Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware box we've got the second part of our June Q&A coming right up plenty of other questions to answer so let's get straight into it okay next question do the harbor box team have all other computers that we use for our day-to-day use as good as the ones we sort of feature on the channel so with custom water cooler and all that fancy stuff well yes I would say yeah basically I did a what was it the thermaltake core P throughout your custom loop in that and that was my core i7 6.50 X system which I replaced last year with three reppin 1950 X and I didn't actually build that on the channel because lazy but timid I both wanna upgrade to the 32 core thread Ripper so we're going to be handing AMD for a pair of those chips try and get the creation board from MSI and we might do like a live stream where we both build dream editing rigs that'd be cool yeah so our systems are sort of rundown dusty old things that are left in the corner and no keep it updated so yeah bit of fun so there you just built second generalising yeah I've got a few test systems for second germs still using first gen on my main memory but it's you know pretty similar we're getting on like you know like either Titan X in my system at Pascal Titan X so again it's you know yeah like she's a lot of high-end hardware for our editing and that sort of thing so basically it's not all just sitting on the shelves behind it collecting dust some of it does get put to good use yep in your opinion do you think that buying a g-sync monitor justifies the price increase and that is very much a Tim question yeah I think it depends what you're sort of comparing g-sync to if you've got like a g-sync monitor and a pretty similar identical freesync monitor you don't care about adaptive sync the free sync motor is just clearly better value because it's like $200 cheaper usually but if you do want adaptive sync you're kind of stuck because if you have an NVIDIA GPU you need to buy g-sync mana you know if you're on AMD you need to buy free sync so from that sense is kind of like you have no real option hmm um but some g-sync might as well through exclusive so I guess there's some maybe some reason to buy that if you've got MD but I think you know if you're wondering about whether you should buy an adaptive sing come on at all for example you've got an Nvidia cheaper you're thinking of buying a g-sync monitor or whether you just will be fine with free sync really if you're playing it like 80 or 100 FPS or higher you're not gonna get all that much out of adaptive sync so ice a free sync 1080p 144 Hertz monitor on an Nvidia system will be almost just as good as a g-sync monitor provided you're running at those sort of high frame range so it just depends what you're after and you know if you're on a budget I still think free sync does offer something for people that have NVIDIA GPUs first thing certainly makes a lot more sense yeah this question parent is for me do you think a hot-swappable PCIe will come to laptops to solve the funderbolt three issue for a GPU so maybe you guys saw my video a couple of days ago and why I don't think a GPS are all that good mostly because of thunderbolt three I'm not sure they'll come up with like a dedicated PCIe port because that won't be super useful for other things Thunderbolt 3 doubles up as your SBC so it's kind of useful for attaching displays and other USB drives and all that sort of thing I just think a next-gen thunderbolt will hopefully solve some of those problems so that's really where it stands fingers crossed for that right this question comes from YouTube do you see yourselves Steve and Tim doing YouTube / tech journalism until you retire or would you want to move on to something new if so what would it be okay so first pile that question well yeah I've actually thought about this a few times and I don't know but I think I could probably see myself doing this right up well into my senior years via senior citizen playing with new tech I don't know it's kind of a weird one because it's definitely something you could do yeah it's not like you know it's not like you know something that's labor intensive so yeah I'd like to keep doing it as long as we can as long as I'm still having fun with it which I very much am at the moment same here really yep if I wasn't doing it something I would like to do something that I couldn't do as a senior citizen and that would be sort of hands-on stuff like I really like renovating and doing that kind of thing so I'd probably go into like property sort of investment renovating houses all that kind of stuff so yeah I enjoy building and doing all that yeah I probably become an engineer a master's degree in engineering so if I didn't do this I probably use that degree so yeah okay next question what was the first GPU you ever purchased well the first graphics card for me much older than my one I'm guessing no you to worry about when they didn't ask when for me it was a creative labs so I don't know you guys are probably still familiar with creative they do a lot of audio products Bluetooth speaker sound cards but they used to do graphics cards and I had a voodoo banshee 16 megabyte AGP and yeah I used to benchmark it with 3d mark 99 a few guys recall but 3d mark joke from my GTX 20/80 joke video I mean anyway I loved that thing it was really cool I don't actually recall right off top of my head what games I played on it but I do remember when benchmarking at 3d mark 9 you know my best friend at the time he had the exact same computer we built them together but he could only get the PCI version of the Banshee and it was one point lower in 3d man I always mean by one point because I had an AGP model so I don't know if it was actually one point faster or for some reason it just assigned an extra point because you had the AGP version I don't know maybe someone knows something about that ancient software yeah always one point faster exactly one point no matter what the school is worth oh yeah I'd to look up and verso remember the first one that I that I bought fine fairly confident was an ATI Radeon X 1900 so that's from 2005 I reviewed that and and that was to upgrade really like a fruit my family to pre-built PC and I wanted to play Star Wars Battlefront 2 the original one okay it's really annoying that there's two games called stars Battlefront 2 but whatever I really want to play that game a PC couldn't play it so when I got the Radeon X 1900 tracked it in and away I went playing that games really sort of the first PC gaming sort of thing I did and then a computer nerd was born yeah pretty much okay next question this is one tim peake so hopefully you can explain this one to me how do you think we will ever use a different contact method for CPUs like more surface area or different hand shapes etc so I don't think this is the mounting method for the CPU it's like are we talking you'd like the IHS sort of thought likes it the IHS or what we put on the I yeah I suppose it's the yeah it has a contact between your cooler and the CPU itself hmm okay well okay that being the case just quickly think you this not really I suppose because there it really comes down to the die size on the CPU and that's sort of the problem with CPUs getting smaller and smaller is that you have a really small point that's pumping out tons of heat and you've got to try and dissipate that as quickly as possible so the heat spread up so that quite a few different purposes really does it it primarily probably protects the CPU really but it obviously spreads the heat as the name heat spreader suggests but yeah I haven't thought about this one too much but I don't yeah so it seems fine as it is yeah well they've kind of purpose-built anyway so in the case of thread Ripper they're massive because they have to be because there's four dice spread out where is in the case of what coffee like they're really small because there's one little die in the middle okay here we go another longer question I'm just curious it seemed two years ago the i-5 60 600 K was the most what most tech troopers would suggest is the premiered gaming CPU so why isn't the 83 50 K or the 80 600 K getting the same treatment has caught and third utilization changed enough to warrant this always a bad advice then and bad advice and hell it's none of those things really it wasn't bad advice then because there was no alternative I mean I suppose you could have bought a core i7 but in terms of value just getting hyper threading tacked on didn't really warrant that additional cost and the only 350 K is poor value in my opinion because of the reasons I covered in my top five worst CPUs video basically it's the price it's just not a good CP of the price because we now have better CPUs for a similar price so that's the main reason there and then as for the Core i5 8600 K I did recently name that the best value high-end gaming CPU so it's pretty good yeah I I was under the impression that most people were recommending the ATT Turner okay it's got six cores that clock five gigahertz it's a weapon really yeah I don't have a problem with that CPU it's really good yeah games are starting use more threads now I think the biggest reason why we're no longer raving about quad cores is because we have faster CPUs with six cores on it necessarily faster we have CPUs that are as fast but have more cores and they're affordable so they're not a thousand dollars anymore so that's the main reason Rison has been a big push towards that so yep okay next question opinion on starting mobile phone reviews so this will be one for Tim like a lot of different Android phones and stuff I did really appreciate your s9 and benchmarks so again I'm glad you enjoyed those benchmarks but yeah it's something we looked at doing but we're a bit busy doing all the other stuff we have to cover really it's yeah it's really only battery life as well that matters when it comes to benchmarking so yeah something we'll continue to sort of look into a little bit but probably not a topic of that we're going to be doing too much on yeah you might touch on it but it won't be yeah regular content as you say yep all right next question stop play with your phone - okay the next question is what's the game you've played the most well as I sort of spoke about earlier or alluded to earlier Starcraft 2 I've invested an embarrassing amount of time but that guy's been out for a long time and I've planned over many years but that's definitely the game I've played the most and what about you yeah I don't like I said I don't really stick to one game and tend to play it just speak to that and play it forever I just play a variety of games really like to experience a lot of different things I do play multiplayer games of fair bit so I guess maybe back in the xbox360 year when I had call of duty black ops a play that got to about fifth prestige with my mate so that took a fair bit of effort to get up to that so that's why we were down and played the most but yeah just buy lots of stuff really how do you manage to compare benchmark performance with so many different computer parts is it a trade secret or are you guys just level 12 okay well promise not to tell Steve from gamers Nexus this we don't want to help him out any more than we have to but I would say it's a lot of coffee late nights and an unhealthy addiction to benchmarking so sorry about that car none of those things Steve would be aware of this is a question from Thomas on YouTube what is done with all the sample products that you test after you test them also we ever do a fan meet up people would show up it's good to know well firstly thank you for the vote of confidence Thomas we haven't really ever discussed a fan made up didn't you realize that was a thing that you guys would attend to attend rather but maybe that is something we could do we've got packs later in the year so we'll probably run into a few guys there and pax Australia that is really yes I would be more than happy to talk to anyone that wants to talk to us as for the samples hang on a minute he I think I know what he's done to he very very interesting to questions to ask you the one question so you want to meet up and then you want to know what we do with our samples okay I don't think I'm I think I'm onto you Thomas but seriously pretty much the samples the important things we keep like you know tim has a lot of stuff here you can see on display he's got his gaming boxes at the top and he'll use them to test don't pretty much sit there now till you get the next-generation gaming boxes and yeah you'll compare them so a lot of the stuff we just keep around graph I've got so many graphics cards that we use for comparing to new ones and you throw backs and it's great when you guys say hey Steve I want to know what this has well core i3 compares to this and I've got that CPU and I can test it so yeah a lot of retesting of course there's some stuff we don't know that sort of gets palmed off here and there to friends and family and stuff like that fan meetups all right so this question comes from our discord Channel you can get access to that through our patreon page and one of our most prolific members you'd have to say Sal Kagan has asked us where you guys think things are going in CPU GPU and software slash games in 2019 based on the trends and the current state of things in all of those areas okay anyways my ask the hard ones really is hard to say historically the development on the game so I've been pretty slow but then it's hard to know whether we should blame game developers because things on the CPU front haven't changed for almost a decade so it's really hard to know what to expect there now that things have got moving I don't know whether the game developers will be quick to start updating the engines and making new engines that take advantage of things like eight core eyes and processes or whether they'll still remain a bit conservative because they also have to make these games work for everyone so it's really hard to say whether we I think 2019 is probably was 2019 wasn't it yeah yeah it's probably going to be a bit too early to see any major change but hopefully we start to see better utilization of these you know six and eight core CPUs and at least beyond 2019 I hope that we start to see this pick up at a bit of a quicker pace so that'll be very exciting yeah I think the CPU and GPU is specifically where those going to go in 2019 it's probably pretty similar to what we thought this year I don't think there'll be any revolutionary changes that will be coming out be the usual stuff you know moving to a new node 7 nanometre we'll be ready around then you know adding more cores clocking them higher that's always usually what they're trying to do so yeah I think we'll see similar stuff in 2019 in that path yeah hopefully it's a decent step yeah and they can continue on from there as they always do but yeah if anything would just be exciting for benchmarking yep and gaming ok next question this is a good one with these new 4k 144 Hertz HDR monitors being released how long do you think it will take to have affordable GPUs that can play games at that resolution with those refresh rates at Ultra quality settings or 4k 144 Hertz all to see if that's still a long way off or even modern flagship cards like the top-end $1,000 GPUs really can't do that now so it'll be a couple of generations before the top-end cars will be able to do that and then for affordable cards probably like a long way to the future and even then like games get more intensive to run over time so you know might always be just the top-end cards to do one 4k 144 Hertz you know unless you're playing fortnight or so thing yeah it's gonna be very difficult without having really high-end hardware for many many years yeah as Jim says sixty Hertz is a bit of a struggle with the modern games at 4k we're not really I don't think we're in a resolution race where we're trying to keep pushing the boundaries of resolution because you can really make games look significantly better at 1440p so yes nice to have that option there but yeah no time soon all right so final question for the Q&A if it's not trade secrets could you tell us a bit about how you benchmark even if it's just the things that aren't trade secrets I'm thinking about what programs you use and how you extract the numbers afterwards how you decide things for each game it's not just using the presets and do you actually game or use scripts for a controlled run that sort of thing so like you know most of the stuff isn't actually like a trade secret is just industry standard practices and lots of hard work I think mostly for gaming benchmarks views like fraps okat and present mod and time to time for Game Capture isn't it's basically just Excel for crunching all the numbers and making the graphs the settings you know you would have seemed that we mostly stick to presets because most gamers sort of just use presets and then we just sort of choose presets appropriate for the hardware going to the games play them you know loop a section of the game tend to you know if there's a can benchmark we might use it depending on how representative of the real game it is but yeah I think that's basically in yeah you could really spend a lot of time answering that one in detail but I think Tim's covered it pretty well and things like presets well I know a lot of people don't like it's using presets for various reasons some games it doesn't make sense and we tweaked them a little bit if there's a silly getting in there that kind of wrecks things but the presets just make it easier to not just for us to load the settings in and make sure it's all you know apples to apples cause even when we load a preset we sort of go through and check the Advanced Settings and make sure they're all okay but it's just easier for you guys to know exactly what settings we're using if we're using the ultra preset and you set the ultra preset it's the same conditions you don't have to go through 30 settings to make sure everything's lined up yep I think that pretty much covers it all right and that's it for this month's Q&A plenty of questions that we answered in this particular one don't forget to go back and check out part one of the Q&A if you miss that and do the good stuff like subscribing to this channel and liking the video consider supporting us on patreon where you can ask us questions anytime you like in our discord chat and I guess then we'll catch you guys right in the next one see you next time