Gadgetory

hey Ron welcome back to another episode of ask Jan I think we're on our 60th episode now I think which in the world of what we do is a special number because 60 stands for 60 fps of course so because of that we are not doing anything special to celebrate but thank you for joining if you have a question for next episode leave it in the comment section below got a couple follow-up ones again on coffee like have some content on gpu-z which I'm trying to get answers on a few popular questions there and some other stuff on just cooling and electricity and things like that so lots to go through today this video is brought to you by the be quiet dark based Pro 900 white edition the DBP 900 marks a return to full tower cases equipped with ample harddrive support effective at noise damping foam high performance fans and the option to be inverted into an alternative layout the tinted tempered glass window and Qi charger at a high untouched to an already well-built case learn more at the link in the description below so let's start with this episode with going through a list of beefs and grievances user crimson posted like three comments now on different videos saying including the review of the 8700 K saying did you why or actually it wasn't even did you test before deleting it was like why did you test after delayed in which we need to have a conversation about how to phrase a question I think but ignoring that as I answered the first time to the question no we did all the testing on the 87 or K stock before deleting except for the deleted thermals obviously so I wanted to address that in a video because it keeps getting posted and the user is obviously not reading my account replies which is fine YouTube is filled with comments but putting it here hopefully will answer that question for other people who may have had it we always test those things stock out of box before any mods and then the mods are tested within the realm of the mods so dewetting was done and the thermals and dilating section after everything else was done obviously now part of that is because I mean one it's out of box but two we don't want to destroy the sample before we through the review so yeah hopefully that question doesn't come up again but this next one is there's a two more here so this was on the content where I was talking about it was the news video where I was talking about how thermal testing works and how you can't just say like so-and-so got 92 and this person got 68 and it's like it's not a score it depends on everything so yeah back to that stuff this this one Jordan malechy Oh said always prefer out-of-the-box animals in all caps to reflect what the general public will experience in setting up their systems I agree with the concept however a couple things here what does out-of-the-box things mean so with regard specifically to the CPU I would agree that out of the box means you're not deleting it and putting liquid metal on so we could establish that if the CPU comes with a stock cooler then you could also test with the stock cooler and that would be pretty valuable information the 8700 K doesn't come with the stock cooler so the next thing you're looking at is what cooler do you use now for us we use one cooler for all of the thermal testing so that we have comparative data if we wanted to present it as comparative data CP to CPU this gets really difficult to do though just total aside here but comparing CPU thermal data between architectures is just it's it's basically impossible to do it accurately because you don't know if the sensors on CPU a are different from the sensors on CPU B they could be in different places they can measure different things like the average different ways we don't know that until name they don't share that information even comparing to AMD versus Intel thermals is basically a fallacy can't really do that you can however compare power consumption which is why power consumption is so important because for lack of a trustworthy thermal metric because no software outputs a thermal metric and says this is identical on AMD and Intel because that's not how it works for lack of that we can't a power consumption at the EPS 12-volt rails and you can more or less figure out the now put because power and temperature go hand-in-hand I mean he is energy so that's why the power consumption charge is so important you there are ways to compare the two I'm not going to talk about them today we've been looking at some of them but none of them involve software because it's just not gonna work so that was a complete aside as far as like comparing CP temperatures across architecture things like that but the next part so this guy's comment of I prefer out of box thermals to reflect what the public will experience the next part of that is let's say we all agree on a CPU cooler maybe maybe for low end CPUs we all agree that a hyper 212 or an analogue to the hyper 212 would represent a low end user build in terms of cooling options so we just kind of assume we all agree on that the next part though is what software do you use to burn the CPU in and this is why we use Prime and blender because prime95 there's a lot of different versions of it like 30 of them but they all kind of do slightly different things and all of them in one way or another will torture the CPU in ways that either will or won't ever be experienced by user for gamers all of the time Prime is kind of absurd kind of like fur mark is however blender also serves as a test that's somewhat real-world and represents how the CPU can be used in a non synthetic application now prime of course represents compute workloads to some extent so it is kind of a realistic application but it's not realistic enough for most of our audience hence the edition of blender you get into things like games those don't really work for thermal tasks for a number of reasons but blender is a pretty good one because blenders it's really consistent it maintains 100% load non-stop for the most part and it's super easy to replicate it does the same thing every time so it's what you want without being prime which is also crazy good at what it does but it's it's got a lot of difficulties in there in terms of benchmarking and it's not always representative so for out-of-the-box thermals reflecting what the public experience is the question is again what does the public the public expect to see there and so that's why we do blender and prime prime gives you a complete torture scenario where you know this is one of the worst possible cases for the CPU it should not get any worse than this and you want to know that because you want to know under a worst-case scenario does it throttle or experience some kind of bad behavior because if it does that's clearly a flaw by the company's manufacturing or engineering even if it's not common to be experienced you need to control for those worst case scenarios and then you have blender for a real world because the next question of course is does the CPU function as expected in a real intensive scenario like blender again so that's why we do those and the point of saying all of this is to highlight that once again like it did in the news video temperatures and thermal testing it's it's a lot more involved than just turning on hardware info and telling it's a log because you really need to understand what's going on another good example is prime so you can use version twenty six point six twenty nine point two twenty eight point five any of those twenty six point six is non AVX and that's important so if you use twenty nine point two or twenty-eight point five with AVX workloads and you start spinning off let's say typer thread it to a VX threads per core that's going to generate a hell of a lot more heat then twenty six point six with no AVX so again it's important to understand what applications being used to test and that's why you can't compare thermal data across site without both of them doing the same thing with the same cooler with same frequency with the same voltage with the same ambient temperature and so on so yeah thermal is for our testing our numbers for temperatures are meant to be compared to our other numbers for temperature unless otherwise noted it's not always conducted the same way we kind of leave it up to you to read the chart title and make that that decision of is this the same as the other one because a lot of time they're not but we have all that information on the chart title so you can tell so hopefully that helps some of it now next thing so the this was a similar comment that I want I'm addressing these now because thermals recently have become out of nowhere more interesting to a lot of you we've been covering thermals for like years now and no one's cared but suddenly people care so time to talk a bit more about how it all works but this college from Allen Tinsley who said thermal should be consistent across the board 30 degrees Celsius is huge this is referencing an hour I don't know 70 vs. lioness is 92 or whatever so 30 C is huge thermal should be consistent across the board heat sink is irrelevant when pro review is performed the same benchmark since all respectful reviewers use the best they have not sure what that means gamers Nexus lost a lot of street cred with this video okay so street cred aside which is something that I've always strived for I've never wanted anything more than than to be a street so um that's a GN hat by the way by one hahaha so yeah this comment no just no heatsink the heatsink is not irrelevant why do all of these heatsink companies exist if it's irrelevant so okay if I put a hyper 212 on one GPU and then I put the other one under like let's not even go crazy let's just say that knock to a ninety dollar air cooler that's gonna be a huge difference like when you look at a CPU cooler review right we published CPU cooler reviews you look at one of those and you'll notice the temperatures different for basically all the CPU coolers why would the temperature be different because it matters which one you use so that's a huge point in what kind of temperature output you get and if you use a lower-end cooler with a thermal test you start running into throttling scenarios which is very important data to have it's important to tell users hey the CPU cooler is inadequate to cool the CPU under these conditions however it also means that you don't actually know how bad the thermals are because you're throttling so early in the process that you don't get that comparative day because it's it stops itself from heating up further so yeah again both sets of data can be and probably are accurate within their parameters but know it thermal performance is not consistent across the board of reviewers because everyone uses a different piece of software and hardware to cool the CPU even just putting the thin in a case versus not can I have a big difference and as far as like the one argument you could make is thermal performance for the most part should be fairly consistent out of box with a stock cooler if the CPU includes own with which the 8700 K does not with a stock cooler with the same motherboard with the same efi with the same voltage and frequency tables with the same piece of software and with the same piece of monitoring software all those things bundled together their whole performance should be consistent I agree but that's an awful lot of things to be consistent between tests and we don't have a big cabal of reviewers that gathers annually to determine who uses what so it really like I I know it's more work but you really just have to look at all the different testing approaches and find the one that fits your scenario does it to pull the data from it that matters most to you that's all there is to it so yeah hopefully that kind of addresses that one I'm gonna go a bit further here and refer to our previous motherboard differences content 4x 299 we have some charts we can throw them on screen briefly I'm not going to talk through them I don't have the data in my head but you can check the video basically just switching motherboards can impact temperatures massively I'm talking like 20-plus degrees Celsius we saw this with the 7700 K originally when gigabyte had their gaming 7 board that we now use in bike actually Izzie 270 board but at a time it had outrageous Auto voltage settings where it was blasting the CPU I don't remember I think it was one point three five to one point four volts like all the time and they fixed it but doing that means that the temperature of that CPU on that motherboard is going to be way higher than on let's say a gigabyte or an asus board that has an auto voltage of maybe 1.25 and actually to that point I do remember these numbers I think gigabytes before the fix was something like one point three five to one point four volts at the same frequency mind you and the other board we tested we were able to get stable on an MSI board at like one point one eight drop one point three five one point one eight volts is massive that means your power consumption drops a lot and that means that your thermals drop like 20-plus degrees Celsius in some tests so just again to reiterate the motherboard used matters and this bleeds into one of the actually really good suggestions or questions from the from the last ask G and let me see if I can find it's out of order here this one was from Nelson Fernandez de Lima who said Steve it is starting to make more sense instead of only doing CPU benches start to do also motherboard vendor benches this thing of some then this so this topic of some vendors having differences in the thermals because of the voltage you can figure are not the same as the users obviously not not english-speaking for a sangwich but I understand what you mean I think most people do so if I understand this question correctly its Steve instead of us just CPU review insert CPU name review we need to better take a better note to the motherboard used because the motherboard impacts thermals because the voltage configured is is not the same across boards that's more or less what I'm getting from it and I agree so yeah this is where we've been doing actually a lot more of these so we had the X 299 motherboard differences impact on thermals video and previously we had one for Z 270 with the game and seven so we're doing it more in trying to raise some awareness to this but yeah basically Auto voltage and frequency across all these boards can vary a bit frequency not so much of they comply with Intel spec but voltage for sure so for example I don't know if I can publicly say who it was but one of the board vendors I spoke with recently was saying that the reason some of their voltage readings that we saw were higher than their competition by about I think it was like a hundred millivolts or something it was it was a decent amount higher so they were saying the reason that there actually was it was less than that it was like yeah anyway smell is 60 millivolts so the reason that their voltage readings in our test were 60 millivolts higher than a competitor's voltage readings was because they found in a specific application Adobe Premiere actually the CPU with a multi-core enhancement feature enabled would become unstable and so what would happen is if you enable MCE or whatever it's called in that particular board the CPU would boost to its maximum single core turbo except across all cores and it was stable for the most part but every now and then you hit an application that's a little weird blender is one of them and apparently Adobe Premiere is too and so the motherboard vendor has no control to target Adobe Premiere and say hey when this application launches increase voltage by 60 millivolts all they can do is say increase voltage by 60 millivolts period all the time or it can figure a table for it but that's what you get and so leading back to Nelson's question or suggestion I yes I mean the differences between motherboards can be tremendous especially early in a launch cycle now they they eventually kind of even out over a few months sometimes it takes a few of them a year to get everything correct but they kind of give an out at launch though please always keep them and we'll do our best to kind of mention this in a very short version every time but keep in mind that when you're looking at temperature and power numbers specifically those two they're gonna be pretty big differences board to board and in our Exton iodine test recently we saw that one of the Giga by EF I is pulling I think about 70 watts more than one of the competing boards I want to say in a Susie EFI that's huge 70 watt increase you know you go from like 190 or whatever it was to 260 that's a pretty big jump that's enough to surpass some competing chips so it comes down to like who looks bad there is it the CPU maker is it AMD or Intel or is the motherboard maker it should probably be the motherboard maker but it's hard to always make that distinction especially when it's early in a launch cycle and because there's so there's so little understanding I guess in general of how much the motherboard impacts these things it pretty much always goes back to either AMD or Intel being at fault which can certainly be true but a lot of the time it is the board vendor and it gets bit muddy because you could say well the board vendor was waiting for specs from the CPU vendor so it's really the CPU vendors fault ultimately like Intel and the x-29 instance of pushing launch forward a couple months from August to whatever it was that's partly on Intel but and AMD the issue is that with rise ins launch which were just about as many as xc-99 a lot of the issues those board vendors had or because AMD gave them the final microcode two weeks before launch so it's kind of messy everyone's kind of at fault to some extent but the point is as viewers and readers you have a responsibility to yourself to understand that there are differences between boards and when you look at review numbers between review sites just look at the number figure out what board they use go look at the other number to figure out what board they use and then rather than saying these two sites are in conflict with their data they're either both wrong or one of them is wrong instead look for other data that corroborates that by using the same boards and figure out which board is is less desirable so a pretty long section there but let's go through some of the others this one is from well this one I actually came with with photos this from RJ Flemming 82 on the patreon backer discord if you want to join that you can go to patreon.com/scishow and axis and join us there so RJ fleming asked question on air cooling sli as you can see i have the 120-millimeter Noctua on top of the GPU I've seen GN and other channels put a fan over an SLI config for thermals most times pushing air down with two inlets in the rear I've made this nock to a fan pull air from between the card so it's pulling out my thermal seem better this way is there a reason GN prefers pushing air down on the card or a fan of this config yes so we are pretty much always doing those kinds of tests either an open air or in an open like big case and generally speaking for our setups particularly with open air all that really matters is that you feed as much cold air to it as you can and then you're trusting if it's a blower card you're trusting that it just exhausted all out the back and if it's not then you're basically just going for pushes much cold air and as possible and then the rest of it will just by nature of all this airflow going one direction all the linear feet per minute or whatever airflow it'll just kind of find its way out the back of the system and this gets to a point where when we do some more extreme really like hot thermal burn ends I think we did with oh when I had Vega set up to draw like 4 or 500 watts of power when we do that if I'm not doing a thermal measurement test and I just want to get the hot air out of the room so that I can keep benching and testing games and stuff I'll actually set it up so that the the bench is kind of shifted so it's facing the exhaust out of the window open the window and then set up some fans case fans near the window that just push air out so that's that's the part you don't see if I'm pushing air down onto the card I probably have something else behind it off the camera off the out of the photo that's getting it out of the room because that's when we do live streams like in this setup right here in which case all that air is normally going on to my feet or face so that's that's where the heat goes in those instances one more note that's related to both this and the previous set of questions I mention all the stuff about motherboards ambient also matters so keep that in mind we log ambient second a second with thermocouples and that allows us to make sure it's consistent or if it's not make adjustments or modifiers as necessary but that's just another point of consideration is ambient ambient room temperature next question liquid paper from discord asked Steve can you talk a bit about the temperature effects of different mounting locations for a radiator in an AIO setup I think Jay did a small piece on this a while ago and found that a front-mounted radiator is best for CV attempts I understand that a various case to case what temperature's would someone generally see you mounting on the top exhaust versus intake we've done some of these tests in the past there is no one-size-fits-all answer cases are the least scientific tests you can do because every case will behave differently with every every configuration some cases for example if they have the clothes off front panel like the s340 elite they're gonna have worse their own performance of the front mounted radiator then obviously case with a mesh or in the same case like that's through 40 elite we actually did some testing on that one with a 140 radiator mounted in the the front the top the rear as part of that NZXT blog I was talking about last episode and I don't exactly recall all the data offhand but you kind of have to start measuring a lot of things like if you're gonna get really serious about it you have to look at things like the GPU temperature as well because front-mounted might be better in some cases for the CPU like it with a mesh front especially but you have two considerations with a CLC you might be forced to have your tubes up which is suboptimal you want them down and the second consideration is now you're taking all that heat from the CPU and you're dumping it into the graphics card so do you have a means for the GPU to deal with that heat and does it require increasing GPU fan speed to a point where your case is now louder and it'll be louder anyway from having the cooler in the front where there's a mesh anyway because you have more noise escaping from the front so there is no one-size-fits-all answer I will say what I have found generally speaking is that I prefer to Mountain the top if I can for that because if it's in the front the the tube orientation things are concerned but also in the front mounted position I just I don't like that heat going into the case so my preference is because GPS are way more sensitive to thermals than CPUs these days my preference is keep the CPU reasonably cool and if you have a CLC that's not going to be a problem and then get the GPU as cool as as possible in that case it's cool is mechanically possible so I like to do top mounted but it's not always better depends on the case and sometimes top mounted intake is something that you want we tested this in the coop like Hales ero for years and years ago we're a top mounted intake both helped CPU thermals with a tower cooler and significantly lowered the vrm temperatures around the CPU which is a concern with some be 350 boards and other lower end boards that have hot be RMS so keep all that in mind but yeah sorry there's no simple answer we have generally found that with the right mesh front it is cooler in the front but again Vega and Pascal are both so hyper sensitive to temperature that you're going to notice more from a 5c increase there then you will from a 5c increase in the CPU and the CPU just it really doesn't care it won't throttle until it hits t.j.maxx let's do a let's see let's do one more with a note the note first it's Raymond Kwok asked I think on YouTube you have two questions asked this on YouTube do you know what the hotspot temperature measurement in gpu-z actually measures there's speculation on forums no I don't I sent a message with that question to the guy who makes DBZ from tech power up and hopefully he'll respond but if he if he knows and responds I'll answer it next week next the last question Dennis Nedry asks how much electricity our users wasting leaving their gaming rigs running idle games going 24/7 could you maybe sure how much kilowatt hour usage is in a common gaming bill in the last two to three years we show power consumption tests and most of our use these days so you can get those numbers there but let's say idle without games depending on on what power settings you have in Windows and SSD and what you allow to sleep and stuff like that it can be let's just assume kind of a higher performance profile where you're not really letting it properly go to sleep you're still looking at at the low end like 50 watts and at the high end my system idles at 200 watts it's an older FX series system it's not configured very well and it gets hot so 50 to 200 watt range pretty big but let's just say you're about 70 watts cuz that's mostly what we see in our high performance profile idle test with most GPUs and CPUs if you're there it's not a ton of power but you can take that number and post and go find a kilowatt hour electricity cost calculator put in the cost for your region I don't know what it is and calculate for the number of watts it's gonna be pretty damn low for idle idling in games isn't really idle I know what you mean you mean the users walked away but if the the system is running a game that can be that I mean that's a big range that's like 100 watts to a thousand watts or more just depends on their configuration but let's take kind of a safe configuration that maybe is reasonable from other people to have let's call 300 watts 300 watts to burn 24/7 adds up fast and I mean we can actually I'll just do a quick calculation of this assuming a I'm going to assume a 10 to 12 cent per kilowatt hour cost because that's about what it costs us for electricity and let's put that in okay so I'm using rapid tables here I just came out first so let's say power consumption is 300 watts for some game with maybe 10 seventy or vaga 56 well no not that ten seventy or five seventy type of hardware or something like that that's not being stressed too hard and let's say it's being used 24 hours a day and let's say your kilowatt hour cost is 12 cents which i think is the US average that comes out to $26 per month 316 dollars per year in terms of cost now of course there's a question of should you be needlessly burning electricity if it is truly needless then probably not but there's your answer it's it's pretty hard to make electricity cost a lot and 300 watts is a middle-of-the-road estimate so you can put the number to get more accurate but still 316 bucks a year when it's not needed that's pretty good savings so hopefully that gives you an idea last question was JL Rockefeller gamers Nexus why does your logo look like a pokemon ball I believe they're called pokeballs thank you very much come on okay all right thank you for watching leave questions below if you have them subscribe for more go to patreon.com/scishow Gary's X's tell us that directly or if you want to be one of the questions from here that was from discord chat and finally if you can't do patreon but you want to help elsewhere store a gamer's access net we have shirts like whatever I'm wearing right now I can't look at it because then it'll blow out the mic audio so subscribe more I'll see you all next time