Gadgetory

your daddy better that kind of love manual enthusiastic okay this video is brought to you by thermal grizzly whose throne pace we used to paint the words build me on the side of the age 500 PE and whose owner said that it was the best use case of the throne pace that he's ever seen you can find more about thermal grizzly and the cryo not paste which we used at the link in the description below the compound we used has a high thermal conductivity for a paste is non conductive and can be used as a substitute for a still high-performing compound if you don't want to go full liquid metal learn more at the link in the description below this is our disappointment build it costs twelve hundred and eighty dollars wait no no you still need the power supply motherboard RAM storage fire extinguisher sprinkler system OSHA inspectors electricians for 30 amp outlets and breakers carbon monoxide detectors and hearing protection but you do save on your home heating system in the winter so why are they here today why have they returned well sort of being possessed briefly and being forced to wear this shirt I also thought that it would be kind of fun to put Vega Frontier Edition a 77 40 X and the H 500 P all-in-one build and see if we can burn the place down before end of year so the 77 40 X required some dusting off after its tragic fall in the review it didn't collect a bit of dust make your frontier Edition needed a little bit of work as well and the H 500 P we restored to its original configuration without the mesh mod because Coolermaster never really liked when we said that we fixed it specifically that word with the mesh mod so we thought we would restore it back to the intended use with acrylic and this then is the disappointment build just as a quick side note no collateral damage is meant for the components that have nothing to do with the disappointment aspect for example the random power supply motherboard and RAM that we pulled but the three core components are definitely on the disappointing side so we thought we'd kind of go back through almost like a flashback up and look at some of the reasons why those were disappointed when they came out and hopefully we can avoid those types of products for 2018 and that's unlikely but we can at least set a baseline for what to expect next year that way we aren't too disappointed with the launches coming out here after so what we're gonna do is go through each of the three core disappointing components one at a time remind ourselves and everyone else why they were disappointing and then we'll look at some quick numbers that were run on this system as a whole because it did in fact complete its test without melting completely asterisk but we'll start with Vega Frontier Edition because it's been out of the light for the longest amount of time it feels like forever since we bought this card and spent basically a month testing it just like we did with the Titan V so Vega frontier Edition if you missed it like we did it's been rebranded actually it originally shipped something like a thousand or twelve hundred dollars somewhere in that range and now it's about eight hundred bucks regularly it's not a sale that's just the new price and it is also the blockchain pioneers card so this card Vega Frontier Edition which spent the beginning of its life being touted as a creators card a Productivity card a it's not for gaming card even though it's not all that different from Vega 64 which arguably is for gaming it spent the beginning of its life focusing on those productivity endeavors and creativity and all these rendering and 3d animation and all that software well now it's been rebranded to the blockchain pioneers card to the point that the site actually lists quote unleashing the power of Vega to crunch blockchain algorithms that striking hash rates perhaps Andy got duped by the same rumor we were duped by when we thought it would have 70 mega hash per second rates that in fact turned out to be untrue and one would assume that AMD might know better by now that that was untrue but it's got striking hash rates so we can start there at least and blockchain pioneer ian is now listed so high up on the strengths of the card on its own marketing page that it's above production the thing that the card was released for and the thing that everyone touted the most when it came out I now fully understand why AMD didn't allow media to take photos during the press event the briefing where the card was unveiled along with its rx Vega brethren it's because they spent an hour or more actually let's just be fair and call it eight because it was an entire day telling us that the card was specifically being kept out of the hands of minors this is something that Andy told all media it's going to gamers we're going to get this into the hands of gamers by bundling it with game packs you spend $100 more and you get two free games in exchange for that and also a coupon code that's non-transferable and you have to use that checkout but anyway the point is they were keeping it in the hands of gamers so we're gonna keep this away from minors and then sort of like some sort of addiction they pretend that gamers are the core focus and then light up at night literally because it's a really hot card and that's where we are today blockchain pioneering there's nothing inherently wrong with that it's just the mixture of not even marketing just language to media versus reality it's okay to say you know we're making this card or we're going to split target crypto currencies or blockchain and gaming 50/50 okay no big deal just do it and we're all cool or you say we're not letting miners get ahold of this oh no only gamers will get this card if they can find it and afford it and yeah also it's a blockchain pioneering card so that's Vega just a quick throwback to remember how hot this card was when we put it under liquid cooling and this is the flashback part of the episode we found if I remember correctly that we were able to reduce power leakage by about 30 watts by putting both the GPU and the HP I'm under liquid which of course gave us more power available to the core so we could overclock the core a whole lot higher and of course it operated still cooler while also leaking less power because just like with a CPU with a CPU like this one which we'll get to in a and the general reduction in power consumption is maybe about every 10 degrees Celsius on a CPU you drop something like 4 percent of your power consumption through leakage so we were able to fix some of that with our Vega Frontier addition hybrid mod that was a lot of fun to work on this year and we later segwayed into the Vega 56 hybrid mod where we were able to sort of hack the power play tables via registry and get its power consumption up to 406 watts along with some some additional changes we later did a BIOS flash with a 64 BIOS on 256 and that got us up past well past Frontier Edition and 64 stock in fact once you do the flash we're really gonna be at parity or slightly better and further than that with 56 versus 6040 ten to overclock a bit higher on 56 because you've got fewer cores packed into that area so the density is a bit lower the sort of heat density as it were is going to be a bit lower giving you more Headroom for frequencies but all that is a side point because Frontier Edition is the one that was truly disappointing it felt like a card that was released specifically to hit the first half 17 promise in fact not only was it not sampled to media which is completely fine medias not entitled to samples we're happy to buy the products I just spent $3,000 on Titan V for that reason for the company to test it and see what we can learn about it but the point is it wasn't sampled it wasn't really promoted that heavily and it shipped with very buggy and complete drivers and the key features weren't even enabled and still kind of don't really work that great so to quote Linus's recent video it's early access hardware which i think is a great thing to call Vega frontier Edition it was a let's get this out the door to meet investor promises and make sure that they don't sue us and that's what they did frontier Edition was shipped and then you got 64 and 56 later which are actually a bit better at a few of the tasks then frontier Edition provided that you don't need the extra two times the memory capacity so that is Frontier Edition in a nutshell that was basically our month working with it wrapped up very quickly what about the other disappointing components though there's also KB Lake X which is so forgotten to history at this point that I had to look at the sheets to remember the name of it the Kami Lake X processor family is just fascinating to look at it was almost universally hated and you can't really even the age 500 P wasn't universally hated I mean it's still got some subjective elements to it you could like it for its looks or whatever they confront to your addition although disliked it wasn't just straight hated that's what was special about kV Lake X it was really despised by most of the consumers the enthusiasts and media didn't really like it we don't make it a habit to hate things it's not really the right way to feel about a product in general although sometimes they do deserve it but this one was just anomalous in almost every way it's a different package size it's a different socket type but it's a 7700 K refreshed sure you can overclock it get one to two hundred megahertz higher okay maybe that has some value the engineering samples that weren't sold to end-users had amazing IMC's to the point that you could hit much higher memory clocks on those than on most other processors on the market and that has something to be said for it although they were mostly engineering samples but Intel's primary defense of the entire KB Lake X line which for some inexplicable reason contained an i5 CPU was it's an upgrade path this is your gateway drug to X to 99 isn't it great you can spend $300 on a processor $600 on a motherboard and then in four months you can spend $1000 on a processor and upgrade it who doesn't want to do that what a brilliant idea so that is KB like XO that's the primary issue we had with that processor when it came out and I think most other media did too in fact not only is it just a bad cost proposition bad value proposition it instills a level of confusion in the market that is just completely unnecessary one good example would be this motherboard which is sadly collateral damage in this build I'm sorry Asus it had to be someone and yours wasn't an event already this motherboard has eight memory slots on it KB like X can use four of those they're on the right side of KB like eggs the CPU the other four can't be used until you put in the upgrade X 299 chips sorry we can't call it X 299 coz k be like X is technically X 299 a sky like X chip when you put one of those and you can use the rest of them this is just some extra confusion to the market where when you look outside of our circle outside of the enthusiasts space a lot of buyers won't necessarily know that and sure you can read the manual figure it out but what if you wanted to use eight dims maybe that's the reason you got it and then you bought the CPU because it's cheaper and you really just need memory capacity but that's kind of resolved partially with language with media with things like that with research so that's not the only issue the primary issue I think is that Intel launched how many processors didn't I launch this year let's go through that January CES January 2017 one year ago was KB Lake nan X that be these 7700 K the 7600 k 7e 573 50k G 45 60 G 4600 G all of those processors you got the idea KB Lake came out in January then there was let's see we had skylake X we had KB like X and we had coffee lake so in one year Intel shipped several processor lines that usurped one another so the 7700 K came out in January and it was unexcited sure wasn't a big jump from the 6700 K and we didn't have the reference point of Verizon yet but it was a decent overclock or it performed well in games if you didn't already own a 6700 K sure it might be worth buying shortly after that you get the 77 40 X which comes out slightly better than the 7700 K - the IGP that was another weird decision on their part and you put it next to 99 and hey you have a great motherboard that you can upgrade later what she'll probably never do because by the time you upgrade you might as well buy something else after that just months later comes the 8700 K which you can buy a cheaper motherboard for you've got the processor for about the same price it's actually better than the 77 40 X and overclocks about the same if not better it has a better thermal paste on it it's got the HTC compound on it so the point is it might feel kind of bad to buy a 77 40 X you get at least with KB lake nine months before a coffee light comes out and it's still kind of a decent processor but you didn't spend quite as much on it so trade-offs there the KB Lake X family though was just odd and it felt like Intel was just trying to accelerate their launch schedule to a point of cramming everything into one year so that they can really push hard next year to challenge whatever comes out from AMD at that point then there was the whole 12 Kate gaming thing which we ran a separate content piece on this pertains asked I like X and KB wake act it was basically Intel saying you can have three 4k monitors because three times 4k equals 12 K obviously everyone knows that if we get maybe we can get some pixel counts on the screen to show that that was sarcasm but the point is Intel was big on this 12 K gaming idea which is of course very popular and everyone is getting into this year so 12 K gaming as we felt it unsurprisingly is primarily limited to your GP is more than anything if you can even afford three 4k monitors and if you consider that 12 K they also said that skylake X with the 700 X was better at vr gaming it's the best it's better than the 7700 K which is just objectively false unless you overclock it to a point of being better as we proved in objective VR benchmarking with actual numbers so Intel had its own share of marketing oddities this year as did a nd they all pretty much did that's what companies do but its end of year so we thought we'd recap some of them just for a bit of fun now that's not to say these companies didn't launch good things they all did and they even had marketing that was also equally good but it's good to look at the missteps to try and correct for them next time and then we have this the H 500 P which I think we've kind of talked about enough at this point so I don't know that it needs a revisit but just for fun I'll put a thermal chart on the screen where we ran tests on this specific build we hadn't done that or and it got pretty hot things throttled vrm was getting hot up to high 70s 80s when it was starting the test and then starts accelerating at that point towards throttle territory but not quite added this vrm throttles at about a hundred degrees Celsius from a an external thermocouple measuring with the chokes or the calves whereas in reality the internal temperatures probably throttling about 110 C is where this board sits but that really wasn't the worst part VR Emison take a lot of heat anyway that's just SPID telling the the vrm to throttle via the protocol from the cpu and you can disable that and still have largely the same issues but anyway the point is that the video card was approaching 90 degrees celsius was throttling its clocks as a result and then the cpu wasn't too happy either it was sitting about 60 to 70 Celsius most the time with a 360 millimeter cooler on it albeit not one of the best ones we we were not really that impressed this fractal cooler this year either but that's the whole point of the disappointment build and how isn't it so yeah it gets a bit warm 60 seventies with a 360 rad and some burning software burning on both the GP and the cpu simultaneously if you want more numbers on H 500 P that are more properly laid out and we have the methodology and consistent comparisons between everything else check the reviews because that's where you'll find it this was just a quick ad hoc test to say like look it's kind of fun to see how hot this computer gets because it's got some hot components in it but the age 500 P has one primary potential Savior and that's that cooler master told us they are actually and why I say told us I mean one of their employees tweeted at us when we started talking on this case that they are looking into a mesh front panel so at least that's what it sounded like so maybe there's something there that would help a lot but that's I think we've really set it off about the H 500 P it doesn't it's it's a little fresher in the mind doesn't it has much of a revisit as the other two parts if you want to see stuff about it we have plenty of content on all of these and again this isn't to say these companies are bad is to say these products were in different ways disappointing and hopefully everyone can sort of live with that because we're not trying to say that Coolermaster or AMD or Intel only made bad things this year we're just saying these three specifically all together make for a a very fun build in fact it was so fun that just running thermal tests on it took me about an hour and a half to get set up because I had various issues with each of the components in the build so it lived up to its name immediately it was genuinely disappointing even though it was really just supposed to be kind of a joke at the beginning it took more time to troubleshoot and get everything working properly to a point that we were happy with it using the stress testing software we used to run the numbers so that's it for this one as always you can helps out directly by buying our shirts or our mod mat on store documents access net help us out via patreon at patreon.com slash gamers Nexus subscribe for more and of course keep in mind that the ten teraflop barrier to enthusiast gaming has finally been broken we crushed the competition