Tear Down
Taking the card apart was pretty simple with the backplate holding the bulk of the cooler together, along with 4 hex screws on the cooler’s shroud which then allows you to take the shroud off being sure to remove the two connectors for the fans and RGB strips.
You also have to take the I/O apart to allow access to that side of the card and then with a bit of light pressure, things come apart quite easily.
The PCB is pretty plentiful, reminding me of the XFX model we looked at recently, though with a lot more circuitry in the bottom right, likely because of the RGB and fan connectors.
Like other 7900 XTX cards we’ve looked at, we find the same 20-phase setup, consisting of 17 for the GPU and 3 for the memory, of which all of the components are made by Monolithic Power Systems.
The GPU phases are managed by an MP2857 controller, while the memory is managed by the MP2856 controller. All phases for the GPU and memory are again made by MPS and are the MP87997 power stages which are rated for 70A of current each.
To keep things under control, the card has a large heatsink which comprises a large finned stack with 7 heatpipes as well as a vapour-chamber base plate which makes direct contact with both the GPU core and GDDR6 memory, while the front plate makes contact with the VRM phases to help dissipate heat away from the main part of the card.
Overall, it’s a pretty extensive cooler and is on the larger side of what we’ve seen and has clearly had a lot of thought and design put into it, so I’m expecting some pretty great performance in terms of the cooling side of things while also remaining on the quiet side at the same time.
So, let’s see how it stacks up in terms of performance against other cards.
