Gadgetory

hey Ron welcome back to another ask GN episode where we try and answer your questions this episode I'm saying this more and more and it's because more of you are watching and getting engaged but we did have a lot of really good questions and once again not going to get to all of them so if I missed yours please post question below in the comment section and we'll get to it for next episode hopefully but before we get into the content this time it is brought to you by this case this is the antec cube case we saw it at PAX we haven't seen it since then but it's finally starting to ship so at least three viewers so we've got one in now I'll be testing it soon and doing thermals and things like that the thermals are really interesting to me for this case because it has a up the the video card faces up so it's sort of an inverted ATX layout and that means that the video cards up here against this acrylic window so you can see the face plate through the top of the case but of course that poses an interesting thermal challenge and we talked about that with the iWeb power revolt to wear that case kind of worked it out because it was an enforced liquid cooler for the unit that at least we had and that works pretty well in this type of environment I'm curious to see if a blower fan verse is the sort of axial fan axial first radial fans will actually make a difference in performance so this is a good test case for that because with the normal push fan set up with like a twin froze or acx cooler you might actually be kind of restricted for air but with a blower fan it might work out okay because it's an IT Xbox so that's the sponsor I am very very curious to actually test it and see how it performs thermally but visually there it is so you can see it so that is the case but let's get to the questions first question is from beam polaris who says i'm looking at a monitor that has a game mode looking at the manual it says this quote turns off the frame buffer to reduce input lag I didn't even know that monitors had frame buffers and can't find any information online about monitor frame buffers and what the disadvantages of disabling it are can you help me em eh can you help me yeah so this is an area I don't know a whole huge amount about but I did some research so I think I at least distill the basics and then perhaps this is something we can research in the future but from what I understand from what I've researched based on this question what's going on with gamemode really depends on the monitor you have I know asus has one because we have a shoes displays and I checked and I know Samsung has their own game mode and they both do it a little bit differently so your mileage may vary the basic idea with all of these monitors for the most part when they have a game mode is that is basically your monitor does some not it's sort of like post-processing where it's calculating color calculating noise or gain to clean up the image it's basically working on color accuracy image processing things like this so the monitor does have to actually perform some calculations when it receives a frame from the video card and get it prepared for the user and some of that is why when you look at one monitor to the next or even just switch between modes you know monitors have modes not just color and brightness or i should say brightness and contrast but they've color as well and that takes processing so what's going on here with game mode from the two asus and samsung displays that i researched and looked at is they're turning a lot of that off so if you go to game mode it will turn off things like the it already do you get reduced color accuracy you might get reduced or completely disabled noise reduction so that could produce a slightly grainy ur image where noise is generally what's referred used to refer to as sort of like dots and specs or imperfections in your your frame and image output and you'll see that in camera for example if you turn up I so I so you'll get a grain your image as you increase and that's kind of noise so noisy reductions turned off or disabled or minimize with the game mode and this reduces the input latency issues you get a faster pipeline if you're super hyper competitive than or if you have a display that's just doing too much processing or slow processing you can help reduce some of that latency by using game mode but you sacrifice some of the color accuracy and some of the noise reduction and other functions that may be going on with an image processing on the display so that reduces your input lag take the good with the bad I guess depends on how serious you are about that or how bad your monitor is out of the box now as for other brands like as I said they seem to all sort of have a slightly different definition of what their game mode does so this doesn't speak for everyone but I think that gives you a basic idea of what they all kind of intend to do with the with the technology with the modes in the display hopefully I answer that question though next question is from ulam's 5 she says hi Steve why doesn't AMD you have something similar to nvidia GPU boost yet it seems like an intuitive feature to implement and n videos already on gen 3 is it actually hardware enabled feature so gen 3 or not it's it's a proprietary technology so I don't know that generation really matters it's it is their third iteration of GP be his friend video and he does have a boost technology though it's just not talk about quite as much because i think it's not fully understood polaris was kind of where a lot of this was introduced and i did talk about how AM DS boost function works in our original launch day our X 480 review and that's got a whole the whole page one is architecture on Polaris you should read that if you really want to understand more about polaris and boost is discussed in there but one of the things that Andy does especially with Polaris and with the wat man you to utility you can see different states so if you've played around with wat manner you saw our overclocking guide you'll see that there are seven I think seven different bars I've thought my head and so you've got seven bars and they kind of very clock rate and and voltage based on the DPM state so that's what that's called as DPM States dynamic power management basically so you've got these seven states and the lowest state just like sleep states on Windows you have things like s0s0 IX with Intel or corrective idol type of thing s1 s3 s4 s3 and s4 the most common s3 asleep as force hibernate this is basic window stuff that I'm talking about right now but similar to that idea you have these different power states that are defined in Andy's hardware as DPM states and lower state a lower number is a less less active or less clock intensive state so if we are on the desktop and you haven't forced through wat man a clock rate which is constantly high and you're running just kind of stock settings and you're on the desktop doing nothing the DPM state will be at its lowest we'll probably the first state and that is going to be the lowest clock rate and therefore the lowest voltage you don't need that much voltage to sustain a low clock rate of a couple hundred megahertz so this is part of the power saving approach that amd's taken with Polaris if you're not going to use twelve hundred megahertz of clock then why push it is the idea and it's really it's not a new concept but the way Polaris has implemented it is new in terms of these specifically at the wap an utility which is brand-new this year so that's what AMD does and there's some interesting points as I spoke out with Raja Kaduri the RTG Radeon technologies group chief architect in one of our two videos and one of those is as game developers begin to sort of better program their devices to work with these low-level API is one thing you could do in theory anyway is aside from like the regular C reservation things like that if you're a game developer you could say hey i know this event is coming in the game the example roger used was an explosion so let's say we know an explosion is coming because the game knows before the video card does the engine figures all of that out and we know that this explosion will trigger some intense amount of load on the GPU you start saturating physics processing you're saturating all these other types of also same with any kind of explosion think just cause 3 or something so if we know that's coming as a game developer we can go in there and work with amd's hardware in this specific use case and basically and it works with NVIDIA as well but we're talking about AMD right now and basically say okay so up until this point we don't need to be fully engaged in the clock so we can run a DPM state 6 or something like that up until this point maybe maybe 1260 megahertz 1240 megahertz is enough and so we operated that sort of lower sustained clock rate for the majority of the time you don't get quite as high a frame rate but it leaves Headroom for when you need it and so what that does is you run at an acceptable frame rate in a DPM six or five and then you hit that explosion the game tells the GPU hey this big events coming up time to get ready GPU can boost up to the seventh state that BTW p.m. 7 or whatever it needs get a couple extra mega hertz or more out of the clock and help compensate for that heavier load so you can keep your frame rate throughout the processing whatever's going on in the scene so that's an these solution DPM does work without direct developer involvement that is just the best example that's that's the example of where it would work the best is when you have an engine and a game working with the hardware to say this is how we need to work together to keep the clock throttles not really the right word but dialed back if not necessary and then amp it up when it's necessary rather than run at full bore the whole time and not have any room when you need it to sustain the the fluid frame rate that a player would expect so that's theirs you can read more about DPM states in our article I think I may have talked about it in the overclocking article as well but definitely the RX 480 review with Polaris I talked about that at least a little bit with wat man maybe on page six but the only on page one so hopefully that answers the basics they do have boost as the short answer it's just not the same implementation as Nvidia's version of boost next question is from hey so now Nintendo is going to take this video down by the question hey Steve I saw a pretty cool mod here on this overclocker net forum post and it gives a link the modder here bought an aluminum heatsink and after applying a thermal pad the heatsink and attaching it to the back plate of his nvidia titan he read a difference of about twenty see after applying the heatsink for less than thirty dollars my question to you could you validate this testing and see if cooling benefits are unique to him alone or if someone like me could reap the same cooling benefits I would appreciate any information greatly if you could do this I'm not gonna promise that we're gonna go slap a and aluminum block onto a video card right now but I can tell you just from experience how it works so what you've got here two things to note 1 yeah putting a block of aluminum on the back of a card with thermal pads if you don't already have something there will probably improve the temperature at least a little bit if not a lot you're definitely gonna be pulling temperature off of the PCB more efficiently and hopefully you've got some form of dissipation in the form of intake from the case to blow that heat off of the aluminum fins that you've slapped onto the back of the video card so that's that's the hope so yes in theory will reduce temperature now one thing I didn't read the whole thread that was linked but I did look briefly through it and the user is using a I believe it was either an IR camera or a thermal imaging device either way IR cameras you've there a couple flaws and one of them emissivity of whatever you're pointing to that like aluminum being pretty shiny and the second point is because of the way a large heat sink on a large area that puts or let's rephrase a large heat sink on a small area of high heat like a large aluminum heatsink on the back of a card where your area of high heat would be the backside of the chokes probably maybe the backside of the MOSFETs that's your area of high heat that's now being pulled up being sunk by the heatsink and that's going to spread out your heat so will definitely improve temperature at least a little bit but it might look a whole lot better in thermal imaging that it is in reality that's why we're sort of retesting and doing extra testing on the EVGA cards that are under question right now for prm's and that's I just finished putting thermal probes on the thing the idea is we're going to be moving the thermal probes because then we can direct read temperatures of individual components rather than sort of an aggregate temperature using a thermal imaging device looking at the back of a bit of a back plate or looking at the back of a thermal pad where you have some level of insulation because you can actually see the device that's creating the heat anymore you can only see the device on top of it so that does create that sort of obfuscates the performance so at the point of saying all of this is that yes the performance will almost certainly improve but reading with just that one device is going to make it look probably better than it is in reality that's not to say that it's wrong to do so especially if you're an enthusiast and you're just you're not in it for making content or something it's just to say that don't expect necessarily if you took a thermocouple to it that you would see the same gains so I believe the gains here 20c is what what the question says 20 see improvement but uh it's it's a bad project for thirty bucks though we've done stuff like that with arctic cooling and they make some good kits if you want to do any conversions on your cards they do have back plates that are aluminum back plates that you stick to the back of a car things like that so that's kind of a fun mod to do if you ever bored on a Saturday day within as far as if it improves your performance you'll get a bigger gain for putting liquid on the GPU but it's not bad to cool down the VRMs or the PCB anyway next question Jason Smith says hey Steve when you start your zen and benchmarks will you include the 2600 k for comparison I believe it is the most venerated i7 if not the most popular and / the most logical place for a quote common user to start considering an upgrade to be worth the investment regardless of workload I agree with you that the Sandy Bridge series is really popular so I spoke to Patrick stone who has worked with me for a number of years now on the site on and off and he does personally have a 2500 k so I am planning to add the 2500 k to the bench that'll be our sandy bridge I don't have a 2600 k and i don't know that i have direct access to one anymore but i'll look I do want to include it but minimally I do have a 3570k we're going to have the whole i-5 sweet covered almost for sure I have access to 2500 ki have a 3570k personally in one of our case benches that is soon being retired and I know we've got the i7 920 or 930 whatever that in a Hail mcp us i'll include that hopefully as well if time permits but definitely the most recent sort of Sandy Bridge onward for i5 or i7 s I've got the 4000 series stuff I will try to get a sandy bridge 2600 k I can't promise anything but we'll see the maybe buying a used one might be worth it i don't know it depends how much they cost about wanted to buy an old system from someone but yeah it's it's a good item test and i will be doing as much as i can on the ham the sandy bridge onward next question don de Silva says steve is it fair to say that older core architectures like sandy bridge Ivy Bridge and the hay lam speaking of have run their useful course I've seen several videos elsewhere that suggests these CPUs i7 920 2500 ke DC are still capable of gaming at 1080p in a variety of triple-a titles as someone considering an upgrade to a 47 IDK so i can read as my ddr3 ram is it better to hold out until the next generation of cds or act now that is the ever-burning question from everyone should i wait or should i buy now generally when things are multiple months out I do kind of lean towards by now because you can always wait there's when when Zen and kb lake launched immediately we're going to start talking about the next product so you can always wait but of course when something's like one month away it does kind of make sense to wait and see what happens now the question here is unique because you're talking about reusing ddr3 and these newer platforms have all moved to four so that is a very valid thing to want and actually when I bought parts for a new system build three plays mine which I never ended up building but their inboxes still but when I did buy parts my plan was I'm going to take a 4770k that's been retired and stick it into a z97 motherboard and use ddr3 and the reason I decided that was because I knew one I had a 4770k but also that with memory I've got a lot of ddr3 like many of you I'm sure that I can still use still perfectly fine memory and sometimes in higher capacities and always you get for with DVR for dependent costs and also because the gains from something like a 4000 series I 7 and the current gen and impending Jen I sevens are not massive a 47 90k to a 6700 k pretty small jump and I think we benchmarked at ages ago at this point but it's a couple percentage points depending on what you're testing games for sure though now we're going to cabling I can't say for sure I'll be able to say eventually but I don't have them yet so we will be testing 4790 case against the 7000 series kb lake cpus by sevens but i can't definitively say what the performance gap would be it'll be certainly larger than a 47 IDK to a 6700 but the 47 90 k is still damn good and if you can lower your costs by buying one of those four in the 200s dollar range rather than the 300s and you can reuse ddr3 RAM that's a good amount of money or taking off the cost and if you put that into a video card you're going to be bigger gains there then from joint a kb league so one hundred and fifty dollar price different videocards that could be a gtx 1070 or something like that from something like a 1060 or a 480 and that is significant enough I would absolutely recommend that route if you're trying to save money now then we don't know what it's going to cost or how it's going to perform so I can't really comment on that but if you're if you're personally looking at should I get a 40 790 k or k be like I do the 47 90 k if you're trying to buy sooner because you'll have a system kind of today and save some money but I'm sure they're plenty of opinions off hat you can discuss below hopefully in a civilized manner last question exiled storm says does the cat use the same shampoo as you snowflake has her own uh just sort of saliva based shampoo I'm not really sure that I want to use that myself or maybe I do that's Chris hey thanks for watching guys if you have questions leave them in the comments below hopefully we'll get to them you can also tweet at us if you ever do have a question that's quick and just like hey this thing I need help troubleshooting it I do reply to a lot of those tweets personally at gamers Nexus is the tag you want to use and if it's quick I'll answer it there otherwise posted below we'll talk about it with everyone so thank you for watching patreon link postural video to help us out directly if you want to subscribe there subscribe to the YouTube channel sponsors right here link for that will be in the description below if you're interested I'll see you all next time you