Teardown: The cooler
Disassembling the Sapphire RX 7700XT Pure 12GB is a bit tricky. You first have to remove the front cover with the fan modules, which is easily done via five screws. We see a total of three 9.5 cm fans (rotor blade diameter) in a 9.8 mm opening. Each fan module has 9 individual rotor blades that are combined with a circumferential ring (concentrated airflow, vibration reduction, tear-off noise). The modules 5.4 watt modules come from GUANGDONG FIRSTDO INVESTMENT ENTERPRISE CO LTD, a major fan OEM.
Under the cover swaps on the massive cooler, which is connected to the board. That’s the one we have to remove now (backplate with GPU clamping cross and a couple of spring screws by the voltage converter heatsinks.
The backplate can finally be unscrewed after removing the cooler. It is made of light metal, but has no cooling function. Pure optics, which is a bit of a pity.
Thus, the cooler is exposed and we look at the construction of the underside. A total of 5 thick 6 mm heatpipes transport the waste heat away, three of which are continuous and were bent over again for the first cooler part. I’ll write something about the pads and the thermal paste in a moment.
The heatsinks of GPU and RAM
The biggest problem is the flatness of the heatsink. While the RX 7900XTX still had a rather curved heatsink, the RX 7700XT has a rather extremely flat GPU heatsink, which eliminates the large production tolerances of the vapor chambers. You can see it well in the larger amount of thermal paste in the center that was squeezed out of there because those amounts are not needed. The heatsink above the GPU is made of pure copper with a nickel coating.
The package with the chip, on the other hand, is nearly flawless and much more level than that of NVIDIA’s big Ada card. This has to be praised, so chapeau, especially since the height dimensions have also been kept well. The 2.7 mm are also stated in the specs.
Now we come to the used thermal paste. This was applied to the cooler in advance by the OEM as a kind of rectangular pad and it is very viscous. The silicone content is very low, so nothing will bleed out big either. It’s a durable and balanced mixed paste of aluminum oxide (Al2O3, so corundum) and ZnO (zinc oxide).
The circulating heatsink, which cools the memory modules, is made of inexpensive aluminum. Here, too, we first encounter a similarly thick nickel layer. However, no alloy is used, which is not necessarily advantageous.
The thermal connection of the memory is done via quite soft thermal pads, which also do not contain too much silicone and thus left quite a good impression. Aluminum oxide, zinc oxide and silicone, that’s all there is to it. That can be left as it is.
Heatpipes
The hollow heatpipes are nickel-plated and again made of pure copper. Inside, a mesh of composite material is used to transport the evaporated liquid.
This brings us back to the 3 mm pads of the voltage converters, which are made of the same material as the pads of the memory chips.
- 1 - Introduction, technical data and technology
- 2 - Test setup and methods
- 3 - Teardown: PCB and components
- 4 - Teardown: Cooler and material analysis
- 5 - Gaming-Performance Full-HD (1920 x 1080)
- 6 - Gaming Performance WQHD (2560 x 1440)
- 7 - Details: Power consumption and balancing
- 8 - Transients and PSU recommendation
- 9 - Temperatures, clock rate and thermal imaging
- 10 - Fan curves and noise
- 11 - Summary and conclusion
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