Intel's Taped & Glued Arc A770 GPU: Tear-Down & Disassembly of Limited Edition Card

oh Intel come on really what is happening here this is so disappointing oh my God this is fragile what the hell [Music] everyone today we are going to be tearing down the new Intel Arc a770 video card and I'm a little concerned about it because on the back of it I can already see there are no visible screws that means that there's either glue or plastic Clips holding it together and both of those things are potentially destructive to tear down so we'll see hopefully hopefully we don't damage any of the plastic pieces but all the testing's already done so that's good and the review is either already up or up soon now we can't really do much other than show this thing today but this is the upcoming RTX 4090 you can see that they are not only an entirely different class of price for the cards but also a different class of cooler I should have picked this one up with my dominant hand I did not and now we have we have to put it back down but the 4090 we actually have some pretty cool detail coming up on this I'm not going to tease too much but if you've ever wondered what the inside of a vapor chamber looks like then we will have that for you and it involved dissecting basically a 40 90 cooler so you want to I need this one you'll want to check back for that let's get started with the a770 teardown and see if this thing is a pain in the ass or not I'm hoping it's not this teardown was brought to you by us on store.gamersaccess.net the only thing that made it easier to tolerate this incredibly frustrating video card disassembly was our own tool kit it's a 10 piece GPU tear down tool kit on the GN store it features most the drivers you'll need to take apart a huge range of video cards on the market including custom ground.ex heads for things like 20 series cards or PCB clearance multiple sizes of small Phillips for better grip Allen keys for occasional blocks and T6 tourist drivers for cards like this one we ship them in a roll bag to make it easy to transport including a GPU tear down silhouette on the screw and thermal pad pouch for easy Transit and they have a seven year warranty grab a kit to support us and get something quality in return on store.gamersaccess.net starting out with this thing uh this is a separate plate that is within the exterior chassis for the back side we can also see the front side consists of a light bar here so this big thin is an LED bar inside the fans there's also an RGB LED ring that worries me a little bit from a tear down perspective it's going to be more cables to work with and down here I can already see that there's a uh I guess a combined fan on RGB LED cable okay let's try and take it apart so first of all there's a tamper seal they've got a seal right here you can see I've already kind of pried at it and that's just a sticker it doesn't say warranty void it just implies that they'll know if we do something I don't know if we have to pop this thing out first remember when we film these it's before basically anyone else in the world has really posted anything on this so we're going into this blind this this to me doesn't seem like it's going to pry up so I think I have to probably pop this whole plate out which would make sense with the tamper seal as well let's take a look oh that thing right there that is just an RGB LED header if we pull that it's got a cable that they ship with it so that's starting to separate a little maybe we just pull it apart I'm going to remove the pcie slot frame first and see if that makes it easier and this is all torques this feels like a Torx 6. so that oh yeah there we go so the GN teardown tool kit for video cards right here comes with 10 tools that we fine-tuned for video card disassembly including these hex heads where you can get really down on top of the PCB we grind them down so they have extra clearance and it includes a Torx 6. now has any other torques uh on this board you'll need a different card but some different uh driver but some reason video cards really like Torx six so we're able to use our own toolkit from store.gamers and access.net for that and you get a seven year warranty with our kit and also you're supporting us while getting something that is tuned for video cards in the process so there's six of these we're just going to take all these out and free hopefully the i o plate all right not the best Artistry but good enough for me to know where stuff goes okay so this plate can come out now I stand corrected it cannot okay well uh we are back to attempting to remove the back I guess I'll just start pulling on it until I was bragging in his blog post about how it's uh a screw-less design the only thing that gets screwed is you when you try to install the driver package but other than that there are no screws at all to be found in this design oh I feel some glue oh Intel come on really seriously this is how it's supposed to cut this is how it starts this is your debut and to look we built a video card what is this it's too it's to be fair it's not glue it's double-sided tape so if you don't know the reason that there's some maybe hyperbole here about glue and tape is uh it's bad and the reason it's bad is that if you ever want to do any kind of user service whatsoever like if the fan dies then you're gonna have to start taking things off that uh at least leave a mess if not become basically impossible to replace when it's glue anyway and a company like Intel might respond and say well we don't have any data to support that fans die and users need to replace them to which we would say first of all um probably because you haven't sold anything yet and secondly fans do die but companies like to conveniently stop tracking those types of failures after a couple of years but they forget that people still use these things and these can be used if the drivers keep getting made for many many years after so basic user serviceability is of great importance to us when we're looking at stuff and this is a terrible start uh it's not even a I mean this could be bent by if I dropped this it would bend it's not particularly high quality either so I think I could literally tear this in half if I wanted to it's very thin probably aluminum all right well that was disappointing it's a screwless design isn't it great thanks Intel thanks Steve all right so getting more into it here's the leaf spring that's what's securing the actual cooler to the rest of the card uh it's not labeled anything interesting it's just a part number Intel has decided to go with this exposed gold look it's kind of what you see on the Kingpin cards so it looks kind of nice it's a shame that they You Know cover it with something taped to it but a clear backplate might have been cool here if you're going to go through the effort of that but anyway we've got Torx drivers here are those torques yes torques feels like a six that's a six that's a six so it's a Torx everywhere and they all appear to be a torque six maybe there's a seven in here so anyway as you can see it's a screwless design uh I think to be fair they only said that about the back of it which I mean that would be kind of like saying the plastic housing on the front of our device is a screwless design or the fan blades or a screw-less design the power connector is a screwless design too actually you know what even the cables don't have screws amazing how do they do it it's such it's I said this to um someone else in the industry reads recently when talking about why we complain about things that seem small my answer was you know it's not the individual thing it's like the totality of the contrivancy that drives those complaints all right let's get these over on our simple diagram the mod mats are better but I did really want the light box to just truly uh highlight the problems with the card oh oh no what nice did you hear the quality so once again we say thanks Intel thank you Papa yeah so we got a separate PCB here as some kind of daughter board it's connected to it looks like LED cables okay so we got longer screws in here you can see using a longer one for the part that goes this is going through the there's a rear brace not not like a base plate necessarily but it's on the back side base plate going through where while the PCB terminates here actually it's going through into the cooler and maybe the Shroud you know what would be really cool is if they had a way to get the heat that soaks into this plate outside to the air okay that is free the spring comes out I'm gonna Orient that the way it was okay that Plate's not free yet oh interesting okay simple as that great you can see there's a little bit of a spider web of cables in there so I'm going to disconnect all those now all LED this is a combined LED and fan looks very similar to the old uh was it like 20 pin or something that Nvidia used caused a lot of problems uh but this one oh no this one's not as popular that's all right okay fair enough that one's fine there's only six plus some intertwined cables that are running down to the LEDs down here they are using headers though that are trapping the cables which is okay if you can reach them to properly release them but let's do this I don't have quite the clearance to do what I want but it's close enough there we go okay oh there's more cables okay excellent okay so those go there and then that what the hell is going on oh my God this is so contrived all right so we have this tiny baby PCB that's for this LED control cable this is then soldered to a cable that runs over the base like what the hell are you doing Intel like literally just open this once in competitive analysis or ask Tom who worked on Nvidia during this project and realized that you never want to open it again what is happening here this is so disappointing and plus the board on the I don't want Intel's product to hurt my table and again you can grab mod mats on story.msnexus.net okay so I don't like that the board on the back side here just moves around freely I guess I can screw it back in all right that tiny one's disconnected this one's disconnected that is taped this is it's like literally I'm having flashbacks the 20 series it's almost exactly the same Construction so this take there's like tape in multiple places they're using the sort of canvassy type of tape to secure this cable and hold it down from where is this going this is going to LEDs also great okay I'm glad we're using our resources on things that are meaningful so this goes to a tiny board up here what does that do you ask it makes this white oh there's another cable I didn't even see that one there's another cable down in there I really hate this okay let's do it this way I'm gonna take the rest of these screws out and then we'll talk about this stuff they're using a few different screws though so this long one with the thicker head is going to be start tracking I'm for real now that's gonna be up near the cable it's got a different screw than this screw it is that one is conical that's different than either of the last two oh yeah you're definitely gonna have to track these screws if you take them out aha that's how it's supposed to come out so here's that little plate we saw earlier they've gone as far as including a thermal pad to conduct from the back side however because I we can only think one dimension deep at Intel apparently when we're designing a video card you can see that it stops here because then we encase this in plastic and aluminum which is a conductor but is not touching this and actually just becomes a heat trap if you're wondering does it really matter ultimately it's not responsible for a lot but if you're going to go through all this business you might as well actually make use of it and we've shown in testing the past like with msi's evoke cards that trapping heat without conducting it into your back plate is bad especially if you're using things where it creates an air gap and it's fully sealed like this one is there's no room for the air to just Escape so you actually just build heat so even though it's like relatively low heat flux you're building it over time this whole thing so this is one piece that has a diffuser here that pops on so it's got these little pins that might actually be plastic welded on but I think it's just press fit on and then we've got the threads and the plastic so those are going to either be born into the plastic or glued um not a big fan of that approach but it's this is a low torque application so it's okay oh I found one that was hidden under the back plate also by the way also a different type of screw I'm gonna have to actually watch this video back to figure out where they all go that's going to be a lot of fun so once again we say thanks Intel thanks Steve ow my knees okay there it is that was a lot of work there's the base plate so as you can see there's a 22 a 21 a 24. this is the month so it's the 22nd tomorrow month of the second year all right so the actual reading is February of 2022 which is crazy this base plate has existed a very long time if you look at the thermal pads they've got like that canvassy material so those uh they're they're pretty dense these look to be about 1.5 or 2 millimeters okay it's actually two it's a little bit lower on the Outer Edge that's two millimeter pad so this is just a it's an aluminum base plate it contacts the core components on the PCB over here the way these work is they help to pull some of the heat away in this case it's pulling it away from the mosfets that's what these canvassy pads attach to here so it's got mosfet contact the inductors are actually pretty wide ones they're sticking through in the middle here and you can see the r15s r12s these are assigned to different parts of the vrm to the r12s I'd have to probe it to be 100 sure but I'm fairly positive this is going to be your core vrm and then we've got two uh two phases or stages for the memory vrm and for memory modules it is all entirely on one side so all front side memory there's a total of eight packages which makes sense it's higher density it's 16 gigabyte for this card it's the exterior of the die where the diffusion barrier is factored in is 25.1 by about 16.6 externally let's take the cooler with all the appendages sticking out of it more of the throttle pads this one is going to be for that is the inductors okay so those pads are contacting inductors and this pad is contacting directly oh actually it's mostly contacting a plate and then below that plate is these heat pipes these look to be a standard uh another eight okay so they've got eight mil pipes here four of them those run all the way through the car this is a very traditional design it's kind of uh trivial in that sense and um really not all that special I don't know why we're making such a big deal out of this thing at Intel I mean I guess the exterior is flashy with LEDs it's got a nice diffusion on the LEDs but anyway this is just a vapor chamber so they're running a thin Vapor chamber here you can see uh well actually this is the vapor chamber and this is just a copper plate so what's going on here is they're using Vapor chamber for contact to the memory they're sharing that contact patch with the GPU silicon uh syncing it all into the same place spreading it a little bit across over here and then this is is just directly contacted either via soldering or another method to the fin stack where it can then just dissipate like normally go into the fins then get uh cooled off by the fans of course so these again just LEDs just getting power here and then this board is Distributing that power to all the different LEDs that plug into it why is this here there's more glue okay well I've had enough of that let's take the let's go ahead and take the actual actually let's first clean the die and then we'll take the Shroud the rest of it off I was about to grab a screwdriver to clean the die okay nothing on the die that's fine sometimes they label it doesn't really mean anything if they do or don't but that's how it looks just might as well have to clean this anyway need more alcohol especially if I want to keep taking this apart okay next one there's screws down here these are the same type as the one I marked earlier that was hiding just kidding not the same almost the same not quite what I'm doing right now is I'm going to mark all these with different colors Sharpie than I've used for any of the other ones so we can track screws pretty well on the mat on the table all this stuff but when there's multiple layers of depth helps to have one more extra step to make sure I don't screw it up nice when I reassemble it later all right it's time oh my God oh come on with the tape and God this is gonna so this is gonna really suck to reassemble of course Intel is like what's the problem just don't take it apart yeah if we really take this down to Bear parts and get the other pcbs out of there locations it's gonna look ridiculous this must be a nightmare to manufacture if I were the factor I'd be like yeah that that's going to be actually like just talking to you is going to be extra all right here's the rest of the cooler it's actually not that big once you get down to it it's kind of like the 20 series stuff and um I mean not a lot to talk about here it's a Finn stack that fans blow into so let's move that aside another Cooler Master fans if you want to replace these the part number you would need is going to be here and the amount of work you would have to do to get to them is so much that you should just throw it out and buy something else which is probably what Intel wants to get them out what you would do is unscrew this so the reason I'm going to software and take every one of these screws out is I want to count them because this is the most screws I've seen in a video card since the Nvidia RTX 20 series and one of those cards had one screw for every drop in the GPU core which came out to something like 68 or 72 I don't remember I could look up the specs of the GPU I wouldn't know how many screws were in the video card design that's the assembly for the fans so you're gonna have to get those from Cooler Master hopefully with this Frame and then you'll need to tape them together at the middle because that's the only thing that's making this rigid at all so this tape is kind of making the entire thing it's pulling pulling the weight here making it all work uh that is all the screws for this but I'm not going to take the tape off so this will have to be reassembled oh that's got a little PCB on it too there's the light bar that's it's diffusing everything oh my God this is fragile what the hell this is so complicated this they spent like real money on this thing look at this there's a cusp Foley custom LED bearing PCB you see this thing all the way around here it's a single PCB this doesn't come off a shelf oh my God these people are insane look at this like so Intel also made a circular PCB for the fan I would be impressed at this if uh is this collude oh no this might not be able to come out there's a certain level of Destruction I'm okay with but um this this is guaranteed assured destruction which I'm normally not okay with unless it's required to get into the card so we're going to stop at this point you can see though like so it was screwed down and it's glued and it's like basically a one layer PCB so it's so thin that uh this thing's just gonna it will tear like paper when I take it out so we're going to leave that in all right so I set that aside have I missed any screws I just I really just want a total screw count on this thing one two three four twenty twenty one twenty two did I count those 35 36 37 38 52 53 54 55 two okay all right it's somewhere between 55 and 56 screws 55 and a half a few loose in there somewhere so I mean that's it I don't know this video is going to be really long with just the teardown I don't have much else to say in the conclusion I guess the shortest possible thing is this this is built in a way where it is not only inefficient in mechanical design in industrial design but also functionally uh impossible to to realistically maintain if you ever wanted to at least in a meaningful way so the problems are with the design side it's inefficient which means it's passed on cost to the consumer you're talking 55 56 screws whatever it is all these different tiny pieces this really just sort of like it's LEDs to a point of sanctimony almost so this weird tiny Flex type of PCB for LEDs uh this thing and I I don't know I mean at a product design level I can understand this stuff being cool because it's like look at all of this attention to detail we put in it isn't that awesome yes the problem is the base product is so fundamentally flawed where it's drivers don't even really work where even though these are different teams than the driver development team there is still a certain perception that comes across where like where is it we were investing the effort in this product and why was it LEDs of course the different teams but uh ultimately you're kind of paying for the wrong thing here and it is really just dressing up something that wants to be much more than it is in reality now our review will have full details on the benchmarks where I'm obviously in Patrick as well both have trouble getting past the fundamental driver issues but this is very convoluted uh it is filled with tape and actually glue we did find some and a lot of screws and it doesn't need to be this way so Intel at least on the mechanical design side please get some real board Partners to do this for you but that's it for this one we're gonna leave the rest of the air time for the actual tear down so uh that's it go to store.gamron's access.net outside directly you can grab one of our tear down tool kits for this apparently you only only need one driver and then you'll need something to scrape glue and double-sided tape you can also grab one of the mod mats there subscribe for more check back for the reviews on these cards and again all testing was completed on it before this so that's it we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 1,181,926

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, intel a770 review, intel a770 benchmarks, intel a770 vs amd rx 6600 xt, intel a770 tear down, intel arc tear down, intel arc limited edition disassembly, intel arc disassembly, intel a770 disassembly, intel a770 worth it, intel arc drivers

Id: N371iMe_nfA

Length: 28min 11sec (1691 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 05 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/lovely_sombrero]

~55 screws. Worst screw to performance ratio I've ever seen.

[u/WaitingForG2]

25 minutes of pure pain

Design is so complex, it actually might affect Limited Edition stock

Also base plate date is February 2022, which is not surprising to long Arc odyssey of delays

[u/Frothar]

is Intel making money on this card? 406mm² die on TSMC 6nm, 16gb of DDR6 and then this very wasteful custom cooler

[u/multikore]

Intel should snatch up EVGA's graphics division

[u/ackondro]

Getting major Juicero vibes...

Every piece is well engineered, but when you put it all together, it's just excessive for the intended market.

[u/CeleryApple]

Intel does not need to make money on consumer GPUs. The main point of this is for Intel to not miss out on the Datacenter AI GPU craze. ARC is like a prototype with gamers being used as QA. Intel’s datacenter customers are not going to buy in bulk until Intel can deliver a bug free product.

[u/Kougar]

I appreciate the attention to detail with the overall assembly, but things like the flat metal plate on the VRM that serves no purpose, receives no airflow and lacks external heat dissipation drives me nuts.

[u/BoltTusk]

“We found the glue”

[u/Acceptable-Milk-314]

What's wrong with glue?