KP card all the way to his rework station his hacks to defeat Asus year after year at xoc and in a second video later he'll take us to the repair and RMA Center to swap gpus between pcbs just like EVGA does for its customers This truly is a special look behind the scenes and Kingpin said it best here it's a moment Frozen in time let's get started with this tour before that this video is brought to you by Arctic and the liquid freezer 2 liquid coolers now including an argb model in the lineup the liquid freezer Series has been a top performer in our Benchmark for years now and Arctic has continually fine-tuned its products even post launch with things like kits for ryzen argb fans for new Flair and new radiator sizes the company also has its brand new MX six thermal paste on the market now learn more at the links in the description below I don't remember the last time we were here but we did a lab tour here before and it's it's a lot different big time well you were here last time right and you remember the whole room was OC right yeah well now obviously I'm doing a lot more with bikes now this is my main overclocking area also in there in the studio yeah I have an overclocking setup for like streams and then like I can do like reworks or you know yeah any kind of soldering and we're gonna check out a repair center later in the trip too so that'll be cool yeah they do most of the major work for me for sure as we discussed earlier this is like and this is sort of like the evolution of every generation of of Kingpin card right first Sometimes is the FTW EVT sometimes it's the KP EVT but there's always this first step so I will ask them we will Design the card to you know have Provisions for all the rails that I think are going to be relevant to that generation so like for for example Nvidia added a new source rail so I told them to add it you know so I can test it so I need to determine whether or not I want to put it on this KP right yeah so you've got Still mvvd Envy vdd we got fbvd we got PEX and we got a 1.2 volt and a 1.8 volt Source right yeah the card has analog power on it actually it's not digital so um yeah this is old school yeah I mean old school old school right does it give you a readout anywhere of the exact voltage you're dialing to I have it oh you're okay so you see watch watch The V chord so it's just a little dial can take it up and down yeah and that's very helpful obviously for fine-tuning the card right looking at Thermals right looking at is the plug getting hot yeah but you've got any trouble with that with that oh man okay dude even even I'm running 3 100 xoc bios yeah 1.2 volt still stays around 40 50c okay it's very reasonable I really believe that it has to do with how these are designed the build quality and the connection strength I think that's the main problem with these plugs I think you guys were the only ones who put on the side like this most people put it here right yeah there's a lot of heat here do you know what the PCB temperature is here under load compared to here it's a huge difference yeah yeah like why would you want to put a power plug right where the hottest point of the PCB is it's talking about it forces it to be a sharp angle to get back to cable man yeah this is just uh it's sort of that step that we do every generation and of course this generation we did it too and I call it FTW but actually this car doesn't really have a name right it well that one especially yeah it doesn't really have a name but you know obviously it probably would have been the FTW yeah um and uh yeah and this this approach would have gotten into KP so what oh this is just connecting to your voltage yeah these are just like extension wires man all the way to the board is it it's hot glue man tape and you can come back and take a look at the card you can see all the wires with all the read points are taped everywhere oh yeah these kinds of cards actually bother me because there's so many points of failure when you're moving things around right wire can rip out or something and it always happens now this thing's interesting this is a this is an old this is an old version of something that I I use now to make my thermal creams that I sell oh yeah tin made this for me okay so uh what what what tin made here is basically I think the technical the technical term for it is uh it's a capacitive discharge welder okay basically it just takes from the AC Mains charges the caps and then it releases all that energy at once and welds the thermostat okay so that's you're talking about the end of the wire where it actually probes yep okay and the the the key for like ln2 like a lot of people like my probes because they usually read pretty accurately yeah yeah like minus 194 minus 195. yeah and uh yeah quick response time yeah the the key to that is actually the gauge of the wire for ln2 should be a little bit thick yeah like like like at least 20. yeah I showed one of those to um a thermal engineer who came through our office and he's used to work working with like very thin ones yeah um so this uh so 10 built the welder yeah he built this for me and then it's it's cool man it's just contacts for everyone who hasn't seen it 10 um he no longer works at EVGA but he did for a long time and we did a tour here with him present before he's kind of like the mad scientist of the lab at that time yeah so um that's a really fun video you should check out do you remember when he was destroying gpus on camera for us yeah so there were unsellable evj gpus that they were engineering samples they had problems with them and evj couldn't ever sell them and he was like let's do something educational with it and show what happens when you burn it up and uh man a lot of people got really upset about the the loss because they're like why are you wasting good GPS yeah that could have been my GPU yeah I see some Titan bees yeah these are Titan voltas uh obviously modded by 10. yeah he made these little voltage mods for me yeah they're retired they still work though actually this is all this just like Parts uh so I see like some boards up here yeah there's some like old pcbs these are all 299 darks that I had um different different types of PCB revisions of my reports and stuff the helmet collections now yeah I'm kind of a lot of helmets I'm kind of obsessed with helmets man I don't know I just really like helmets so um and also I'm obsessed with the weight like I'm always kind of trying to find like a lighter and a lighter helmet yeah and this is this is my most recent helmet I mean you feel how light that is to x-light yeah yeah it's really really nice helmet super nice yeah and I did it like it's like I don't know if you're you're in the Slayer but I'm I'm like really in the Slayer so this is like a replica of the lake guitarist uh cool guitar it's basically yeah I did a replica of this guitar yeah that's cool yeah I'm kind of obsessed very nice guys this is the classified stuff yeah you know I I mean when I I was working with EVGA at this time but I wasn't working on this Hardware it was Peter 10 who's at Asus now right all the Rog stuff right you know that pretty much board we talked about before you were running seven all in two parts at once I want to say like evga's history evga's history of making things that for enthusiasts and the fans started with this motherboard okay is this the uh this is the 762 classified okay um this is related to the SRX this was before that okay okay so there's some some cool things about this board um did you know that EVGA invented four-way SLI I did not know that yeah EVGA invented four ways okay do you remember this was that something that at the time did did you have to did evj have to get Nvidia to explicitly allow that well do you remember GTX 295 was a dual PCB card right so that was the first implementation of quada Sola it was two 295s right but it's still four pcbs and you know those are hard to clock right so we were sitting around discussing and Jacob was talking to Peter and they were saying hey why don't we just do four 295 285 GTX 285 and they they figured out a way to hack the BIOS and it worked so they designed this board for four of those cars right so it's really EVGA that that did that that started four-way SLI yeah that's that's it was that also the start of of uh Nvidia clamping down on some of that stuff or did they not not at that time no that came late supported yeah it came later you know or did they actively support it or they're just like dude do whatever you want and video wasn't so huge back then okay so it was kind of different times yeah right but this I want to say this board really is is a perfect example of everything that we've done in the very beginning what's the is this on vrm yeah okay yeah that's a massive yeah this has an NF 200 on it oh it's on maybe there's a chip is there just there's an nf200 here oh is it Northbridge Southbridge yeah that's a while yeah yeah yeah yeah it's 1366 man yeah this is old but this is sort of this is the very beginning of of that VGA really being for enthusiasts and then this board came next which is bios hacking seems like it's what got you guys a lot of the uh a lot of the advantages and in the early days yes yes yes and this board just kicked ass right this board was insane right nobody else was doing that hey let's make a dual dual CPU board that can Crush records yeah what companies do things well on the um so there was the SRX and was it the sr2 was the other one one of them got kind of killed right by Intel the s o uh you know what I'm talking about were they they like flipped the toggle and decided no OC on one of those that was SRX was that SRS that was 10 did that board yeah that was the successor to this board but they kind of killed that right yeah with the Noah C so we left that off yeah I mean I don't know if this is something you want to get into on camera or not but um just there's a lot of cool engineering that that goes or went into some of this stuff and then like the SRX last minute if the company decides we're gonna turn OC off you're kind of stuck holding the bag of overclocking boards big time man right big time and do about that yeah nothing there's nothing you can do just hope that you can sell it you know I mean the board was designed for enthusiasts for overclocking right once you lose that I mean what's the angle right yeah it's just a lot of pcie slots at that point yeah yeah so what about um uh we talked about The Slap Chop last time the U.S infomercial slap job yeah I don't see it yeah I don't remember if we talked about the murder Hornet drink last time this one yeah yeah I'm not sure in Taiwan they they put they this was gifted to you by someone yeah and in Taiwan they they actually put murder Hornets in a drink and drink it and it's sort of like Red Bull I guess kind of gets your blood pumping uh yeah so that's your that's on your trophy shelf yeah it's kind of interesting what I don't know how I'm gonna bring this back home with me though you know they're not gonna let me through customs I don't know maybe I don't think so I guess you'd ship it back home I just hope it's not yeah I hope it doesn't break it yeah and carry it open it and they all come from uh and then this is all new so at least since I was here yeah yeah Media company on uh eighth or ninth floor uh have sells all this stuff so I had him come down and I kind of told him yeah I wanted like a like a system up here so I could kind of move the lights around anywhere I wanted and I used this for I use this for live streaming with Jacob when he does his charity streams and I will probably use it for my channel as well this I think you it might have been an early version of it but that um Jacob what was that video we did with Jay where it was like me Jay and then Vince yeah what was that uh it was one of the charity streams we did yeah overclocking right one of the rip Jays Steve one of those it might have been 20 I don't know if it's 20 or 30 series but I think it was that 30 it might have been 30 series yeah yeah I did it remotely from here yeah because you were here I remember and you had the you had one of our hoodies on yeah and Jay was like that's not fair he knew what I was rooting for sorry jay he was fired up after anyone man yeah um let's uh I don't know I mean I don't know if we should start with the stuff on the table or the stuff on the wall where you want to start here well the wall is just an evolution of all the things that me and Tim worked on together yeah and this was this is sort of the start we sort of transitioned from classified being the high end right to KP being the high end and this is the this product is actually a clear one classified kingpins the first one okay it's got both names it's a classified Kingpin continue or did it just become one or the other just became Kingpin after that okay yeah so the 299 dark was our first motherboard together oh no actually it wasn't x79 dark was our first motherboard together like KP we redid the first x79 made it better and then we did 299 dark and then then we got into mainstream boards right c390. then we did that that board sr3 yeah that board I really like it's a shame that the in the CPU Intel's part was I can't get it it wasn't available yeah like none of them yeah any story to the uh this is this is kind of special you know I don't know you know bisobiso he's he's one of our overclockers that's overclocking an arena he killed everybody on these two cards man I don't you always saw his name at the top yeah right yeah he just wrecked everybody with this card everybody all the Galax guys everybody this is 30 series 20 30 90 30 90 TI yeah um it's kind of a cool story with piso right Jacob's like hey man there's this Korean guy he bought a he bought a retail card and he got the record but he's having a problem with this card can you help him out yeah I'd look I was like wow man the guy got the record with a retail card you've never heard of him before that never heard of him man so he's his whole thing is like his whole thing is like what's so cool about him is that he bought a retail card it's not like some hand-picked you know EVT sample or anything like that right that's really what a campaign card is all about that's what we try to give people that's why we've been the gpus that's why we try to make the memory better than other cards right right we want people to get it out of the box and be able to get the same kind of score that the overclockers get right some companies they do it they don't do it that way they do it like hey let's just give our overclockers some EVT that we're not going to sell and let's sell a piece of junk yeah yeah that's that's not the way right that's not how we do it right this card I absolutely love this is the legend I think it still holds all the four-way records how does it really right maybe for a long time is that 1080 TI yeah 1080 TI until Nvidia comes out with a with uh now there's no more SLI so there's gonna need to be one GPU can beat four of those right before those things yeah with the the 40 90 you can't no take it down so so 10 4 10 ATI is still holding records over 149 yeah for 3D marks many years man those records stood for like two three years now the main thing with this card is we found that the PLL circuitry on uh on like the Nvidia card and the other cards that we tested it needed to be kept separate or else like the power good would shut it off so the main thing with this card is it has like a separate PLL circuitry that doesn't turn off and that was kind of the secret with this card um have you ever noticed how every generation people get really pissed at the current EVGA aesthetic and then the next Generation they're like oh I like the last one better will they bring that back yeah so where what was the response to this because I I think this looks really cool there are a lot of mixed feelings about that one on launch yeah a lot of people didn't like the Frosted like the way it was frosted but after it launched people seem to like it yeah what I was thinking when I designed the ID for this was like kind of like Ferrari F40 okay like the clear clear yeah duck lid on it you know you can see the motor through it like I was kind of thinking like along these lines was the red painted base plate stock also like that's how it was sold yeah I mean I think it's cool a lot of people got really excited about the um the 700 XT AMD GPU it had the engineering one had a red PCB it's not file it's not going to ship that way unfortunately people were really excited about it yeah yeah because it's different yeah we do that 10 used to always do EVT pcbs like green yeah just for fun this is 790 now this one is this is 980 now this one's interesting we actually put a PCB heater on the cart oh really okay so the 980 classified is the one I'm sorry uh actually that is classified that was another Kingpin classified my bad that was the last one that one has the the PCB heater element on the card so that was kind of nice so is it um so no need for a heater right right it's in the PCB um this one is 980 TI which is this was an awesome card this was probably one of the most popular Kingpin cards I think um yeah we were discussing that earlier yeah right um just beefier version of this more memory this one is the what which one where did you so for the first one did you say it was 780 Ti yeah 780 so for the 780 Ti what what was the launch for that like I mean when when it came out did it feel like it was a success or did it feel like weren't really sure yet what do you think Jacob which one 780 Ti it was really popular right I think we we sold a lot yeah it was a very popular it was one of the one of the biggest selling cards yeah it's big so it was there was a lot of hype around it you know yeah so instantly already and it was dude it was a lot better than all the other cards it was like big difference you know was there um at any point in all of these I mean did you hit uh a spot where it felt like it either wasn't successful there was a lot of resistance either from Nvidia or uh engineering challenges which one yeah all of them man there's always challenges with every card because we want to push the limits of what right what you know vendors can do and what they can't do when we talked with 10 I remember we did the interview with him about some of the cards and he was not willing to to publicly share some of this stuff like he wouldn't even tell me off camera yeah because he said then they'll go in behind you guys and lock it down yeah uh that's kind of how it works arms race yeah yeah yeah um where's the this one is special because this is actually this actually is the 1080 Kingpin which never was released um we were a little bit late making this card and we knew that we got an announcement that the ti was coming so we just stopped it yeah 1080 was like October of whatever year it was and then the ti was May I think so yeah and the 1080 TI was way more powerful so right no point yeah killed it yeah no point so unreleased this one is the 1080 TI campaign this one is special because it has a gold capped Edge this is the only one that has this gold oh I didn't know it was the only one okay I do remember it and I I used to be a snowboarder for a very long time and it's like the old Joyride snowboards and a few others type A snowboards they had these capped edges around that when they first came out yeah absolutely loved it so what made you guys stop doing it for these manufacturing problems okay the the factories you'd have trouble with flaking or something there was just a lot of rejection man so EVGA told me no more no more capped Edge so we stopped that but this is the only one has it also x299 dark has it yeah you see the gold Edge it looks sweet man it looks really sweet I mean it's very distinctive this is 2080 TI now this is where the face counts started to really go up right now using both sides for vrm right this is the one you have on your wall yeah in your studio yeah where where did um this is Tim's last card I was gonna ask that I was gonna say where did 10 start and end on these do you want to see on this one oh yeah yeah so he was there since the beginning definitely man we were together on all of these and of course he takes the lead and then after 2080 TI No More ten yeah so did he I guess he probably when he departed EVGA probably the 30 series wasn't even known to you guys yet no yeah it wasn't yeah it wasn't even behind the scenes yeah and also motherboards uh 10 left before we did this board this board this board he didn't do any of the Angels yeah and this board and also the 790 right he stopped sr3 and then 30 90 30 90 TI everybody knows you can see that the gold has gone way up yes these are my cards you can tell yeah way more gold so um any lights over here where do you want to do some you want to do some pottery wheel action again so we showed this before for um laughing yeah CPUs and uh you've got your ultrasonic there which we also showed you I said great I said what do you put in it and you were like basically like 100 IPA man and he said do not do that and you'll see like people warning against doing that don't do it fireheads but it works the best extreme fire hazard actually don't do it but um I've seen some people say like it's not good for electronics but I've never seen that man I've done so many boards and guys I've never had an issue uh these we never looked in any of these though that I remember so these are basically just old old stuff okay I'll I will show you something okay because I just want to show it okay I've always wanted to show this but I've never actually showed it okay nobody knows I've ever used this but I think it's time to tell so this is maybe you can guess what that is UJ host device uh uh see if you can guess whatever yeah just by looking at it kind of so I mean there's four was it did it sock it into a board like this to then raise the GPS off the board the whole point was so I could use my business big pots space them out right so I didn't use my slim pods for four weeks right I was always using the fat pots that's cool so that's one reason why I was crushing everybody is because I had this board yeah so you had to know the spacing of the board side but if you're if you're using you're on boards and that's easy um at one time me and Tim were talking and I'm like God man these slim pots this is just it's hard to keep up with them tense like why don't I use fats it's like I can make a board you can space them out perfect do it so did um was there any meaningful loss like going through the translation layer no okay no we tested all that the cold mattered more yeah like the additional Trace lengths add some some signal yeah some signal degradation or something nothing perfect that's cool yeah so that's kind of what what um finally I I'm showing it were there any records you broke with that one with so many yeah so many four-way yeah all the four-way stuff was on this that's cool yeah that's why you guys got crushed [Laughter] look look oh another one what is this that's the bridge for it oh it's a custom custom four-wave version yeah so yeah some of the SLI Bridges especially 20 series I think is when this really started but um Bridges were sometimes only available on certain distances so this solves that problem I guess then that's myself that's cool that's pretty cool tin's a badass man um what about uh what is this what the hell is that this is the original this is the original Tech N9ne icon man oh Jesus all right okay one thing I can say about GPU pods yeah I found out like that button on the front is obviously bad thermally right yeah because it pushes the GPU away from right where all the action is so this was just an internal testing pot that we did where there was actually no button okay the GPU bolted directly to the pot and it's just massive man I mean that's gigantic do you know which card we were using that on we were using this on 780 Ti so that's how old it is the very first Kingpin card well there's also it looks like you hadn't quite refined uh uh how you were making full use of the service area potential yeah because there's not it's not nearly as much utilization as I see on your newer stuff yeah I mean look so I'm guessing you were able to shrink the size by increasing the surface area too right do I have one of those around here no yeah it's it's obviously the size the size the size came down a lot right and the performance still really high on the new stuff so yeah very good the new icons very very good has very good performance this is what's with the random air coolers in here okay yeah you know what that that's a water something this is no it's not a water something is it Chiller I win too oh Alan oh from uh roboclock yeah it's similar it's similar this is just a block that I use for testing what is roboclocker's current health status uh decommissioned not good not good it's it's all doll torn apart yeah we'll show some b-roll of it but but actually when I if I get my channel going yeah if I really get it gone then I was thinking about doing some robocopter stuff yeah that'd be cool really cool people keep asking about it yeah that's cool so early on to Loop yep people ask all the time about why don't you run lm2 in a closed loop and um it's been done Vince has done it you can kind of see the ln2 hits in the center and then oh I never actually saw the exits block this this was the roboclocker block okay so L2 comes in centrally right here blasted at the center and then it just kind of comes out and when you're when you're flowing that one too I mean there's a constant flow how did this get engineered like was this did you do cfd for this may intent just just sat down and did it man did it in SolidWorks cool versions it's really just a practical design it looks like right like you you guys didn't go and do there's another one computational fluid dynamics for it or anything uh he did he ran some simulations on it yeah you know to make sure we're on the right track these are crazy because normally I mean probably everyone in the audience knows but normally you have like water come in and hit some micro fins this is nothing like that though oh cool so they just sock it together yep it's a lot of stuff came in here yeah it came out here yep that's cool this is stuff I never really show yeah this stuff is really cool yep a lot of history a lot of EVGA history here yeah a lot of old stuff I don't want to really throw out any of that stuff because I'll throw it out it's not I'm nostalgic the worst case even if even if you get rid of songs because you have too much I mean you could probably do giveaways or charity things or whatever yeah I thought about that too maybe do some giveaways some some rare stuff like that yeah go find some roboclock or block that's about it it's just some random odds and ads in here but those are the main main cool things that's cool yeah what um so what I mean these projects is all this stuff done like are you you gonna do more stuff like this or uh kind of after 10 left a lot of that stuff got put on hold yeah because we were sort of doing it together it was like we were we enjoyed it very much together to just do this stuff about stuff so but you know lately I'm thinking about exploring it again right for sure I'd like to do another roboclocker setup to have a a channel yet that you've started I actually I actually created the channel but I don't have any content up yet okay so place in Texas yeah should we give that should we give the name is just Kingpin yeah just campaign just came pin yep and then uh also if you're interested in stuff that Vince has done external from EVGA there's Kevin cooling yep I have campaign cooling where I sell my all my products my thermal grease bench platforms to pots and then I have my Instagram which is overclock overclock Kingpin all one word probably a lot of e-bike stuff too at this point yeah yeah it's starting to become Marty bike right I saw somebody posted some comment like hey when so there's something like that's making me uncomfortable this is the lack of overclocking it's making me uncomfortable did you say it just makes me feel uncomfortable too yeah yeah what's I I guess the broad question then is what's next right like you got all the e-bikes I I really like I really like e-bikes man and I know it's becoming like a passion of mine right I might I've been talking to a few manufacturers here and there and exploring some options on possibly building a bike custom bike it works on any uh EVGA projects motherboards EVGA right now we're doing customer support for 790 um finishing up the BIOS doing overclocking on it the sports this board's amazing man 14 layers you know there's no other mainstream board that's 14 layers dude it's a lot of layers yeah the memory signaling on this thing is awesome it's really good they hit 9200 on it the other day frequency that's a lot yeah crazy right so then if if people want to keep up and see like if you what you end up working on next like whether it's e-bikes or more of this stuff uh sounds like Instagrams probably yeah you can check out my Instagram or even FB yeah Vince Lucito I post some stuff on it yeah so I'll link that below but that'll be the laboratory for now we got some other videos too and uh I mean it's crazy it's changed a lot since we've been here a few years ago so the e-bike stuff we might do I don't know if we'll do a side Channel video for that if you want to check it out like that below as well but Vince thank you for the walk through cool and we will see you all in the next one

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 623,248

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, evga, evga rtx 4090, evga lab tour, evga office tour, evga kingpin, evga what happened, evga tear down, evga rma

Id: cr3lsU718Lg

Length: 32min 51sec (1971 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 14 2022