It’s not news that EVGA is getting out of the GPU card game, after a ‘little falling out’ with Nvidia. It’s sad news nonetheless, as this enthusiastic band of hardware hackers has a solid following in certain overclocking and custom PC circles. The Games Nexus gang decided to fly over to meet up with the EVGA team in Zhonghe, Taiwan, and follow them around a bit as they tried for one last overclocking record on the latest (unreleased, GTX4090-based) GPU card. As you will note early on in the video, things didn’t go smoothly, with their hand-lapped GPU burning out the PCB after a small setup error.
The fun parts of the video show some behind-the-scenes details of the EVGA GPU operation, including some sections of BGA reworking which are pretty informative (but we’d like more detail, thanks!) showing that even with only a handful of AD102 Silicon available and a few prototype PCBs, even letting out the magic smoke is not necessarily the end of the show.
But why hand-lap the die? Apparently, the surface is pre-curved outwards, so that when it warms up under load, the die surface ends up flat, making the best contact with the thermal interface surface of the cooler. But [biso biso] uses liquid nitrogen for their overclocking speed records, and that has the opposite effect, with the extreme cooling (about -90 Celsius) causing the die to flex differently, and ‘crack’ the thermal paste, ruining the thermal contact with the cooling media. Lapping the die back to flat, apparently reduces this problem.
On the rework side of things, (14:45 in the video) they needed to remove the lapped GP ..
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