High-End AMD: Sapphire RX 6700 XT Nitro+ Tear-Down

so now that we've taken apart the exceptionally disappointing rx 6700 xt reference card we're gonna take apart the sapphire nitro plus uh 6700xt partner model and that's this card here unfortunately the xt pricing is just not good in general it's too high so you should probably buy something else if you can but a lot of people can't and that's why andy charges whatever they want for msrp floor pricing okay so we're gonna take apart the nitro plus see how it looks from a cooling perspective and overall design look at the cooler and uh make determinations as to whether it is significantly better than the reference design or not it'd be pretty hard to not be better before that this video is brought to you by squarespace squarespace is what we've been using for years to manage our own gamers nexus store and we've been incredibly happy with the choice squarespace makes ecommerce easy for those interested in starting stores but it also has powerful tools to build all types of websites photo 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what nvidia calls flow through design of course nvidia invented the idea of air moving through an object uh sapphire's been doing this for many years now they this is not new to sapphire it's been used in some nvidia cards as well but very basic stuff at this point that the air goes through the fin stack and comes out the other side rather than bouncing off of a pcb so it's just worth pointing out because nvidia's made such a big deal out of it fin stack is oriented top to bottom so you're going to get most of your exhaust expelled through this part of the heat sink with the bottom bouncing off of the motherboard and on this side there's actually a little bit of room for some exhaust to come out from that side fan because the fin stack does not obstruct it so sapphire didn't bring the fin stack all the way over to the i o slot and since there's holes in the i o slot there's room for some of that to be exhausted for the top i'm only seeing one screw so we're actually going to start here normally we start by taking the card apart but this is actually the feature that makes me the most happy to work with the nitro line as opposed to many of the other cards we take apart and the feature is that a phillips zero that's a philip zero uh we're getting all these screwdrivers out of our tear down tool kit by the way which is in stock and shipping now it's on store.gamersaccess.net it has all the screwdrivers you'll need for most of the gpus on the market including this one from what i can see right now so these fans uh this is something xfx has done in the past as well with the ghost series but yep there we go that's what i like to see okay cool great start for sapphire here so it's got a qc mark on it and some cardboard but this fan is a socketable fan so it's a pin to pad placement these are a little more they're more expensive to do partly because of the tolerance for the pin to pad set up and the cost of materials as opposed to doing the cables the cabling approach is the most common with three fans though that gets really messy and what a lot of companies will do like evga is they'll run one cable from each of the fans all bridged to some messy daisy chains connector and then run that into the board or sometimes you'll see each with its own header on the board which is now taking a lot of pcb space to do and this obviously does need to connect to the board still because it still needs to get controlled by the board and get power from the board but pin the pad's nice because when the fan dies and the fan is the most common failure you can email sapphire saying five years from now and say hey my fan died and uh you can tell them i'm confident i can remove one screw and sock at a fan and they'll just mail you a fan and it saves everyone time and it saves them money because then they're not shipping the card back and forth so this is what we like to see it's just a higher quality of component or build for something that's actually a meaningful feature and there it is that's all there is to putting it back okay let's take a look at the rest of this any bios there's a bio switch right there so you can see the pcb is not making use of the full height of the card and the cooler which isn't necessarily a bad thing just an observation uh but i see a cable in there with some daisy chaining going on and then i see a bio switch the default position is towards the i o that's going to be important for us later and i'm actually going to mark that we normally try to keep a record of where it's pointed so that we can restore it to defaults if needed these are spring tension screws sapphire likes to do this on their cooler designs just to get the right mounting force on them so those are going to hold the back plate to the cold plate that's going all the way to the to the not the cold blade the fin stack on the other side these screws are coming in from the pcb side so those are going to secure the back plate to the pcb and then these are going into the cold plate so we're going to release these first it's going to be a phillip zero this is a pretty large card but the board is a standard length it does cut off here a lot of that extra sizing is to fit the third fan both vertically and horizontally that's why it's so tall too those fans two of them look like they're maybe 90 mil or a hundred even and then the other one's a little bit smaller than that we'll measure those in a second so there are two tamper seals on here but they're not warranty void stickers we're fine with that typically when companies do this it's in theory to help them diagnose if it has been tampered with but not necessarily reject a warranty at least that's what they tell us but you can always take the sticker off if you're worried about it and tell them it wasn't on there let's get a couple of other screws out so that's holding the fin stack to this side of the pcb that has to come out there's that giant spring tension screw so this is part of the retention kit for the cooler actually a little hole right there curious to see why it looks like it's just to accommodate an mlcc or something okay and then we've got two more screws so actually i don't think you need to take too many screws out to get this cooler off these two would be the ones next yep all right cool there's two more left that's going to be these two over here it's pretty good okay so there's a little bit more slack in these cables than the reference card it's easier to disconnect them safely this is a little bit odd i'm not sure i would have made this choice but that's an led bridge i think cool so we're already down to the pcb and the cooler this is what made the nitro good in the last uh round of tests we did so here's just for perspective here's the screws we took out for getting to the pcb uh so four standard retention screws two in the i o plate supporting the plastic part of the cooler and then we have another six that are for the back plate not too bad this is amd's reference design frankly not bad because they're not weird screws it's a lot of them but sapphire's design and we'll see in testing it'd be kind of fun to do pressure testing on these typically sapphire's design distributes the pressure fairly evenly so we'll see we have tools to test all that if people care so let us know if you do this cable over here that i disconnected so that's just taped down and this is actually for rgb so that's what this light bar is it's powered by this thing and that's connected to an extension cable where is that oh there it is so there's the extension for that i think that is actually leading to this there's a pcb in here so that pcb right there that's going to the extension cable that powers the leds okay let's start with talking about the layout of this design so first of all this is not too uncommon but it is fairly uncommon uh basically what they're doing is they're putting their part of their uh typically this would be the vrm heatsink but so far it looks like it's just a memory heatsink i don't think there's any vrm components hidden up here so this looks like a vram heatsink and when i take this off we'll we'll look at it closer this has served sapphire very well in the past the reason this layout works well we did a whole lot of thermal testing on this for the 5700xt series and the reason it works well is because you're now isolating uh effectively the the heat capacity of your cold plate and your fin stack and heat pipes to more or less cooling the gpu core and some of the other hottest components the mosfets this means that the memory is not sharing in the most literal sense this cooling solution it's not really connected you can see here there's actually some damage on some of these fins not in a way that matters just in a way that tells us a few things and that is right around here there's some scratches that's because the fins sort of sock it together with some of the other fins and they come very close to each other but in the the truest literal sense of it they are not connected or intended to be connected in a major way which would facilitate the transfer from the vram plate into what we'll call the primary cooling solution and that works out well when you're working with something that's relatively compared to the gpu low power like memory because this can be very effectively cooled if enough air gets into it so if you have sufficient airflow over these fins and you have enough surface area here and this is a lot compared to for example well this for one but compared to amd's and the base plate for better example there's how amd's cooling their memory if if you needed any evidence that sapphire's done a better job so this has worked well for sapphires is what we're getting at and that design is good because it isolates the things that are being cooled because i want a dedicated solution heat pipes it looks like one two three four at least and this is a it's a diagonally oriented silicon as opposed to typically it's square for andy but the end result is that we have two heat pipes that are going straight through the center we have one heat pipe that's sort of cutting off this bottom corner here and one that's cutting off this bottom corner top corner so overall good distribution of heat pipes across the area of the highest concentration of power for the vrm the mosfets are contacting thermal pads these we should probably start taking note of these someone on twitter specifically asked that we start logging thermal pad height and i agree with them so that others can easily maintain their cards later these are one millimeter pads so one millimeter pad into an aluminum plate into the fins and that's all fairly standard should be fine the fan cable ends up as a two three four five six i think that's an eight pin although it looks like there's maybe seven connected and then we've got actually i'm not 100 sure how these are isolated we'll need to take more of it apart one looks like maybe tack or something or control uh power so there's an eight and a six pin okay what i'm gonna do now is take the back plate off so that we can then free this heat sink these screws are all the same as each other but not the same as the ones on the back so don't mix them up if you disand re assemble it nobody wants thermal pads on the giant metal thing they put on the back of their cart huh so this plastic coating is just here for uh preventing direct contact like the legs of the through hole components or of the other smd's on there but there's your led light box right there let's move that aside these are the same as the ones in the top we do have this thermal pad as a replacement if we need to replace some of these and if you need to replace them these are approximately a millimeter thick comes out to 0.8 but it's been compressed so i would call that 1.0 okay so this is the what's curious about this this is sapphire's three switch bios they typically ship these with a silent mode so that's gonna maybe run a lower power target i haven't checked the specific model yet for the the power target options but it's gonna have normally a lower power target or at least a less aggressive rpm for the fans a more aggressive one potentially a higher power target for overclocking they call an oc mode normally and then one switch which is typically the center but you can check the manual obviously is for software control so that would be you use sapphire's tri-x x utility and then you can tell it what you want it to do by using that third switch position it's not technically triple bios but it kind of behaves like that in a way this is actually i think oh is there oh i just found i just realized this thermal pad on the back i take back my previous comments sapphire is aware that thermal pads help to some extent so this is actually directly on the back side of the inductors doctors get really hot uh there's the inductors or the chokes you might hear them called it's just a copper coil inside of a shell they do get hot they can also run very hot though let's get the thickness of that pad it's a very large one so the plate spaces it pretty far away wow it's about 2.5 that's about 2.95 so factoring in compression i'd call that a 3.0 that looks like three to me it is actually a little more compressed on the lower side probably just the way the back plate sits so okay well they they i would like to see thermal pads where the memory is still but at least there's something on there uh back to the boards that is the same i think yes is it the same mosfets too three five two and seven three five two one so they're both using the same voltage controller it's an international rectifier 35 to 17 and then the mosfets i think are the same 649a sic649a same mosfets same controller this is different on sapphires over here the new authon controller or however you say it memory placement identical so this is the amd reference board design partners in order to hit the market fast will often use a reference board design rather than a full custom design so the custom design you might see it run taller to maybe accommodate a larger vrm or something like that but uh amd often over builds its reference designs so sapphire may have just said you know what that's good enough let's just hit the market as fast as we can and then put a really good cooler on it and hope that that's all we need so this is mostly the same pcb some exceptions one of those exceptions is these which these are just fuses these are not really there to protect your card and keep it running but they're there to help the technicians diagnose the problem see if they can maybe fix the card and uh and and help isolate where a failure might occur we've shorted across these in the past to in air quotes fix problems but it'll get it back up and running again either way though that is nice to have as a feature for a quicker rma pipeline there's another one down here and again that's more of a helping sapphire feature but hopefully it's to the extent that it helps sapphire get your stuff fixed faster so a couple observations the we can show this from our amd reference card tear down too so if you look at this side by side with the amd card we took apart both of them have this low spot i think it's a low spot we'll do pressure testing to determine if it's low or high but just based on cleaning it earlier it looks like a low spot and the silicon or in maybe just the way that the coolers retained but they both had that spot this cooler or this silicon let's see also has a very tiny coverage gap in the top center of the thermal paste it's not too bad but there's there's a small sliver up here that is not very well connected with the cold plate that we saw that on amd use also as far as the cold plate goes there it is just a piece of copper no vapor chamber nothing trying to be too fancy it's copper with some nickel plated copper heat pipes running through it oh you've got a bit of a uh what evga calls a pinhole design here too just noticing this so in the heat sink these holes that pierce through horizontally help with getting some of the air out the sides this is good uh it allows some contact to the the inner surface area of the fins but more importantly it gives the air another path so it's not only going vertically into the board and into the side panel of the case which isn't a bad way to cool it really isn't but pushing some of the air out the sides is helpful too because then well one it can help deal with turbulent noise a little bit depending on the design of the cooler but two it just gives it another path to escape and get the air out as efficiently as possible those do not punch all the way through to the i o side but they they punch through to this point so they go down to about where the you run into the vrm right here so it gives the air somewhere else to go i think i realized i didn't read the actual fan model so and that's because this design is good enough that they'll just replace it for you but if you want to replace one of these fans on your own you don't want to go through sapphire at some point maybe they've stopped supporting the card in the distant future then this specific one is made by or branded by n8 ntk hong kong limited uh you don't necessarily need the same brand but the model number does need to be the same it's dash fdc10u12d9-c it's 12 volts and it's .45 amps it's actually fairly powerful for a fan of uh in this use case also made in january which the fan supply they're probably shipping to multiple customers but um that that aligns with trying to rush these things through production right before lunar new year so that's it for the sapphire nitro plus teardown now a couple takeaways here the 6700 xt as a gpu is still too expensive for what it is so instead of buying too high up the price category in the partner models it might be worth instead looking at something like a 6800 or a 30 70. because once you start buying the high-end partner models for 6 700 xt you're gonna be close to those price brackets anyway and they're better as for what we learn here about sapphire's design we'll send all this stuff through formal testing if enough people care we've kind of cut back on the partner model reviews over the last few months because it was just clear that the audience wasn't overall interested in them if that's changed let us know in the comments if you want to see a bunch of reviews of partner models or even just a few but the point is this design especially compared to reference is significantly better it's going to cost more however up the stack if you end up scaling your budget the 6800 xd nitro or the 6800 some of the higher end sapphire models might be worth considering as an alternative if you're going to be spending more anyway depending on what kind of class hardware you're looking at so the nitro plus design is typically among sapphire's most expensive other than maybe the toxic but it is good it's just when you're ultimately your main goal is to get a card any of them it stops mattering quite as much design a versus b this is however the better of the two that we've seen so far we'll take apart the xfx card as well and if we get more we'll take those apart but if you want to see more testing on thermals and power consumption overclocking let us know in the comments because at this point that's what we're going to need to see to be convinced that it's worth working on these for full reviews as opposed to just doing feature tests on them just since people you know can't get a lot of the cards right now so the reviews are going to be helpful eventually but maybe not today that's it for this one thanks for watching you can subscribe for more go to store.gamertexas.net if you want to pick up one of our tool kits or mouse mats the toolkits are in stock and shipping now or you go to patreon.comgamersnexus if you'd like to get some behind-the-scenes videos we'll see you all next time [Music] the

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 245,776

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, amd rx 6700 xt, sapphire rx 6700 xt nitro+, sapphire rx 6700 xt nitro review, sapphire rx 6700 xt nitro benchmarks, sapphire rx 6700 xt nitro temperature, amd rx 6700 xt review, rx 6700 xt vs rtx 3060, rtx 3070 vs rx 6700 xt

Id: I8Xac4YzLiY

Length: 24min 32sec (1472 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021