Gadgetory

everyone welcome back to another episode of ask GN where we answer reader and viewer questions if you have questions for the next episode please leave them in the comment section below or if you're one of our patreon backers you can leave them in the discord channel called ask GN questions so we've got a couple good ones this week gonna be talking about a bit about liquid coolers I have some overclocking discussion some stuff on the 1080i hybrid mods and how to reduce pump noise which we've talked about in the past so some good questions but please leave more below if you have them before that this one is brought to you by our own GN store so we have a store at store gamers Nexus dotnet where you can buy a shirt like this one this is the anniversary edition shirt and it's got teal and grey and pretty cool design it's basically an explosion layout of PCB and electrical components except in the shape of the logo and we just got these in so coal baseball caps that have the GN Graff logo on them we're just giving it a trial so that's over on the store if you're interested in it and I think we have some photos of snowflake in front of it just as extra marketing materials starting to look at what companies like Intel and AMD and NVIDIA do I realized one thing is they are all lacking cats so I think basically what I'm saying is if we ever make a CPU or a GPU we're gonna sell the most because I figured that out so you heard it here first first question is from Matt Matt wolf excuse me who says maybe this is more appropriate here how important is the CLC pump speed at all I've played with it yesterday and the delta is like 1 to 2 degrees Celsius at most with the pump speed between 50% and 100% rad panspeed seem to impact temperatures much more yeah so radiator fan speed definitely impacts it way more if you you could set whatever pump speed you want for the most part as long as it's still moving liquid and you're gonna see a much bigger swing from going from like 5 or 600 rpm on some matter see mid-range fans 1500 rpm that's for sure as for the palm speed so we test this we did some work for NZXT earlier this year for their blog i don't think we ever published it on our own site maybe we should look into it though but we did a really quick to test one was radiator placement in their ass 340 elite and we tested it in 2 or 3 I think 3 different locations to determine where it worked the best in the s340 elite specifically we didn't bring that content over to GN because it's such a specific a specific test that even though we could definitively state where the radiator performed best in that case the s340 elite that doesn't necessarily extrapolate out to everything so basically before we did something with it on this channel we wanted to test it in more cases but that's over there and then along with that test and we also provided them with some pretty quick silent versus performance pomp speed testing and I think this was on annex 42 if I can find the article on their blog I'll link it below but because it was I mean it was written by us by Patrick and I worked on it as well and it reads just like any of our other articles it's just it was work done for them so the silent versus the performance numbers from memory I think we saw about a four degree benefit by going to performance from silent on that radiator in that case as opposed to an open-air batch we'd maybe see different results so about four degrees under load I think idle temperatures we saw at most it might have been a degree but I'm pretty sure the idle temperatures were closer to less than like 0.5 degrees Celsius different between silent and performance which makes sense not under any load so it's just gonna be as close to ambient as it can be and yeah that's that's more allow us to start in the end of it you'll see a couple degrees different difference but I think once you start getting into open loops it matters more as you get into higher heat loads in the loop and different setups with multiple radiators and things like where you've got a lot more tube lengths to cover and things like that then it probably starts mattering more but I haven't tested that so I couldn't tell you for sure but for a closed loop liquid cooler which is what the question was here it matters a little bit but I think this relates Matt wolf who was in chat talking about as the discord patreon chat was talking about replacing I believe his hybrid CLC cable to slow down the pump speed of the CLC so if this question relates to that then you could easily run your pump for one of those coolers at 80% and be perfectly fine and the noise basically disappears and there's not really gonna be a temperature difference so if that's the kind of point of the question I would say definitely just lower the pump speed if it's causing noise for you maybe drop to like the equivalent of seven volts for the speed and and you'll be in good shape and not really lose any temperature any thermal performance that's worth speaking of but again that that's all I know so CLC's I know pretty well and with CLC is generally speaking pretty much always less than four degrees Celsius difference I've maybe seen one instance of like five degrees open loops I think get a bit different as you expand the loop and things like that you have different needs so I can't speak to those the next question is from V thoroughly oh and this I believe was posted to YouTube so V Thor says hey Steve great Channel and great Nick video content thank you keep it up I have a question if the next ask GN why don't we have hardware that's capable of determinate determining its own limits for overclocking like why can't motherboards and graphics cards specifically a IV partners auto-tune themselves to the maximum provided some parameters like fan speed or CPU and GPU temps and voltages in an ideal world you'd plug in any C you two compatible socket and the same with the GPU and have a button on UEFI that's labeled OC for me if this already exists why isn't it more widespread it definitely does already exist it doesn't work great so you'll see a lot of motherboards with I think just as OC I'm bummin does this want to have it yeah this gigabyte gaming 7 I have next to me from our GPU bench has one on there actually an OC button and an eco button most board just have those buttons now MSI as them in UEFI some of them have physical switches on the board they don't so two parts your question I think that what you're really asking is why can't the board or the video card determine what the max performance is and just set it to that as opposed to why not have a button that pre overclocks what these really do is they kind of have a look up where they go this is a 7700 k let's try and set it to 4.9 gigahertz at this predetermined voltage and these two numbers together work in ninety percent of use cases so let's just apply that for the user that's all they really do generally speaking it's not like they're sitting there stepping through enumerated through voltages and determining the lowest stable voltage which is what you should do when you're overclocking because if you don't do that you're just blasting the thing with voltage which is one not great for the CPU and two just a waste of power and causes more heat so Auto o'seas really don't work that well at getting you a good overclock they'll overclock and most the time they'll be stable because the manufacturer has basically said we know that one point three five volts on a KB Lake CPU will sustain pretty much any four point nine gigahertz overclock on those KB Lake CPUs so let's just apply one point three five volts to everything that the user hits us button for and it should be stable and from that perspective they're correct it would be stable but it's it's going to be pretty hot and you don't need it to be that temperature so what I would recommend if you are someone who is either afraid of overclocking or a little anxious about it or you just don't have any experience with it what I I mean ideally you kind of look around for guides maybe look up reviews and kind of find what the mean number is that people can achieve without extreme measures so let's say let's take kb lake again as an example or even Rison let's say with Rison you know that roughly four gigahertz is achievable on most our 7s and with kb lake i sevens you know that roughly 4.8 to 5.0 gigahertz is achievable on those so you pick that number and kind of increment your way towards that number I would suggest starting with an auto voltage run a short test and look at what the voltage is in hardware info 64 ADA or CPU zo they're not always accurate look at the voltage outputs there and then take that number reboot set it manually and set it a little bit lower than that maybe a hundred millivolts lower so let's say that you go to four point nine gigahertz and it's automatically adjusting to one point three five volts so reboot go into BIOS change that one point three five number two something like maybe one point three three see if it's stable reboot keep lowering it until it's no longer stable then go up a bit that's what I would recommend rather than Auto OC because you're gonna get the best the best thermals the best power consumption and it'll be stable as you do it yourself it does take time but yeah I there to answer your question directly there are buttons on a lot of the boards I just don't like them and I would recommend taking the approach I just described as for video cards these kind of do already pre overclock so video cards are really interesting right now and video has Boost 3.0 they've had it for a while Boost 2.0 and below basically said let's say your frequency on the video card was thirteen hundred megahertz so when it's playing a game you look at gpu-z or some other tool it's always thirteen hundred megahertz it's a flat line with Boost 3.0 it I jump around between 1280 and 1330 megahertz and ultimately your performance will be better for it your power performance is better in terms of consumption you're probably your thermals will be better when necessary your performance in terms of frame rate will be better but it's still not overclocked as far as it can be you can get it a bit further on your own because they're always a bit conservative and also it's kind of annoying to try an overclock with a boost 3.0 and video card or with an AMD Vega card because they auto adjust their frequency of it and and that means that setting a target frequency just doesn't always work in an intuitive way so one item of note here is with the auto or what adaptive voltage frequency scale and I think a BFS I think that's what it stands for is it's a vote frequency curve so new cards you can go set a volt frequency curve on Pascal I have a feeling am these going this direction as well and with precision it will actually sit there and iterate through volt frequency settings and basically auto set the max clock you can kind of get without pushing it harder yourself that would be the equivalent of this button on a video card Vega doesn't have it I think AMD will probably go that direction eventually but it's kind of their the stuff you want is kind of there on video cards already it's just it works a lot better than I think them the OSC buttons on CPUs but it still could use user oversight if you want more out of it it's just it does a good job on its own next question I was just one mad wolf again okay we've got two from him apparently hi Steve to disassemble a 1080i hybrid for a pwm adapter install is it necessary to remove the backplate and basically do what you did in the teardown video is it possible to just remove the top cover where is okay so I have these cables I just ordered these to do a thing about this tutorial these came from China and it's about the only place you can find them so these are very specific cables these are the four pin GPU fan header on this side - 4 pin motherboard fan header on this side so what you can do this is where this does loop back into the first question for mad wolf he has been embarking on trying to lower the pump noise of the hybrid cart so you take it apart to answer the question immediately yes you take off the back plate and some of those screws go into the shroud and some go into the base plate or the cooling the heat sinks for the prm's and things you take that all apart and expose the pump and the pump header then you disconnect the pump from the PCB and plug it into this side and then you plug this ultimately into your motherboard you get extensions or things like that is necessary that will allow you to control the pump speed through bios like normally like any other fan so we would wreck if if you are a person who's like I really like the idea of hybrid cards but I can hear the pump and it bothers me this fixes it I think I spent 10 dollars on these you have to wait for weeks to get them but that'll fix the problem so yeah that's just questions into one right there next question is from red underscore M who says Steve could you maybe look at doing case roundups I personally have a 1/2 X and I'm curious to know what you look for in a case for personal systems we've done case round ups in the past we did one not long ago for mid towers it was pretty driven on data I have the half X as well it was my personal case for a long time and what I look for personally so when I'm building a system which I don't really build computers frequently for myself I've had I tend to build them and keep them for like three or four years because it's got all the business stuff on there and it's a pain in the ass to move it all around and like find everything keep track of all the files and all that get the environment going there's a lot of software I need that is annoying to reinstall and then you run into situations where in a time crunch you're like I forgot to reinstall the thing that I need right now so I don't really build systems a lot for myself but what I do like I'm gonna be using the be quiet dark Bass Pro 900 which is down there under the table I'm using that for my next build I'm currently using a throne Rosewell throne which is similarly large and I before that I used the I want to say I had it maybe in a Thor at some point and I had it in the I wanted to build in the Raven rv0 - like that case a lot never built in it and then I also like the half axe originally I don't like it anymore for a lot of reasons mostly dust and I think I before that it was the antique 900 and stuff like that so basically trend of large cases I go for bigger cases because it sits on the floor forever and it's gonna be there for years I care more about things like being able to fit all the components that I want to put in there and having easy access to maintain it so the system I have now although it's old I've gone in there I've replaced - replaced three coolers now I have replaced the video card a couple times the hard drives are kind of stacked on on the floor of the case but I can fit a lot of them that way and the idea is to be able to get in and out and swap components without having to like pick the thing up and move it in here and do a whole hour long process I wanted to take me five minutes to swap a component so that generally means bigger cases I also need a lot of hard drive bays in my cases we do have an ass but I have a lot of drives internally so those are my requirements I care a lot about thermals the cases tend to be loud I tend to go for cases with a side panel intake and when I don't have one I drill holes in it and put one there so yeah that's that's kind of what I go for in a case next question is from Kay real or Crill 89 who said I asked this Lac last week I was the YouTube video a Szyslak last week twice but probably after you made this video would need to ask Andy for this so Andy on my Vegas 64 gets pretty hot I've seen it get up around 85 see what is the safe temperature for it to run at for an extended period of time I also seem to have a bit when I overclocked the memory and I don't know what that that part means but basically what I'm seeing here is what's the safe temperature for HBM to and the answer is I just emailed Sampson I got a response it's not a number yet but I got a response basically saying that we'll talk sometime in the next week or so and hopefully they can answer my question I'm not sure if they can share that publicly it's not always the case so I don't have a data sheet on HB m I don't know what or - I don't know what its specs for cooler is better but I yeah I mean I just don't know if 9 DC is kind of the cutoff that tends to be what it is for GGG r5 x you don't really want to go above 90 C but uh yeah I don't have an answer for you but I've asked the right people and hopefully they can tell me so basically stay tuned for next episode hopefully last question is from idle voice who says at what point do you saturate a custom water loop I read some stuff that beyond a certain amount of rad space for your extra part for your parts extra radiator space isn't going to do jack squat for you what determines that limit so the limit is basically the heat transfer rate is proportional to the surface area and I'm going to quote some of ESG here from thermal bench again because he summed it up pretty well so he was saying heat transfer rate is directly proportional to surface area and delta T so adding a radiator affects both parameters meanwhile bottlenecks remain the same so eventually you get to a point where the heat that can be removed as minimal when delta T approaches 0 so delta T here is the liquid temperature versus the ambient temperature so if your liquid is 24 and your ambient is 23 you're at one that's your Dells a team value for that so as that number approaches zero you're kind of hitting the peak of what you can do and this is a scenario where adding more radiators does not give you a linear reduction in temperature it depends a lot on the heat load of the system so because it's not a specific question there are a lot of openings here to look at it different ways if you have a system with let's say like an overclocked 600 watt eye 9 + 3 10 8 et eyes or 3 Vega 56 is with the power mods on them and you've somehow you plugged it into a dryer plug at that point as you increase the heat load to something like that more radiators will help more but it's a you get diminishing returns for the systems that are more reasonable you get diminishing returns anyway but yeah basically proportional heat transfer rate to service area and then as your liquid temperature versus ambient approaches zero you basically have no more room to grow so keep an eye on that if you have a temperature sensor in your liquid if you don't definitely get one but if you have one pull that number up hardware info 64 can off and read them off of the motherboard headers and then compare that to your ambient temperature keeping in mind that your AC control unit on the wall might have its sensor somewhere else in the house so it might not be 100% accurate but it's probably pretty close then compare those two numbers if you're getting near zero probably stop adding stuff to the loop because it's not gonna help you at that point so that's all for this time as always please leave more questions below if you'd like to chat with us directly go to patreon.com/scishow and axis join the discord I hang out there most the day at this point and just kind of answer questions every now and then so tag me if you want to ask a question directly but otherwise throw it out gamers Nexus not not to help us out through other means got the hats and the shirts there subscribe for more I'll see you all next time