Gadgetory

this is Al Gatos for k60 Pro it's a 4k 60 capture card and it's $400 there aren't a lot of reviews of this one it's relatively new it came out in November MSRP is about $400 and there aren't many competing products either the main thing with a capture card like this is that it's more or less plug-and-play you could record things locally on the same system using something like shadow play or relive the only downside with those is you occasionally have issues with for example frame time variants 0.1% low as one resent lows dropping off a little bit and if you're a more serious competitive gamer you might want an external capture system that said the other main use case would be with consoles and it's a bit peculiar there because at 4k 60 you really only have two consoles that can even do that the Xbox one X and whatever the new ps4 is called Pro and with those there are very few games that actually do 60fps so it's more like 4k 30 so we're gonna review this today and as you can see you've got thermocouples hooked up to it just for a bit of an extra thermal test out of pure curiosity before that this video is brought to you by the new cable mod pro series cable mods new pro cables come with pre-installed closed combs for clean builds accompanied by a revamped color style and vibrance the cables are now using thicker wires and they've also added right-angled internal USB 3 extension and right angled SATA data cables by the pro series cable kits at the link below or customized at your cable set with the configurator also linked below we've been using this capture card to record our xbox footage for benchmarking one of the reasons we got into the decision to review it was because one of the very few reviews of this specific card on Amazon by a user said something like I thought this internal PCIe by 4 device would work with my laptop so clearly we need to talk about that this is an internal card first of all in terms of the looks it looks like it's got a giant heatsink on the front and on the back it doesn't we'll get there and talk about that in terms of the capabilities it does for k60 the saw sir by default allows you to do up to 140 megabits per second using virtualdub OBS or some other software you can go higher than 140 megabits per second and do so more or less without introducing any significant lag there is a point at which you would find that the stutter or lag or drop frames but you can still go higher than 140 the company says that the card works best with GT x10 series and Andy Vega cards we tested it all the way down to 960 it's fine technically speaking this word it gets more interesting this card has no on device encoder so it actually doesn't do any encoding work and it helps it does some of the processing but ultimately it's pushing that work off to either your CV or your GPU you can select which so if it's going to CB or GPU on the GPU with Nvidia you'd be relying on n V encoders a gtx 1080 or t I would have to envy encoders everything below them would have one on V encoder we found that a 1060 or 960 could still process 140 megabits per second without issue you might be able to go a bit higher than that with two env encoders but because you're on an external capture machine anyway it's not consuming nearly as much resources as on the same machine and E has its own encoder as well but you could do either CB or GPU and then at that point you're really just piping the video out of the console or the PC into another one and this has two HDMI ports on the back so no DisplayPort unfortunately but if you think about the target market probably consoles that makes sense again there's a bit of an oddity in that not many games actually do 60fps but this is capable for the ones that can and a quick addendum on that clearly talking about consoles they're not about pcs so it doesn't seem like this things are flying off the shelves which speaks more to the current demand for 4k 60fps streaming than anything if you're not bottlenecked by the game basically your bottlenecks by your upload speed so not that many people are doing it right now demand seems quite a bit lower than a 1080 card but it still worked really well overall the existing alternatives are much more expensive this is 400 bucks well has a mage valve Pro capture HDMI 4k Plus which has the worst name on the planet and that's 800 to 900 dollars major well does have a heatsink and fan the 4k 60 Pro does not more on that later doesn't matter a whole lot for this particular product but this card the elgato one has functional drivers in software for Windows 10 and we had issues with those drivers working properly even on Windows 10 so on versions of Windows 10 from before the fall creators update we would run into a catastrophic issue that required removing the card on installing the drivers inserting the card reinstalling the drivers and then it would work again but updating to 1709 resolved all of those problems for the Windows version the solver is not much different from virtualdub or OBS it actually does a lot less than either of those two things it makes it easier for new users but we'd recommend other sauce or if you want more control you can toggle between CPU or GPU and coding you'll need their software for that there's a bitrate slider and that's about it so using virtual dub or OBS it's possible to capture higher bit rates io on the back is limited to HDMI and put an output and there's not any meaningful amount of latency visibly noticeable during the capture process with this card so that's not really a concern either let's talk about thermals though this was more curiosity just for fun in theory if you have this in a system what you're probably doing is you're if it's not the test bench you're sitting it in a system below a GPU and these days probably above power supply shroud so it's really going to be limited for its airflow options and it's got a GPU above it if it's not doing a lot of work it'll help cool down the backside of this if it's doing a lot of work it'll heat it up so we're gonna go through some of the numbers for assembly it's four screws very easy to take apart we have thermocouples on here you can see them sticking out of the card there's a venting slat here it looks like there's a fan in there there's not it looks like there's a heatsink in there there's not it does not make contact to the PCB whatsoever on the front side it's actually just a hollow shell not on the backside there are no thermal pads there's no direct contact except for maybe in one instance to the back plate so all the heat for the most part is transferred via radiation not via conduction which is far less efficient and it's not really meant to be heat sink in that regard this is this does one of two things it looks cool or it keeps console players I guess in the eyes of El Gato from touching things they shouldn't if they don't know what they're doing I don't know but I think it's more of a looks cool thing so getting to the thermals the back plate would also be great for sinking heat away from hot areas on the PCB except again no thrown pads or points of contact at all with metal shell in general there are some small vent holes cut on the front it's otherwise sealed and in the case of testing for k60 we've noticed that it gets pretty warm without active airflow on it even on an open air test bench and this was to the point that I get unpleasantly hot to the touch so we decided to stick thermocouples on it but we also test with the 140 millimeter md exeed radiator fan to blow air out over the test bench during testing which helped a lot but we've seen multiple pictures of builds where 4k 60s or HD 60 Pro cards are jammed in next 2 GB back plates with no room for ventilation or just a PSU shroud for thermal testing we first took thermographic images of the card when its heat sink was fully disassembled which was really meant to give a spot measurements so fill things here thermographic imaging is misused a lot in tech media people use it to get an actual measurement of something but that's not really what you're supposed to be doing when you're taking an image of a graphics card the way we use it is strip all the parts off get rid of anything that's going to cause emissivity or reflectivity issues with a thermal camera take a picture of a blackbody component like an SMD and then use that to determine where we should put thermocouples for properly accurate measurements so we determined that there were two places that got pretty hot and they were opposing each other there on either side so one component is right here on the back another one is on the same spot on the front and those components are the large silicon lattice semiconductor part and also the dual part dual port hdmi receiver so that's where we put the thermocouples and although the cover looks like a heatsink again it's not so let's look at the numbers the first thermal test with the covers on is stock configuration the test was started with the system off so there were a few seconds of near ambient temperatures at the beginning it was a little warm from earlier use after that there were relatively slow increases in temperature as the system was turned on the Xbox was off at this point all Salter was closed and the card wasn't doing any real work but it did still pull some power while idling of course once the Xbox was turned on and the card began passing through an HDMI signal temperatures rose abruptly we had the capture utility open which doesn't seem to matter but we were not recording and the card was just passing signal from the card to our monitor during this part of the test we waited for the temperatures to reach steady state which happened at around 86 degrees Celsius on the front 79 on the back and then we began to record some gameplay whilst recording started using the elgato for K capture utility GPU accelerated the temperature initially went down and began to fluctuate more that's because our GT x 1080 FTW had been idling up until that point the fans are not spinning but the envy encoder load caused them to activate and begin moving air across the test bench we could control for this of course but it's a good example of the kind of behavior that might be seen in real use case temperatures continued to climb and then levelled out around 90 degrees Celsius on the front and 84 on the back with this experiment going we experimented with switching to OBS at higher settings during this part of the test but there wasn't a noticeable effect we then placed a 140 millimeter fan on top of the test bench which is what we do when we actually need to capture your footage temperatures instantly dropped as expected and leveled out around 75 degrees Celsius on the front 69 degrees Celsius on the back when using the fan we stopped logging here but the guard retained heat in the metal plates for quite a long time after being turned off here's the test data when the cover is off the card idled at around 35 degrees Celsius with the cover off and no HDMI signal going through it 35 C is fine it's above ambient a bit but it's not going to overheat just by idling of course once the Xbox was turned on and the card began passing a signal through temperatures rapidly rose without the benefit of the metal casing soak up heat it was also less insulated though so we reach steady state around 69 degrees Celsius on the front 66 on the back even once recording started this is superior to the 84 degree and 90 degree temperatures of the test with the cover on which is more to look cool than to be cool again adding a fan to the test bench lowered the cards temperatures drastically the test finished up around 47 degrees Celsius on the back and 49 in the front the duration of this whole test was much shorter than the first one note the time scale as the lack of metal to soak up and retain that heat did make the changes much more rapid we lose that soaking ability we never saw any performance loss with this though so although the temperatures are getting to levels of being more or less unacceptable for these silicon components even though we're there we didn't drop more frames there's no performance degradation now there probably you might run into is this was on an open-air bench if you have this in a poorly ventilated case under a GPU and above a PSU shroud your thermals will be worse and I don't know what kind of protections are on these cards I don't know if they have over temperature protection but regardless if they do or not doesn't really matter the point is you've got stuff getting really hot and over time you could have things like capacitor bulging that would damage or destroy the usability of the card so thermals are certainly we would like to see al gato improve the thermals on this and they could do it by not building a literal heat trap on the card that'd be a good start maybe you know connect the big piece of metal that's over it to a component on the card so it's actually sinking heat and exposing it to the outside where you've got airflow that'd be a good start we'd like to see that it's not something that ruins the usability of the product it works fine if you're in a case with poor airflow please make sure you put fans in there so that they can actually breathe and that will solve most your problems as far as the product itself it worked pretty well for a four case of capture we didn't really have problems with the product the saucer is pretty bad it's it's really it's got some bugs we've had a lot of crashes it does not play well with older versions of Windows 10 even you want FCU or later and it also is very limited in its options we found OBS or even virtual dub which is basically a 20 plus year old project maintained by college students for free we found both of those to work better so if you're looking at buying it consider those but they'll got our stuffs ok it's frustrating sometimes that does 140 megabits you can do more on the other software the other oddity of course again 4k 60 doesn't apply to a lot of console games works fine for PC we tried it it handles actual 4k 60 just fine and the playback is no problem we've been playing clips probably through this whole video and it all looks good so the only the only real bottleneck in terms of performance and frame jobs are the games especially for the consoles $400 is a pretty good price but there's no point in buying the card unless you're actually going to use it for 4k 60 if your internet doesn't support it and you're live streaming then don't bother unless you're gonna upgrade your upload speed soon if you're capturing local and then uploading later it's worthwhile if you can actually play the games at 4k 60 on the host system and other than that the 1080p version of all the million capture cards that are out there for 1080p 60 are cheaper better alternatives if you're not legitimately transmitting 4k somewhere to the Internet at some point so that's kind of how we look at this there's a $200 Blackmagic intensity Pro 4k we can't vouch for its quality we haven't tested it but we did see it we used to use a vision card that's an SC 2 HT 4 I believe is the model we use that for VR capture it's like 2,000 plus dollars so the disparities large and it can't even do 4k 60 like this can but it does a lot of other things so different tools are different jobs and then of course there are there are plenty of more expensive options as well but this seems to work pretty well for it works well for something that's in between $200 in 2000 the $400 4k 60 is fine it's just make sure you actually will use it because if you're not going to because your Internet's bad or something and you're streaming then there are cheaper options that do the job fine with 1080p60 so that's it for this one thanks for watching someone dressed in data on third all thermals there's not really anything you can do about it other than put a fan in the case and make sure it points generally towards the capture card you're not gonna lose performance probably unless it gets really bad but you might have a component degradation over time which will not manifest itself as decay and performance this is this is something that it's a common misconception people think that video cards from overuse will decay in performance for example same thing with this that's not really true it's just an instantaneous failure so you go from working like it's always worked to not working and works fine until it doesn't in other words so with the the kind of temperatures are dealing with on this if it's it'd be used in a low airflow case over time you could have cat bulging or popping and that's it so just make sure there's a fan on there but otherwise it's fine so yeah thanks for watching get a stored on camera's nexus dotnet to pick up a shirt like this one or one of our mod mats which are on backward but shipping within the next couple of weeks now and we sold out instantly last time so get an early if you want one otherwise go to patreon.com/scishow and razaaq's ourselves that directly and get behind-the-scenes video access thanks for watching I'll see you all next time