I have to say a few words in advance about the circuit board and its assembly. The 1 mm pads on the memory modules are 0.25 mm too thick and require an enormous amount of thermal paste between chip and heatsink due to the too large gap. I replaced the pads AFTER the review with good 0.8mm pads from Ziitek and used Alphacool Apex as the paste. The GDDR6 ran over 5 °C cooler, and the GPU temperature even dropped by 8 °C. That is already enormous for such a small card. By the way, the nibbled pad on the photo is original so, there was simply a piece missing.
Now let’s move on to the board design. The PCB is kept simple and has a very mixed configuration. The two phases for the GPU remain uncooled (despite the 115 watts in the Torture test with overclocked card), which already seems quite sporty. A small Monolithic Power Systems M2940A PWM controller controls two MP86956 placed on the upper left, which are actually the only highlight among the components. This is a monolithic half-bridge with integrated power MOSFETs and gate drivers (DrMOS). The MP86956 is based on a monolithic IC approach that delivers up to 70A of current per phase. The integrated drivers and MOSFETs provide high efficiency due to optimum dead time (DT) and reduced parasitic inductance. The two coils have no printing with the value for the inductance, but from experience this should be around 220 mH.
At the bottom left is the single voltage converter for the memory, which, in contrast, was equipped from the rather lower price segment. The high and low sides are realized discretely with N-channel MOSFETS from Sinopower and unfortunately not cooled. Here, the board already reaches more than 45°C in idle. An SM4378 with a maximum of 49 amps for the high side and a somewhat stronger SM4507 with a maximum of 60 amps for the low side are used. The coil used has an inductance of 470 mH. Beyond that, we find some voltage converters for more the partial voltages and the memory in the form of three 2 GB modules from Samsung. There are no other big exciters here.
The installed MX25U6432F flash memory from Macronix is also interesting. It is Serial NOR Flash Memory, i.e. flash memory that consists only of NOR gates and can be used as a flexible replacement for a normal EPROM. This NOR flash is connected via the bus system and can also be filled with content from the motherboard’s UEFI. This could be one of the reasons why Resizeable Barstets has to be enabled and does not work on AMD systems because you have to rely on microcode from the BIOS. It’s just a guess, of course, but it would make sense. At the bottom right, above the connections for the LED and the fans, there is another MCU labeled Gunnir, which should be responsible for fan control and light gimmicks.
On the back side, we can see very nicely from the traces that only 8 lanes are electrically connected. PCIe 4.0 is used, which is completely sufficient. Besides a few more small MOSFETS and diodes, there are no other active components on the back that would be of interest. Incidentally, Gunnir has dispensed with longitudinal chokes in the entrance area, which can be seen as a pure cost-down measure. Such a thing is not beautiful.
The cooler
Here, Gunnir made it quite simple and cut a large, monolithic block of extruded profile to size and reworked it. The cooler only cools the GPU and the three memory modules, the rest unfortunately remains free, including all the voltage converters. The few slots hardly help the cooling air to penetrate from the top to the bottom of the board’s surface. At least the voltage converters would have benefited from this in terms of temperature and efficiency.
The surrounding 6 mm heat pipe made of nickel-plated copper composite material is ground onto the GPU as DHT (Direct Heat Touch) cooling and was pressed into the aluminum block on the front.
The backplate is pure decoration and unfortunately does not cool as well, which would have been good for the voltage transformers, but they probably didn’t think that far ahead, which is a pity.
With that, we are already through, because there is not really much to disassemble.
- 1 - Introduction, an important foreword, specs und details
- 2 - Unboxing, hi-res pictures and features
- 3 - Teardown: PCB and cooler
- 4 - Telemetry, overclocking, bottleneck and micro stuttering
- 5 - FPS - Frames Per Second
- 6 - FPS - Curves
- 7 - Percentiles - Curves
- 8 - Frame Times - Percentage shares as a bar chart
- 9 - Frame Times - Curves
- 10 - Variances - Percentage shares as a bar chart
- 11 - AutoCAD 2021 and Inventor Pro 2021
- 12 - 3ds Max, Catia, Creo, Energy
- 13 - Maya, Medical, Siemens NC, SW 2017
- 14 - Power consumption as an overall consideration
- 15 - Load peaks and power supply recommendation
- 16 - Power consumption individually for all games
- 17 - Efficiency individually for all games
- 18 - Clock rate, temperatures, fan speed and noise
- 19 - Summary and conclusion
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