We still have some toolkits in stock & shipping on the store if you want to do similar component maintenance! Signed & unsigned versions available: store.gamersnexus.net/products/gamersnexus-tear-down-toolkit Watch our AMD RX 6700 XT review: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-oj8SuJ2Mb6A.html Watch our AMD RX 6700 XT Reference card disassembly: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-AmOp3LLwHmM.html
Id appreciate tear down of Asus Strix 3090, actually, if you're takin requests; need to open one up soonish for changing pads and paste and add water block. Otherwise, I still find it nice to see the way different partner cards perform and are designed, in general
go ahead with the gpu reviews and tairdowns, all though gpu's arn't avalable at the moment and probably wont be easy untill sometime next year at least everyone will know what cards they wanna buy when they are back to bing instock all the time if you get the reviews and tairdowns done through out the year. the gpu shortage is really annoying but it's not like this is the way its going to stay forever. thank god
sadly, I am the last person to ask if I want per card reviews to help scalpers buy up the good cards for maximum profit right now, because even if things were not insane, the AMD GPUs don't do iray so they are not on my radar. if anything it would be out of geek curiosity, so eh. it can wait, let the scalpers end up with stock of stuff they will have to sell at a loss later on when inventory returns to normal. Great vid Steve and crew, even if Andrew didn't get the camera to focus in time for a shot of that spring, lol. it's cool, I would rather have the HD cat pics used in that Squarespace ad. B)
Somewhere there is a Polar Opposite of Steve in Nvidias Assembling section of SCREWs Lets throw in something complex which will make things challenging for the Enthusiasts
Nvidia at 1995 released the first, then 3dfx in 1996 did the difference, then nvidia had to put real work on it. I have my voodoo 3dfx in a box now it is all yellow cause of the years xDDD
@@chroma1004 yeah, I wouldn't mind having better than 240p screen-caps of some of them funny cat pics. oh well, guess the days of good stuff is long gone after 2020 and now 2021. I still get a kick out of that add.
When it comes to partner card reviews I'm most interested in the extremely well engineered and the extremely poorly engineered cards. It's nice to know what is the best of the best, and what isn't worth your time.
In fact, those fuses are very important. If a failure occurs in a MOSFET, it explodes, seriously damaging the PCB. It makes repairing way more difficult, and chances of successful repair will be very low. But if the card has fuses, instead of the MOSFET exploding, a tiny wire inside the fuse will melt and disconnect the power, saving the PCB from serious damage.
I agree, even if the mosfet blows the fuse stops overcurrent from a short caused by a blown mosfet and without the fuse it can potentially make multiple layers of the PCB fuse together at the spot where it is shorted as it can get really hot and melt the layers.
Yeah it's not exclusively there to help sapphire, I bet people who do component level repairs on hardware (and I know a few in my city) really appreciate this kind of thing as it makes their job easier too. All repair-enabling features on products are great and TBH should be mandatory if we even pretend to give a crap about reducing resource waste.
@@GreatGodSajuuk Yes they are there to prevent further damage & help diagnose for any repairer, Steve just says it's to help Sapphire as most people will send a GPU back to the Company rather than take it to another repairer especially if it is under warranty
@@DylanClements98 Well that just sounds like a lemon. They make a lot of gpus so you'll get some bad ones. But it's about the company standing behind their products and making it right. If you have an issue and they make sure you to send you another one that's in proper order. Idk how you can knock them. One bad issue doesn't mean you'll get a bad product Everytime from them.
Personally I would love to see card reviews again, I never lost interest on them because I couldn't afford them even if they were available at MSRP lmao, I'm just a tech head who likes to see top-tier reviews of the new stuff and see how the industry progresses
it would be cool, however, as of now, I think only the scalpers would benefit from knowing what are 'good' cards to gobble up and sell for a far insaner price later on. without per card reviews, it's more of a guessing game, yet also a guessing game for the few lucky enough to click through the carts before the bots gobble up the inventory.
on the other hand, part of me is thinking that GN should start making vids to hold on the side, so they can drop the per card reviews when prices and inventory return to almost normal, resulting in scalpers sitting on stockpiles of cards that they would then need to sell at a loss due to them not being as good as others that people can get direct from retail far cheaper than what scalpers paid for them. vindictive, yet, my sympathy only goes so far, and there is a limit before it realy is taking advantage of others in need.
"We can do pressure testing if people care so let us know" honestly every video with interesting data or new stuff to learn is something i care about from you guys
Sapphire is really up there nowadays. Makes my more excited to get an AMD card for my next upgrade, and I'm seriously considering a Sapphire model as my top priority to get.
That's because sapphire exclusively does models for amd. So they are more specialized in amd chips and thermals than multi companies such as msi and such
Won't go wrong with Sapphire in my opinion. Been doing builds for about 15 years, and have used multiple AIBs for builds...and I ALWAYS come back to Sapphire no matter what. They just make really damn good cards, and great RMA policy too. You pay a premium even more than other AIBs...but you get quality for what you pay, which is never a bad thing !
saphire has been doing a good job with amd cards for a long time now. I had one of their products back a few years ago, a saphire nitro rx580. It was very good, cheap, quiet, and cool.
Your teardowns are very useful, and the full feature reviews are helpful. I took apart my 3080 ftw3 to water cool it recently, and without your thorough coverage of it I would have been a lot more hesitant to attempt it. Turned out great! Keep up the detailed coverage of products, it's what sets this channel apart from others!
Partner Card breakdowns are very important! It lets us see where our money should go and lets the other card manufacturers see where they can improve, because you know they watch what you do!
I am most interested in seeing performance and temperature data between the Sapphire, XFX, and Power Color Red Devil 6800XT models. I've had XFX and Power Color and loved them both, and they're both still kicking! It's nice to see Sapphire also become a leader in quality.
I like that you do the teardowns. It gets people the information they need down the road to help them fix their own products correctly, or even someone at a computer shop do it properly in a timely fashion. Especially the thermal pads. That way they can install the correct thickness.
Oh, Steve, don't underestimate the importance of fuses. Cards without them may have a failure in power delivery like mosfet short and will literally burn through the pcb in the place of a failed component. It is really difficult to repair and will require drilling hole in place of failure and recovering traces, that were destroyed in the process of failure and repair. If the recovery of the mosfet was not possible it is often adviced to lower power limit to not put to much stress on the remaining power delivery system. A card with fuses will just turn off without any burn or damage to the pcb. You will only need to find failed component and replace it + replace fuses. After that your card will work like nothing ever happened to it, no power limit shenanigans needed and you card will not have a hole or a crater in it
I am all for partner card reviews. At some point I will be able to buy one, and when that happens I would love to have some imperical data to help make my choice.
Agreed, I'll happily take as many reviews as GN can give. I was fortunate enough to get a pre-order, and receive 5 months later, a current gen GPU. But I would still love to see as many reviews as possible.
I personally would love to see more in-depth on the cards (pressure testing and such). Assuming the companies that want their card to last longer will put more time into the design and make mroe of an effort that the cards are good quality, narrows down which cards we will purchase. Not many youtubers have the resources and tools to actually do the testing so it seems it kind of down to you. If you decide not to thats okay, but many people love to hear your opinion about different designs.
Since you asked, it would be nice to always have a review of all the different partner models, buying 2 6800s near release felt like I was taking a shot in the dark
As that guy from the Benchwarmers said, “If you build it, they will come” Steve, if you make a video about the pressure of the cooler on the chip with this pulse card people will watch it. You could make a video of you cutting grass with a gpu fan blade and people would watch it.
I am a technician, and fuses are also awesome because if they blow and a customer sends something in, they haven't run it for long in a high current draw condition. This can let us replicate the condition by jumping the fuse to find what's wrong but not run it long enough to hurt a bunch of other parts (using a current limiting supply). It can really salvage a trace from getting burned up or an expensive part.
The design that Sapphire routinely employs is the reason they are the only brand I will ever use in a personal rig. The only thing I'd wish they'd change is adding a proper case badge to their higher end cards. I want to show off.
@@zeronin4696 i was mostly joking and ignoring the bad position the 6700 is in price wise. More like what Steve was saying in that the nitros are almost always great cards.
@Nick Diesal everything is over priced. Demand is insane with many people building/upgrading and crypto going nuts too. Bad time to need upgrades. I have an rx580 and 3800x....
@Nick Diesal yeah I'd love to do the same as thats exactly what I'd do. Other priorities keep it from happening and I mainly play Doom Eternal so its fine now. I'm just biding my time.
6 Months on and I am still happy I bought this card when I did. It is $250au more expensive now and prices don't look like they are going down anytime soon.
I would say PowerColor and Sapphire are the best, this time PowerColor has the better cards, this one doesn't do that well vs Red Devil or even their new Hellhound as the Hardware Unboxed tested.
@@wolfgangchristl9978 Depends on the luck of the draw With the silicon. My RX 6800 Nitro+ OC sits at 2530mhz and full oc on the memory 2150mhz. (I know my card has more oc headroom too.) With my full custom water loop now fitted it never goes over 50 degrees in a 21 degree room. My temperatures dropped only by 11 degrees with the same overclock at ambient with the fans at 1500 rpm. I'll be interested to see the Sapphire Toxic and Powercolours Liquid Devils. To see how they perform. I bet the prices for those cards will be horrendous though.
@The Patriot I wanted to get a Nitro + 6800XT because for ky first build I got a Nitro + 5700XT and loved the card but because GPU's are like unicorns this time around I got my hands on the water cooled ROG Strix LC 6800 XT back in December at Micro Center. Luckily got a good silicon sample because my cars can hit 2.7 ghz 100% stable but a commenter in one of my videos got a Nitro + 6800 XT and his too went to 2.5. Matter of fact another commenter with a ROg Dtrix like mine had an OC cap of 2.5ghz as well.
@@TerraWare I was going to buy a 6800xt too. But when i saw the AIB prices i just laughed. And went for the 6800 instead. I game a 1440p though so the 6800 made more sense.
@The Patriot yeah me too. 1440p is the gspot imo. You get good pixel density (depending on display size+distance) and you don't need massive amounts of hardware to feed high resolution. I use Radeon Chill with some games and lock it at 60. It's nice to crank all settings and have the gpu barely run drawing 100 watts. RDNA 2 is quite efficient.
yes please, I'd like more partner model review! If you can get your hands on one and have to make a quick decision, it's best to already know which ones you want to get.
Measuring the pads is an awesome adition. People seeing this prior to performing maintenance can make sure they have all the correct size thermal pads. Maybe a list of materials to perform the maintenance at the start of the video would be a good idea so people don't watch this has they go and reach a point of "oh crap I don't have that size thermal pads" with their graphic card almost fully dissambled. I get that these tear-downs are mostly to check out the build quality, but it could be very helpfull for the comunity in the future. Taking that into account, maybe start out with the required tool/material list, do a straight forward dissambly only calling out quality/features/defects when really necessary and once everything is dissambled then start analysing, talk about the card, cooler, pcb, etc.
I've got 6700xt red devil, 330mm with no noticeable sagging, run extremely cool too, SOTR max settings at 50deg. I also mine with it when not gaming, 49deg core and 60deg mem junction.
@@TylerWardhaha the only downside of Powercolor is 2 years limited warranty, but anyway I bought Red Devil as the coolest card from design perspective.
I really like watching the card reviews/teardowns. They are very informative and it gives you a good idea as to which card are the best to get. It would be great if you would continue doing them even if we can't get any of them at the moment.
I love these card tear downs and reviews, so please keep doing them. They have really helped me know which cards to buy, and which ones to stay away from.
If you can do a video on the GPU Memory Junction temperatures by comparing the different AIBS and what can be done to fix the high temps, that would be great! i.e. 3080, 3090, 3070 ti, 3080 ti, any GDDR6X
I'd be interested in seeing how these AIB models perform, especially how the seemingly same cooler design performs across the product stack for example 6900XT Nitro+ & 6700XT Nitro+
I would like to see a full cooler review :) But then, I'm a 'more of the same, please' kind of guy. Love the accuracy of your testing and it's why GN is my #1 review channel!
My first experience with Sapphire was with my 5700xt Nitro+ and they won a lifetime customer with that card. Rock solid build quality, outstanding thermals, and just the right amount of rgb
Because of children crying about shortages we didn't get many performance reviews for a whole generation of cards. And now only a single year later when prices have dropped and are expect to drop more, I can't find performance reviews of cards I'm interested in from the sources I trust. Not saying it was the wrong decision at the time (because adults are still children), but in the long run we missing data. At least GN used the time to expand their testing knowledge into other system parts, power supplies for example.
I did some of my own testing on my reference 6700XT before/after adding thermal pads between the backplate and back of the PCB. After a 15-minute Furmark test, the GDDR6 and VRM (as reported in HWInfo64) were 7-8 C cooler with the thermal pads than without. Looks like you were justified in your disappointment with the lack of thermal pads under the backplate!
"You can e-mail Sapphire and tell them - Hey my fan died... 5 years from now..." and they will respond with "Well that's unfortunate. We no longer produce those fans. You'll have to buy a new card."
A fan died on my 2.5 year old Nitro+ card, Sapphire support offered to sell a replacement. Notably, Sapphire's warranty is 2 years, while their competitors like Gigabyte and Asus give 3 years.
I don't mind watching these teardown videos. While it's impossible to get a card right now, these are interesting and can help me make a decision once they become more available
I think their production line in Dongguan manufactures the Zotac brand too, even though I don't think they are the same brand. They are also known to manufacture some of AMD's reference coolers.
The new sapphire 6700xt nitro still looking solid. But my rx580 nitro will live for another year since no gpu would be available here (thailand) at reasonable price.
I actually enjoy the reviews. Also in this case I snagged one of these cards in particular so seeing a review of performance compared to other cards would be interesting.
I just bought one of these. I am gratified to see the quality on your tear down. It was the only card I could get for my new build, I am very pleased it happened to be this exact one. Thank you very much for this tear down. Cheers from Canada. By the way, i wound up paying $1200 CAD plus taxes for it at a retail store local to me. I have not tried it out yet, still waiting for other parts. This will be my first new PC build since 2005, this is replacing my MacBook Pro 15”, back to PC for me lol.
im quite happy by the invention once again with the sapphire products, i loved em from the very beginning. And still do, this video proves it very well.
I really like those tear-downs video, it really helped me to chose my rx590 when I finally decided to buy my first brand new gpu ... yes those video are quite interesting and please don't stop doing them ... it's a nice touch to measure the thickness of the thermal pads and I'm pretty sure it will help a lot of people in the future when the time comes to do some maintenance on the gpu.
To be completely honest...since I started watching GN last year around May..i pretty much just watch everything you put out because its relaxing and enjoyable. You post what ever you guys ay GN want in my opinion.
Ended up getting one in a pre-built down under for $1598 AUD / $1236 USD with a 5600x, Mortar Max, 16gb of Tforce 3200 ram etc. Swapped out my 3600 and Rx 480 into it, and gave it to my 13yo son. Keep up the partner reviews if you can. Found it really helpful - ty Steve.
I would love to see more reviews of AIB boards for recent cards. It's still some of my favorite content from this channel even know most if not all of the cards aren't available!
I am using the XFX Nitro+ BIOS as a soft power play table using morepowertool on my reference 6700 XT. Instead of 186 watts it's now 211 watts and works great! I got a nice boost in my overclock. I may order some thermal pads. A user on Reddit says it reduced his temps by about 7c.
Edge case here where I click on your videos almost regardless of what's actually in them, but at a minimum I would definitely find a board wrap-up video of multiple manufacturers' takes on a given GPU insightful. I also really like the tear-downs as I'm fascinated by the choices manufacturers make and the theoretical reasons behind them. Even if I'll never spend over X amount for a video card, I like any content that helps me appreciate the craft--or lack thereof--that goes into making a thing that I'm interested in.
Please keep logging thermal pads. So useful! Make like a dedicated website page for them for each cards or like a table. Thermal pad review in general would be great too. You can't find thermal pads right now because there is also a shortage and everyone is buying them to replace on 3080 and 3090. A thickness guide would be amazing
I'd love to see fan noise and more teardowns for partner boards! I was looking to buy either an XFX or the gigabyte 6700 XT board and it was really hard to find fan noise and thermals and performance reviews for the different partners and that would be really helpful for me making decision because I do trust this RU-vid channel
I ended up getting the RX 6700xt Sapphire Pulse model, since the Nitro+ looked too "gamer-y" for me, and I wanted to have an ARGB color-coordinated build, too. The Pulse requires a bit of tweaking with the fans, since stock fans let the GPU go up to 80c, and I wanted some overclocking headroom. I turned the fans to a config that gets it up to 68c at full load, so it runs a bit louder, but not much louder than the rest of the system when under load gaming or something like that. I really like the darker, less flashy look of the Pulse. It goes better with all-black, more general purpose builds (not ones that are all "gamer" and flashy). It also will fit in your case, too
@@bigbubba0439 I just got the gigabyte eagle 6700 XT 12gb board. Not impressed with noise and performance compared to my evga rtx 2060 xc ultra gaming card. I'll be returning that GPU
I'm always gonna buy a FE/reference model and rip the cooler off anyway, but please keep reviewing the partner boards! I can't keep up with Actually Hardcore Overclocking every day!
My local Microcenter listed one of these in stock on there website for an in store purchase of $749.99 at the beginning of this video and by the end of the video it had been purchased.
$560.00 on NewEgg & just ordered one. Sapphire fan-boy from way back as I think they are the best build quality in the business thanks to GN's tear downs. Thankx Steve & I also think that as prices are coming down to at least reasonable levels now, these reviews become more relevant & appealing...
I think a cool video would be "3090 rear side memory temps". Look into various AIB cards, how watercooling helps (or doesn't), and mods like replacing/adding thermal pads on the backplate, adding heatsinks onto the back, etc. They're famously hot in most use cases (including my own), and that falls well into the GN niche of good testing, enthusiast building, and tuning, I think
I was fortunate enough to get a new GPU, although I had to wait 5 months after pre-ordering it. But I'd still love to see more partner board reviews and tear-downs. Please keep them coming.
A quick roundup of the most popular or interesting partner board models would be nice. That way, if we ever get a choice of which model to pick, we can be better informed on which ones have the best cooler design and clock frequency compared to the reference/founders designs.
9:02 That's perfect! Looks really simple to get to it and being able to disconnect it. I'm still scratching my head if I want to disassemble my RX590 to disconnect the Sapphire's logo LEDs -_- All GPUs should have hard switches for de LEDs as they have for the BIOS. It gets really annoying to not have the possibility to turn them off
I'm interested in all tear-downs as they give us very good information prior to actually disassemble it... like fan model, thermal pad thickness etc. Info like this are somewhat easy to find, but not all sources are as reliable as you have proven to be.
Steve, you have some good thermal imaging equipment now, it would be very interesting to see you test thermal pads, show their conductivity (or lack of it) etc. I have a hard time understanding how they even work, how they conduct heat to begin with.
