Board layout and components
With the circuit board, they almost outdid themselves (like AMD did). Well equalized hotspots and a very thoughtful design with a very neat input filtering after the three 8-pin connectors, which relies on a proper LC filter (low-pass) and not only on series coils (chokes), should on the one hand soften the load peaks at the power supply and on the other hand also increase the stability of the overall system. Nobody really needs annoying HF wave salad. With an XDPE132G5C from Infineon we also rely on a very high-quality PWM controller, which drives the 14 phases for VDDC_GFX of the RX 6900XT Liquid Devil.
For all important active components and the coils, the same component selection is used as AMD’s reference. A correct decision. On the top left we see additionally the BIOS switch and on the right an aRGB connector for further LED elements like the light band of the cooler.
In parallel, an IR352717 is used to generate other partial voltages such as 2 phases for VDDC_SOC and 2 phases for VDDIO_MEM. In addition, we find another phase for VDDCI, so that in total there are 19 phases for the various main voltages, all of which work with one TDA21472 per phase as a Smart Power Stage, which can supply a maximum of 70A. The TDA21472 includes a synchronous buck-gate driver IC in a Schottky diode co-package, as well as the high-side and low-side MOSFETs. The combination of gate driver and MOSFET (DrMOS) enables higher efficiency at the low output voltages for the GPU.
The internal MOSFET current sensing algorithm with temperature compensation achieves higher current sensing accuracy compared to the best inductor DCR sensing methods. Protection includes cycle-by-cycle overcurrent protection with programmable threshold, VCC/VDRV UVLO protection, phase fault detection, IC temperature detection, and thermal shutdown. The TDA21472 also features automatic bootstrap capacitor refill to prevent over-discharge.
The TDA21472 also features a deep sleep power saving mode that greatly reduces power consumption when the multiphase system enters PS3/PS4 mode. This certainly explains the very low idle load that both new Radeon cards produce. The used coils with 150 mH are quite decent, but sometimes they buzz quite audibly. PowerColor installs a total of 8 GDDR6 memory modules from Samsung with 16 Gbps.
The back panel is quite tidy and you won’t find any SP or POS caps below the BGA. in general, everything looks very high-quality in large parts and otherwise at least very purposefully equipped. Instead of elaborate design stunts, this one relies on solid home cooking, which can really please. In the left third we also see the two PWM controllers
Cooler and backplate
The water block is significantly shorter than the PCB and is largely the same as EKWB’s Vector design. You can see that PowerColor uses very high quality 1 mm pads, which I analyzed as 7 W/mK pads, and their consistency is the same as the much-loved crumb. PowerColor only overdid it a bit with the thermal paste, which is too much and will have a rather counterproductive effect, as we will see later.
The cooler design is classic with central injection above the microchannels of the CPU and a circumferential channel for cooling the voltage converters. The radiator geometry isn’t up to snuff, but it’s not bad either. Something like solid average. One of the reasons for the delay of the launch was the rather poor cooling performance of some models, so PowerColor decided to do a complete recall, hence the really expensive pads now.
The backplate is another part of the stabilization and also an optical eye-catcher, but nothing more, because it is not integrated into the cooling, which I can not understand. At least one pad could have been assembled here.
- 1 - Introduction and technical details
- 2 - Teardown: PCB, power supply and cooler
- 3 - Gaming performance
- 4 - Gaming power draw in detail and efficiency
- 5 - Power consumption, voltages and standards
- 6 - Transients and PSU recommendation
- 7 - Clock rate and temperatures, infrared
- 8 - Overview and conclusion
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