Product PCB and component analysis

Product PCB and component analysis

 
Right, it's time get down to the nitty gritty - let's strip her nekked and see what is going on at the PCB components wise.

 
The cooling solution is fairly normal slash plain looking, it uses three thick heat-pipes that pass through a heatsink, with thermal paste tied to the all-copper block. Heatpipes wise, we've seen better really, it seems a bit on the shy side for a GPU at a 185 peak Wattage. All critical components have been thermally padded including the VRM area as well as DRAM memory chips. 

 
With the cooler removed, we now have the full PCB visible, a fairly clean PCB.  To the left the VRM area, in the middle you can spot the Polaris GPU and surround it, the GDDR5 memory ICs. Let's run through some of the components.

  
Okay, should we just call her Polaris or stick to Ellesmere? The Radeon RX 580 uses Polaris 20, also referred (read rebadged) to by AMD as Ellesmere. The GPU is the same towards the original Polaris used on the RX 480, however, a newer FinFET+ fabrication process has been applied, offering better yields. The GPU has a die size of 232 mm². ASRock applies thermal paste in-between the die and cooler surface area.

The memory then, ASRock is making use of GDDR5 chips from Micron, it's a really familiar series, SKU code D9VVR is rated at 2000 MHz (=8000 MHz GDDR5 effective data-rate). You'll quite easily get 9 Gbps out of them really. We'll demonstrate that in the overclocking segment of this article.

   
You can count them, there are six phases for the GPU. It's not showing on this photo but to the top right one extra dedicated phase loops through the memory as it's own power phase. So this is a 6+1 phase design.  Across the PCB you see a clean component layout which includes VRM components. You can see solid core chokes, that would be molded inductor chokes (decreasing buzzing noises). The rest is kept simple enough, including MOSFETs for each phase. The square chips to the left of the capacitors are MOSFETs. We stumble into 5K capacitors (which offer a longer lifespan compared towards normal capacitors ). 

 
ASRock is using an International Rectifier IR3567B power controller feeding six channels to the GPU. From the top of my head, this phase buck controller can handle 8-phases, since there are more channels available, one phase from this regulator is used for memory.