Gadgetory

against all odds we got the bill done this is the last minute Christmas bill that's been worked on for the last few days had a lot of problems with the RGB setup because it's a mini ITX board and those have limited USB 2.0 headers but I had a brilliant solution by which I mean basically cables bypass out of the back we'll talk about all that and more talking about the benchmarks for this performance versus the old system and before getting to that content this is brought to you by catalyst energy mints you can get a pack of three for twenty dollars and they contain caffeine taurine and B vitamins to give you a bit of extra energy find a link in the description below and use coach gamers Nexus for 5% off so for anyone who didn't tune into the first two episodes this was a different format for us there's a lot of fun basically walking around the office setup scavenging for parts and piecemealing together a system for Christmas this is going to my sister who helps with some of the testing on the site watchdogs to of testing and things like that so she plays a lot of games plays Skyrim heavily modded and watchdogs too and Black Flag right now that means those are the only three games I cared about benchmarking for this this is not a public service benchmark this is very specific to one user so I only cared about benchmarking the games that were relevant to that use case so we looked at those the system if you didn't see it was pieced together basically I wanted an in win 901 couldn't get that in time it wouldn't arrive until the 27th so we threw together a manta which is something that I just had in long-term storage and was not probably going to be used again so put that in for the case the motherboard is an aged 77 Ivy Bridge board the CPUs at 35 70s not the newest parts in the world and as someone pointed out probably you can get the CPU cheaper then you can get the cooler in here which is a crack in X 52 that I chose because I wanted the RGB LED everything because she likes that so that's the the basics of the build the CPUs fine motherboard mostly fine but it is definitely the weak point in the build it's got more limited lanes and our memory frequencies pretty limited as well the 1600 megahertz so that's probably the most obvious point of upgrading in the future if not the GPU the GPU is holding us back in a few games as you'll see we're running a GT 964 gigabyte card one option I was thinking of was a potential hybrid mod of a 980ti with basically a EVGA hybrid solution and that would be interesting because the thermally this is a pretty not great scenario it's not ideal we have intake being pulled in through the radiator through a fairly limited mesh side intake it's not bad honestly but obviously not as good as an ATX case being pulled in and that air is hitting the video card that's really a pretty direct impact from the front of the case but it's still warmed air because it's cooling the CPU so this is pulling warm air through not great but as we find out the thermal test not too bad either a liquid-cooled card would bring temperatures down I could lower the fan rpm a bit and that would make for a lower noise system but overall I'm pretty happy with this for now let's go through some of the benchmarks though and see how it performs if any of it was worth it overall worth it's kind of a questionable things that he used I guess because the goal was a gift and it's better than an 8/10 5800 K for sure which is what the current system is it's got native USB 3 port which that didn't so that previous system couldn't actually utilize the front USB 3.0 headers and then this is also all RGB everything which was important for this particular build so the weak point motherboard PCIe lanes chipset things like that potentially GPU thermals but as per FPS the original build with Skyrim heavily modded was 30 FPS average 28 1% lows and 25 0.1% lows and then the new build with Skyrim same modded same everything was 54 point 3 FPS average so it's a 24 FPS gain 48 1% lows and 45 0.1% lows so the change here plus 24 fps and the averages in Skyrim's worst case conditions that was in Markarth with the smoke coming out of the sconces everywhere and I don't know to be honest with you what mods she has on there it's a lot it's more than its 250 whatever the limit is in mod organizers 256 floating-point limit but a lot of mods and of course normally under normal test situations we would go through in detail all of that and talk about all the methodology and everything but just doesn't matter here because the only end goal is does this perform better than the previous one so all we care about is testing under the same conditions which was done now what those conditions are I can tell you it's pretty heavily modded but that's about the extent of it because I didn't install them and there's too many to look at so Markarth was the test bench and smoke I knew from watching the FPS previously was the really heavy hitter on the old system and apparently that's drawing on the cpu pretty heavily I thought well a lot of the game is hitting the GPU because the 960 is kind of limited we're running at ultra ish settings with texture packs I'm sure but the CPU limitation was greater and that's why we get that 20 F guest gain by moving from a 1500 K to the 35 70s that I have in here and I did force the 35 70s into constant turbo modes if that 3.4 gigahertz all the time that helps a bit with our RFPs as well most importantly for Skyrim the low has improved substantially so it went from 0.1% lows were in the 40s now with this set up and previously were about 25 almost the 2x gain for the is your problem time lows which means there's less noticeable stuttering throughout gameplay and that's a good thing watchdogs 2 is the game for which I suspected the biggest improvement because it is CPU intensive but with the GTX 960 it turns out we're still heavily limited by the GPU anyway so the CPU change isn't coming to play as hard as with Skyrim and this is because Andy does prefer to play with her graphics around high-ish with San Francisco fog enabled and doesn't much mind fps in the high 30s and low 40s as long as she gets the better graphics so I want to improve that as best as I could with the limited resources we had in limited time we had went from 30 4.75 FPS average to about 39 not a huge game but certainly a measurable one the worst measured 0.1% low value for the old build was 15 fps and the worst measured 0.1% value for the new build was 21 FPS so that's something but we'll have to look into GP upgrades for more than that and watchdogs to not the biggest games they're the 980ti liquid mod would be the place probably to move next for watchdogs too but that's a start now for the old build with Assassin's Creed Black Flag we had a 43 FPS average 35 one percent and 30 0.1% in the new build was 51 not seven so not quite a 10 FPS game but certainly a big gain 45.7 one percent lows 37 0.14 some lows definitely pretty large gains and 0.1 percent lows and an averages with about a 9 8 to 9 FPS increase in the average FPS and we'd have to pursue a GPU upgrade for more than that but that's pretty damn good I mean first a sanskrit black flag with whatever it was a high ultra mix of settings with those settings to be at basically 60 that you don't need much more than that for that game if at all so that pretty much recaps the FPS gains all around some games bigger than others anything that cpu-bound like apparently skyrim with the mods that she's got installed and potentially something like we see some gains for sure in GTA 5 if I were to test that I'm sure there'd be an improvement but overall not bad especially considering it was resources that I had access to readily without having to order anything else the rest of the build the thermals of course would be the most interesting part because it is a mini ITX case we're using a liquid cooler on the CPU a GPU is just a dual fan cooler and ultimately this one this one that's in here now is for show this will leave an MSI gaming X 960 will go in there instead also four gigabytes but I can't make that switch until Christmas Eve because still in use but you got the idea so that's a dual it's a twin frozen design like every other one and that temperature roughly 32 celsius idle and roughly 75 Celsius load if you look at the totals but if we look at the Delta values just to kind of even things out it's about eleven point four Celsius delta T over ambient and I've 55.4 Celsius delta T over a mid for the load values that's idle and load for the GPU the CPU 13 C delta T and that's her idol and 20.7 C Delta T for load both over ambiens of course and if you care about it the cpu temperatures for the totals the non Delta values after we've kind of done some calculation to account for the fluctuation in ambient averaged to about 41 Celsius temperature when it was under load and that's with fire strike extreme stress testing for about an hour so that's it's not as intense a situation as we would use for our normal test methodology for a case review for instance normally run probably 95 to burn the CPU and the RAM and we run burn mark to burn the VRMs on the video card and those kind of generate worst-case from potential runaway scenarios that wasn't done here because I just I wanted to do fire strike because I thought it was probably more similar to the type of games she'll be playing and we don't need to root out worst case thermal runaway scenarios because all these individual parts I've already done that I already know how the Krakken color performs I already know how the Massa performs we did actually a whole article on the Mantha with the different case vamp placement and radiator placement so that wasn't necessary for this and it was skipped but that gives you an idea of the build overall not bad the places to look in the future would be I guess the the video card upgrade now in terms of issues so I mentioned having issues with routing and the hue plus and the crack and everything working together basically we've got a problem where NZXT makes a mini ITX product the case most many ITX boards pi 90% if they have any at all will have 1 USB 2.0 header something like the z1 somebody's thinner from EVGA it has 0 so if they have any at all it's probably one this has one and that means we can only connect one of those two devices so what do we do well splitters don't really exist so we ended up using the USB hub that ends exe just refreshed they basically its internal motherboard male pin out headers that you connect the Kraken and the hue to and then you connect that splitter dongle thing to the motherboard directly and that gives us in theory what would work perfectly now a couple they're Wanda's cables sucks to manage in a mini ITX case so that wasn't great but it was something I could get over the real actual problem was that it didn't work so I thought it was gonna work it looked promising and I was talking to fajn from NZXT about this all the way up until a couple hours before shooting this video I just couldn't get it working he says that one of their customer support guys actually an employee of NZXT has this same setup working with the crack and then the queue going through the USB to splitter but I couldn't get it working so that's an issue of software or firmware or something in NZXT x' devices cam was not great to work with the software is it's powerful when it works but I had some serious issues updating firmware on my early model NZXT hue to the point where I don't think it's bricked but it may have been bricked because it shows 0% up to hit on the firmware bar and it's at for about 20 minutes and I was like ok this isn't working and I unplugged it but what I found out is it's silently updating the progress bar doesn't work for that particular model and if you unplug it and it's in a write process then you could ruin it so I did happen to have another one that I could deploy that was a newer model hue plus so we've got that in here and it works which is good that solved the problem but we stole the USB 2 header limitation so what I did it was a really simple workaround I suppose I took the USB 2 I think it's a what is that a mini it's a mini USB 2 of coming out of the Kraken and all I did was route it through this hole right here in the case and plug it into the back of the mother port because at some point I realized oh it's just USB 2 anyway so it's the same pin out on the board as here it's just a difference of how you're connecting so this we only needed a normal USB to mini-usb and it worked perfectly and that's kind of the standard camera cable so we're good to go it works the hue plus is connected directly to the board disconnect to the back and control both of them separately or synchronized through cam now that that's functioning and all the difficulties are more warded so that's the build that is the mini ITX small form-factor gaming PC that we built for the the Christmas last-minute gift solution that I needed if you like this content as always subscribe for more patreon link in the post troll video to help us fund more stuff like this thanks for watching I'll see you all next time I bring the mod of a 980ti I think