Gadgetory

hey everyone we're back for another episode of ask GN and this is our last one before flying out to Computex or Taipei for Computex we might do one there but I'm not sure it's going pretty crazy the first question for this episode I can remember which video I saw it on by do remember it being asked by one of the regulars so maybe Leo das or Street guru but whoever was asked how much variance there is in testing data and so the question was basically you guys run three tests for parity on all the FPS benchmarks is there that much variance the answer is yes so a lot of these other outlets will present data it's maybe 22 games tested or 30 games benchmarked or something like that and that's just an absurd amount of benchmarks to run unless they have multiple systems running it's normally not really feasible in the review time that we have so if you run I could certainly run more benchmarks if we only did one pass per game but the thing is with these even though automated benchmarks there's still a variance of sometimes 1 2 3 fps and that's a big deal when you might be comparing things that are 1 to 3 FPS different so it just it depends on the game and the throttling where the game throttles if it's more intensive on one component or the other if you're testing GPUs and it's more intensive on the CPU then you're going to hit CPU throttles and so the CPU boosts or does any energy control which we turn all that stuff off then you'll see fluctuations there but normally it's only a couple fps so not enough to be an invalid tool for the test suite but enough where you want to run it multiple times and that's just because if maybe the first tested card a test at 76 fps and card B tests at 73 fps that looks like a pretty reasonable difference but over multiple task passes they might average out and be the same or very close to the same so yes there is actually difference and it is important to do multiple passes especially and this is the important part with the frame time so anyone who's doing frame time testing should do multi pass testing because especially with the 1% 0.1% blow is that we use 0.1% might only be a couple frames that might be like 5 frames for the entire test sequence so that's a pretty low sample small sample size doing multiple tests will smooth out that data and make sure that from one's the next it looks consistent and if it's inconsistent in one of the passes we know we need to run it a few more times just to try and understand what's going on if we can't repeat reproduce that inconsistency then we know that it's basically an outlier we discard that particular piece of data so that hopefully answers that question next question is a marker show who says dude to benefit from the NATO GT X 1080 am I going to need a new CPU and motherboard my current C views and I 540 670 46 17 on K I've been saving up for a rift my current GPU is a 780 and then some other words I'm just making sure there's no other questions in here do I need to say for a whole new machine if I want to see benefits from the 1080 so I haven't tested this yet but I can tell you from really brief testing I just did on total war Warhammer which are benchmarks aren't up for that yet really brief testing they're using a 59 30 K which is more powerful than the 40 60 70 the 59 30 K at 4.2 gigahertz versus three point six or eight gigahertz at a 15 or 20 fps Swain and that was with the GTX 1080 so what that tells us is that in the very least frequency in that particular game has a huge impact and will throttle the GPU in if you sort of extrapolate that any other games that act similarly that are maybe CPU bound a lot of racing games or CPU bound like grit and dirt those are instances where you will be bottlenecking the GTX 1080 out of 46 70 because we were bottlenecking it on a 59 30 so that would be certainly a consideration the 46 70 is still a good CPU but I I need to test it more personally we are working on that but it'll be at least a few weeks till it gets up because this Computex trip it is something that you may end up replacing though so just be aware of that the next question zero Sami Sami Sami who says hi recently I switched to a mini ITX low end motherboard but the former overclock I sustained on my r9 290 GPU couldn't be achieved on this new board what could cause this I only switch the motherboard and nothing else so I know for sure it's the motherboard but why it's possible dependent what you had for your previous board it's possible that maybe there were additional phases or something the better power cleaning going on that was stabilizing your clock so that would work on stabilizing voltage supply to the GPU in that case that maybe that's what it was but that's not super common for a change like that to destroy an overclock it could also be maybe the I don't know maybe the PCIe lanes are handled differently or something like that but that doesn't really doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me so I would probably suspect two things I would look at BIOS or UEFI and see if there's anything in there that handles PCIe timings or latency or PCIe bus clock or something like that bus speed that would be one place to look the next place to look would be the power delivery design on the new board versus the old one and see if the old one is better and on mini ITX that may be the case because they're really limited on space so those are the two places I would look of course also look at your CPU clock because maybe well depends on what you mean by you can't achieve the same clock it may be the case though with for gaming FPS that you were overclocked on one board and you're not on the new one for the CPU that would impact it too but if you're just straight not seeing the new clock be achieved on the GPU then it's one of the first two issues I thought of the next part of this question was also I cross fired r9 290 with an r9 390 and my friends high end machine for fun to see performance scaling I noticed in the GPU panel that the second card ran at x4 or by 4 or 4 tap PCIe noting that my friends rig has a devil's canyon i7 that sounds like a motherboard potentially motherboard things so I don't again don't know what motherboard this is it's not listed but boards will they even though it's there's a full length pcie slot that would normally be called x16 even on new agra amazon a lot of those slots even if there's four on a board a lot of those slots will only be electrically wired four by four or by eight and that's basically so they can put a full slot to fit the cards but with crossfire you may end up running like X X 8 X 4 X 4 or something like that so it's possible that the slot used was just not wired electrically 4 by 16 setup but if it's a full by 16 slot you also need to check the manual and make sure that it's not suggesting that you run a different slot for SLI or crossfire because that is also something that happens next question final question Homer Thompson it says see what do you make of the price inflation we've seen in GPUs the last 5 years in 2011 a GTX 560 Ti was sold for 250 in 2012 doubled for 500 for full-size the GK 104 GTX 680 $50 price increased to 550 for the NVIDIA uncut GM 204 and then another increase to $700 for the equivalent uncut GP 104 in the 1080 how much until we're paying $350 for the small GM 206 equivalent in GTX 960 yeah that's a real concern so the price gains are there's a few things I'm not 100% sure what I think of this Jessie I'm still thinking about it but one thing is these cards like the the 560 TIG P equivalent of today they're a lot more powerful in the games aren't necessarily growing in their demands a lot of games anyway so I guess that you can get away with a low end or mid-range card a lot better now than he used to be able to so that's one thing that might help the companies justify the price increases the next thing is just a general competition I guess misalignment so because then video is not super threatened right now in their market share they have a ton of market share and just strictly speaking to gaming PC's we're not counting consoles here gaming PC's and videos AIB presence is 70 something percent so they're certainly not feeling the the threat to lower their prices and these putting pressure on the low end but they've always been there now another thing that I think is more relevant than that is Intel and AMD with their apos they're both really pushing this low-end market so that the demand for maybe a GT 740 or something that demand has kind of evaporated because the reason you would buy one of those is if you didn't have on board video or you didn't have one that was good enough to play some simple games but you also didn't want a full and full mid-range or low on GPU you would buy something like a GT 740 or whatever now you don't need to do that because the CPUs have these iGPS ApS have their their GPU components so those kind of invalidate the need for a lot of the really cheap GPUs and I think that probably creates a weird gap in the market where now the low on GPUs are priced a little higher than they used to be and that of course raises the price of everything else but of course there's also just general inflation but I'm not a high percent sure what I think of that just yet I do I will say that $700 for founder's Edition 1080 is too much but the $600 price point seems good if any of the IB partners actually reach that price point when they make their cards so that seems good 700 certainly cheap we don't know what am these stuff will cost yet but we'll see and analyze that once we're reviewing the Polaris tough players 10 so that's all I got for you this week as always pay Charlie commercial video if you like this content will be in Taiwan China and Macau next week and we're going to be doing factory tours headquarters tours and the compy tech show floor and we'll probably do some kind of random walking around the giant empty abandoned mall and Shenzhen so that'll be fun but check back for that thanks for watching I'll see you all next time