Gadgetory

hey Ron i'm steve from gamers nexus dotnet and we're back for another ask GN episode lots of good questions this week they get better every week and i really do mean that they're getting very good and it helps me call with new article ideas talk about some things that maybe I've thought about but haven't really written or done a video about so please keep it up if I missed your question sorry we you know we can only fit so many in a video without it being ridiculous so just post it again and I'll try and get to it or tweet at us at gamers nexus for the next video so let's get to the first one the first one is from mark mark has a pretty good amount of text here but the gist of the question is how do I know how many lanes talking about PCI Express Lanes my current processor has how does it allocate those lanes which would be referring to probably the chipset chipsets allocate lanes HSI o lanes differently then purely pcie a lot of the time excuse me and then he also says how many ladies motherboard has chipset and is basically asking how do you know what do you do with pcie lanes how do you figure out what you need so here's the thing we've talked about this a few times now it's been a recurring topic in the episodes and hopefully at this point things are starting to make a bit of sense pcie lanes come in a few forms but ultimately it's just a pcie lane it's a form of communication through which some device the cpu chipset communicates with a device in a pci express slot which is an interface it was what we call those and those interfaces have bandwidth limitations they have standards they have pin counts all this stuff and that creates the PCIe laying the PCIe device pcie slot all that so when it comes to PCI Elaine's first of all to know how many your processor has the best thing to do if it's not on our website or something just go to google and type in the name of the architecture for the processor or the chipset often will work as well followed by block diagram so if you go to google and you type in z 170 block diagram that diagram which I've shown in a previous video several times now should include two thins it'll have the CPU normally at the top and then the chipset at the bottom which is Z 170 so even though you're looking for the chipsets block diagram it should include the current generation or generation appropriate CPU diagram in there as well which will tell you how many pcie lanes the CPU has those lanes from the cpu are generally what's allocated to your graphics processing devices the CPU unlike the chipset just has access to maybe 20 maybe 24 maybe 40 in the case of the ex 99 2011 CPUs some amount of lanes it takes those it gives it to the high powered devices and then the chipset does the rest so in the case of the Z 170 chipset you have 26 HSI oh lanes those can be allocated to various things they can be allocated to SATA two gigabit ethernet but they can also be allocated 20 of them are already allocated to pcie however as we've discussed a few times out the chipset lanes are used for i/o so if you have 20 pcie lanes from the chipset and they're in groups of four or five groups of four you're generally going to be using those not for graphics which you really would want x8 if you're doing SLI but you'd be using those for storage so m dot too for example a lot of people maybe don't know this i'm about to is a PCIe device even though it's called m dot to it will use pcie lanes and the thing to note here is well how many lanes doesn't end out to device use and generally the safe assumption is four lanes but some lime a bit slower or older and they will use two lanes you can assign them more not not that you assign them but the chipset can assign them more but it doesn't mean it'll go faster and this is true for basically any device on any interface just like SATA drives back in the day before SSDs were really a thing if you had a say too hard drive it really didn't matter if you have on SATA 2 or say 23 because it was generally other than maybe some bursted increments it was generally not the interface that throttled you but the device that's true here as well so that stated generally the items to look for would be look up the block diagram for the chipset or the CPU that tells you how many lanes are available figure out what your building is it multi-gpu is it more than two GPUs if it is you need to be very careful in your processor selection to make sure that that processor will support an adequate Lane configuration this is different topic for another video maybe but generally just keep it around by eight that's a pretty safe range us to buy 8 by 16 thing yes there is a difference it's very small and the performance gain from just having another GPU is going to sort of make that difference irrelevant but the next thing to look at other than GPUs is actually SSDs if you have pcie ssds or if you have nvme SSDs or if you have m.2 ssds those all use PCIe lanes so you need to make sure those are available through the chipset or somewhere else if not I hope that helps the question was it left a lot to to my interpretation here so if that wasn't a good enough answer then just clarify below and I'll try and address the next week because it's a pretty fun topic and I think we people people probably don't hear about a lot easy over dose asks a big question asking about CPU limitations for benchmarking and it is a it's a pretty big question so the gist of easy overdoses concerns where why don't reviewers post benchmarks using custom settings for games and why don't reviewers try to use higher end or lower end cpu is appropriate to whatever graphics out there testing so this comes down to methodology and specifically talking to the question of custom settings will do a lot of that if you look at our Witcher 3 and GTA graphics guides I sit there i go through every single setting I test all of the benchmark performance FPS I'll figure out okay what's the best setting to use how can you get an extra 5 FPS out of GTX 970 or r9 380 or whatever how do I get an extra 5 FPS out of that without just tanking all the settings down to high or medium from whatever the other setting is so that's something I do but in the benchmarks like with battlefront yes i'm using a preset and there's a few reasons for this and other reviewers will likely agree on at least one of these but the reason most reviewers stick with the presets for settings is about two two main reasons one is usability a lot of gamers will try to just choose a preset because they don't understand the options or don't care to understand the options so in that regard it's easier to present the data to someone who is les savy now it's also easier to search for the data on Google if you're looking for just an ultra bench it's easier to find that said the bigger reason that a lot of reviewers myself included will use the preset is because we want to eliminate the possibility for test errors so this is a testing methodology question which is something that I actually specialized in before and all throughout the creation and existence of gamers Nexus so test methodology was my field and with test methodology your objective is to eliminate the chance for tester or technician error during the execution of a test especially when we're time limited like we often are with games and video cards and one of the best ways to do that is to not screw with anything that you don't have to change so you want to use presets because maybe maybe I have Patrick stone one of our editors maybe I have him come in and run for tests on video cards for battle from for me in that scenario I need to be able to tell him just set it to ultra and set it too high and then run the tests the minute I start changing settings is a chance for him to miss that setting or a chance for me to screw up as the night drones on and missed the setting so it's a testing methodology issue where you don't want to inadvertently introduced test error and generally at least at our website we will always catch test error when it comes to settings if there is any but maybe some sites don't have the the amount of eyes on a benchmark before publishing it in that instance you really don't want to don't want to mess something up inadvertently because it'll skew all the data and you won't find out until it's published so that's why that happens there's other reasons too but one of the main ones battlefront for instance we published the benchmark on that I'm looking at the actual settings do a graphics guide but because I did the benchmark first and because that was the thing that we wanted to do first for strategic reasons we didn't go through and dig through all the settings to see what they all did before the benchmark so it's best just leave it on presets I hope that helps as far as CPU limitations bench test benches are built in a way that is specific to the component of tested so we have one bench for GPUs we have one set of components for CPUs where the platform obviously changes it was set up a bench for RAM all this stuff so there are four or five different computers that are in use on or off for different testing purposes and the reason for that is because you want to isolate all of your environments to make sure there's no contamination so as you install test equipment on one system software otherwise you don't want that to influence for example i'm installing so on the RAM system I don't want it to influence my GPU system you it's very important to make sure that environments aren't contaminated make sure they're the same every time make sure they easily deployable because any kind of change can mess up the data and then you have to rerun all of it potentially months of data so that's how the the benches are built and then in terms of CPU selection in GPU benchmarking you generally want a CPU that will make sure there's no throttling of the GPU so if we're throwing in an MSI seahawk into a bench we probably want to use and did use an x 99 solution with eye on cpu to make sure the CPU does not bottleneck the GPU because if it does we're no longer presenting an absolute performance Delta between all the cards so that's sort of the methodology behind it that goes way deeper than that I'm happy to discuss it quite obviously I've been caught on now so if you guys do want to know more about the methodology just let me know I'll go more into it but I don't want to take too long here one question so moving on Samuel Clinton says my question is not related to specs or any items in specific but i think is something everyone struggles with how to minimize or even neutralize dust from getting in the case so I actually really like this question does it something I've been dealing with myself lately there's a couple ways to do it there's a lot of voodoo magic online arcane BS such a while but couple main ways to do it with cooling a system you have various options liquid cooling air cooling for the sort of primary to everyone's familiar with but there's also things like the stack effect the stack effect is when you create a system in which the air intake is normally on the bottom and the silverstone raven 02 would be an example this it takes on the bottom there's no one take anywhere else only exhaust on top and so you're creating a smoke stack where the air comes in under the case there is going to be cooler towards the ground by the way and that gets pulled up and then shot through the exhaust fan at the top of the case now on this set up the motherboard is rotated which is actually very interesting it's a 90 degree rotation so in that instance your cooling the GPU more efficiently as well this is the best performing case I've ever tested so that uses the stack effect it cool as a sideline to this stack effect cool and often but not always often helps with dust management because you're forcing all the dust through a single intake channel which means it's easier to clean it so here's the the main thing with dust you're never going to build a system that's just magically impenetrable to dust it's always a good idea to clean once a month ideally but if it goes longer that's okay as long as you set it up properly so there is no such thing as a system which won't collect dust but you can minimize it quite a bit and the main ways to do it are to try and force the dust through one area just to make your life easier when you're cleaning so if you have one kind of primary intake area you can do it that way the other main theta is positive and negative pressure systems so if you bill your system with a case where you manually configure the case in such a way that the air intake is is considered positive where the in the air inside of the case is a higher pressure than the air outside that creates a suction action where the air is moving one direction or the other depending on if it's positive or negative so if you set it up the right way you can have sort of an all-in taker all exhaust system that's sort of the easiest top level way to do it but there are cooling issues there you can potentially create vortexes ideally you sort of set up a mix of positive and negative where you just have maybe one or two intake fans you position them somewhere easy to access with the dust cover like most cases now have some kind of dust filtration set up and then the rest is exhaust and the reason that works if you think about it is because if you have exhaust you have air blowing out of the top of the case dust shouldn't be collecting there because there's air coming out of it it should push the dust away right so that will help a lot just kind of do a couple intake fans in one spot and then liquid helps as well not a whole lot because what happens hand as the dust just gets all shoved into the radiator if you don't clean it off in so that is a concern but liquid can help especially do open loop because you can limit the amount of fans you need and then you just set it all up to be exhaust really except for maybe one fan if you if you want to make sure there's some intake of course but you can set up more exhaust that wait in line with the dust so moving on next question Derek L love this channel thank you that that means a lot definitely is a reason that we produce all this content work so hard love this channel my question is about psu degradation if my current setup is using a nineteen ninety percent of my 500 watt psu should i replace it sooner rather than later EVGA recommends a minimum of 500 watts so you're right on the right on the middle I've talked about this a bit but not it not this specific question so first of all the power supplies are happiest when you're using them depending on the the supplier the manufacturer they're happiest when you use them somewhere in the sixty to eighty percent of power utilization range that's when they're the most efficient so a very easy example take a 100 watt power supply depending on the manufacturer it will be happiest if you're using 60 watts of power maybe 80 watts of power leaving some overhead for heat and efficiency loss and degradation as we're just discussing here so degradation is a real thing with power supplies they do actually lose some of their ability to retain that advertised wattage over time they lose some of the charge and that's from things like capacitor aging and other electrical components aging but especially capacitors and especially in lower end power supplies where they're maybe not rated for as many hours like the solid or Japanese capacitors and that's because they start leaking the week power that happen is just from heat from age it makes them less able to retain all the power that they used to so in that case you you do actually face the the question of well when will my power supply died as long as you leave that overhead in there that rule of thumb sixty to eighty percent utilization you'll probably be okay if you're on 500 watts and they're recommending 500 watts for whatever your setup is then you're pretty up against the limit there but just looking at the specs provided to me by Derek Derek Scott at 46 90 k at a 970 I'm not sure how much power that that exact 970 draws but the 46 90 k with a 970 should probably not be really much above 300 watts if it is about 300 watts and that k is written we're in pretty good shape because you're not they recommend 500 but you're not going to be heading 500 probably with that setup unless you have some crazy amount of fans or other stuff going on that I don't know about I hope that helps moving on you to be 24 hello Steve great show as always thank you my question is is it true that you need at least a minimum of 24 to 32 gigabytes of memory system memory to fully take advantage of 12 gigabytes of vram on Titan X thanks in advance so this is an interesting question I'm if you could let me know where you read that that would be really helpful I'm not too active in the workstation communities so maybe maybe was there but it depends on what you're doing if you're gaming you're not going to use them at that vram anyway but the system memory will not be limiting you in game Ian what they might be talking about some sort of virtual memory type thing or maybe they're talking about the workstation application where the workstation will just bottleneck if you don't have that amount of system ram because for example adobe premiere adobe premiere eats all the system ram that you throw at it we have 32 gigabytes in one of our round two rigs 64 and another all of that Ram gets used when we're rendering videos of post-processing effects the video does not come out looking like this from the camera we have to do color correction audio correction stuff like that that takes memory and if we put 12 gigabytes of memory in the system then yes using a tight necks with 12 gigabytes it will probably be throttled by the limited system ram but not because adobe can't use or access the video ram on the titan exits it's more because it's choking on the system ram limitation if it wants more of that before it wants more the via gram so that's one very specific example where I think I understand the question but other than that please let me know specifically what you're talking about and I'll get back to it so hugs a lot was the last real question hugs lot says I asked the slack last week skylake isn't ideal for two-way SLI crossfire due to its twenty lane pcie limitations right so forcing two cards at a texts and significant loss on performance but then again if you can't measure the difference on skype anyway is it at all possible for pcie video card to use by 16 off the cpu and then pcie another pcie card by 16 off the CEO and sony chipset so the answer to that is no these e170 chipset supplies its twenty pcie lanes groups of four as I've said two groups of four which means five sets of 4 20 and because they're in groups of four you can't mix and match them it doesn't work that way they are more meant for i/o throughput stuff like that with my two devices or Wi-Fi cards or gigabit ethernet stuff like that for the HSI oh lanes so no you can't just mix and match the lanes like that for sli that said using two by eight cards currently I'm it might change the future but currently you're not losing a lot of performance by going to buy it from by 16 yes it is half of the potential throughput on the interface but as I said in the beginning of this video the interface is normally not a limiter to the device itself so the PCIe interface is starting to get that way where it's there's potential to limit the newer high end video cards but generally right now at the launch of this video if you have pcie 3.0 by 8 and you have some modern video card a 980 TI you're not going to be losing a lot of performance it will not be significant compared to the performance gain from just having two GPUs and by eight so I would not worry about that too much final thing here the count from dark drifter his head did you shave no and a frowny crying face so there sometimes videos where it might look like this goes unmodified for a while fun fact that normally is a way for you to tell if I've been up for 20 hours trying to produce content so like the the battlefront stuff the star citizen stuff that just came out recently both of those things are very very time-intensive and not friendly with sleep in those instances there might be some sacrifice of management of any kind of hair or a shirt or anything as you'll see in the videos like the star citizen one I have like a white dot right here something that I missed another video I had like a hair hanging off my shirt video so that's normally indicative of how long I've been up producing content but that is all for this time thanks for watching guys please leave more questions comments in the video in this video I'll check this one first and as always hit that patreon link if you like this coverage anything that helps as always big thanks to those of you who have backed us but I do want to make clear again the best thing you can do is is just watch subscribe hopefully learn something that's the goal of the channel and tell people about it posted on social media or whatever because that's that's really the biggest way to spread the word about the channel and help us grow it patreon is great but I don't need direct money I really just want the content to get out there because I feel like working with the audience with you guys we're starting to produce some really cool stuff and it's more time intensive but it's also really rewarding to do so help me share it and thanks for watching I'll see you all next time