AMD Radeon RX Vega 10 chips differ - physically and quite significantly (Updated)
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Agent-A01
Looks like they skipped a process in assembling the dies to conserve time and money?
NewTRUMP Order
Lets see if my prejudices' towards Chinese manufacturing is wrong. The top sample looks neat and complete and gives off a polished manufacturing look. The second looks like my teenage cousin made it in his basement. By looks and prejudice, the top one I would expect to be from Taiwan and the bottom shabby looking one from China. Where were they manufactured? Both from Taiwan? Well I was honest up front and will admit I was wrong in my assumption.:eyes: In reality the cpu doesn't know that it is ugly and works just as well as the "pretty" one. I guess down the road if there is a rash of doa cards be interesting to do a post mortem on them to see if the fit and finish was to blame.
Hilbert Hagedoorn
Administrator
No, after further checking both models do originate from Taiwan.
gianluca
To me it seems that the two gpus don't have differences in height, just the missing black finiture.
Would be interesting to see if this missing black substrate causes some differences in temperatures or in performance, somehow. I mean, if it's there is for a reason.
Or maybe it's just some insulating material placed there to avoid thermal paste to go in between the elements.
Evildead666
I read something about this yesterday at home.
An Article about the packing that had to be done to protect the Interposer and chips.
As much as I read, there should be no chips without the packing to protect the HBM2 and the GPU Die.
I'll try and find it (i'm at work) if not, i'll look in my history tonight.
schmidtbag
I doubt these differences have any effect on performance or thermals, however, I do wonder if this has something to do with the voltage. These GPUs can be under-volted a lot, even for AMD cards. But if they're manufactured by different facilities, one may have worse quality transistors, where the voltage needs to compensate for that. It may be easier to just use the same configuration for all chips.
shakum
It's an article on Toms Hardware on a Vega Frontier teardown
Evildead666
Thats the one 🙂
Its also on page 3 (oo-er) of their Vega 64 review.
SuperAverage
Look like the same height, one is jsut missing the material around and inbetween the chips.
tsunami231
to me one look incomplete/missing stuff on the chip, I think Q/A is skiped on one
__hollywood|meo
ES vs final spin, seems like? how bizarre to have such physical difference, at any rate
Reddoguk
The HBM on the unpacked package does look like it's slightly lower. That doesn't look good at all compared to the other version.
It might be a trick on the eyes but i still would like mine to have the black filler because those chips look like they have been lapped but the other one doesn't.
One looks like it has a metal layer and the other looks like raw chips silicon.
Plus you can see connections on that GPU so you could fry it without a non conductive paste.
fantaskarsef
Looks weird. Is there also a difference in average performance with and without the black stuff? Because to humble me it looks more like a spacer than anything else (at least it doesn't look like it helps heat dissipation), probably only there for better sturdyness against phsyical stress due to "heavier" coolers or a firmer mounting (maybe AIO mounting?)
vbetts
Moderator
I thought it looked more like a heat spreader between the actual chips?
JonasBeckman
Guessing it's something like that, I don't know what the black is but I would assume it's filler and then you can get a even spread of the actual paste or what thermal material is used which has even contact with the actual copper plate for the cooling device.
EDIT: As for how much of a difference it actually makes I'm not too sure, might be near identical although it looks a bit rough with bits of it missing like that.
Elder III
Hmm, getting paste down in between the HBM2 and main chip can't be a good thing. Hopefully anyone repasting their GPU would use non conductive thermal paste anyways, but I would still definitely prefer the more finished look of the black "filler" material.
cowie
when you realize what they are doing they must of had a hard time even getting that close.
Stormyandcold
This DF video shows the same cpu without the black material at 12:12
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1JxvN_2i6c
Srsbsns
The black stuff is epoxy. Makes no difference in terms of function and performance.y
Hilbert Hagedoorn
Administrator
Update: We've received word back from AMD, I'll just leave that here:
We have multiple manufacturing partners for Vega10 package assembly. To meet the high-volume production that we target with Vega10, we need access to most of the world capacity for 2.5D interposer technology. Each partner has unique processes, including one which has an epoxy fill to level the entire SOC surface. This specificity is inconsequential to the system solution and all Vega10 packages are form, fit and function equivalent. As there is no functional difference, any Vega10 package flavor can be binned into a Vega10 XL, XT or XTX.
