Product Innards
Product Innards
So we take off the back-plate locked in with screws. At the backside there is a protective plastic cover and critical areas like VRM have proper padding.
Here we have removed the back-plate. As stated, the critical ICs have been cushioned with thermal padding. That's a whole lotta white though !
The cooling solution is impressive overall, it uses very thick heat-pipes that pass through a heatsink, with thermal paste tied to the all-copper block. That's as good as it gets really, and sure, that shows in the great cooling performance.
When we flip the PCB around you can also see that the critical components are covered with a full contact plate. The memory area has padding and is thus cooled as well as most ICs.
GALAX / KFA2 also applies padding on top of the GDDR5X ICs, the VRM area as well. Here I have taken off the front and back-plate btw. There is roughly 2 mm space in between PCB and plate on the backside. This is a very clean PCB design alright.
Here we have the GP102 graphics processor from Nvidia covered with thermal interface material. The Nvidia GP102 graphics processor is based on Pascal architecture at a 16 nm process at TSMC. This bad boy has a transistor count of 12 billion and do not underestimate the die size, that is 471 mm² you are looking at.
The GDDR5X memory chips are made by Micron and are specced to run at 11,000 MHz GDDR5 (effective data-rate). Tweaked, you are looking at a capability of roughly 12,000 MHz (effective data-rate). These are Micron D9VRL rated at 11 Gbps / 1.35V, however Micron also offers a 12 Gbps IC under the product name D9VRN, this is the first one though.
You can count them, 16 phases for the graphics processor, there are another three phases for the memory subsystem.
I had to carefully look & check here, but among others, GALAX/KFA2 is using an International Rectifier IR3595A voltage controller, a fairy high-end controller that actually was/is used by MSI on the Lightnings as well. To achieve 16 GPU phases, they are using PWM doublers, which feed into other power stages.
And since the voltage tap points are hard to read with the cooler installed, here's an extra photo should you feel the need to 'alter' or monitor some stuff.
