Gadgetory

everyone welcome back to another episode of ask GN I think we're on episode at number 30 but there's no special occasion we're just to another ask GN so as always post your questions in the comment section below finally got that right after saying it on the last two videos you have questions person bullet we'll try and get them for the next video but this is basically a Q&A segment so starting off we've got a question from Reza and Elle who says hi GN your custom GT X 1080 hybrid mod inspired me to do the same that's awesome I'm pretty pleased with the results it doesn't go over 45 COC and underload my question how important is the cooling for other components on GPUs such as vram does the hybrid fan really help with anything or just for show so I talked about this a little bit in the gigabyte extreme review and the EVGA a hybrid versus the Seahawk I think yeah that one so those two reviews we talked about it a bit because the EVGA card on the gigabyte card both cooled vram gigabyte one also cools the vrm with it's sort of with its liquid and directly through like copper solder heat pipe solder aluminum so very indirectly it cools the vrm and then directly cools the vram sort of through a copper plate that can actually cold plate of the the CL see as for how important it is one thing I can tell you is that when we were doing some of the tests previously with the maybe I think it was the 10 60 I was forced to remove the base plate for some tests and ultimately we ended up filing down the plate as many of you know but when doing tests without any cooling on the VR the vram at all and that includes something like an aluminum plate it was still performing fine even though the the blower fan was really doing nothing in that scenario because it was just spinning there was no enclosure to guide the airflow there was no cold plate or anything to sink the heat so it did perform fine and by fine and air quotes I mean didn't immediately crash or exhibit a catastrophic failure now down the line it's hard to say how much that actually impacts your lifespan for the car for the memory gddr5 and 5x is not that high-voltage especially if you're not overclocking so it's it's not under as much of a threat as something like the GP or a CPU some kind of serious piece of silicon but to answer the question does the hybrid fan help the answer is yes depending on what you're looking at especially but in particular if we're looking at let's say a car that doesn't have a copper plate or an aluminum plate on the vrm the blower fan does more than just cool the vram it does cool the vrm and that's definitely important cooling the vram as I said it's it's hard for me to really know the answer to that because we don't have a good way to look at the temperature of the vram without actually putting the thermocouple on there or something because there's no software that reads it so let's let's kind of push that to the side for now just talk about the vrm the voltage regulator module VRMs get pretty hot they can sustain a high heat some of them upwards of 125 C for the inductors but they do still need to be cooled and they're dealing with basically sort of cleaning your voltage delivery to the GPU and train it gets enough voltage and off amps make sure it's all clean and if that gets too hot and it will lose its efficiency so you have some power efficiency loss you can draw more power than is necessary to perform a certain task whatever it may be you're doing powering a GPU just to perform a performance cycles or whatever so that's important yes and the hybrid fan does cool that it's responsible when I say hybrid fan what I mean is the vrm fan that's mounted to the normally the base plate or the shroud or whatever on top of the right side of the board that cools the BRM generally so that is important vram it's hard to say from kind of a stock clock perspective how important that is but we've run it without cooling I wouldn't recommend it because I don't know what the long-term impact is but you can definitely do it overclock and probably not a great idea to overclock the memory or over bolted a name these not cool it next question is from Aaron Cox who says hi Steve I'm considering purchasing an LG 29 at um 68 p which is the best naming monitor's by the way have the absolute best naming scheme on the planet because they are all letters and numbers and it's it's human readable I says it's a 21-2 9 ultra wide with free sync and a new wants a new GPU to pair with it so here's the question is it better for me to get into our X 480 and leverage of the free sync capabilities of a monitor or a 1070 and use its greater raw power to output higher fps and have a card I can potentially use for longer and then he says more generally what purchasing behavior would you suggest to people when shopping for cards is the old put most put the most money into your GPU still valid so that's that's a good question and it's well worded let's start with the question of is it still valid to put the most money to GPU week as always it depends on what you're doing if you're just gaming I would say I don't know that I'd necessarily use the words the most money but in terms of proportioning your your purchasing the GP is probably still worth spending a good chunk of your cash on for for most gaming bills now it depends because if your options are by an i3 or an i5 and getting a slightly cheaper C or GPU can let you get the high five I'd probably do that instead but generally if you're at an i5 or i7 level already then yeah it makes good sense to put some money into the GPU and that's especially true as we roll into new AP is if they ever actually kind of start hitting mainstream which they will eventually but it's it's still a little while out so and buy based on strictly API future promises right now but that is that is a point where CPUs will kind of be they're still really relevant we talked about this before obviously but you will be able to get away with a slightly lower spec CPU if you've got a good GPU that can handle juggle all the draw calls like that from a low-level API as for the monitor specifically that is a very hard question because AM D just doesn't have something that directly competes with 1070 1080 current generation right now and that's not gonna happen until Vega so it really does force you into the position of well I either have to buy a ton 70 plus to get a higher performance or a 480 and you get free sync and I think my suggestion would probably be depending on what video card you have now it may be worth waiting until Andy pushes there Vega GPUs just to get that free sync because it would kind of suck to lose free sync it's actually just like g-sync is it's actually a good feature the other option of course by different monitor but G sync is expensive and the competitors an ultra wide space are very expensive like the predator which is a thousand plus dollars so my answer to you would be depending on how you feel either wait and look at Vega or maybe buy an R X 480 if you're okay with sitting on using something now and then pulling it out later put it in a different box or whatever they're not that expensive relative to what you're looking at purchasing anyway so if you have a way to repurpose it and upgrade in a couple months then that might be an OK path to take but otherwise I kind of wait 1070 is a good card though but next question fd6 says in your experience which components are more prone to fail from voltage issues I only asked because I had my fan and audio cables melt on on my r5 case and I was astonished out of all my parts I never thought the case would be an issue I've seen that before - I don't know what case I think it was on a salman case a an exceptionally high quality Zalman case that we may have we may have reviewed that one but yeah that definitely happens so it's normally with fan controllers and things on a case it's just an issue of the fan controller being dumb and pushing the wrong voltage and having low-quality wires or whatever and they're controlling it but for the question of what normally fails in my experience I have had a good amount of motherboards fail from voltage being pushed through the CPU things like that especially FX 9000 series CPUs even with boards that were rated for them if it's a low-end board we still had burnouts we've shown one of those on camera so motherboards I've had a lot of issues with in the past not too many recently other than the one with the FX 9000 and what else I have also run into issues not voltage issues causing a power supply to fail but I've had plenty of power supplies fail and cause other things to fail because of that normally after a lightning strike or something the power surge or something like that but yeah I'd probably pin it on motherboards for the most common issue that I've run into personally video cards and CPUs are surprisingly robust you can really screw up an over volt in your and your BIOS on a CPU and as long as you haven't forced to that voltage and you haven't started really load testing it it might actually be okay wouldn't recommend it but but they're pretty robust generally despite being one of the more one of the component you need to be more cautious with next question Matthew Osborne Hastie when looking at your review for the i7 6700 K that was a long time ago I notice there are no comparison to the 6600 K is there a reason why they weren't compared directly to each other well GNB making these comparisons for future generations of CPUs I was looking for the difference in framerate lows between the two chips after digital foundry mentioned that the lows is where i7 shows the largest value but doesn't provide I graphs I can reinforce that claim to some extent we I haven't extensively tested it but we've looked at things like Metro last light in particular comes to mind where even disabling hyper-threading there's actually a big difference but I don't have charts for it for you right now now as for why we didn't test the 6600 K it's because I didn't have one now because since then we were the buy one intel does not currently provide us CPUs there PR team has changed far too much for me to keep up with so I just buy them now but we didn't have one that's the answer to that as for the future yeah I am planning on getting an i5 and i7 probably an i3 on the bench for when Zen comes out we'll revisit all the kind of core CPUs you'll be buying that will include the either last or current generation depending on what what's up with kb lake but uh but yeah we'll be looking at them then I can't say though that there are there are some places where an i7 shows value in the low performance and it's primarily going to be seen if you're trying to hit like a 144 120 Hertz output for your monitor or something like that but in Metro last light it's almost double without hyper-threading depending on the the CPU specifically so that's kind of interesting but the next question is from Tamsin who says how do you guys actually calculate one percent point one percent lows by plotting a frame versus time graph and finding manual ADEs some kind of software we we talked about that in our video called what are one percent lows or what are one percent in point one percent lows that answers a lot of that at a pretty decent level specifically calculating it it's just a formula that we use that we have a Python script right now that was done in-house so the script digs through either present Mon or whatever right now it's digging through the present Mon data which we have these four DX oven Vulcan testing so it looks resent Mon at the millisecond presents like the the on present millisecond like the latency between the frames and from there it can calculate based on frame versus milliseconds what are the slowest one percent of frames what are these lowest point one percent of frames and then it averages those and you have your value so that bypasses minimums things like that talk about that more in depth in the other video I mentioned I think this is the last question daven dice DV n dice says will you ever compare this generations hardware to that of two generations ago EG r9 280 or 60 so we do that in the original reviews with the Wow with two generations ago okay we did that with AMD because just a volume of card stating so I did look at that with AMD with a 280 and the 280x or something 285 one of those and the 380 X I don't think I've actually done that for the current generation Polaris cards or Pascal cards that is a good question that is also a good request it normally becomes a time thing that my current plan is because of this question a couple others like it is to visit these two generation old cards specifically in one-off articles sometime the next couple months and just basically do how is the 760 today how is this the 280 today or whatever and see how they perform now versus other cards that we have on the bench currently that's the current plan I don't think we necessarily have the bandwidth to include them in specific game benchmarks for example Gears of War 4 or battlefield 1 I'll try but it's it's really a time thing and there's a high demand for current gen stuff and one general stuff but we will try and do them in one-offs because of that question and others so as always thank you for watching the patreon link of the post roll video helps out directly you can subscribe for more content leave a comment below for next week's episode I'll see you all next time