We Found the Glue: Tear-Down of NVIDIA RTX 3090 Founders Edition

hey everyone so the rtx 3090 review is already live at this point and now we're gonna tear it down we already tore down the rtx 3080 founders edition card as you all know a drill may or may not have been involved in that instance but now we know better and uh this one should be mostly the same process except it's massive er so we're going to take a look at that look at the construction internally see if anything's changed with the 30 90 fe versus the 3080 fe specifically because of how much larger the card is and we'll look at the pcb as well before that this video is brought to you by the gigabyte z490 extreme motherboard the gigabyte z490 extreme motherboard is a high-end overclocking board built to gigabyte's highest quality standard and tuned for memory overclocking cpu overclocking and system stability the z490 extreme runs a densely finned heat sink for its vrms has rgb leds for flare and uses 90 degree connectors everywhere it can to improve cable management access learn more at the link in the description below okay so it should be mostly the same process that is the assumption i'm going to fly under for this to get this part off this is the first step this time we can treat this more almost like a tutorial rather than just a blind tear down because i know more now so this part just snaps in with these two snaps pretty straightforward it's the same as the first one there's a magnet right here that grabs onto a magnet hidden on the other side of the back plate so that gets removed first step we're going to track this on the modmat which you can back order on store.gamerzexus.net we keep selling through them we sold through them in uh we can't keep them in stock for more than a week it seems like but they're on back order again on the store let's take out the screws i already know where they all go at this point the 3080 fe i've probably taken apart and reassembled no fewer than uh 15 times at this point so i no longer need to track where the screws go but maybe once we get internal uh i'll need to do that so these actually i'm going a little bit out of order but these have to come out at some point so there's four phillips screws and then we're gonna use some tape just uh duct tape gorilla tape whatever and these four covers right here are held in with a magnet you can't really pry them up because they're kind of deep into the grooves you'll see it just rips right out so that is the way it should be done for these look at how easy that is so much better than the glue recommendations oh there we go there's four of those and now this should be a torx five or four four torx four so there's four screws to this i actually have a bit of a conspiracy theory about these cards and disassembling and reassembling them namely that just removing the back plate and putting it back on gave me issues infer mark earlier that i can't explain and don't understand all the thermals are fine but it kind of behaves as if otp is on i never figured out what was causing that so starting to develop conspiracy theories of ntc thermistors hidden somewhere or tamper circuits but there's no evidence of that i spoke with nvidia they said that stuff's not in there so it's just the ghost of jensen sabotaging me i guess but it all worked after a little while you can see the grease mark where i was working on a thermocouple so we had one planted there had one underneath this bracket we had one over here but we ended up not really being able to work too much with that data i have not disassembled the 30 90 past this state yet uh so yeah back plate comes off you do need to pay attention to the thermal pads you do need to try and preserve them because these are very fragile just like the fuji poly type pads any canvas style pad is and there's memory on the back of this card tj maxx is 110 degrees celsius and since there's memory on both sides plus a hot gpu in the middle it's pretty easy to hit that mark if you don't uh don't reassemble with all the cooling in place one thing i i was curious about was not seeing a thermal pad on the back side of the gpu we see that sometimes on partner models and it just wasn't here but that may actually help a little bit with with cooling down the gpu you maybe see a difference of a degree or two depending on the cooling on the back of the card this should be a torx six which we actually have in our own tool kit and oh actually before i completely loosen those let me remove these so there's three cables you'll have to take out the first two are ribbon cables similar to a laptop and you have to pull up this black um like clip and then you can remove them so that's on those two this one you have to pull back the silver clip same process for the 3080 then you can pull out the cable that's in there but don't pull at the wire so you have to be pretty careful with this if we zoom on these tweezers they are called uh pto2 engineers the brand i love these tweezers you bought them in taiwan and uh really fine point so i jammed that between the pin and its housing and that's how we're able to pop it out without pulling on the wires i saw someone actually kind of big thread somewhere where people were asking how do i turn off the leds right here they didn't like the leds right now that's the best way to do it disconnect it uh i think there's going to be a soft resolution eventually okay so let's unscrew each of these by about 30 to 50 percent and then we'll come back through and get all of them here's the leaf spring retention mechanism really not looking forward to reassembling this because i've had a hell of a time getting the the cards to behave normally after one disassembly and reassembly uh they do all work but it's really not the easiest process they could have done this all in a way that's a lot easier to reassemble that's not to say it's mechanically difficult it's actually pretty simple to reassemble it's just all the other the issues the thermal pads mostly at this point i think i can actually flip the card up but we're going to just go ahead and remove these while we're at it so there are six of these in the back plate or in the i o plate rather back plate's already off that's released so there goes that now we should be able to flip the card yes so let me think about this i want i think i want the cooler down for this yep okay all cables are disconnected here you can see that this thing is just kind of resting in there screws go through that it's also just a light it's got a lens on it for the light right there so let's move all this aside once again extremely dry paste like really dry fairly even application though so that is an upside pcb is fairly familiar uh if there are differences we'll talk about it in a separate video in terms of the vrm but for memory that's the main difference oh that feels like a glue almost a lot of residue from the thermal pads so memory is still micron gddr6x i think they're the only ones making it right now it is double-sided you can see we've got four eight and then 12 right there one offset towards the bottom typically this is the hot spot on cards where once it gets this close to the pcie slot you're close to power in but the real problem is that you're below a hot gpu and you're sandwiched right where the air has a hard time getting out of underneath this part of the car that gets trapped between the slot so that's uh that's probably the hottest module on the board it's also possible that one of these middle ones right here would be a candidate for the hot spot but that's how i would look at it if i were going to thermally probe it further another note i was talking to jay actually earlier today and he noted that one of these so he had picked up his 3080 he never disassembled it and heard her rattling and so he took it apart well he took the back plate off actually and one of these things was loose in the card so this is as far as i can tell just a guide for mounting the card you can see these sort of the opposite end the the i guess we'll call them the snap and the socket on the back plate so that'll sock it in and that's all there is to it but for whatever reason he had one that was loose and hopefully that's just an early production run issue and not a widespread thing because that that if you pick up your card and you hear rattling and one of these is loose in there it's metal it can short something easily and yeah your card might not work after that so keep an eye out for that we're not sure if it's actually a real issue or not yet while working on this earlier i thought i had maybe seen some thermistors on the board but nvidia tells me there are no thermistors on this board i probably should have asked the wider question and said are there any temperature probes on the board i think the answer would still be no though uh reasoning for that was i thought maybe the card was was following a temperature other than gpu and maybe other than memory for its behavior earlier and uh so i was asking about thermistors around the board like icx style but we have not been able to verify if any are present and they said there aren't any present so that's it for the pcb for now we'll put this aside this we'll check with build zoid on if it's any different from the other one from the 3080 the cooler is the actual change so significantly larger fans take a measurement of these so this fan is about 100 to 110 millimeters you can see right here we've got the measurement that's measuring the outer frame of the fan the frame is kind of like a flow guide uh it is there's a downside where you do get reduced uh fin depth by uh what's that about a millimeter or so let's see it's about 1.4 millimeters less distance for the fins to go but it's supposed to be a flow guide that said we've noticed that the air is a pretty wide spray out the back of the card and we show that in our photography video our schleyer and photography video so size is pretty large difference where that's 1 10 or so this by same measurement approach at least is about 85 so most marketing people would call this a 90 millimeter fan because that's how you market products so that's about 85 to 110 and uh the end effect as we show on the review is that these fans will end up spinning faster at a higher rpm to do the same work but uh the larger cooler ends up louder at a higher fan rpm because the outer edge of the fan spins faster obviously so that's that's where you see some of the difference in noise levels at the same rpm but this one spins significantly faster at around 18 1900 rpm to maintain temperature target open air whereas this one does around 11 to 1 300 for the same task for the rest of this you can see that it's all pretty much scaled up i've not put on the cover the cover back there right now but uh back plate same thing just larger so no surprises there you can see actually just lost this uh this thing almost came out these little rubber stoppers go in here for that plate that snaps in but magnets right there that i was mentioning earlier that's the back plate the cooler let's look at fin density so fin density looks to be mostly comparable that's about a one millimeter that's a one millimeter fin and it's a little smaller that could be variance maybe 0.87 millimeters versus one i'm going to go ahead and say that might be manufacturing variance that's 0.94 yeah i'm thinking these are maybe functionally the same size take a couple more 1.1 1.1 1.0 so they're about the same size fins and fin spacing should also be comparable so those are actually 2.7 millimeters apart 2.6 millimeters apart 2.5 millimeters apart so let's just go ahead and call that like 2.6 that's the middle and that's 2 2 exactly and [Music] that one was actually 2.4 2.3 so it's about 2 to 2.3 on this set they're about the same that said the surface area much more on the 30 90 clearly and that means in the thermal testing you'll see in our review this one takes longer to hit steady state it takes longer to soak without the fan spinning up and that's overall a good thing because it does mean it'll stay quieter if you have a short bursted workload whereas the other will start working uh harder earlier in terms of heat pipes internally there are several there's four large heat pipes these are typically four six eight or ten millimeter that's going to be an eight oh i can't really measure that's an eight and that's about an eight as well let's see if we can take this fan out too just to do something extra and look at what kind of fan it is curious about the supplier for this so there's just some screws in here would really like to see it if they could do a and really if you're listening pin to pad approach would be great for fans it makes it much more user serviceable depending on whether nvidia feels like that's a good thing for its business depends on how much it wants to be like apple but this is the greatest invention of all time got it so there are four screws pin to pad approach is exactly what it sounds like it's um they're actually already doing it elsewhere so right here you see those pads and then here you see the pins it's the same thing as that except it's more of a contact contact and this pcb is actually very thick just notice don't know the pcb layer count but that would make it so that the user could just socket it maybe take out a single screw and that's it and it would be as simple as nvidia sending out a fan and a guide saying remove one screw and then if there's fan death later on which is often the single highest point of failure in speaking with board partners then the user would be able to service it because you don't have to do all this that i've just done to replace a fan if it's designed right you can just get it without opening anything so this is the ribbon cable this actually just fished out over here so you would only have to take the back plate off to get this uh technically you'd want to go in a little further to reroute it the way it was back through all the fins but you don't have to do that you just remove the back plate and then route it a little bit more sloppily and you can take this out with just those four screws but in terms of what the fan is that is in fact a delta logo so it is a delta electronics fan very well known in the industry of course and for the model number it is uh so it's dc brushless and then the model is afb 111 2hd zero zero so hopefully that helps if you are replacing this fan on your own later i'm sure you'll find it on aliexpress or something pretty quickly the spec is 12 volts and it is a 0.90 amp fan there's a gp9 lettering over there too and that should about cover it it's nice it's even got the rotation angle on it so that should about cover it if you wanted to replace that guessing the other uh ribbon cable is gonna be the other fan so let's take out the other fan too you see just how many fins there are in there though it's kind of crazy so pull this one out should be the same process i'm actually i'm going to track it should be easy for me to remember because they do look different but we're going to track which is where just so i don't accidentally mix them up change the flow direction although that might be a fun experiment because then you'd be you'd be pulling the air in as the wrong screwdriver you're pulling the air in through over here uh with the other direction so that might be kind of amusing might be able to just pull this one up and then dump the screws so this one's kind of caught when i get the screws out so they don't fall into the cooler and this is causing a problem right now this ribbon cable have to be careful with those i'm going to have a lot of fun putting this back in and it's probably not worth doing what i'm doing but we're going to see what the fan model is this one i hate to say it but the heatsink might have to come out of the housing which is a royal pan with these so this is where nvidia could have done a better job with user serviceable fans because this is not user friendly i think we probably want this to go towards me yes we'll have to go that direction pretty sure the lock picking lawyer reference didn't make it into the first cut but i'll go ahead and make it again this seems like the kind of thing he would be good at this one's got a new unique problem and that it's much deeper than the 3080 it's much harder to do this there's three clips you have to release top bottom and then this one latches both directions so this is the real pain interesting assembly huge pain in the ass but also not required for like water cooling or anything like that why why would you do this how on earth would you design it this way this is so stupid increasingly dangerous tools to hold this close to my face jesus look at this look at the amount of effort that has to go into releasing this so andrew sort of answered my somewhat rhetorical question of why would you do this the answer is it's easy to assemble because i can drop it in but man what a pain to disassemble so we showed it before but there's the two directional lock you have to shove it you have to first of all hit this thing a bunch to get it to the point where it all flex you shove some skinny ruler in there or something and then you've got two other clips like this on the other side then you pushed in and then you can push the whole thing through that is a ginormous pain to deal with but now we can maybe remove the fan it's glued i found it i found i found the nvidia glue can't have a card without it if you're nvidia this time it is on a ribbon cable which is in no way fragile at all and definitely man i don't know if i even want to take that out that's there's such high risk with that with these ribbon cables really not much holding it in to begin with the heat gun might be a little easier see if we're leaving any cable behind no i found where they hid the glue can't hide it from me there's the nvidia trademark glue in a video card even the ln2 tank disagrees so the fan is actually not delta it's abc that's interesting model is dapa1115b2up001 so look that strain up if you need to replace this at some point in the future dc 12 volt and 0.60 amps for the current it is a ball-bearing fan it's even got the direction on there so that's the fans that was obnoxious easy to remember which one goes where fortunately because of different brands there's the vapor chamber once again there's two heat pipes here for vrm cooling not sure if these connect over this way and uh that'll pretty much recap us for this cooler oh actually we can get the manufacture date august 12th this cooler is made on august 12th 2020. well i don't see a date that's human legible anyway okay let's clean off the gpu so that has to be done anyway once again very stuck thermal paste and the identifier is ga 102-300-a1 a1 being probably revision number first public revision ga 102 being the die dash 300 for the sub identifier that tells us this is a 30 90 not a 3080 or whatever else is in between roughly 23 by roughly 26 the actual die size is public but that's the size of the packaging this will do whole spacing too and finally the whole spacing for water cooling 56.9 but well so 57 let's call it maybe 56 by approximately 66 millimeters so that'd be your whole spacing on the 30 90s if you are water cooling one of these even the reference boards in theory should be the same so that's it for the 30 90 founders edition teardown we have the 3080 fe on the channel as well 30 80 fdw3 teardowns coming up on the channel soon and 3080 fv pcb analysis coming up on the channel soon we're also going to be doing a stream later today when this video goes live hopefully with either air cooled overclocking with 30 90s or liquid nitrogen not sure yet if we do liquid nitrogen it won't be part of the rip j thing that's going to be a different thing uh and if we do air cooling then we probably will make it part of the rip j thing and do a port royal score or something so that's it for this one check back later for more coolers mostly the same larger fans uh huge pain to replace the fans but they could do it it's just not necessarily something we'd want users to do especially because reassembling these boards to preserving the thermal pads more than one reassembly is very difficult and we've had issues with uh having to fix some sort of otp somewhere in the system after reassembly got it all working uh but it's it's a pain and it's not necessarily a fun process and this is coming from someone who's done a lot of these board assembly and disassemblies so keep that in mind you want to probably avoid disassembly if you can on this card but for water cooling obviously that should fix most of the problems with otp anyway if there's any going on so that's it thanks for watching subscribe for more you can go to store.gamersaccess.net to grab this shirt or you can go to patreon.comgamersnexus to help us out directly and we'll see you all next time [Music] foreign

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 549,702

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, nvidia rtx 3090 tear down, nvidia rtx 3090 founders edition, nvidia rtx 3090 founders edition fan replacement, fix rtx 3090 fan, rtx 3090 disassembly, rtx 3090 water block, nvidia rtx 3090 founders edition tear down, nvidia rtx 3090 benchmark, nvidia rtx 3090 review

Id: 9JWqRjqqNko

Length: 26min 6sec (1566 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020