Ask GN: DDR3L vs. DDR3, 4790K vs. 6700K, & 1% Low Testing
Ask GN: DDR3L vs. DDR3, 4790K vs. 6700K, & 1% Low Testing
2015-08-18
hey everyone I'm Steve from gamers Nexis
Donna and today we're doing something a
bit different we are doing an ask GN
video so this is something I wanted to
do for a while basically we're taking
your comments on the YouTube channel on
Twitter and stuff like that
and we're just gonna address some of
them here for the comments that need a
little more depth or are perhaps just
interesting comments in general and I'm
sure you all know what I'm talking about
so that's what we're doing here this is
the first ask GN video if you have any
questions for the next video leave a
comment below or on any of the other
videos on the channel I do read almost
all of them for the most part and we're
gonna start right off here with a
comment from blue blur 50h posted on the
AMD a10 7870 K ap review that we post
posted recently and blue blur says good
lord what is that now I'm not really
sure to what blue blur is referring with
this comment but I would assume that to
answer your question the obvious choice
is either going to be hair or the AMD
APU that we were reviewing so that
hopefully answers that question
we've been out of something a bit more
in-depth there is a good question from
excuse me on the pronunciation here
subic Chakraborty who posted on the
intel i7 6700 k review we did recently
that would be the skylake platform the
first exposure to sky like that we had
and Subic asks does skylake support ddr3
this is actually a really good question
and one that does need to be addressed
so skylake is an interesting platform it
supports two different types of memory
it Sports ddr3l and ddr4 and that L
indicator is actually very important
it's not as simple as just tagging an L
at the end of ddr3l actually means low
voltage and ddr3l memory chips have 208
pins which is a fair bit fewer than ddr3
as a base platform and a lot fewer than
ddr4 which is something like 280 or to
88 I'll out my head and ddr3l is
something that has been around for a
little while it's used very commonly
in certain types of laptops and other
mobile devices or ultra portable
computers and ddr3l draws less voltage
which means that it's clock rates
generally going to be lower across the
board it also means that it has less
overclocking Headroom depending on what
you're looking to do with the memory so
ddr3l and ddr4 are quite a bit different
but ddr3l and ddr3 are also different so
yes skylake does support a form of ddr3
but it is the low-voltage form so you
have to buy special memory for it and to
that end it is important that I address
something here a lot of review outlets
ours included have mentioned the option
of purchasing motherboards for skylake
with ddr3l support rather than ddr4 as a
means of reducing build cost and that is
true you can buy cheaper cheaper ddr3l
memory and some of the platforms that
supported our cheaper as well but the
one item of note here is that if you
have an existing system with ddr3 memory
for Haswell or similar you can't rip
that memory out and just move it over to
skylake because it's not the correct
low-voltage form of ddr3 so that is an
important item that is worth pointing
out and a good question by Subic the
next question is sort of interesting
it's from 21 EC and this was posted on
one of our other recent videos so what I
want to see asks coming from aq 9550
should I pick up the i7 4790k or the i7
6700 K and then goes on to add
parenthetically I'm a gamer but I'm also
working with 3ds max so that's something
that actually changes the answer to the
question question quite a bit the first
and shortest bit of information I should
say here is that I have not specifically
tested the 4790k or 6700 K in 3ds max I
have not compared their performance
against one another in that particular
piece of rendering software so I don't
have first-hand knowledge of the exact
gain from the 6700 K if there is
and 3ds max but we can talk theory first
of all coming from IQ 9550 really
anything you buy either of those two
CPUs is going to be so profoundly
advanced in comparison that you really
are probably not gonna be unhappy with
your purchase and the q95 50 was a very
good cpu that was one of the first
quad-core CPUs it came out around the
time the Q 6600 came out which was
actually my first quad-core CPU and the
same for a lot of other people I believe
so cuteee 9550 was good but it's
definitely dated the thing with the the
sky link and the has well platforms for
3ds max and other professional software
is the memory support so ddr4 if you buy
a skylake platform with ddr4 is going to
actually output a much greater
performance for software like 3ds max
maya Adobe Premiere Adobe Photoshop when
you're working with very large files or
you're doing batch processing of files
and the reason for that is because ddr4
has a much greater memory bandwidth part
of which is fueled by its increased
frequency so ddr4 you can find memory in
the 31:33 range pretty easily and
there's some stuff that's listed at 3800
I haven't really tested that yet I
haven't validated that it's stable but
31:33 definitely is if frequency you can
buy a ddr4 pretty safely so the
increased memory bandwidth will actually
be advantageous to you if you're a very
serious 3dsmax user or really if you're
a serious production user in general and
that is something that should be taken
into account but when I say serious I
mean this is your job you're doing this
all day every day you're sitting there
rendering out files if you're working on
video files because that's what I'm most
familiar with then the kind of person
who will benefit from ddr4 is the kind
of person who is syncing entire days
into rendering or producing content so
that's really where you see your
disparity there at the end of the day
the 4790k is a very good cpu you can get
pretty fast ddr3 and coming from aq 9550
there's really no wrong choice if you're
working in a professional environment
then definitely investigate the option
of the 6700 K
and ddr4 I'm not a source of authority
on that because I haven't tested 3ds max
personally I would recommend websites
like Puget systems they are the system
integrator so keep that in mind grain of
salt etc but they do some pretty cool
tests and we actually use their tests as
a source for what we put in our render
rig for work you know Adobe Premiere and
there are other sites similar to that
that work with the creative tools we're
more of a gaming site so next question
here from Morningstar says I don't
understand what it does mean hi 1% low
performance and 0.1% performance things
what does it mean so this is actually a
good question as well Morningstar is
asking about our charts that we
published in almost every review for
CPUs and GPUs anyone who's seen them on
the channel knows that we publish
average FPS 1% low FPS and 0.1% low fps
and these three numbers mean different
things but all of them are very
important so traditionally a lot of
sites especially in days past will
publish the minimum and maximum FPS
numbers with their benchmarking we don't
do this because we feel that minimums
and maximums are outliers and are
unimportant and really not indicative of
overall performance because it's an
outlier so the problem with minimum is
you might hit the benchmarking key the
recording key a quarter second too early
and for example shadow of mordor and if
you do that in shadow of mordor what
happens is you could actually hit a
serious very brief spike I have a hair
in my face and the problem with this is
it's not representative of in gameplay
it's popping up because something to do
with the shadow of mordor benchmark is
loading an extra overlay so that's an
example of where you would want to one
refine test methodology but to not
record the minimum FPS because it's not
actually happening now in actual
gameplay like with Skyrim if you have a
very brief less than half a second
period of loading a ton of data or
dumping previous data you might have a
one FPS output for a fraction of a sec
so that's another place where minimum is
not great to measure and it it's
important to note that point 1 percent
and 1 percent actually do take some of
the lower times but they average them so
in the case of 1% low it's the 99th
percentile performance of the game so we
take the slowest one percent of all
frames delivered in the thirty second
test period all three of the
thirty-second test periods we take the
slowest chunk of those the 1% chunk and
then we average that chunk and that is
our 1% below so in the case of a lot of
games maybe you have a 60 FPS average
output but you have a 30% 1% if I have a
31% low one of the best examples for why
we measure these metrics is GTA 5 so we
recently published a CPU benchmark
looking at the g3 2 5 8 and the 7 6 DK
and a number of other low-end CPUs and
the thing here is that the g3 2 5 8
outperforms the 760 K Richland the APU
in terms of average FPS but the 760 K
had a better point 1 percent low the GC
2 5 8 had a for FPS point 1 percent low
but a faster average FPS so this is
important because when you're playing
the game and you get really fierce
stuttering or framedrops or whatever you
want to call it colloquially
colloquially the the slow frames that
you're seeing can be measured in point 1
percent or 1 percent lows and that is
actually very damaging to the gameplay
experience and it's something that we
want to reflect in our testing and
convey to the readers what's actually
going on here because with some drivers
a.m. these old drivers and some of
Nvidia's past drivers before this became
a thin frame time testing became a thing
they were actually very poor performing
metrics for certain GPUs when looking at
the 1% in point 1 for some Louis but
their average FPS was very high in
benchmarking that looks great in
real-world gameplay you you see and pick
up on those stutters and frame drops and
it's really a lot harder to get in
the immersion of the experience so that
is what those numbers represent I'll try
and get a full video and article op
online in the future talking more in
depth about all of that and how it all
works and how we measure it but that's
sort of a brief overview for those who
are unfamiliar with what it means and
why we test it I would strongly
recommend or suggest looking at tax
report and PC perspective for more
information on frame time testing they
innovated a lot of it and they've done a
pretty good job reporting on it one of
the last questions here is it's from bu7
saying kill illuminati killuminati
something with the illuminati asks is
980 superclocked worth getting so we've
done a video on superclocked versus non
superclocked cards in the past I'm
assuming Illuminati here is referring to
the EVGA 980 because that is generally
who calls their pre overclocking super
clocking so with super clock and all
that means is that they have pre
overclocked the video card or the GPU
beyond reference and just because the
980ti is something I've memorized the
reference clock of the 980 TI is a
thousand megahertz if you by for example
a 980 TI hybrid by EVGA I think it's 12
something maybe 12 28 megahertz so
that's a pretty substantial overclock
and it does actually have a big impact
on gaming performance as we've seen in
our hybrid or the liquid cooled 980ti
testing and that's definitely an
important factor but it's a bit of an
outlier because normally when you're
talking about overclocked and
superclocked cards they're not a gap as
big as as 200 plus megahertz they don't
produce that big of an FPS output so
looking at a 750 Ti that we tested ages
ago the conclusion of our test was that
there is very little impact on the super
clocked cards performance with its pre
overclocked applied rushes the reference
750ti which we also had we had both
cards and that made it really not worth
getting the superclass card unless the
price difference was so small that it
didn't matter so if you had like a 750
Ti superclocked card
for $10 more sure get it whatever not a
big loss and you might even gain a
couple FPS we're talking one to four fps
and the average metrics normally for
super clocking at the higher end the 980
and similar cards it really it just
depends on which model you're talking
about and how big the pre overclock is
in general if there's a big price
difference it's not worth getting it and
you can also normally apply that
overclocked
or pre overclocked setting very easily
on your own using precision or
afterburner or any number of other
software Suites it's pretty easy to
apply most of those moderate pre
overclock so that is a certainly a
back-up plan in the event that you do
want an overclocked card hopefully that
helps with that question we've tested a
few of these things in the past search
the channel for super clock or super
clock in and you should find it and then
finally a comment from Jan and
Christopher s tlemen who said first and
to that I say don't you or not you're
actually the second comment on the video
but good try try again on this one that
is all for this ask GN video please
leave questions in the comments below
and in the other videos as always thank
you for watching we really appreciate
that you guys have been into the content
it's a lot of fun to produce and I want
to keep producing it the team has been
expanding so things are going well over
here at GN and of course check out our
patreon page if you haven't yet I know I
probably sound like a broken record but
it does actually help quite a bit to get
any amount of support on patreon because
we're trying to shift away a bit from
the traditional advertising model and
that helps a good deal in that endeavor
so that's all for this time I will see
you all next time easy
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