Gadgetory

hey Ron welcome back to another episode of ask GN as always leave your questions in the comment section below for the next episode quick note here we're going to play around with the idea of uploading to sgn videos in a week so basically we're not removing a video slot we're going from seven videos to eight videos per week temporarily it's a trial if it goes over well we'll keep doing it but the current plan is to basically upload - Astraea episodes in one day so there'll be about twelve hours apart and that's just because we're getting so many good questions lately with the growth of the channel that we want to try and accommodate more of those per week so we'll see how it goes if the reception is overall positive and if the performance isn't too heavily impacted by whatever YouTube's algorithm does then we'll go with that going forward but additionally as always we'll have the bonus fgn on patreon for people who go to patreon.com/scishow and support us directly all tears get the extra ass chin up so that goes up the patreon and we'll be filming one of those for every at this point two of the normal ones so a lot of good questions this week but before that this video is brought to you by thermal takes view 37 case the view 37 focuses on highlighting custom PC builds with its full panoramic window and tinted front acrylic and our thermal testing the view 37 performed reasonably well when considering its looks focused build which is partly thanks to the airflow design and the removal of a bottom power supply shroud for a balance of looks and performance check the link in the description below for the view 37 first question is from Justin Parrish who says when will snowflake host the news and will there be subtitles and/or dubs available will will let snowflake try hosting the next news episode the next hardware news episode we do have some good b-roll of her lately though she's she's discovered a few new found favorite toys for a little while she liked the infrared thermometer go figure it has a laser and now seems to really really like the basically metal bottle caps that she just knocks around all over the floor next go and we'll get her in some more b-roll shots next one st reMed says Steve one fan reviews we have some b-roll we'll put in the I guess we'll put it up now but basically recently did a behind-the-scenes video for patreon where we showed some of our new fantastic capabilities so it's off to my right over here we've got some shots of it but basically we have the last piece now is coming in the mail so we thought the last piece was the costume breadboard that we worked with a thermal engineer to make we have some b-roll of making that team a we'll throw it in but that breadboard is all done so it's just a it's a power circuit so it allows us to control via basically the world's smallest scope the PWM going into the fan so that will allow us to eliminate the testbench entirely in terms of making sure there's no computer components to keep up for this testing because a few things here so for fan reviews we are going to be doing thermal testing and it will be on a computer let me just say that first however the most important thing with a fan review if done properly just as straight numbers is going to be something like CFM which we can do because we have wind tunnel with a known volume so we can calculate the cubic feet per minute flow by taking the linear feet per minute flow and run it through a spreadsheet with the volume of the wind tunnel so we think CFM we think things like static pressure measurements roughly by impeding the airflow with known common objects like radiators and dust filters we have all that stuff those really the most important elements those things don't require a computer to test other than a laptop to hook up to a scope and send a signal into the fan and tell it what to do so we have the last piece it's really cool it'll allow us to be super accurate with our testing because we're eliminating the variable that is a motherboard which is a gigantic variable you have no idea how many problems motherboards have given us the way some fan headers act versus others it's not they're not all the same and that's a problem if you're testing fans with tight tolerances for differences we are still doing thermal testing just because ultimately you could see CFM differences that look significant but then maybe when you actually thermally test it they perform somewhat similar or close yes a difference that I guess it's all that perspective the CFM is kind of an abstract thing when you're talking about or even linear feet per minute ultimately at the end of the day that's not a number that directly mentally for a lot of us translates back into performance it's the most important metric for a fan airflow is really the only thing that matters theoretically on paper if you know the CFM of fan a is better than fan B that's really all you should need to know in terms of which one will be better thermally because it'll follow and the only difference is for the most part will be generally error or the lack of difference might just be because it's not as relevant as we thought and that's important to test too so that's why we're doing some thermal testing I'll explain it more in a future video but the short of it is we are basically we're setting up a semi pseudo synthetic but not really attached that's for air flow for noise and then we'll be doing a realistic test for thermals the whole point being to tie it all back together and say like okay so these two devices LPM might be 100 points apart but what does it look like thermally does it really matter if a fan that's $10 more and 100 LPM better or whatever is performing roughly the same so that's that's what we're playing now when fan reviews found out I need one more part I said we had one more on the way that I wasn't expecting to need that is a benchtop power source so basically it's just going to allow us to manually control the voltage and the amperage going into the fans so we had a problem with originally I hooked everything up to an ATX power supply I just stripped the PCI or the EPS 12-volt cable and hooked it up to a bench top or to a an ATX power supply that caused problems for non pwm fans because it just didn't work with the way we set it up so I bought a bench top power supply and that'll fix that problem I should have everything we need at this point they'll be really accurate I'll say that much but it is taking quite a while going that said once it's going it should be pretty quick to knock out fan reviews as new fans come out so I'm really really looking forward to it probably testing I'm most looking forward to right now outside our power supply testing which I think we're gonna talk about that this week - I just set up the sun/moon test system in another room so yeah fan reviews coming soon power supply reviews not sure exactly when but we're getting geared up for it we have all the equipment for the most part and yeah I know it doesn't let me give you a direct answer the question I'm hoping to have some fan tests done and published before Computex so that should be the direct answer to your question before economy tax is my target can't promise it if something doesn't work the way I want it to we'll update you but I do think that's semi-realistic at this point next question blue in guidance says is it safe to overclock twenty four hundred megahertz ram to 3000 plus speeds by bumping up voltage and kind of loosening the timings if it's fine to do that does the memory vendor matter if not would you recommend more expensive kits and they'd be like some pee pump it up a little more so first part of the question yeah it's there within limitations it's safe to increase voltage to push the frequency higher generally the guidance is so for isin one a couple guidance pieces on voltage and these official guidance for risin one safe long-term voltage is one point four two core so that'd be where we'd say stop for rise in V core on rising one SOC voltage Verizon one one point two volts is kind of the max safe area the AP use are a little questionable we got sony mixed reports on what the different motherboard vendors and what AMD recommend for safe SOC for the AP use that we're just not a hun percent sure I think our previous AP testing content we talked about that and kind of had some conclusions there be dim though so the memory sticks themselves can take a hell a lot of voltage like I mean these a memory stick you could push 1.8 volts into it and it would be fine for the most part now I obviously make sure you know what you're doing but there are people who run memory you have two volts 2.0 2.1 and the difference is why are you running it that's the voltage so for our testing we did with the x2 9 platform when we did the ripple TT stream we had our memory at something like I think we ended up settling at 1.65 but we did some tests at one point eighty five volts that's fine the sticks were fine they survived doesn't matter but that's not a daily system it's not something that's gonna have thousands of hours of use on it it's kind of booted run through some benchmarks and then disassembled later once you get the score you want so very different worlds for daily use 24/7 use 1.5 v tim is the recommended maximum verizon one risin two and Intel 14 nanometer including sky like acts so 1.5 is the recommended maximum for long-term use even though the sticks themselves can take more you're still going through memory controllers and SOC si IO or voltages to pay attention to as well so I might as well cover some of those Rison one I said 1.4 to 1.2 for SOC 1.5 be dim horizon 2 under 80 degrees Celsius TDI and rising to the max recommended the core is something like one point three eight but it really depends on your thermal solution rise and who gets pretty warm it's not like as hot as X 299 but it's definitely way warmer than risin 11.25 SOC Verizon 2 is max recommended for long term and 1.5 v TM also 440 14 nanometer Intel processors 1.4 to under 90 see if you can manage it and obviously something like an 18 cores gonna have a hell of a lot more trouble with that than something like a 4 core system agent 1.3 IO 1.3 VM 1.5 so the only thing to really be careful of would be increasing your SOC and si voltages and IO voltages because those are easy ones to like yes you can push to one white 4 and it'll probably stabilize a whole lot of stuff for you but the trouble is there will be long-term degradation of IMC so even if it makes your clock stable and everything looks ok thermals are ok whatever what you don't know is that in a couple of months time the integrated memory controller is going to take a hell of a lot of a beating and the frequencies that are stable today at the voltages you have today might not be stable anymore at those voltage in the future you might have to increase the voltage and that's just gonna create just entropy it's just it will continue to get worse at that point or of course you might have decreased the frequency and the voltage to stabilize for for the new degradation so those are numbers hopefully that helps with those you have a question should I just buy better memory the vendor to some extent matters like Samsung B died B died and II died ICS are generally going to be the easiest to work with and generally will withstand higher voltages it's not a hard rule it's just a general rule and as far as like should you buy coarser g.skill whatever they all use different die different kits from different suppliers so there's high annex in samsung and to some extent micron so just buying corsair g.skill won't necessarily mean you get the b diary die that you want if you want that you'll have to check reviews online see if there's any guaranty that the specific memory kit you're looking at comes with B diary die or whatever it is you want and if it definitely does then obviously buy that one to apply cost it more for example G skills tried NZ kits 3600 megahertz as far as I can recall are supposed to be P die basically always but sometimes the vendors mix and match so just make sure you do some research on it it I would have to do the same to answer your question at this point because I don't keep all the memory kits and their memory solutions in my head all the time but those would be the things that look for hopefully that helps next comment I guess is a shady Brady actually I'm glad you asked that I don't think it asked anything but I was quite annoyed when you and others published the videos about X 219 I and how the motherboard VRMs were overheating etc there's some of the worst press I've ever seen out of all the X denying coverage specifically because everybody forgot to mention the VR arms were overheating using a single software test incorrect but I'll get to that moment that is patently false under no circumstances would any was anybody else able to heat up the V arms like a 264 was not what we used even in the single software testing you're referring to that's not what anybody was using in a 64 it's not even that good of a stress test continues on to say not even 5 gigahertz overclocks playing games and rendering videos at the same time at the same time dare borer or whatever his now that's super disrespectful whatever his name is is one of those guys who makes extraordinary claims just to show how nerdy he is I take everything that dude says with a grain of salt by the way I'm not saying you shouldn't run these types of tests bla bla bla bla I know this okay alright I've read enough first of all there bauer is an expert at what he says and has a professional overclocking engineer basically that'd be hard to describe his title he knows what he's talking about secondly we ran similar tests there Barrett so this is probably referring to this horribly horribly ill-informed common is probably referring to when dare Bauer was running tests I think he published a video called the x29 vrm disaster we did some follow-up testing with the Asus Rampage 6 extreme we did a lot of testing on the EVGA x2 night on dark and I think that probably was what we focused on there might have been one other board but we found mostly the same things as eated the rampage 6 extreme was not that impressive for dealing with vrm he and spoiler alert it doesn't require one piece of software and certainly not ADA to create the amount of heat load on the VRMs you can do it with real software in fact we ran basically all of our so d98 exe Thermal tests with blender especially when overclocked why is that because prime95 had some kind of issues with the frequencies we were pushing the voltages we were pushing and I think there was just OCP that was getting tripped on one of the boards but either way a couple things to note here so for VR purposes of erm thermals what you need to know is how much power is going or how much current is going to the board so you can clamp the EPS 12-volt power connectors with a current clamp and see what kind of current is going down those lines into the motherboard we know the voltage it's probably 12 I think our Paris light we tested with is twelve point three volts so twelve point three volts times whatever 50 amps is not unreasonable Forex 299 and you got a hell of a lot of power so I hear over 500 watts in that scenario and in our power testing for which we have many many charts we found that in fact blender with I nine CPUs is capable of pushing more than 500 watts so you can push 50 amps down the EPS 12 volt connectors with I mean you said not even 5 gigahertz which is an insane number to pull out of your ass because if you're talking about something like a 79 80 Hz which is what most the coverage was talking about that's a really high clock so that's kind of pushing your your exaggeration a bit into the realm of complete not being believable alright so here's the thing a lot of our testing is blender blender is not a synthetic software solution in fact our in-house our main video editor and also the guy who does like designs for our merch our clothes so this logo was done in blender the mod mat was designed in blender technically it's all 3d but we just make it just flattened it orthographic is the word I'm looking for this 3d cube blender that's why it's 3d because blender is a 3d modeling solution also animation so blender is a real software solution that real people use every day and blender also uses things like a VX which is not just a prime95 thing and it's not just a stress test instruction set it's like actually useful and blender can create the unreasonable heat and thermal loads we were seeing on some of the X 299 V RMS same for de Brouwer dere Bauer did do a lot of testing with stress software but at the end of the day all that matters is that you're pushing the same current into the vrm same wattage as your realistic software so it doesn't matter if prime95 is pushing 50 amps into the or into the into the board from the EPS 12 volt cable and blenders pushing 50 amps into this and the board via the EPS 12 volt cables doesn't really matter doesn't matter how that power is getting created the fact is it's drawing the same in this scenario and blender uses a VX by the way so yeah it's actually a thing that's not just ease for stress testing so the point is this comet is horribly horribly informed and we were able to replicate the vrm thermal issues with real software this is old news at this point it's several months old I don't even remember our own coverage that well but I remember it enough to know that Prime gave us issues crashing with the 79 80 XE a lot of the time and so we end up using blender for all of our D lid tests using the D letter back there all the liquid metal tests the repel TT stream we use blender to stabilize that before we went on the stream so we can figure out what kind of our baseline clock was going to be so blender is a great software solution that does actual things that professionals use to make movies and also by the way is a very good stress tester and that's typically what we use so this I just wanted to point this out cuz this comment was just so off base and the tone of it was absurd to me so I had to point out how incorrect it was but yeah I mean there's been a vrm thermal problem for a while now I'm glad that you think yours is fine when you're running your taps at 105 see for the whole life of the system let me know and about I don't know a year a year and a half when it blows up and obviously better vrm designs have been coming out for a while now and some large part of that is because people have picked up on it's like gigabytes X 470 board with an actual heatsink that wasn't a mistake that's because people were really complaining and the tech marketing people over there thank you you know who you are pushed internally for improvements in that department even though it wasn't actually needed on that bored but that's kind of you know it matters to talk up about things that are designed in a shitty fashion because they actually get fixed and at the end of the day powers power and if you're pulling a lot of power with any i9 then it doesn't matter how the power is created for the most part unless you're testing CPU thermals in which case it absolutely matters that's created because AV experts not a VX will have a different impact to your CP thermals but as far as the fear is concerned that's what we're talking about right now blender really stressed it so next one kiss Stowe says how would you choose a video card for water cooling would you go for the cheapest variant the founders edition or a card that has a higher clock speed already like a board partner card great question so we previously we talked about the ten atti armor which is an MSI card and the 1080i armor has one of the worst coolers ever outfitted do a card of its power consumption but it's got a really good PCB so 1080i armor used as a gaming X PCB which was one of the higher end ones originally the armor was about 700 and the gaming axe was about 750 poor went out for the GP prizes I guess but the point was you could get an armor and basically have a gaming ax and then just pull the cooler off of it don't use it with that cooler put a liquid cooler on it and you have a really good liquid cooled card that was actually relatively cheap cheaper then about the same price as a founders Edition card at the time that this was all launched so assuming the price equivalence it was a crazy good deal because vrm is better gaming X PCBs great and and then you put your own cooler on Sakhalin solutions totally irrelevant founders edition cards or reference cards in the case of Vega are also just fine the thing with water cooling is the reference designs have the most blocks for them so if you want some variety those are going to be easier to shop for in terms of your liquid cooling solution if you have another card that you like and I'll give you an example that I gave you one the game index PCB you might like the VR I'm a lot will it be better than the founders edition of overclocking it's hard to say a lot of overclock with especially with nvidia gpus comes down to the silicon quality and comes down to the throne performance which you're putting a liquid cooler on it so that's already taken care of but the well I guess if it's a full-coverage block technically if you have a better vrm that spreads out the heat load more then and it's a larger PCB like the gaming x1 so you've got more surface area of copper covering it for a full coverage block then technically the the the fact that you are sharing your GPU cooling solution with your vrm coin solution it will be advantaged advantageous to have a better vrm because you're spreading the heat out over a wider area theoretically there should be less less sort of thermal density and maybe it'll perform a bit better but basically what it comes down to though with NVIDIA GPUs is silicon quality which is why you see some founders additions clock and better than really high-end cards and also the thermal performance so every 5 degrees it gets you meaningful gains in frequency you can gain 12 mega Hertz at a time all the way down to like 20 C as long as I've tested it anyway so if you go down to say 60 degrees from 65 there will be a meaningful increase and frequency the point of saying that is that you put you're putting a liquid cooler on it regardless so that's going to take care of most of your frequency limitations before anything else as far as power yeah they're better VRS than others but the gaming axe is one of the better ones and I just like it because you can buy an armor and get that so it's a really cheap way to do it if there is not a good water cooling solution for that specific PCB because it is oversized reference size cards are fine there are non founders Edition reference sized cards but you still need to make sure that the vrm components are all clear in terms of like clearanced and tolerance for how thick the block is mounted so something like the SCT or an IC X card you might want to buy one of those if you don't want founders Edition because you can get a Founders Edition PCB basically with an see card and which is an EVGA card and you get icx sensors in it so there's not a whole lot of point to this in performance terms it's just if you want some thermistors and your cards you can check the vram performance of erm thermal performance sort of adjacent for backside GPU performance you can get those with an IX card it's really more of one of those things that you play with because it's fun to do not necessarily getting a lot more performance but I would be completely fine recommending a reference card for water cooling because it's just so much easier to work with and it's cheaper to get into or if you can do it something like an armored card which a bit of a hidden gem another PCB is great and the only way to really know that is watched like our PCB teardown analysis videos or build Zoids same thing in one of the same and but when I say that I mean his own channel actually hardcore overclocking has a lot more but he does contract them for us that'd be the best place to start just make sure you get a block for it next one soup can man says now that rise ins main architects lots for Intel how long do you think Andy will stay competitive with Intel I think they're fine so Jim Keller hasn't even been at AMD for quite a while like at least a year not a number of years hasn't been at AMD for a while architectures are in the pipe for a long time obviously he put in a lot of his time before he left but there are a lot of really talented people on that team I can name a couple of corporate fellows who are very talented in the power department I know a couple folks like Mike Clark talented in the being the chief architect Department so I think they're fine Jim Keller obviously brought a lot of talent to the table but working with that team I think AMD CPU division now is pretty much up to speed on what they need to do to make a good product I think they have a really good architecture and roadmap planned out they seem to have gone with a multi-chip approach and it's working out excellently for them and now that they've done that I'm I feel relatively confident knowing the people I know at AMD in the engineering side that they'll be fine without Jim Keller so I don't think I don't think it's like there's any need for panic where people are like first of all Jim cut and just not leave but I don't think there's need for panic where it's like he left and suddenly Andy's screwed he's not the only talented person there there's CBO divisions done really well lately so I think they'll be fine Intel absolutely needs the help with 10 nanometre so it's good that he's going there if Intel's gonna get anywhere with with their future designs next also he's a bit of a mercenary Jim Keller it's totally cool the guy's a brilliant architect and he's worked at least companies on and off for his whole career so it's not unreasonable or uncommon for someone with that talent to shift around between companies as they take on new challenges and obviously get pay raises and things like that and the satisfaction of confident an engineering challenge is this the last one I think this last one before the next episode metal shark says how do you test the maximum safe amperage of a custom-made power supply cable preferably without expensive equipment such as desk bench power supply configurable load thermal imaging camera etc the easiest way is to not test it and look up the wire gauge so you can check the if like cable mod or someone if they don't specify the gauge of the wire you can hopefully figure it out either by peeling back some less leaving and hopefully it's labeled and if not you can measure it there are you just buy most wires triple strippers will have something to help you measure the wire gauge so check the wire gauge and then look up there's a table online that will tell you what kind of current learn to expect for each gauge like 18 versus 16 gauge for instance and you should be good to go that would be the easiest way to do it without needing to melt anything and and sacrifice cables so that's it for this one as always go to store it on Cameron's nexus net to pick one of our 3d teardown Hughes which is made in blender which is a real software solution that's great for thermal testing things and finding vrm at thermal limitations got a little carried away but you can pick it up on stored of cameras nexus net it's super cool for our mod mat and also patreon.com such gamers axis to get access to the bonus episode of ask the yen and check back subscribe more I'll see you all next time you