Gadgetory

hey everyone i'm steve from gamers nexus dotnet and this is episode 11 of ask GN we haven't done one of these for about two weeks now because of the crazy game launch season that's been going on I'm sure you've all seen of course battlefront fallout 4 black ops 3 there's at least one other one in there we did some overwatch work as well so it's been non-stop for the last few weeks just benchmarking game after game hours and hours a day with the help of some of our testers like Mike gaglione big shout out to him for helping out and of course keegan doing the videos all that so it's been a very crazy couple of weeks here but we're back with svn so let's just dive right into it the first question here is from abs in 33 who says I need some help overclocking my 6700 k i'm using the asrock extreme6 motherboard with the corsair h100 5 cooler i'm currently at 4.4 gigahertz on auto voltage but once i go above 4.4 it crashes even with more voltage should I mess with low blind calibration so this is a good question as well one of the things that we do when overclocked in CP is for review purposes is disabled all of the power saving stuff and this is even without overclocking CP as we do this because it's important to get consistent test data for reviews as a user you can kind of leave it on but when you are overclocking it is a good idea to disable some of the sea States if it's an intel cpu which in this case it is to disable the load line calibration helps with some stuff it helps with v droop which is the dip in voltage so if you have a voltage supply imaginal line just a line on a graph every now and then it'll dip like that and that's that's not a good thing because as you approach higher clock rates you can introduce a lot of instability by any voltage drop like that called V droop and load line calibration helps with that so at higher load line calibration settings you can sustain a more consistent voltage but it does risk blasting the CPU with voltage and it can heat it up and I would generally advise against maxing out load line calibration because as you do max it out you are threatening the life span of your CPU you're planning to replace in a year anyway it's kind of it's one of those now who cares but if you are trying to keep this for long-term use I would not max out load line calibration if you enable it to some extent your motherboard should have a recommendation if it's a good board it'll normally recommend you want fifty percent if you're overclocking or you want a hundred percent if you're doing an extreme bossy or whatever but generally using load line calibration will assist as far as disabling it it is I probably i probably wouldn't do that unless you really have nothing else to disable so go for the sea state's first just checking my own notes here because i did take some notes on this question you'll want to do a base clock overclock so if your stock at 4.4 with the multipliers you can get a bit more out of the cpu with a base clock or be clk increase and that will allow finer control so you can do smaller steps basically between the clock rates and then you also want to do manual voltage control so get off that auto control and switch over to manual and just do some burnin tests to see how it performs if you want to do a real world burnin test games like The Witcher 3 producer pretty good load four cpus fire strike is a very good load test that's kind of real world you can do the combined test to stress the CPU and GPU but or the physics test just stressed the CPU but that's kind of that's where I'd start with those power states and you should probably get a bit more than 4.4 gigahertz but sometimes the silicon is just not as good so it is possible that your CPU in particular isn't that great at overclocking or your motherboard can be limited but the extreme sticks isn't bad you should be able to get a bit more the next question is from caffee Oh or coffee ohh Who says have you been how you been following my search history this wasn't reply to the overclock specially did last time just got an r 9 290 reference card and i'm hoping to watercool so i can overclock or flash it to the r9 290x that is definitely something you can do which is an interesting thing with AMD cards do you know if there are any concerns with overclocking a reference to 90 if I can't get a water block soon first of all there are concerns with flashing it in my experiences worked out pretty well but you do carry a risk of bricking your BIOS your firmware on the video card when you flash it so for anyone interested in that just know that you carry a risk of potentially damaging or disabling the video card even if it is uncommon on some devices and talking to reference cards only have one BIOS normally so there's not really a recourse or a case of action you can take to resolve that with the overclocking card this is one reason they're really cool this is one reason that things like the kingpin to stop thought my head exists it's because they have multi BIOS so if you do brick your BIOS you trying to switch a physical switch and you can enable the second one and then you try it again hopefully with something more stable but getting back to the question here are there any concerns with overclocking the reference to 90s the concerns our thermals so the reference to 90 has a pretty bad cooler design we actually do have a reference to 90 in house or 290x i should say if you look at it the so this is our video card right and this is where the slot is over here where the fan is it uses a blower fan which is a good thing normally but it's got the whole intake right here closed off except for one spot so we have front intake from your case it's not going where we want it to go which is straight into the fins it's got to go and set around the underside of the faceplate and that into the blower fan so it's not a great design thermally and that will be a restriction as long as you monitor your thermals actively you'll be fine just use a 264 or what's a free tool hardware monitor has a free tool hwmonitor and speed fan has a free tool i think that's only cpus though there there's a couple free tools for modern we use a 264 which is a professional utility I think they have a trial version that you can use I would use one of those monitor the GPU diode temperature actively when you overclock run your burn in test watch it furmark furmark has a GP diode reader in it as you run the test it's not the best test in the world because it's a little more stressful than necessary sometimes but that is one way to see it and as long as you're not sort of hitting dangerous temperatures I personally like to stay below 90 and that is still pretty darn hot but 90 is about where I started feeling uncomfortable and then you definitely want to be below you want to be able to follow a 90 that's kind of that's kind of my limit personally some cards will go up to a max of 100 before they shut down thermally but 90 is a good max and even sitting there is not great for the silicon and mantra muse but one thing that's cool is with the new radeon setting the suite you can do per game overclocking so if you don't need the overclocking for everyday use you don't need it for counter-strike go but you want it for The Witcher then you can do that and I would recommend that for purposes of longevity moving to a liquid cooler first is a recommendation so I would wait till you get that water cooler if you haven't already gotten it at this point next question or the last question royal predator says right now how smart is it to buy a GTX 980 TI so this is this goes back to what I say at the beginning the 980 TI and all the existing cards especially at the top and the high-end are still really good even with Pascal coming and whatever Andy's got next so just because there's new architecture doesn't mean you should stop your upgrade plans this is something we've said regularly for the last few years of operation there's always something around the corner in the hardware world once it gets to Pascal you're gonna be like should I buy this one or should i wait for whatever the next one that amd's doing is and I would just say if you need a card now just by now because the next GPUs that will compete with the 980 TI are quite a ways out we're looking at 2016 sometime probably towards the middle or end so I really wouldn't hold back my upgrade plans based on an architecture that doesn't even publicly exist yet if you have a good card already you can wait but if you're buying now just get something and use it if you really want to save some money maybe by like a 960 or 970 and then invest more heavily in the next architectures when they come out but I would not halt my upgrade and build plans for the things after skylake or Zen or Pascal so that is all for this episode if you liked this content as always hit that patreon link in the post roll video thanks again for watching supporting the channel as always if you like some of the content you're seeing please share that's the best way you can help and we've got some other cool stuff coming out soon so stay tuned and I'll see you all next time you