Gadgetory

everyone welcome back to another episode of ask GN as always leave your questions in the comment section below if you have them for next episode next week we'll be at CES in Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show so if we do one of these it will be there but it might more likely just be a bunch of news from the show about PC hardware so getting into the start of things we have a short male segments this time I guess because I got some I don't know I guess Christmas presents from NZXT I got a fish I'm out here so NZXT sent this haha over the holidays you may remember our review of the s340 Elite which is right here and things that I said so NXT decided because of how much we loved their cable management rubber puck with magnets in it to send me to more of that very same thing so I guess this is our first ever unbox I'm gonna make sure it's not a threat or something like that oh it's a white one okay I don't know they made this that's like yeah there's her here's our present from n NZXT two more of these things and they sent a family photo I believe signed by Johnny the CEO today and wishing you happy holidays on an awesome 2017 you passive-aggressive bastards it's that's not for that the mail segment I just put that back in there we might actually use those well if I keep those around for props don't worry they're not the big pieces of rubber aren't being thrown out so that's that's that CES is next week as I said this episode is brought to you by our patreon supporters if you want to help us out and creating more content at the frequency we've been doing it late which is about a video a day almost then go to patreon.com/scishow soon in 2017 the first question I have is one I have a live demo for it's not a very complex one but live demo nonetheless this is from a Christopher Bjork in who says is it worth buying a high-end power supply just because it's higher quality and has a less chance of blowing up so yeah there's a few things that make higher-end power supply is actually properly higher-end and the probably most noticeable one between something like a $20 no brand psu other than cable supporting things like that the biggest difference between something like that or some really low on psu and something that's at least half season like most the stuff you'd find them that sort of $70 range is the protection so you get a lot of stuff like short-circuit protection OCP ovp for over current and over voltage protections things of that nature and those would be useful if you don't know for an instance where either through user error or through component level failure your power supply will at least to some degree attempt to protect your system an example of this would be if we hooked up a motherboard to a case and there's something bridging contact between an IC or something like that some contacts on the motherboard and a steel panel and that causes a direct short it's not a good thing but normally it's not gonna kill anything it's just in theory it should just not turn on or should shut down immediately another example of something would be as we use on our power supply PSA would be if you plug in a non spectacled like and I think in our example in that video we had the Silverstone and EVGA power supply if you took a power supply cable from one of those plugged into the other which you shouldn't do and the you end up sending 12 volts down ground or something like there down calm and or something like that you could end up with dead components at least potentially sending current in the wrong direction reverse polarity basically and really hurting something so a good power supply will protect you from that at least somewhat and that's a good thing now let's say you're like I'm not gonna make a mistake so I'm not worried about it other things like things falling out screws falling out of you know not screw dendrite or computer get smooth Oh help protect from some shorts driving from that depending on where it falls not all of them because that's pretty bad problem other things that a good power spy your efficiency of course improves a lot of the time with the good PS use and efficiency with a power supply you're basically looking at how efficiently does this unit convert the power from the wall to the power used in the computer and if I were to ask you what is the power supplies purpose in a computer it's not really to provide power to supply power as its contain to the name it's actually to convert power so you end up with AC at the wall DC in the computer the power supply converts it you have loss of energy through heat or other inefficiencies in the unit depending on how low or high end it may be so that's another obvious advantage and that's pretty clear I say obvious because eighty plus is everywhere and they do a pretty good job of outlining exactly what the requirements are for each level of 80 plus so that's an example also where you would gain some benefit now will you make up for the extra expense to buy something like 80 plus gold or platinum in your power savings maybe not depends on how long you have that power supply but minimally you're using less power from the wall and it's more efficient as conversion and the heat should be lower and things like that which is not a bad thing it's just not something you necessarily need in a computer if you're on a budget V droop is another thing in voltage droop if you have a good power supply you should hopefully not have too much voltage ripple down the rails and that means that you could in theory maintain a more stable overclock how much that impacts kind of a casual overclocker I would say not very much but it's another one of the small many benefits that add up with PS use and now one of the last ones I wanted to mention there's plenty more you can read Johnny gurus website for far more depth on this he knows a lot more than I do that power supplies but one more thing that's worth showing is if you have a power supply that can do it and I'm only using this one you I have it not because it's product placement if you have a power supply that can do it you can actually gain some benefit in a surge so if there's a power surge and you very briefly lose power then what happens with something like this is it'll stay on a bit longer this is a platinum axe PSU it's pretty damn expensive stays on a bit longer bigger capacitors things like that so it'll get you through really short surges and all I'm gonna do right now is connect the black and the green to turn it on okay black and green yes let's just see if this paperclip will work okay so when I hold that there and flip the switch okay we're gonna flip the switch and I'm gonna put it there okay power supply is on I think fans should be spinning yes and now I am going to kill power Oh kill power all right and it is still spinning it'll turn off eventually this one lasts about 10 seconds with nothing connected to it it's not drawing any power so you can see it's still on I flipped the the power switch we can even unplug the cable for good measure and it'll keep spinning it's clearly no connection to outside power right now and our fan will eventually turn off and this would not be you wouldn't get quite as long an effect with this if you had components connected without any components connected or not drawing any power the power supply as far as its concerned this is effectively a surge scenario you've lost power to the unit and yet it's still on and just now something like a 15 or so seconds later the fan has turned off just a quick additional note here on the fan it'll also partly spin because it's try to keep the fans spinning in the system to lower temperature prior to shutdown this is part of the features of this power supply but it's a mix of basically you get some level of surge protection because it'll hold its power for a very short period of time long enough normally to survive a 1 second surge and then the rest of it is just trying to spin down the fans and keep the temperatures low before shutting it down completely and ideally in terms of saving your data you would want to get something like a UPS or a battery backup rather than rely on your power supply but an extra step in the chain certainly doesn't hurt so that's another example of something good from a high-end power supply again it's another one of those things where as a normal user who cares maybe you lose some progress in a game that would suck but this thing I don't know the prices today but when I originally got it I think it was like a $200 power supply maybe more cuz a high wattage one so something like this would be really beneficial if you are doing rendering or production we're losing power means that you might lose all of your progress on a render and that would be not good so in that event something like this is kind of making you money in a business sense and that you're not wasting it when you have a small surge for a few seconds so that's that's a that I'm more obvious like clear to show example of power supply benefits again not everyone needs something like that but it's not like it's just marketing there's actually a reason you would get a high end PSEO voltage checkpoints are another nice thing some of them have them built in with LEDs so you can kind of check on things as it's live without needing to probe directly with a multimeter next question is from wraps up 100 is a regular wraps up says how do you feel about Nvidia pushing g-force as a platform and not just components I asked in the cons for clarity on that and he was basically asking about the new $10 a month g-force elite service so that was something that was announced I think the day of our filming of that Nvidia versus Andy why are they so polarizing video we filmed it maybe a week before we posted it and after filming that it's kind of like that would have been really useful to have because we mentioned I mentioned Red Team Plus and these program and this g-force one kind of Ament reminds me of that in some ways and the main one is that it's designed to get people involved in a way that tries to build brand loyalty from that user toward the company so in the case of this g-force one let's kind of briefly look through what was leaked because it was basically basically a leaked job posting leaked I think some of the basics were with the $10 a month g-force elite club I don't think NVIDIA has officially announced this yet I think this is all leaks so keep that in mind but with that club if you pay 10 bucks a month they say you got a full copy of an exclusive indie game once per year you get free custom skins or in-game items for a triple-a game once per quarter and be honest who cares the path had early beta access for Talos and NVIDIA first party content exclusive hardware discounts for gaming gear okay so that's something I guess the the way I feel about it is I okay let's let's go through one by one exclusive indie game I don't care about that I'm not gonna pay $120 a year to get that so most indie games are probably gonna be far far less than that and I there's a good chance you're not gonna play it anyway let's let's be honest next one was custom skin in-game item there's no guarantee that it's for a game you play I don't know how Nvidia is planning it maybe they look at your game library with GeForce experience that would certainly make sense right because they can see all the games you have that's part of the program it's not a malicious thing it's here's the games this user has does the user want us to optimize the settings for the hardware they have yes or no easy enough now one other way they could leverage that is okay based on these games what can we give the user to justify their $10 a month premium payment once per quarter so that they feel like they're getting some rather than say if they give out a one-size-fits-all dough to skin and maybe half the people don't even play DotA that would have no value for them so that's that's a potential way it could be leveraged that would make more sense than what it sounds like just from the bullet points that we see online I still would not pay for that personally speaking that's my opinion the next question was early beta access for Talos I just don't care about Talos principle we benchmarked it a bit that's that's what it's meant for and if you want to play it as a game you can buy it as a game exclusive hardware discount so that's the last one that I've got some thoughts on because I don't think if Newegg or Amazon came to me and they said we have a new service you can pay us $10 per month and we will give you coupons to buy things from us I think I would I would say no and I would probably write an article or do a video about it because it does seem kind of almost offensive from a retailer now from a manufacturer it's a bit different man Vidya it's not quite as offensive as if a retailer came to me and said you can pay us for the right to buy things for cheaper which of course there are clubs where you can do that in physical retail but not something I like from a from Nvidia standpoint it's you know I just wouldn't recommend paying for a discount one that kind of locks you in because you feel like I'm paying a hundred twenty bucks a year I really better get my value out of this thing so if you get a hundred bucks off this card maybe not that much but you get some amount of money off the upgrade then you feel like it's justified that's the point of the program right it's not a malicious thing it's just these companies of course they want you to stay loyal to them and keep buying their stuff that's the hardest part of any money-making operation is you made the sale okay make make them come back look at GoPro for example of that so that's that's kind of a thoughts on it now AMD I don't think it's perfect either so Andy's got red team plus which does the whole tout the brand and get free stuff and it's it's just not it's not a setup I like for either vendor it's it builds on the video we just posted about the whole blind brand loyalty and vitriol being spewed because people have this incentive to do so beyond the normal incentive of I've spent money and have to defend my purchase so that's my thoughts on it not a fan of either overall but we'll see how on videos actually comes into play because it's not really finalized yet they could potentially do interesting things with it maybe they'll hook in something like whatever that program is called now they used to be called grid I think it's GeForce now these days something like that would be more interesting that's game streaming that would be a service you could pay for discounts and giveaways no next question sir Papa asks question for the next sgn what is the physical difference between free sync and gsync why does juicing cost so much could nvidia in theory is free sync with and and e.g sync we have a whole article on this that's pretty good it was written by Michael Kern's and I believe it is called the unproductive relationship of G sync and free sync or something like that we basically talk about how the two of them existing don't achieve the goals that we would like to see which is a more universal standard but we do in that article Michael goes and lays out how each of the two services works at a very top level give you the basics and you can go to the article from work so I don't want to spend the whole video talk you know that and it certainly could be done the main points Jesus Inc has it does not have the same variable refresh rate that freesync has it's done in the range doesn't exist on g-sync where with free sync you have a variable refresh rate range and the monitors somewhat define that range and the top end max of course is the maximum of the monitors refresh rate she think doesn't do it that way gyah sync physically because you asked about what are the physical differences the physical difference is that G sync is a physical product whereas freezing is not so g-sync uses an FPGA board and that's a field programmable gate array uses an FPGA board which are pretty easy to produce versus when you're looking at something like the way freesync rolled out initially it's faster to roll out FPGA board that cost money it's a physical component that goes on the monitor and for some of the older ACS very popular monitors you could actually buy a kit to convert it into a g-sync display so if you're curious about what it looks like not in a monitor you could look that up so that's the main thing in terms of physical differences freesync uses the V blank attribute it was originally sort of exploited from the embedded displays DisplayPort spec so this this V blank was in laptop displays and has been supported and monitors to plays displays for a few years now so that's how freesync operated SCID operates on this attribute v blank and from from the display ports back and AMD has also added their own HDMI sort of custom integration so you can do it through that interface as well not just DisplayPort free sync and gsync they have different costs g-sync cost a bit more it's a physical component so of course it's got a physical cost free sync although it is an attribute in the display and in that regard not as much of physical components they'll realize on the scaler even though it's integrated that way there's still some cost and we talked to Robert Halleck about this about at CES maybe a year ago or this year or something and the cost of free sync is basically just validation so you pay a bit more because it's got to be validated but it's not gonna be as much as g-sync that's not to say either it's better or worse just to say that free zinc will be cheaper but it's also not free next part of this that's worth going over g-sync can work as low it can work that frame rate it's like 20 FPS it doesn't have the same low-end limit that freesync has of course in 20 FPS range you're gonna be getting basically a slideshow anyway so the value is kind of debatable but it does have a lower low end than AMD does Andy uses rather than the FPGA and all this other approach I just described for free sync they rely on the a6 and the display that's gonna be the scalars to handle the all the the freesync adaptive refresh rate basically and Asics that integration is not necessarily quite as fast but once it's been rolled out like it has been at this point now that all these display vendors support it and suppliers support free sync it's not as big of a deal that it's slower to market initially because it's out on the market now see if there's any other points that are done that are important to note free sync doesn't work at least initially outside of the monitors free sync range still doesn't so monitors got a listed range on it doesn't work outside of that they do have some little framerate compensation now that I haven't really tested and written articles about but that's something worth looking into and then finally free sync uses variable refresh rate over DisplayPort has custom protocols for HDMI as I said G syncs range is limited by the refresh rate of the panel maximum refresh and our thoughts in that article were basically ideally the two companies work together and make a more uniform standard with a fixed frequency range something like 24 Hertz to the max refresh maybe 140 for 200 or whatever that would be best but but I think that answers most of it they're not going to use each other's technologies though that's that's not going to happen next question super-good e says hypothetically the rise in chipset comes out and the prices of the Intel chips drop well each tier of processor drop equally to or dependent on tier so the high range of Intel chips drops more than the mid range and low range will drop in price the least purely hypothetical I do not think you will see a change in price for Intel at most I would expect 10 to 20 dollars but that would be in step with their normal generational stats on not because of Andy and Rison it's more likely that they would drop it because they or at least retailers tend to always drop the price of the i5 and i7 about 10 bucks when the new one comes out maybe a few months later you see that reduction but I would not I would not Bank on a price change for Intel based on Rison it's just not something they've really ever done I don't think they feel enough pressure to make that change if AMD started really clawing back market share maybe but until I think feels probably fairly confident in the desktop market right now and people are used to paying what they pay for Intel processors I don't know we'll see but I don't really maybe I think I fives and I sevens in the core family of processors will probably not change in price but once you get into the extreme serious stuff maybe there's a price change because it's a lot harder there to justify the high thousand dollar-plus prices if anthe can actually compete in that segment that might make more sense but I wouldn't say for the average gamer it wouldn't matter last question wiseguy says how are you still such a small Channel that question got a lot of folks probably because it's technical content but please feel free to share as always and I would tell you to like but I don't know that it actually does anything I will ask that you subscribe though subscribe and share that that does something likes and dislikes I don't know comments are arranged and totally haphazard order spin out if you're logged in or not we see them in a different order than you guys do if we're logged in just realize that recently so you're up votes do nothing unless we open an incognito window and look at it as a raw user so thank you for watching as always patreon link in the post roll video if you want to up side directly links in the description below for more information subscribe don't bother liking I'll see you all next time