Gadgetory

hey everyone i'm steve from gamers nexus donna and we're back for another asks GN episode some really good questions this week and a couple that were pretty detailed and i'm not getting to hear but i replied to at least one of them because i want to do a full feature article video everything on that question and particularly i want to do more than just breeze through it on an asked GN episode but let's go through some of the good questions for this week and of course if i didn't get yours please post it again below and i'll see what i can do about the next episode the first one is from dink see who says i have a short question if you could cover it is there any risk to having hard drives placed in a vertical position any known issues of skips failures reading data that you have come across this is actually a really good question and i'm a fan of this question because vertically mounting hard drives if you think about it seems like it could potentially be a gun spec so a hard drive in a traditional use case you kind of think of it as sitting like this and a desktop rig or something like that and a hard drive as you all likely know has moving parts it has spinning platters some of I have three some of 5:01 and those are little metal discs that spin very rapidly in a circle so normally 5400 revolutions per minute or 7,200 or something like that and the traditional point of failure for hard drives is the very way that they operate it's the mechanical method it's the mechanism through which they spin so because you have a spinning platter at several thousand rpm and you have a header which effectively acts like a header on like a record player you have a header that's trying to read a very precise point on that platter just like with a compact disc although that uses lasers you're reaching a very precise rein in the disc around the around the center so it requires a lot of accuracy it requires high speed requires precision to make sure you're not missing the data and hitting the wrong point of the drive which causes all kinds of errors reading errors check errors stuff like that drivers fail a lot they often do the click of death death excuse me as it is known and the click of death starts happening when the drive age and things like the the platter will start wobbling at its rotation or the header will just really not move quick enough to access the data so hard drives are very interesting mechanically and technologically because of the way they operate I'm I'm very interested in the topic we can do more on that later but answering this question specifically if you look at the specs from all the major manufacturers including some of the defunct ones like Mac Store WD Mac's or Samsung HGST and Hitachi which has been consumed or HGST has been consumed by WD but all these manufacturers state very clearly that their drives will function across all six axes so you don't mounted in any direction it's got six axis functionality and if the drive will not care so you would think that gravity would have an impact on the vertical revolution of a disk because it's it's just it's applying more force in ways that would not be applied when it's like this so you would think that's a problem but all the manufacturers insist that it is not in their spec sheets and these are even stretching to enterprise drives so this is an important point if you think about enterprise outside of the consumer world's hard drive racks for servers are normally mounted so the drives are vertical and that's for space reasons they can fit a lot more devices that way they can build blades and more fine-tuned configurations for their clients so the drives kind of have to work vertically and all the specs sheet spec sheets say it's not a problem there is one potential concern but it's probably not a concern for any of us as gamers or system builders or enthusiasts and one concern is that you will generate more heat if it's mounted vertically but I'm talking a very very small amount of extra heat and hard drives don't get too hot to begin with and that is because the platters dissipate heat best when they're mounted horizontally heat rises from the surface and the the enclosure for the hard drive for the platters is designed in a way that allows the heat to escape more readily through the big metal plates on the top and get out that way so that is the one tiny concern but for our audience for you guys for me personally that is it's really not something that's worth us worrying about unless you're in some sort of enterprise configuration then you really should not be talking to to YouTube about that you should be consulting you know experts for multi-million dollar enterprise configurations but so that is the the deal with that next question let's go IO IO actually I remember this name previously let's go iOS says hey Steve on the topic of degradation talking about PSU degradation for the previous episode how well do older graphics cards hold up over time have you noticed any particular trends one way or another with a certain model and then goes on to say I think the long lifespan of the gtx 8800 and AMD 7970 we're I guess he's saying we're good while the 580 seems left by the wayside in comparison what traits lead to a lawn GPU service life another good question I would agree that the 580 has not aged well I actually had one and used it for a number of years and it's really not holding up that well at this point which it's kind of surprising because actually in this example you're talking about the 8800 I had one of those as well and that held up crazy well so a couple things here when we're talking about how things hold up there's there's different things that can mean with fps that is going to be largely dictated by the environment of the game development atmosphere currently so when the 8800 came out it was the top of its class the only game really pushing it was Crysis 1 and this is I don't remember for his 2007-2008 somewhere in that area maybe it's not as late as 2009 7 or 8 and games did not really get a whole lot more intensive after Crysis 1 for quite a while so the thing we're talking about with FPS metrics in terms of degradation is more dependent on the game space and the drivers space than it is on the architecture of the GPU because the architecture of the GPU is always going to be limited by some technological fab process or similar engineering challenge but the way game engines utilize those cards the way API is you those cards with dx12 and back then it would have been probably the x10 maybe going into 11 eventually that that changes how long they will last in terms of FPS so and that's going to happen again with the x12 coming up but then we look at other topics outside of fps and those are going to be things like thermals so how well does the GPU itself hold up under lawn service life as you're asking and the answer to that is going to depend on how the heatsink is designed so you want to look at things like the compound used talked about this in a recent video certain types of compound will decay over time and some metal compounds will really don't necessarily hold up too well over time you want something like ceramic or some non conductive compound for long service life and then other things like the thermal pads used to hold the heatsink to the V RMS to the B Ram and all of those very critical power management or memory management items if you don't have a high end thermal pad on there and a high end heatsink design or when I say high end I really I just mean quality then yeah it's going to age faster and the way it ages fast is from thermals so if if the GPU is running at 90 Celsius as one of the counters pointed out in the video or in the reply to the question here it's running at 90 Celsius for its whole life it's not going to have a long life and you can replace the compound the heatsink all that stuff but it's still getting damaged over time and silicon does actually like heat a little bit but not that much heat so you'll want to target a lower temperature as low as possible you know kind of build the get a case that's cooler build the system around it they even go with the closed-loop AI OCLC or something on there but if the if the thermals are lower it'll it'll last forever I mean it's not going to really have a problem because the thing that happens with thermals is as it gets hotter the compound cracks the heat pads lift up off the surface and get some separation so then they're not doing anything anymore and then the the heatsink has no contact with the BRM ER to be and another item to look at is bearing so fan bearings will wear out over time and a double ball bearing setup for example has a pretty long service life than only 40 50 thousand hours something like that so that's a number of years of 24/7 and then you look at things like the driver support going back to FPS driver support matters because it dictates you know how well does the card hold up for new games you look at and videos recent 700 series drivers against their 900 series drivers the 700 series video cards sort of fell off the cliff as the 900 series is ramping up and that's because driver support was less emphasized or just not done correctly so that's something to look at as well as part of why the 580 is now basically useless and 800 because they're just not supported and tuned for anymore so those are all different things to consider but at the end of the day it is thermals I'm not going to really harp on one brand or another here but some thermal designs for GPUs are better than others that's all the AI B's the Adhan Board partners actually do is thermal design so you want to buy one that's a good design silence does matter but don't don't go full silence if you're going to run this a long service life because you want it to actually stay cool as much as possible next question Howard Thompson who is also posted before asks Steve can a budget motherboard eg H 81 limit GPU overclocking versus what pairing with a higher-end board the Z 97 with cleaner power delivery might be capable of I wonder because the GPU can pull 75 Watts through the PCIe slot so and so's I'll of the channel say thank you so this is a good question as many of you know the H series chipsets will limit CPU overclocking and actually to the point that you can't even do it depending on which generation we're talking so that is actually a thing that happens and they also normally have weaker VRMs it's fewer phases lower grade chokes or caps not all of them but a lot of them and this limits the the efficacy of the power management so that's why you don't want to overclock and why you can't overclock on those chipsets now with GPU overclocking what you care about is going to be the BRM on the GPU not necessarily the motherboard so the motherboard does matter it still manages power delivery to the GPU and if you look at high-end of other boards you'll see that some of them are built for GPU overclock and so an example would be we've got an X 99 EVGA board in the lab I think it's a classified board or maybe the FTW so it's a high-end x99 board and that has an extra pin out on the board for the GPU so we can plug in other six power pins from the PCIe header from the power supply into the board and that gets managed and delivered to the GPU if you're doing any kind of extreme overclock some boards do this through molex 4 pin connectors so yes the board can impact GPU overclocking but we're talking at the sort of extreme class here you're doing serious overclocking then you will want that extra power but a lot of GPUs you'll need to custom tune the BIOS to even get to the point where you can accept the power to prove any difference so boards do impact it but not terribly so if you have an HID one board or whatever something similar h1 10 whatever one of those then the limitation is going to be primarily by the GPUs vrm itself and your power supplies grade of cleanliness for the power delivered and you can probably get a couple hundred megahertz out no problem it will get hotter though so the the chipset which is located beneath the GPU if it's not really cooled adequately on a lower on board the chips I can start overheating that will cause IO problems and stuff like that so hopefully that gives sort of an answer to the question the I guess the short form is that yes a motherboard can impact GPU overclocking but not to a crazy extent it just it well it can but we're talking extreme overclockers here not kind of the average user who just wants 200 extra mega Hertz next question hi Steve is from ill to xbox hi Steve really like me to ask GM videos they're very informed I have a question about improving air flow reducing the noise in my system and then the question goes on for for a good bit they're talking about different items in the scenario so reducing noise the best thing to do is fans first so you can just getting a liquid cooler first of all it does not make your system quieter depends on the liquid cooler a lot of radiator fans are pretty loud so the first thing to look out is that for is pwm fans and those are indicated by a four pin header on the fan cable and that needs to be plugged into a four pin header on the motherboard pwm fans can be controlled depending on need by thermals that the CPU often dictates so if you're in a low thermal environment it'll run them at a lower rpm they're quieter that way so that's one thing that can help a lot now not all fans are made equal either so if you have a bunch of 120-millimeter fans it's important to look at the bearing type some bearings are louder than others some age more poorly than others sleeve bearings for example do not age very well ball bearings age pretty darn well but towards the end of their life and we're talking four to 50,000 hours here toward the end of their life they start squealing from the the grease drying up so that's another thing to look out for if you have an older systems is what kind of bearings in there and if you got get some kind of fluid dynamic or hydro bearing those should be quieter in terms of the bearing noise but you still need to make sure the rpm is lower and rpm is really what dictates a lot of the noise as is the blade design the blade design will impact the turbulence in terms of the air being pushed into the system how much is getting trapped between the blades on the on the intake and let's see other than that probably one of the major things to do would be increased fan size where possible and again not all are made equal but the larger the fan the slower it can spin and still move the same amount of air as a smaller fan so you'll want to eliminate like eighty millimeter fans in SFF build you want to eliminate 120 where possible and the next thing to do is get some kind of vibration damping set up so that you can get like Rober sort of glue vibration absorption systems that you just attach to your hard drives and to fans between the normally the rear fan and the chassis that will reduce vibrational noise you can also get a foam that is applied to the paneling the side panels a lot of cases shipped with this now you can buy separately from modding sites as well and it's an adhesive and you have a side panel sticky adhesive to it and that will absorb block or deflect depending on how it's designed a certain amount of noise not a ton it's better to go the fan route first and look for vibrational noises and then probably look in to see LCS or better air coolers and that's the biggest item I think that I haven't mentioned yet is your CPU cooler matters that makes a lot of noise so sod coolers are pretty loud if you want a quieter setup you could get something like the the be quiet coolers true to their name they are very quiet we use them on our test bench because they run basically 100% of time behind me or my shoulder so those are dead quiet and they'll modulate the CPU fan based on load which is really good because you don't want it spinning full speed all the time it'll spin down and even almost stop sometimes though it's not necessary because the giant aluminum heatsink can do the job just fine when it idle GPUs you buy a GPU like the Strix or the EVGA ACX cooler stuff like that the MSI gaming coolers those will spin down to zero rpm when they're under 30 watts or less load so dota or League can generate a small enough load that your fans only need to turn on for the GPU that makes it quieter the power supply after all these items if it's still too noisy start looking at the power supply because those fans make noise too and a bigger fan is better in this instance because you can spin slower so they're normally 135 milliliters or 120 depending on what you're looking at that's another place to look Corsair makes pretty darn quiet power supplies so does be quiet NZXT s can be a little louder but that's all sort of generalizations hopefully that helps let's do one more here very quickly and I'll address this one probably in a a upcoming full feature articles so we'll get back to this later but question from Street guru says would you suggest an 860 K with an r9 390 or an i5 4460 with an r9 380 so $70 plus $300 860 + 390 versus 180 + $200 I 5 + 380 which one do you think is better relatively the same cost cost this is pretty cool so this is a good question because it is actually a real scenario where if we're building that's something we think about it kind of comes down to personal preference I really like building with a stronger base platform like the CPU the motherboard and the power supply because things like the GPU and RAM are very easily upgraded later so for this specific scenario I would go with the i-5 and the 380 because I would rather have a high-end board and CPU and just swap the GPU maybe a year from now and I have more money or something like that so the my thinking behind this it's a couple things one is Windows really does not like it when you change the motherboard and CPU if you're working on keys then sometimes it won't let you you have to call in and get yet another one which might result will often do but that is a consideration that can increase your cost they hit in $100 if you have to reinstall the OS but mostly it's just that if I don't want to reinstall my my host setup in a year just to upgrade then I would probably want a base platform that stays the same static so the CPU in the motherboard stay the same the next thing is GPUs are really easy to upgrade you don't have to do a lot you just pull it out and put a new one in with CPU you might have to change the motherboard in the case of the 860 K it's a pretty good chance you're changing the other board because FM 2 plus only gets you so far right now and that's another cost and then with the the CPUs the actual performance you really don't want a bottleneck something like a 390 which will happen on an 8 60 K you don't want to bottleneck that GPU for a whole year whatever long you're waiting to upgrade it's just kind of a wasted expense then so those are the is to consider I am a fan of building a stronger base platform and upgrading the more modular items later if that answers that but we'll we'll run some benchmarks and do a thin on this because it's a fun question I do have to get hardware from AMD though and that is sometimes hard to do so that's all for this video thanks for watching and submitting your questions post more below huge thanks to those of you who are patreon backers I think they're called patrons or patchen's or whatever you want to how you want to pronounce it and I think we're up to maybe thirty now it's it's getting there it's really tremendously supportive and I am appreciative as is the rest of team so that's all for this time check back for more content throughout the week check the website for some good stuff on laptops some new news items and things like that I'm currently watching that the focus box follow my head around on the camera anyway that's all for this time I will see you all next time