Board layout and components
I have to say that this time I was not allowed to disassemble the card as usual, because due to the small number of pieces the card remains in the rotation and it would be very uncooperative to change the state of the test sample by own interventions. Thus I have to use extra made pictures from the factory, which are sufficient however for the Basics all times. With this board, however, they have once again outdone themselves and the reference from AMD. as well as the in-house Nitro topped.
Well equalized hotspots and a very thoughtful design with a very neat input filtering after the 6-pin and the two 8-pin connectors, which relies on a proper LC filter (low-pass) and not only on series coils (chokes), should on the one hand mitigate the load peaks on 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 AMD uses a very high quality PWM controller, which drives the 13 phases for VDDC_GFX of the Sapphire RX 6900 XT Toxic.
For all major active components and the coils, Sapphire relies on the same or at least very similar component selection as AMD’s reference. A correct decision. In the upper left corner we also see the BIOS switch and at the end of the card in the center right an aRGB connector for additional LED elements. But we already know this from the Nitro cards.
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, resulting in a total of 18 phases for the various main voltages, all of which operate with one adequate Smart Power Stage (SPS) per phase. Again, this is a synchronous buck-gate driver IC in a co-package with a Schottky diode and 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.
According to AMD’s specifications, the SPS used also has 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 the new Radeon cards generate. The coils used with 150 mH are quite decent, but do buzz a bit at times. Sapphire 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. We also see the white areas for light distribution, around which various aRGB diodes have been placed.
Cooler and backplate
Now let’s move on to the threatened cooling solution with the hybrid AiO. We see the usual Asetek module, as it can be found similarly on various CPU coolers. However, we will see and hear later that this pump knows how to drown out even the fans with a gesture of nonchalance when the card is under full load in UHD. What else? Everything except the GPU is cooled semi-passively. On the cooling and mounting frame, two flat heat pipes take care of the heat dissipation from the VRAM and voltage converters to the flat fin heat sink, above which then sits a 9.2 cm fan with 12 rotor blades.
The 360mm slim radiator carries three very simple, PWM-controlled 12cm fans with the usual aRGB lighting art and just 7 rotor blades. However, they didn’t cover themselves with glory here, because in view of the very high price, it could and should have been better fans. But there is also an extra chapter on this when it comes to noise emission
The backplate is a purely optical decoration, but is not thermally connected to the board. It could have been done, but it wasn’t mandatory. Therefore, no criticism, even if you leave some potential.
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