Gadgetory

everyone welcome to another ask GN this is part two so we have three that we've just made one of them should already be live on the main channel there's one on the patrons sgn side of things if you're at patreon subscriber and then we have the third one here in the old studio well just for the start anyway featuring senior AMD analyst snowflake how's it going before that this video is brought to you by the gigabyte Z 390 ARS master motherboard which comes equipped with one of the more powerful Z 390 VRMs for heavier overclocks on the new 9th Gen Intel CPUs the ARS master is also one of the few motherboards with a really heatsink this generation featuring a mix of high surface area fins and looks oriented cover blocks oh and it's also got updated RGV illumination learn more at the link below alright and we're back in the studio not sure what shirt I was wearing in the the first part of this featuring snowflake but it's probably different one now has been about a week so uh first well actually know what there is there's one not really a question but there was a comment recently I think on the hardware news video where someone said isn't it about time GN upgrades of technology you know why don't you have a 4k camera well actually we have an a7 r3 and/or a 7-3 art whatever its called and pretty nice lens on it and we have this one which is a u X 180 that we've had for a while now it's it does 4k 60 the thing is YouTube has been completely just butchering 4k 60 uploads lately we are not alone a lot of creators have had this issue we've spoken with many of them the easiest solution was to just film at 1080p 60 until YouTube fixes it we might be able to some more often get away with 4k 30 but it's really not worth it so so yeah we switched back 1080p 60 till YouTube figures out what the hell it's doing because I mean we can use less than a third of the data to get the job done and the problem was uploaded in 4k 60 it still works but I would have to sit there and do it like five or six times before it finally just clicked and up until that point you'd get like 360p exclusively it would never under 1080 which it used to do or you might go up to 720 and then the video playback just break you can ask hardware unboxed Steve had the same issue over there and again several early creator so anyway because of that comment we're trying this one for K 60 K so I am positive I will regret it and probably have three render it for a rehab load at multiple times but we'll try it anyway first another one there's another non real questions sky Lancer 77 said snowflake you're the best Steve I love you man but snowflake is far better than you even if you are cyber Jesus I still love that video where a snowflake ate your script okay okay she's not a fan of the Nvidia news items for killing the claim Nvidia NDA discussion on the GTX 1050 discussion he done thank you so next one first real question Nintendo eats in the early days of 3d accelerator cards dedicated pipelines and fixed function hardware engines were an important part of overall performance provided that game developers targeted those features with the prevalence of GPGPU and abstracted api is like the x11 i'm wondering if this is still true it seems as though the bulk of modern video card performance comes from having a processor which is turing-complete but sacrifices fast integer calculations to pursue improvements in matrix and vector math are these really two different paradigms how much of the speed of a modern GPU owes itself to specific or tasks specific hardware i'm particularly curious about where tessellation falls in this discussion thanks as ever for the great work for this one this is a fantastically worded question thank you for making it so well written i actually pitched this over to david cantor who's an expert analyst he might as well be among the architects that we interview in terms of knowledge and so I pitched it over to him because he's he's about the best we can get to answer this one David said the following the rasterizer is fixed function and most importantly so is the texturing I'm not entirely sure about tessellation if you look at intel's studies on lrb they might give you somewhat of a hint in the context of much older dx9 and the x10 stuff today there's a lot more compute shading in games a CPU and GPU are really very different it's not just fixed functional hardware that differentiates them GPUs are efficient for throughput tasks and terrible at anything latency sensitive CPUs are designed for excellent latency and are okay at throughput that impacts everything from transistors it's a circuit design to architecture so there's David's a quick short take on it and I will say too specifically to his point of computing games and stuff like that so we've noticed specific games like shadow of war and sniper leap forward to some extent there's at least one other one I want to say maybe rise of the Tomb Raider not not sure about shadow but rise of the Tomb Raider I think those three games specifically a Wolfenstein 2 that's another one those are all they actually do leverage some of that that integer pipeline and like in torreón for example and that's something we talked about in our interview with Nvidia at CES so if you're curious about more of that side of things you can check that out but that is David's answer for you next one Roger asks paying up for a review is paying for a review it necessarily a bad thing so long as they aren't paying you for a biased review they're just offering to compensate you for your time that's a terrible thing it's really bad on the list of bad things for a review outlet a media outlet it is the top bad thing there's not a bad thing worse than that for a media outlet now if you're talking an influencer it's not really a review at that point it's just it's marketing but let's just pretend let's just pretend they the the influence or the uploader markets it as a review if they're paid for it they disclose it and everyone knows that they regard themselves as an influencer then it's a little different but not much it's still month like bad things in our eyes so here's how I break down I'm gonna make this as short as I can and not like go on a rant about and try and stay organized in my thoughts so I you do have I fully understand your question it's a great question thank you for answering that let me get that other way first so let's let's address this point my point they are less where do I start with this so long as they aren't paying you for a biased review starting with so long as they aren't paying you they would be paying me and then for a biased review I put breaks down uh as transparently as possible it is already very difficult to filter out certain bias issues with just with like working with the companies for example if we're working with the product and we have a really hell of a hard time with the PR team but the product might be perfectly fine but the PR team is just is maybe awful really hard to work with duplicitous stuff like that it's happened and it still happens every now and that's its bit less often but it still happens so in that scenario where you've got pretty good product horrible team to work with that alone is really difficult to filter out that bias you're constantly like I don't attack the product just because I don't like these people that I work with if the product is its own thing the consumers will never interact with those people those people shouldn't really influence the review of the product because it's not relevant it's not relevant to what the consumers experience will be they're not dealing with PR in this made-up scenario so this is a scenario that has happened probably at least once a year depending on you know the cycles of the time so that alone not involving money just involving relations of that is difficult to filter out like it's we have to make active efforts and we do peer review and things like that sometimes to really make sure like was this too much did I go too far here does this seem reasonable to you someone else you know in the team does this seem reasonable and if it doesn't tell me why and we'll tone it will dial it back before we publish and reevaluate so that's difficult once you add money to the mix it's I mean it's just you know you can you can pay for things like for ads ads we're fine with obviously and the way our ad model works isn't really worth going into in this question but you just kind of we just run a random ad on a video basically it's how it works they don't buy a specific adverse specific video they just buy ads and then we run them on the videos so that's one thing but paying for the time to review the product is another and the thing is you have to look at what's our business model how do we make money and the way we make money ultimately is to produce content a review is content that we produce they don't pay for that effectively you are paying for that and either it's directly maybe you buy stuff on the store maybe support on patreon or it's indirectly you watch the video you get a YouTube ad or sort of indirectly you might have YouTube rather premium as it's called now and we get a small cut of that or maybe you add a super chat during the live streams either way it's some level you the viewers are paying for it and it's it's either with money actually out of your pocket and for that we are greatly thankful or it's just from your eyes from seeing an ad that YouTube runs and chooses and we really have no control over before the video so that's how we make money it's we produce content that is the business model we make the content we put it out there we run ads we sell some you know merch shirts like this and then we get money from those transactions to then add another layer of the manufacturer paying for that is just it's it's not only I mean it's not necessary it's not how we make the money because we're already making the money from all the other stuff the more views we get the more ads that serve our the more people who biased for support on patreon that's where the money comes from so the time should not be compensated for a view a reviewer especially by the company that has asks for the review or maybe they haven't but you are reviewing their product there are times when a company can transact by giving an organization money to do something with their product that those things they're either like really specific projects and to give you an example there was what was that there was a series that fractal did with like with Kyle and I think J it was really good and they just like built a computer I think while they were on a boat or in a tank or something and saying like that so that's an example of a sponsored piece of content which we don't really do that that's not part of a business model but for something like that it's it's totally appropriate it's it's entertainment and it's ridiculous and there's no way that these youtubers on average would come up with that idea and then you know go fund it and work together and do all the logistics so in that scenario it kind of makes sense it's it's an entertainment value thing they're not really reviewing the fractal case they're just working with it in a fun manner so you know trying to build a computer while the tank is bounced around or whatever it was I don't know it was I don't why is it a tank I don't know but uh that seems too crazy I think it was though but you know that's one thing but to then say you know I I want to pay for your review of this CPU of this video card whatever all i'm doing is compensating your time well what happens then if you give a bad review it's going to soil the relationship they won't get it they're gonna feel offended and you're like well what the heck the product wasn't good so to avoid that and to avoid the alternative which is you you tone down the review the harshness of the review you just don't accept payment to review products period so so that's my explanation of how we make money and why you know we don't take the money for it I didn't fully explain why exactly this is bad but I think you can kind of connect the dots you know what I'm talking about like it's hard enough to isolate relationships from products and every reviewer is biased there's no such thing as an unbiased reviewer this is something I learned when I used to review games and the important thing for you as the viewer the audience is to identify reviewers with whom you can familiarize with their biases so if you know that for example in our reviews we tend to favor four cases in our reviews of cases we tend to favor cases that have a bit more airflow and we can give a good review to a silent case and we've done it plenty of times but on average you know when you watch our content that we tend to favor things with more airflow more function focused more performance oriented that's just well it's what we do but that's a bias now that's a known bias and it's also not really a bad one the bad kinds of biases are the ones where you're getting money to review something it's more of a corruption than it is a preference of the product so to have a bias of you know maybe someone really likes RGB LED that's totally valid some likes performance some like silence someone likes whatever it is no pump wine maybe as a more objective one but could still be maybe you've had just you know pump wine killed your your dog and so you hate pump wine that's a pretty bad bias but as long as it's disclosed it's okay money is not really one where even disclosure is okay because it is always going to influence the content I mean this is this is something we struggle with constantly in terms of just internally figuring out like is this even an advertiser we want to work with and fortunately our team has grown strong enough now we can reject advertisements we don't like we can sort of do whatever we want and we're gonna be completely fine but it's really hard to get to this point and then it's also hard daily to not fall into the trap of accepting easy money for things that are just genuinely unethical and then further there are FTC guidelines as well ethics ideally should not be you know you should be able to just kind of follow your ethics to run a business based in media but if you do require legal oversight to say no you actually aren't allowed to do that the FTC does have some guidelines on unpaid content as well and disclosures and all that stuff so law TLDR a paid review is not a review is is I think how we would define it is marketing and and that's not a good thing so there is tremendous cost involved in reviewing a product if my time Patrick's time Andrews time other editors on the team software utilities that we have to build ourselves that's time potentially hundreds of hours of it and those costs are very high in office it's stuff like that payroll of course and all of the many thousands of dollars of lights and cameras and all that it's all cost but it's the cost of doing business and it's paid for by the rest of the business model we don't need the extra from the the maker of the product now one last point here if you see ads by a company on our channel for we have one right now for the gigabyte there's e 390 master for example that is one it's a product we've already kind of evaluated and determined to be acceptable to advertise for secondly it is not run on content for gigabyte products and the content it's run on gigabyte doesn't choose we just sort of go well let's put it there so just to give you an idea of how that side of things works because sometimes people are like wait a minute this is this is a video at the Asus booth but it's got a gigabyte ad why did you do that well it's because if ASU is paid for it that would be messed up that's sponsored content we don't do that some people do but it's not part of us because we see ourselves ourselves as a media outlet not as as just sort of you know entertainment or something like that so so in that scenario Asus would have no involvement in us being at the booth aside from signing the NDA s if there are any and there are often aren't or working out the time and date that's about the end of the arrangement so any ads that are run during trade shows those are pre negotiated before the show they just run for the month and until we hit whatever agreement we've we've made with the company in terms of you know performance things like that but they don't pay for booth visits ever and all of that's in 100% of our agreements for ads that are sold near or in the vicinity of trade shows you you do not pay for booth visit and actually several times we haven't visited advertisers who've run ads with us during a trade show because their products sucked so I yeah just to give you an idea of how that runs anyway that was a really long question and I almost feel like it should be a separate thing but whatever next one Big Mike Steve who is Jim I think there's a reference to bit wick Kyle's bit Witter nitwit celebrity edition should be called minor celebrity edition Jim appeared in that and answered correctly for me the what was the the capacity the first hard drive ever made and Kyle said something to the extent of thank you for making Steve look smart and Jim said smart I'm just old so Jim was in a he did a computer history museum tour with us I've known him my entire life he was a business partner of my dad's and has been a programmer for like probably 40 years or something at this point and he's he's written he's coded and everything Fortran machine languages everything up until modern day a lot of Java or as he calls it Java because he's Canadian but Jim is a sort of just like a friend of the site he is a friend of mine and he shows up in content occasionally the Computer History Museum tour we did with him was amazing because Jim is a a walking encyclopedia of often movie quotes garbage and computer stuff so and he openly admits this Jim is is happy to recite for you all of his terrible jokes about every store we go by on like in the Las Vegas Strip for example where every time we go past strip burger he says it's called strip burger because it strips your intestines things like that so Jim's a really fun guy he was in that video because he goes with us to some shows he's not really on editorial side he just adds some fun value when we're traveling and also though is incredibly reliable for computer histories it's just incredible what he knows ok next one baver na says it seems that there are many opinions about buy and used graphics cards that were used for cryptocurrency mining what are the risks if any with buying motherboards that were used for a cryptocurrency mining seen quite a few boards that were used for mining for twenty to thirty five dollars free shipping some were marketed for my and some weren't so would there be any issues the number one potential issue is maybe blown-out PCIe slots if they weren't using powered risers although I'm pretty sure pretty much every miner does so maybe not as much of a concern you run into things like maybe capacitors for example capacitors are more they have a life whereas some of the other components the life of them is relevant to something else will die first so caps you might be working with let's say maybe a low and mid-range board something like that kind of suitable for mining where you just need PCIe slots if you're working on one of those you might have caps that are rated at 2500 hours at 85 degrees Celsius it's pretty pretty bad you might have maybe 5,000 hours at 85 or ideally had 105 something like that hours but if you have a lower sort of rating maybe 2500 hours 85 degrees Celsius and it's been running under heavy enough load with no cooling over the board the caps on the board just on the cards it is definitely possible in a hot server environment effectively maybe and I mean with poor cooling or ventilation that it could have been running at about that 85 range for a significant part of its life or you go up to 95 you had about 10 degrees Celsius and suddenly you're having the life of the capacitor so it's roughly half for the extra 10 degrees C pretty significant change for only another 10 degrees Celsius and that's I guess your main risk I mean how realistic is this risk I don't know it depends on I guess the mining operation and how well cooled it was where the caps are on the board do they have a heat sink fan on the CPU that's downdraft or something like there's a million variables but that would be probably a number one risk is at some point does a cap blow out sooner than it would if you had thought new that said if they ran at about spec and it's rated for 2500 hours and it ran for well I actually wouldn't take that long to kill that if you're running a 24/7 mining under load it's just a question of was it actually at 85 C and probably a lot of the times the answer is no it just has been a bad environment so that be my main concern I don't know really how relevant that is ultimately because like it's there's just so many variables and if if it had enough airflow over it it's probably not really that abused but I would we avoid the lower end boards that we used for mining for that reason because if they have just bad caps to begin with that have then been abused 24/7 potentially in a hot environment you don't want to like build the whole system and then in a year you can't use it you know you got to replace the motherboard that kind of sucks so but I don't know speaking of biases from earlier this this would be a bias of mine is I don't genuine generally like to buy used hardware even if logically it's sound just because my I value my time greatly and I would rather spend an extra X dollars than to deal with a couple hours of downtime later which could cost me you know potentially a lot of money depending on when the downtime is next one now I had some other notes here oh yeah you might be missing some advanced overclocking options they might have some settings pre-configured you know make sure you clear BIOS stuff like that reduce PCIe generation for example might be one that they set next one L PI I think on discord I was wondering if you'll soon do any memory pricing status post CES like he did with GD v @ vs h BM & y HP AMD chose the latter for Vega and you can combine that with ddr4 pricing as well it'd be interesting to see how g6 goes against HP I'm - and what will happen or at least speculate with g5 ax and g5 like they'll still be used for mid to low end cards say an on our TX card or Navi low-end card just get rid of supply if there's much less I'm just going to read part of something we wrote previously about this and we'll open up that page and we can for the editors put the page here to show it so this is from our content of why does AMD use HBM and what was the cost of Vega and this should answer your question of why is aim the using HP I'm still it's so expensive so what we wrote at the time was AMD has to use HP M Vega architecture his memory starved HBM to critically allows AMD to run lower power consumption than gddr5 would enable given the Vega architecture and at the time we spoke with build Zoid and learned that vega frontier Edition 16 gigabytes of HP am to Paul's about 20 watts max using a he used some tools to determine the consumption this ignores the voltage controllers 3.3 volt draw but we're still at 20 watts memory and no more than an additional 10 watts for the controller so that's less than 30 watts for the entire entire memory system on Vega F II we also at the time we wrote we also know that on our X 480 uses 40 to 50 watts for it 8 gigabytes which is already a significant increase in power consumption per gigabyte over Vega F e the RX 5 480 also has memory bandwidth of 256 gigabytes per second with 8 gigabyte gddr5 vs vega 64 484 gigabytes per second the result is increased bandwidth the same capacity and lower power consumption but at higher cost to build in order for an Rx 480 to hypothetically reach similar bandwidth power consumption would increase significantly build Zoid at the time calculated that a hypothetical 384-bit gddr5 bus on polaris architecture would push 60 to 75 watts and an imaginary 512 bit bus would do 80 to 100 for this reason alone HBM 2 saves AMD from high power budget that would otherwise be spent solely on memory this comes down to an architectural decision made many years ago by AMD where they which were most readily solved for with HBM 2 and there's a lot more notes in that content but Andy was more or less forced to use HP m and stick with it once they made that decision so as for the rest of your question the answer is yes we can do more confident like that for sure we have the we have the the data already we just have to put it together last one scooby-dooby is AMD making any money off of it Radeon 7 16 gigabytes of HP m27 nanometers and then a confused face excellent question so speaking of the previous content we can kind of use parts of that to evaluate this I am NOT current on HP m2 pricing I haven't been for about 6 to 8 months but it shouldn't be too different might be a bit cheaper I don't know so keep that in mind I would need to go last time I got lucky I sat next to someone on a plane from SK Hynix and then he got drunk and told me everything so I haven't had that happen for 8 months but for pricing at the time what I knew is that HBM 2 was about a hundred and fifty dollars for what was going on vega 64 and and that may have may well have come down but let's just pretend it hasn't if it hasn't then you're looking at you know upwards of two 250 $300 for HB m to on well what would be sitting here is the Radeon seven card so that's a lot of money I mean that's for cost that's what AMD pays and then you're talking GPU cost - I don't know what that is but the inter poser plus the yield might be like 25 bucks something like that and then you're dealing with the die yield you didn't with die on interposer yield with HB m as well so the costs add up very quickly are they making money on it I would say yes they're not selling at a loss they really can't afford to but are they making a lot of money no probably not and for anyone who complains about the pricing I mean you may have will see how the performance is of course I don't know when this video go up but we'll see how the performance is and if it's if it's justified but if anyone's complaining about the pricing there's only so much that does because and he can't reasonably sell it at a loss so I would say it's close I would I would estimate their costs to be quite high I mean you're probably probably approaching 300 for memory assuming the price doesn't change it probably has your memory plus board components I probably you know call it 50 bucks or something for all of the miscellaneous board components PCP all that stuff maybe a bit more cooler it's gonna be like 25 to 40 dollars depending on the metal I guess of the shroud and how complex that is to assemble with the screw count so I I would say they're making a bit of money yes but I don't know call it like 500 bucks or something cost plus or minus 50 something like that really rough estimate if you quote me on this then say that's a rough bad estimate on old data but just to give you a rough idea that's about probably where you'd be you know a year ago something like that so assuming seven animators had been a thing so uh yeah this is also why I think partner models will be scarce if and when they show up and and the price and will be a bit higher probably because AMD sells the GPU to them at a slight markup and then they you know they have their own markup so are they making money yet I would absolutely assume so I think they would get killed by their investors if they sold it for a loss but it is not a lot of money and and I think the price is probably fair strictly based upon the cost of the product based on the performance we'll talk about that in the review I actually I'm not being coy I genuinely don't know I haven't looked at the data I do that specifically so that I don't accidentally say things and videos we filmed before the review so I don't know right now it today but you know when we film tomorrow or the next day I'll know so that's it for this one thank you for watching always leave your questions the comment section below for the next St an episode we also have some behind the scenes that videos going up on the patreon you know thin uploads so we'll have some more behind the scenes we have the patreon SPN video going over there as well and it started put some more some more time into that now now that we have a bit more staffing support on the team from the video team so thank you for watching stored on cameras exit sign out to help us out directly otherwise I'll see you all next 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