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This is the iris xe video card that we talked about in detail in a gaming benchmark series that we did previously. We should also have a production workload benchmark series, either online already or coming up soon, so the dg1 we haven’t taken it apart for camera, yet and we’re going to look at the pcb it’s made by asus. They handled the cooler and the pcb and the gpu, which is made by intel let’s tear it down before that. This video is brought to you by kiouksia, said to be the original inventors of nand flash memory and formerly known as toshiba memory. Kiosks xg6 m.2 ssd is a high end, nvme ssd, claiming up to 3180 megabytes per second read and 2960 megabytes per second write: speeds, sequentially and it’s, ideally used in high performance, gaming, pcs or power conscious laptops. The xg6 is available up to one terabyte, and the company also has its bg4 ssd and a much smaller m.2 2230 form factor for up to one terabyte of ultra compact storage learn more about keoxia at the links in the description below, including about their enterprise storage Products all right, so if you need the primer on this check out our first video on it, it was the one looking at the the gaming benchmark performance. We talked about the architecture it’s intel, iris, xe, there’s, a dg2 coming out as well that’s, the one that you all are probably more familiar with, because that’s the one intel hasn’t shot up about for over a year now they’re working on it it’s supposed to be A gaming car like a truer gaming card, whereas this is more of a stop gap, so intel pushed this one out to serve small business systems and to sort of again fill the gap while waiting for more discreet gpus to hit the market.

It was good timing, for it it’s not meant to be a gaming device, and when we did testing with gaming, although it is capable of playing games, it struggled and things like frame time consistency. So the frame to frame interval was not as consistent on this as it was on a gt 1030, for example. So the card’s, obviously very simple, there’s, not a lot to the tear down there’s four screws, that’s going to be it it’s about the easiest we’ve done in a while, but there’s still stuff. We can look at given that this is not sold separately. It’S part of prebuilts only, it makes it a little harder to judge things like the cost or the value, but we can still get an idea for how much ace is carried at least and how much uh intel carried when working on this we’re going to be Doing work on our modmat, which you can grab on store.gamersaccess.net, and that was the mousemat which is in stock and shipping. Now that i just pulled aside okay, this is going to be andrew, try and try and keep up on the camera all right. This is very complex. Okay, so, as you can see, the process is difficult. No one should do this unless they’re a trained professional. Where can you try and make it? Can you do it more dramatic so that they think it is harder? I’Ll put this one back in okay, you ready ready all right.

As you can see, this is really hard because uh earthquakes happen when you, okay, when you start taking about the card all right so that’s, it that’s the four screws, all right: uh that’s, bios chip right there, wind bond. This is a 64 megabit bios chip. So that’s eight megabytes eight bits and a byte that’s interesting so funny. The paste application is kind of funny. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s insane overspread. We don’t see this a lot on devices, normally they’ll, silk screen it and apply it in a way where there’s barely any bleed over the edges of the diffusion barrier or the silicon itself, and a lot of the reason for that is, if you do this on, Every device and you ship, 100, 000 of them, or a million of them in the case of nvidia gpus, then you’re starting to use a lot of material that you don’t need to use. But this the fact that there’s so much bleed over the edges again. It’S not bad, it doesn’t hurt the performance thermally or anything it’s, just gon na squish out we did thermal testing in our review uh in the gaming section it was. It seemed okay, so um, although we did see clocks, dropping a bit as it heated up, which is expected uh, you strap a fan to it probably do a bit better, so aluminum, cold plate, aluminum fin stack, no connection anywhere to any other component at all.

It is only cooling, the igp which is in this instance, basically a dgpu and the memory is left with no direct cooling at all. This is lp ddr4x, so this will run cooler than say gddr6x, it’s a little easier to manage and that’s, maybe why they can get away with it now we’re going to clean off the gpu, so as always, it’s just it’s silicon on a substrate, which is what The green part is and that’s going to be connected by bga to the pcb general reminder. Don’T use your fingernail to dig into the sides of paste that spreads over the edge of like a gpu, because you can rip off small smds that are next to it. This case there’s nothing. There just watch just rip off the entire dye fairly clean. So for gpu silicon they don’t do any labeling on it like nvidia does. We should probably get a measurement external measurement of the die size. Uh 11.85 millimeters. By about, like eight point, something 8.3 or so so this these external measurements they’re useful to get an idea but uh that even if we measured it perfectly edge to edge that’s, not the actual silicon area um, because there there’s gon na be some bleed over okay. So i just had a patrick stone on our team: go through and figure out the vrm layout for this. We just probed around on the board and it’s, really simple there’s, not much in the way of the vrm.

So we’ve got a core vrm and a memory vrm that we can easily identify and then anything extra we haven’t done any probing while it was active or on so for the core vrm there’s uh, two caps over here that are 270 uf, 16 volt polymer capacitors And these appear to feed six mosfets, so we’ve got upi semiconductor, fets n channel 30 volt. They do 90 amps at 25 c, 57 amps at 100 c. Tj max is 150 c on these, so we’re, fine, even without air flow or direct cooling from a heat sink, also keep in mind. This is very low power. This uh gpu core it’s, the tdp, is something like 30 watts or something like that. So we’re not dealing with a lot of power here and uh these two chokes. These inductors are two super alloy power. Two chokes asus uses these a lot on a lot of its video cards, he’s really common for them, so just a kind of a reminder that it is asus working on this one. So, on the end here, at the other side of the chokes for the inductors, we have three more capacitors. These are apac 820, microfarad, 2.5 volt caps and that feeds to whatever voltage we eventually end up in the core. So our thinking from looking at this, we, we didn’t we’re, not uh experts on what this specific board is doing, but we’ve been trying to study it and learn a bit more as we go so here’s.

What we think just from a glance is going on here. It looks like the power is coming from this side and it’s connected high side to the qn3104 fets, and that would be the ones in the middle and it’s connected low side to the sets of qn3106 fats. The fets are, it looks like they’re feeding the super alloy chokes at that point, which are really common on asus. They use them on most their boards and then we hit the last stop with the storage caps that looks like they’re, eventually leading us to the desired voltage regulation as for the memory, so that would be these four right here. These memory modules are eight gigabit chips. That’S bit with a lower b, it does matter, a capital b would be bite. There are eight bits in a byte, so four, eight gigabit chips we’ve got therefore four gigabytes on the card, and i think it was 4266. We talked about in our original coverage uh, and these are running 32 bit interfaces per chip, so you’ve got 32 64 96 128 that’s, where our 128 bit bus comes from. Of course, there has to be a corresponding one over on this side, but that’s where that number comes from there’s a couple other. Just looking around the board couple other small things: we noticed that right there that’s for hdmi. So this is, we looked at the data sheet for this one we’re not really familiar with it specifically, but board does hdmi 2.

0. It looks like it’s a six gigabit per second jitter cleaning, repeater or a retimer from the data sheet, and we assume that would be to clean up the hdmi tmds signal to meet the 2.0 requirements. Tmds being transition minimized, differential signaling, so that’s that chip there on the back of the pcb, pointed this out already but that’s the bios chip, so that is a win bond, module and uh. Looking up the data sheet for this one, it’s 64 megabit flash for vbios – and this one we think, is probably the controller for the core vrm, so uh, that is labeled 5v equals 8b 197.. We weren’t able to find any details on that that’s going to be it for the pcb side of things. I guess just out of curiosity. Let’S get the package size for this too 34 for the entire thing, substrate included by roughly 28 or so and there’s other various small things around the board and we’ve got shunt resistors here here, there’s another one up here: uh but that’s, most of it. Now the heatsink again is just aluminum single contact patch there’s, not really anything to talk about with this. It has some fins, and i mean that’s it. This is just a. This is a small business card, it’s built like a small business card. It looks like a small business card and they’ve spent about as much money as you would expect them to spend on making a small business card so that’s the board that’s.

What the gpu looks like and i think that’ll pretty much take care of the teardown aspect of this that’s gon na, be it then on the tear down it’s, straightforward it’s, a board that lets the gpu run. There’S, really not a lot to talk about here. In terms of power or the vrm, or really much of anything, because it pulls power from the pcie slot, it’s, something like 30 watts or so uh by the spec that intel has provided anyway. We haven’t validated that yet and so there’s not going a lot going on vrmys and that’s fine until something more advanced comes out like in the dg2. It doesn’t really matter that much as long as it’s kind of able to run the device. Now the clock wasn’t stable, that’s, a thermal matter, though we think from what we’ve looked at, maybe strapping a fan to this would fix that. We can play around with that in another piece if there’s interest, but otherwise check back for our production workload, benchmarks of the dg1, intel, iris, xe card and uh. If you haven’t seen it yet go check out our gaming benchmarks of the device, because it’s kind of interesting it’s intel’s first attempt, even though they’re not really trying to make it a gaming device, it’s a precursor to what the dg2 will become so that’s it. For this one, thanks for watching, you can go to store.camerasaccess.net if you’d like to grab one of the mod maps that we worked on or one of our mouse mats which are in stock and shipping now or you can go to patreon.

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