NVIDIA RTX A6000 Disassembly (with small guide)

[BrandonTheCat]

Welcome to my RTX A6000 disassembly guide! 

I expect the majority of whos reading this is more in curiosity of what the A6K looks like inside, because hardly anyone has this card. I'm not sure if I'm the first to cover a card like this. This post might go on reddit as well. 

 

Preface

This is my first post in 6 years. A lot has changed to me and my PC in that time frame lol. I'm now a computer science student studying deep learning (in the next few semesters).

 

I obtained this A6K from a giveaway from Nvidia in the "GTC Treasure Hunt". I knew about GTC from previous graphics card releases, and learned about the giveaway from the Nvidia discord (which I highly recommend you join). In the giveaway there was a challenge to tweet out hidden clues in the first keynote. 70 tweets later I won first place which was pretty awesome. 
 

Normally I'm sure unless there was something thermally wrong with the card I wouldn't tear apart a $5000 graphics card, but since the card has no warranty from Nvidia because its a giveaway item, and since I'm VERY curious to see the differences between the founders 3080 which I have and the A6K, this is where we land. Sit back and enjoy the teardown! 

 

 

Teardown

On the back of the card there are 10 TR6 screws that need to come out. These are all the same sizes so you can put them in a small pile somewhere. Note that you don't have to actually take the 3 fan screws out. If you need to take the fan out, I'd recommend unscrewing that after the backplate is off. Carefully remove the backplate (There is some force required) and mind the fan connector.

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

After the backplate is off, you can then remove the fan. I believe this is the same connector used in the founders cards, but all you have to do is slide the silver connector to the right, and lift the fan cable up. After this, If you need the fan off, you can unscrew it from here. 

Here we can see a good clear shot of the back of the card. What stands out to me (and what is not really important anymore) is that the card uses more MLCC's than POSCAPS. Again, doesn't really matter, but nonetheless interesting. 

The PCB design is very reminiscent of the RTX 3090 PCB with a shorter height and more components for the SYNC connector on the top. This is one crammed PCB. 

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

These chips are K4ZAF325BM-HC16 SAMSUNG GDDR6 chips. A lot of people when they see the card think that it has the 6X variant but I think it would melt the card. There is 48GB available in this specific card. 

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

After the backplate is off and the fan is disconnected, the next thing that we need to take off is the IO bracket. These are TR8 screws and they have a lot of thread-locker on it requiring a good amount of force to take off, but its doable. 

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

After that IO shield comes off, the entire card can be lifted from the housing! 

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

After this, there is 4 screws that come out from the GPU itself highlighted below. Make sure to loosen in a star pattern to evenly remove pressure from each corner. 

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

The most nerve wracking part was here. There is a lot of stick to the thermal pads and you need to slowly remove the heatsink from the GPU. With enough luck it'll come off, but be sure not to rip any thermal pads. 

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

And then you're done! You'll find that it was super easy (Because that's immediately what I thought). It's a blower style card so it inherently would be easy. Compared to the founders this was much easier to pull apart. My card was put back together with MUCH better thermal paste (Thermal Grizzly) and temps are 1-2 degrees lower. The thermal pads are much higher quality than the founders counterparts, and the low power GDDR6 doesn't really warrant a pad swap.  

 

 

Spoiler

 

Thanks to nvidia for sending out this card, I've had a lot of fun with it so far and I'm excited to see what I can do with all that VRAM in the future. 

 

Q&A

 

WHATS THE HASHRATE?!

This is the most frequent question I get. It does about 85MH/s, so it's somewhere underneath a 3080. 

 

Dude that's like $5k, just sell it, and get 2 3090's

I don't plan to. And also, good luck getting 2 3090's. 

 

What do you need 48GB of VRAM for? 

There are many applications that can fully utilize this amount of VRAM, and Linus has explored some of it. Deep learning applications, specifically the ones that use graphics are known to use a lot. There are some videos on youtube from a data scientist on this specific card that dives deeper. 

 

Best Port Royal? 

Using a heavy overclock on it while being power limited to 300 watts is difficult. I squeezed out a 13430, which is really good. Complete stock it gets around 11400. 

 

The GPU is actually better in specs than a 3090, but it does worse in some performance metrics. Why is that?

Being power limited to 300 watts really doesn't help, and the slower VRAM doesn't help either. Just on those two alone you can tell it isn't a gaming focused card. 

 

What are the specs on it? 

Sure.  

1455 base, 1860 boost, memory clock 2000 Mhz. It has 10752 CUDA cores, 336 Tensor cores, and 112 ROPs, as well as 84 ray tracing cores. More can be found here.

 

[igormp]

Can you run tf's benchmarks on it?

[WhitetailAni]

What's its F@H PPD?

[DigiMat]

Thanks for the teardown, very cool!

One customer in our shop wants to watercool his A6000, and finding a waterblock is not that easy 
Just to be sure : is yours a PG133C model? I was hoping to useyour teardown as a reference for the PCB (I d'ont think there's a lot of different model for this kind of GPU, but you never know...)

[Elnur Hajiyev]

10 hours ago, DigiMat said:

Thanks for the teardown, very cool!

One customer in our shop wants to watercool his A6000, and finding a waterblock is not that easy 
Just to be sure : is yours a PG133C model? I was hoping to useyour teardown as a reference for the PCB (I d'ont think there's a lot of different model for this kind of GPU, but you never know...)

All RTX A series(formerly, Quadro) cards are manufactured by NVIDIA, therefore, all RTX A6000 graphics cards should be in the same form factor regardless of the seller.

 

Are you going to use the water block from Bykski? I cannot find any other manufacturer making a water block for these cards. I hope you will share your results, even a full guide on how to install a water block to RTX A6000 cards.

[DigiMat]

10 hours ago, Elnur Hajiyev said:

All RTX A series(formerly, Quadro) cards are manufactured by NVIDIA, therefore, all RTX A6000 graphics cards should be in the same form factor regardless of the seller.

 

Are you going to use the water block from Bykski? I cannot find any other manufacturer making a water block for these cards. I hope you will share your results, even a full guide on how to install a water block to RTX A6000 cards.

Yes, we're in touch with Bykski, and we all think theses cards should be the same. The waterblock doesn't have a release date yet, but we'll definitly share the installation of the water block asap 

[Elnur Hajiyev]

3 hours ago, DigiMat said:

Yes, we're in touch with Bykski, and we all think theses cards should be the same. The waterblock doesn't have a release date yet, but we'll definitly share the installation of the water block asap 

I thought you can buy it right away from AliExpress or Bykski US store, since they already have a “Buy Now” option. In fact, I have already added it to the cart. Why do you say the release date is unknown?

[DigiMat]

13 minutes ago, Elnur Hajiyev said:

I thought you can buy it right away from AliExpress or Bykski US store, since they already have a “Buy Now” option. In fact, I have already added it to the cart. Why do you say the release date is unknown?

Oh, I did not see that. I was on their website (https://www.bykski.us/collections/new-products/products/bykski-full-coverage-gpu-water-block-and-backplate-for-leadtek-rtx-a6000-n-rtxa6000-x) and just so "Coming soon" 

[Elnur Hajiyev]

@DigiMat, good news! EK also released a water block for RTX A6000 cards! However, it has ~2x the price of the one from Bykski. Let us know please if you ever get a chance to compare these in terms of performance and build quality.

 

https://www.ekwb.com/shop/ek-pro-gpu-wb-rtx-a6000-nickel-inox

[DigiMat]

Yes, we saw that EK waterblock last week, and we asked our client he'd like to go for this one.

The bad news is that after contacting PNY France this week, they confirmed us that watercooling the card would void the waranty. 

Our customer doesn't feel confortable taking the risk, at least for now...

 

Be sure I'll be back if he changes his mind, watercooling that card would have been a very nice experience 

 

 

[Falkentyne]

I noticed a missing fan connector silkscreen mark on the PCB.  That seems to be the same template of PCB as used on the 3080 Founder's edition card (you can tell by the positions of the shunt resistors on the front side of the card).  That missing fan connector is obviously designed for the 3080 FE production.

 

I do find it odd that they are using the 3080FE template rather than the 3090 FE template even though this has RAM on both sides like the 3090 FE does (the 3090 FE PCB is larger and you can see that the 8 pin shunt resistors are in different locations).

[Tenchi Muyo]

Maybe i want to replace the termal pads - does anyone know which size is needed ?

 

1,5mm?

 

Which brand did you recomnend? Alphacool Eisschicht thermal pad - 17W/mK ?

 

Thank you!

[BrandonTheCat]

On 10/22/2021 at 4:18 AM, DigiMat said:

Yes, we saw that EK waterblock last week, and we asked our client he'd like to go for this one.

The bad news is that after contacting PNY France this week, they confirmed us that watercooling the card would void the waranty. 

Our customer doesn't feel confortable taking the risk, at least for now...

 

Be sure I'll be back if he changes his mind, watercooling that card would have been a very nice experience 

 

 

I plan to do this in about a month. This is a giveaway card which doenst have any warranty, and I'm really excited to squeeze any more performance out of it. 

[BrandonTheCat]

On 1/21/2022 at 5:03 PM, Tenchi Muyo said:

Maybe i want to replace the termal pads - does anyone know which size is needed ?

 

1,5mm?

 

Which brand did you recomnend? Alphacool Eisschicht thermal pad - 17W/mK ?

 

Thank you!

I believe this has the same pads as a 3080 but they're just overall better pads, so 1.5 is probably correct. I'm planning to tear this apart when I slap a water block on it very soon and I'll give measurements there but FYI the stock cooler is already pretty swamped of heat, so it might not be entirely beneficial to go with better pads.