Gadgetory

hey Ron are back for another episode of ask GaN following a week of crazy rx 480 of mods and benchmarks of course after the 1080 mods and benchmarks and as always you can leave questions in the comments below and we'll try to address them in the next episode before getting to this episode's content it is brought to you by Origin PC and their new Chronos PC which is equipped with either the gtx 1080 or our X 480 available on their store so getting to the questions the first one I wanted to look at is pertinent to the last few days of discussion on overclocking with the RX 480 and it's a general question asked by many of you basically stating why does under volting help with the RX 480 so this is something we've seen on reddit threads and a couple other places on the internet basically some folks have found that if they under volt or lower the voltage on there are X 480 they're getting a more stable clock rate and that improves frame rates so the way this works at a top level first of all the RX 480 Polaris and GT X 1080 Pascal architectures are both pretty complex with their their boost functions boost 3.0 friend vidya and just normal boosting for AMD and part of that complexity is an attempt at power savings during idle States or low load States part of it is throttling the clock rates as the power increases either undesirable levels or unsustainable levels and those things factor in too if you were to plot it against time you'll see that the frequency sometimes goes a little bit like that and what you want is a line that's as flat as possible when you're playing games and we show this in our reviews for both of these cards so because of the frequency modulation and because AMD and NVIDIA are both kind of looking at ok this is what our frame rate target is if you've defined one the under volting will help by two main modes and one is reducing the power consumption as you increase your voltage you also increase the power diversion in watts to that function of the GPU so you're giving more power to the voltage which helps stabilize the clock rate if you're overclocking but it also takes power away from other components like the core and the memory and so under voltage means that you're freeing up some of that extra wattage for use elsewhere in the system or the video card in this instance but it also means that you may threaten the stability of your clock because you can't push the frequency as high didn't a potentially but in the case the RX 488 kind of a special card because of its power draw because of the issues that have been discussed the last few days and we'll have videos on this with the PCIe bus and things like that under volting will primarily benefit by not threatening stability if you're sticking too close to stock clocks and it will also allow extra power to be given to the cores so what happens is if you look at our how to overclock guide for the rx 480 you'll see that when I first pushed the clock rate to 1,300 megahertz which is maybe a 30 to 40 megahertz offset we don't actually hit that 13 hundred megahertz numbers so the overclock is almost a phantom overclock it's not actually doing anything and it doesn't do anything until I increase the power percent given to the the card so increase that to 50 percent that frees up more power for the GP by way of allowing with the draw more and that allows the higher clock rate so by under volting you can sort of do the same thing without even having to increase that power percent or at least without having to increase it as far as we did and you're able to preserve sort of a lower power state on the card while maintaining a more stable stock or slight overclock clock rates so hopefully that answers the basics of it it's a very complex question with these new boost clocks on these these two architectures but that's the top level that pretty much explains how it works in a way that that is relevant to overclocking next question is from Lee ods who's regular on the channel leo says we are seeing tons of custom pascal cards with added power inputs and decreased power delivery is there any point to that at this at all or is that just something that manufacturers are doing to be able to checkboxes on feature lists but ultimately give you no advantage of course historically better check see basically asking we get a better overclock if there's more vrm phases more power or should you just buy the cheapest pascal card with a decent cooler so this is a good question the main the main thing to look at here we've posted this in our GT x 1080 review of the msi card and of the reference card and of our own hybrid model which we've built here and basically we're seeing very little additional overclocking if any at all from these more advanced vrm phasing power delivery solutions like the msi one which even has an extra power header so you might get a little bit extra room i think we were getting like 20 or 30 megahertz extra off of MSI's card we got i think about a hundred extra megahertz out of this but of course silicon is different but the cooling solution didn't matter quite a bit ultimately though you're looking at a couple frames per second if you are overclocking four frames per second so no it wouldn't be worth released but dumping a ton of money into a high-end 1080 if you're just after FPS if you're trying to get as much overclock as you can it's really not an enthusiast overclocking architecture you can get pretty far with pascal overclocking sort of in the 2100 megahertz range but that's still it doesn't feel like a lot when you're actually doing it because it's maybe one or two steps and you're kind of done there's no more stability left in the card to be had so kind of answering the question I wouldn't go buy the cheapest card certainly especially if it's something with a cheap plastic blower fan that's kind of like the reference design but with a worse fan that's gonna be noisy and have a bad cooler so always prioritize thermals when you're trying to spend less but don't really care about overclocking and still prioritize thermals so look at the multi sort of push fan coolers in terms of extra power phases I'm not seeing a lot of difference right now and that is mostly because of V BIOS and whatever limitations Pascal and its unique architecture has this is still a new process notes we're still learning about it so yeah I wouldn't go and spend a bunch of money on some insane overclocking card right now for example if a 1080 lightning were to come out today I don't think I would necessarily recommend buying it unless they do some kind of custom V bios that does not have the Nvidia imposed BIOS limitations or voltage limitations I should say because those are what's ultimately going to hold you back and I don't know if there's V BIOS limitations are for any other reason then maybe just this new FinFET process doesn't survive well at these higher frequencies and voltages for the long term use or it could just be trying to keep things under control if there's a higher end card coming out soon or any number of reasons but no I just wait wait and see what happens if there's like V BIOS hacks on posts on a forum maybe it'll be worth it then next question cryo cryo Hell Inc says regarding the hybrid GPUs EVGA GTX 1080 hybrid in an MSI 1080 Seahawk and gigabytes 1080 extreme water forest which one to pick cooling wise in the future saw your DIY video for the 1080 hybrid and the results are impressive will you test those cards so we've tested the Seahawk from the last generation and I'll be testing hopefully the new one it's the same as course there's hydrographics msi provides the board courser provides the cooler eb J's got their hybrid model and then gigabyte it's got the water force as mentioned the water force is a little bit different the water for school is it more than just the GPU if you look at it it's got some extra copper in there and it's piping some of the water through other components which helps keep those other components cooler but also means that your liquid temperature will be higher and I would suspect and I have not tested this I would suspect that the GPU core temperature would be slightly higher than something like the EVGA hybrid but your cooling things like the VR am more efficiently so there's trade-off there it's the same thing we saw with the fury X where you're piping water through more components liquid temperature is higher as a result but overall card temperatures that's that's the different one here the Seahawk and the EVGA hybrid function the same way they basically use a CLC mount just like this CLC mounted to a card and a bracket and then a blower fan for the vrm so those work the same way and the vram I should say the EVGA model historically we've seen performs better that's for a few reasons one the the cold plate on the liquid cooler has an extrusion or protrusion and that adds basically extra copper to sink the heat before wicking it away and dissipating it and the fan design is different of course that's important and an MSI is Seahawk uses an H 55 CLC that's a CPU cooler it's got the same cold plate on it that is used for the age 55 and those are targeted more towards cooling cpus so there's different hotspots on CPUs than on GPU silicon so you see some differences there now the Seahawk in the past generation was overclocked higher so they were slightly higher FPS results so really became a trade-off what you wanted there both of those cards were fine when I tested them the the hybrid was more thermally impressive but the Seahawk is certainly fine too it just it comes out of the price relief there's a $50 difference then I probably lean towards the cheaper one for the most part or the one that looks the best if it's if that's your thing the 1080 water force we will see I'm not sure what to think of that yet next question is CY 2087 I'm doing my first system bill wanted to wait for the release of the 10 series of GPUs now that they're here I noticed the sweet spot for gaming seems to have shifted from 1080p to 1440p that seems somewhat accurate that's the direction I'm planning to go but give them the money of the monitors required have also gone up in price recently do Planet D reviews monitors so I think I will kind of address this at a general level one thing to note is don't skimp on your monitor purchase especially now because the ability of GPUs isn't increasing to push those high resolutions and people especially me in the past people tend to buy their monitor and stay with it for a number of years I would imagine most of you do the same unless you really you really like getting a new monitor regularly so I would spend extra money on a monitor certainly and and grow into it as opposed to buying a high on GPU and not being able to utilize it fully that would be general advice as far as the last bit of this question I don't know if they'll work well that 1070 speaking specifically to the X 34 the actual 34 is it crazy good monitor I really like that monitor I don't normally develop opinions like that for hard work because we kind of just go through it and review it and do objective analysis but the X 34 has grown on me and I do like that display that said it's also crazy expensive it's like $1,200 the g-sync or it was anyway last I looked that's it's good I would not spend $1,200 on it that's your like a month of rent there it's yeah the predator is good the 1070 will run games on the predator you'll have to drop your settings in some cases basically if you want to interpolate our results look at our 1440p benchmarking and look at our 4k benchmarking 34 40 by 1440 is right in between them like halfway between all you have to do is multiply the pixels the width by height and you get a total pixel count and then you can kind of interpolate the results based on that percentage if you want hard numbers one of my friends over at Tech gauge comm Rob Williams he ran tests on ultra wide and you can view his results and I would encourage you to do so because he does he doesn't work that I trust and that is rare so he has some hard numbers for you the last question whoever that guy is says so was Steve another ask another ask GN episode without cornrows I would be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed but that's neither here nor there right now I'm sure you are pretty skeptical when it comes to my comments and I don't blame you but I have a real question all right so we got G's question considering the recent leaks of specs for Nvidia's up next tesla card the potential pricing and specs of and these of Vega series in relation to Polaris and the specs and pricing of the 1080 when Wendy next question the next question was about a hair products you know welcome to my crib come on in so we got all this stuff right here in the trash can that's my L'Oreal is my Pantene we got this up here that's my boy what's with my favorite statue in this place okay so have a thermal paste this compressed air to dry out you know a blow dryer and we've got some of this anti-static mat cleaner deep down in the roots you know I'm talking about that's how we get this right here and I'll get you so that's the meat of cameras anxious hair