Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unboxed he is the monthly QA and yeah things don't seem quite right because my trusty sidekick tim is not here this was meant to be the first QA we did in my studio for the first time in a long time but unfortunately tim has got sick so yeah that sucks he's been sick a bit lately so poor little guy okay hopefully he gets better soon I didn't want to risk catching up with him this week even if he did start to feel better and he was possibly feeling good enough to do the Q&A because well we've got a lot of really important content coming up on the channel over the next week or so and I can't afford to be sick at all so yeah we're gonna give Tim the flick this week I'm gonna handle all your questions by myself so yeah a bit of a lonely Q&A this month but anyway hopefully to move you back next month and we can do our usual Q&A where we tackle all the questions together anyway I'm gonna jump into the first question here and this one was the most heavily upvoted question on the YouTube page the YouTube community tab besides and actually I'm gonna sometimes put my phone this way because I've taken screenshots of the questions and they're absolutely tiny on Google Docs and have my phone around this way so yeah that that's why I do that for some people get confused while I'm holding my phone or reading questions when it's oriented this way if I have to explain that anyway beast besides the tech stuff what other hobbies do you guys have okay good question not sure we've addressed this one before Tim basically well Tim's Tim's a pretty simple guy he's 11 years younger than me that's not what makes him simple he just he likes to stick to his Legos you guys have probably noticed for me he's back drop in his studio so he's a big lego fan he likes what else does Tim like he likes Lego he likes playing with tech stuff or making YouTube videos he likes watching TV's and movies Nealon TV he's a big fan of that so and of course he's a he's a big PC gamer he also is a pretty big console gamer as well so I think Tim's just a a video gamer in general so that's Tim and then me what am i well when I'm not slaving away on the YouTube channel producing videos every minute I really enjoy going fishing so I'm a big fan of kayak fishing so I'd do that as much as I can pretty much a thing for the warmer months of the year but yeah I really enjoy doing that and I try to take at least one big sort of fishing trip per year so we did that earlier this year where North spent a week fishing on the kayaks that was a whole lot of fun and I also really enjoy I suppose you call it handyman type things building working out how to use different tools and things to create so I spend quite a bit of time outdoors doing that when I do get some free time and the weather's half decent so yeah I mean I enjoy doing a whole heap of different things but yeah mainly fishing and building stuff so I do quite a bit of that and I'd make some behind-the-scenes videos that I share with the patrons to sort of give a bit of an insight to what I do in any spare time that I have all right next one is from Jeremiah throws me a bit of a curveball with this one but a lot of you did upload it so we'll address it do you think AMD and NVIDIA a price fixing the GPU market quite an interesting one that honest well we were sort of talking about this I had a good chat with Chris from the good old gamer if you don't know who the good old gamer is have a search in the youtube search and yeah subscribe to his channel he puts out a lot of really interesting thought-provoking content he talks about this kind of stuff on his channel a lot we mostly agreed with what's going on Chris was a bit more critical he was a bit more insistent that I suppose price gouging was taking place and again yeah I didn't really disagree with that but I wanted more information I'm not convinced that things like manufacturing costs haven't also increased quite significantly as well over the years and it makes producing these big complex GPUs quite quite costly so yeah I mean you can take a Vega for example I mean there was the whole HBO memory thing there but AMD didn't really make a profit as far as I'm aware with Vega if they did make a profit it was extremely small and there wasn't much in it for their board partners which is why you didn't see custom Vega cards if you don't see custom cards there's obviously well there's no margins there to make them so I'm buddy's trying to turn a profit with the rDNA stuff I think they're going to successfully do that and to do that they sort of have to price-match in video where they're at I think once AMD becomes a bit more competitive they've got a few more SKUs covering a broad a range of price and performance then they will will see the GPU was fire up again I hope I think that'll happen but yeah I'd like to know more about things like manufacturing costs we know they're spending a lot on research and development these days to try and get those gains it's a lot harder to get those big gains that we used to see these days and we're sort of seeing that everywhere in tech so yeah it's not the Moore's law is somewhat dead I think in 2019 but anyway to answer this question really quickly no I don't think AMD and NVIDIA teaming up to do any kind of price fixing ok bit of an easy one fee from Stanislaw I think it is will I get better gaming performance from changing my r5 1600 x2 upcoming r5 3600 X or from changing rx 588 gigabyte to Vega 56 prices of both upgrades should it be similar another heavily outvoted comment sure to turn my phone sideways for that yeah ok that's that is a pretty easy one to answer I would say you'd be much better off with value 56 though I'd strongly advise you wait at this point to see what the Radeon rx 5700 series has to offer and then reevaluate your options then that'll make the most sense we also have some new NVIDIA GPUs coming up not sure what that's going to do to sort of that what is well what I don't even know Vega 56 is at you said that's the same as the CPU upgrade in your region it's around what are they 350 to 400 US dollars have looked recently but yeah we'll have some new GPUs filling in that price point soon okay one here from Daniel do you guys remember AMD said a m4 would be officially supported until 2020 when they announced it back in 2017 what do you think will be the future of the platform going forward well yeah I do remember AMD saying that and as far as I'm aware that's true to this day with well I suppose the exception of the a 300 and a 320 motherboards which are said to not support as n2 for various reasons but as far as I know speaking with companies at Computex again I'm yet to test this and verify it but the companies I spoke with said that all of their be 350 and X 370 motherboards will support these and processes or the Zen to processors if I had to guess which I hate doing but I'll do it anyway so this is just me guesswork speculating I would say that these n3 processors so that's the seven nanometer plus rice and CPUs probably going to be called the rise in 4000 series probably not a huge leap that one I'd say they'll work on existing a.m. for motherboards as well at least in some capacity but again just guessing on that one so yeah AMD have said that they will support the a m4 platform to at least 2020 beyond that though yeah again I'd have to guess I'd say probably not at that point we'll probably see some sort of socket change that may be incompatible with a m4 again I'm just speculating on that one so ok next question here I won't butcher your name so I'll spare you that will aim DB releasing Navi GPUs at 200 to $300 range to compete with the 1662 I slash 1,600 or they leave it at rx 590 by the way did you know 570 XT limited edition was going to be called rx 690 you can check the slides aimed as shown at e3 if you zoom in on the fan it says rx 690 loved from India well thank you okay so the first part that question I would expect at some point we will see more affordable rDNA parts but another one of those speculations guesses I have absolutely no idea when that will be so with AMD it could be it could be at any point in time so yeah I'd hate to guess on that one but I think it makes sense that they will make the rDNA architecture more affordable and more accessible at some point in time and then as for the 570 series or the 570 XT being the RX six and 90 yeah I would have guessed rx 680 or 690 personally probably pretty safe place holder there and then they've decided to change it to something that sounds a bit more fancy to go with the new RDA architecture okay an interesting question here from deep are you gonna keep using the FPS charts as benchmarks forever recently Steve GN has introduced frame time chart method what is your opinion about it are you expecting to bring similar methodology to your benchmark marathon and quite a few up votes on that one as well yeah we might I haven't ruled it out I doesn't work particularly well when comparing a lot of CPUs and GPUs which we tend to do I know gamers Nexus do as well I suppose you can select just a few to do head to heads with so yeah if a head head stuff it is possible generally it's been my experience at the frame time or any frame time issues that you see are reflected in the 1% low data which are which is a frame time metric then converted over to fps so it's a bit easier to digest basically I try to make data or our graphs as clear and easy to understand as possible a lot of you guys seem to appreciate that and really like reviews and content because we do that occasionally I'll remove some unnecessary things like for example from the Zen to content I'll be removing the eighth most of the 8th gen core processes because well the IE 600 K has just been replaced by the 9600 KS but it's a hundred megahertz refresh so there's no point including both of those that clutters up the graphs and I'll just say to you guys in that content if you've got an 80 to 200 K or you'll want to know how that performs it within a percent or two of the 9600 K I'll have the ID 700 K because that's obviously a non refreshed part but yeah my point is I try to make the the graphs and the data as as well as clean as possible I try to remove any unnecessary clutter and I know the line graphs tend to be a bit hard to follow if I have to illustrate that yeah there is a frame time issue there's some spikes here and there then yeah we'll use them I know Tim's done that in the past so yeah we certainly haven't ruled out using them but yeah at the moment we're not going to use them regularly next one here is from Rick what's your plan for Zen to coverage and how many sleepless nights are you expecting to get from those rapid-fire benchmarks thanks for the benchmarks it really helps a lot well thank you for enjoying all the benchmarks yeah well firstly I've already started testing all the necessary processes for comparison so I usually try to do that at least a week ahead of time so I've been spending about a week at this point testing the necessary 8th gen processes like I just spoke of the 87 or okay then the 9th gen stuff like the 9600 K the 97 or okay the 99 or okay and then some first and second gen rising processors then I'll probably look at some scale like X and thread ripper parts so already I've had quite a lot of really late nights updating that data of course I'm also updating my GPU data as well and about a dozen games for comparing with new Nvidia and AMD GPUs so that's a lot happening at the moment and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little bit terrified of what's gonna happen over the next week because yeah I'm a little scared about how AMD is going to execute this release and yeah I think in video might be throwing some stuff in the works there as well so yeah I love my benchmarking but I think it's going to get a bit beyond a bit out of control over the next few weeks but we'll see what happens the 3700 X have more overclocking Headroom compared to 3800 X okay well right away obviously I have to guess because I don't know at this point in time and if I did know that I couldn't really tell you so still don't have any CPUs to test at this point in time so pure guesswork and yet as I just said so well I suppose we can kind of work it out based on what we've seen historically the 2700 X that generally overclocked better than the 2700 if you look at sites like a hardware but I think on average of the 2,700 X hits around I think it was about four thousand one hundred fifty megahertz I might put some links or some stuff on the screen so you can get the exact stats and that was from about 3000 users than the 2700 that hit about three point nine five about there so it's about 100 megahertz lower and that was from about 560 users again I'm not really sure how reliable that data is it's based on there's a lot of variables such as motherboard quality people with 27 hundreds may not have bought ah as high-end motherboard as those with 2,700 X's then it's based on user skill and all that kind of stuff and the cooling and whatnot so it's really hard to say my 2700 matches my 2700 X but it's not quite as good at memory overclocking so that would suggest that 2700 X's are Bend as they they claim to be that's a 65 watt and 105 wat comparison so better one might be the 1700 X and the 1800 X and as far as I know they're basically identical on hardware but the non X 1700 is about a hundred megahertz lower so again those 65 watt parts don't overclock quite as well which is probably why they've been as 65 watt parts top vines asks are you going to test cheaper X 570 motherboards as well and ITX boards yeah well I'm going to try and get my hands on all of the X 570 motherboards probably bit ambitious as many as I possibly can as quickly as I can but yeah if that means taking some of our patreon money and buying the cheapest boards from asrock MSI gigabyte a Seuss for example then yeah I'll do exactly that because I'd like to know yeah how the VRMs on those boards perform what sort of temperatures they run out what features you get and just overall who offers the best budget x5 70 board so it's definitely something I'll do the ITX ball I'd like to look at as well they're probably lower on my priority list but yeah I'll get to those that also have liked have a look at the asrock MHz export as well so hopefully I'll be able to do that before too long but they'll definitely be some ITX Rison 3000 series builds on the channel and they're not reduced in future I reckon Tim's gonna be pretty keen to get into those so yeah we'll make them happen our next question here is from awesome tech Chan my phone the right way do you think 2nd gen prices will go down further with 3rd gen being in market or in the market again another one of these tough questions that my crystal ball isn't functioning right now but second gen Verizon's already pretty cheap they've gone on sale a few times at ridiculously low prices they'll probably drop a little bit though I don't know if it'll be straight away like I said they they're already quite cheap at the moment they're definitely gonna head south at some point yeah whether it's six months after there's end to launch I have no idea but I I probably wouldn't be holding out for any massive discounts straight away but like I said who knows I'm just guessing time will tell we're not a few weeks I don't know if this is one sorry again if I've completely messed up the your name what is the minimum power supply for gaming PC for gaming PC should you get a bigger one and how much is too big yeah okay I'd say for a mid-range PC probably around the 600 to 650 watt range is probably pretty optimal assuming it's like a sort of at least a bronze rated power supply yeah that that'd be fine really I mean a mid-range system doesn't draw that much power so 600 watts is plenty of headroom and does allow for a few upgrades and really too big I'd say for most people once you sort of start getting up for over 800 watts 800 850 beyond that it's getting a bit extreme and unnecessary but it's not necessarily a bad thing either I mean you do lose a bit of efficiency when you go stupidly too high so and you're just wasting a ton of money because you don't need a power supply that big so anyway I think it's best just to look at your hardware configuration and what you think you may be expanding to upgrading with power supply ones always a tough question but in my experience pretty much all the builds we do work perfectly fine with like a 600 watt power supply if you can get a gold rated 600 watt power supply you should be pretty golden no pun intended okay the next question here is from my man Zak how long do you guys spend editing an average video the content is always top notch thank you very much and with only the two of you it must be a decent timespan yeah well as we've said a few times in the past Tim and I were completely independent of one another so I don't help with editing Tim's videos and whatnot because we live about two to three hours apart depending on traffic and uploading the content to share to add and stuff so it's not really an option on Australian internet so yeah all my videos to Matt it's all his and to answer the question it could be anywhere from a couple of hours to a day or more it really depends on the content so for example this video this would probably be one of the quickest videos we have to edit I'd do this in like an hour or so and it probably takes just as long to encode it and then upload it so this is a pretty quick and easy bit to do which is well we enjoy doing them each month partly because of that but also because you guys like having some of your questions answered but big benchmark videos yeah they're at least a day because that's just putting all the graphs in getting all that sorted footage and yeah there's a whole heap of stuff involved there Tim's news corner that's another pretty easy one he says he bangs that together pretty quickly so you can probably tell which ones take a lot of editing work and which ones don't and generally the ones with a lot of editing work have a lot of other work associated with them so filming b-roll that's always massively time-consuming and then maybe creating graphs exporting excel graphs making sure sure they're all the right dimensions and things haven't moved all over the place that's always very time consuming tedious and annoying anyway depends on the video tick GT says hello welcome how do you benchmark so many games do you an HDD slash SSD that games are on and then you swap the hard drive or SSD between different computers no we don't do that because that method would work quite well for Steam games as you can just sit your Steam library and then there's just like an initial install each time it takes only a matter of seconds and you're away but games like the epic game store it's a real pain in the backside the Windows Store is an absolute utter nightmare so we try to avoid that at all costs origin and you play aren't too bad origin just sucks because the hardware limit but yeah you play in that you just copy the games into the right folder and then you're away but you'd still have to copy them to the folder from the secondary drive so it's not really a great solution generally what we do is we have multiple two terabyte SSDs Tim's got a couple I've got a lot so we've spent a hell of a lot of money on SSDs but it's a really good solution because I have one two terabyte SSD that has all the games on it so I can then copy them to the appropriate folders when we do a fresh install and that's quite quick because you can do it like three four hundred make per second and then I have another you know two terabyte SSD couple of them for AMD installs a couple for Intel installs because we're always updating and doing fresh installs and all that sort of stuff so yeah two terabyte SSD is really are the key and be nice to upgrade to some 4 terabyte SSDs but yeah not quite in the budget just yet ok next question here is from Tomo the x5 70 will be really expensive according to some leaks or leaked sources plus Intel will decrease their price so my question is will AMD build stay value for money for high end processes depends on I suppose what you mean by value for money so you know you can argue that the thread were for 2099 and WX isn't good value because it's an expensive processor but then you get 32 cores for the same price that Intel's giving you 18 there's some cons and pros back and forth there but it's still a very expensive CPU they're not giving you 32 cores for $500 so yeah I mean they're charging I think it was $700 for the 16 core part $500 for the 12 core part and that's pretty pricey but I'm and I think it's outrageous and I think it's still better than what Intel's offering of course we've still got a bench market and see where the performance really lies but I think based on what we're expecting some IPC gains the clock speed gains some better memory performance yeah I think I think it's they're still gonna represent really strong value for the performance that you're getting so I don't think too much is going to change there people are getting a bit yeah caught up with the x5 70 motherboards being very pricey but AMD's already said you don't have to get an x5 70 motherboard performance is exactly the same with ABI 450 or x4 70 motherboard so Amy's claim to that again we'll test it but it'd be weird for them to say that and then it'd be different so it seems like you can get something like a really there's there's a couple of really high quality B 450 motherboards that aren't terribly expensive or just over $100 u.s. so you can grab one of those and then you can stick an eight core processor on it for not much and you should have a really really high-end system capable of some good productivity stuff gaming whatever so I think it's yeah I think it's still gonna be pretty good people are getting a bit a bit caught up with the the these are rumors or confirmed pricing for expensive x5 70 motherboards aren't necessarily necessary ok I think we have a monitor question here but we haven't got Tim so I'll do my best can a 4k 60 Hertz monitor do 120 Hertz in 1440p or Eternity pay that seems like a few of you were interested by this question a short answer is no so if that was the case say it was 144 hurts cuz we have a couple of 4k 144 Hertz panels that I'm aware of if it could do that at 1440p and 1080p but not 4k it would just it would still be a 4k 144 it's panel but for some reason it would be disabled at 4k which we've never seen and wouldn't happen so yeah the refresh rate user doesn't really work that way or generally doesn't anyway so anyway the answer's no if Tim was here you probably would've got a technical and better answer to that question but he's not he's sick so you know that's on Tim Jacob says what is your most hated QA question that people constantly ask you how tall are you I get that a lot I don't know why people have this obsession over how tall I am or how tall Tim is don't really care don't hate that question at all it's just funny that so many people are curious about that I suppose because we sit and you don't see the lower half of our body most of the time so I don't know anyway yeah there's nothing I really hate I really like all the questions you guys asked it's always interesting to us sometimes it helps with content we we create because it's based on things you guys are interested in and it's just always really awesome to hear from the audience so there's nothing I hate probably the difficult ones to answer are the ones that we can't really answer the ones that I've sort of tackle t where I've had to speculate or guess I suppose maybe you guys are interested in hearing our guesses again we don't put a huge amount of thought and effort into the guesses so it's not really doing your questions justice but at the end of the day I'm going to have a much research we do it's a bit more of an educated guess but it's still a guess all the same so we rather just wait and give you guys the actual information then risk misleading you so that's that really now I'll move on to the next one from Brian let's see where are you Brian here we go how much difference would the IP see improvement of Zen - compared to zonal Zen plus make on GPUs like Vega 56 / 64 GTX 10:17 1070 TI 1080 our checks 20 60 and 20 70 some pretty much all mid-range GPUs would it also give a noticeable boost in FPS or will only have an impact on high-end GPUs such as the RT X 20 IDT I I suppose the best answer for that question would really be what I often say it depends on the game so for the most part you would be with those GPUs you'd be GPU limited even with sort of a more affordable CPU so when you're playing at 1440p with high to ultra quality settings you're very much GPU limited so for games such as World War Z rage - maybe yes probably farcry and a list this long of other mostly GPU bound games that won't make a difference that's not to say it won't make a difference everywhere so games that are very single threaded single core maybe Starcraft maybe I don't know any any games like that you're so I think all those roller coaster sort of games the city building games they'll see a noticeable uptick in performance thanks to increased IPC also clock speed memory performance all that sort of stuff but yet it's really game dependent more than the GPU obviously within our TX 2080 TI @ 1080p you'll see a performance increase everywhere less so at 1440p and then maybe almost not at all at 4k because you're extremely GPU limited there so anyway we're I'm interested to do the benchmarks and find out what's what when we do but that's what I'd guess ok interesting question here personal question these are always good hopefully you know asking how tall I am why does Steve look and feel like an Aussie okay while Tim is really a well behaved disciplined bloke who doesn't even feel Aussie I'm going to need a moment to process that one so I'm not even sure whether I should be offended by this question or I'm just a little confused so yeah I'm I come across as very much an Aussie bloke I don't know why and I don't know why Tim doesn't Tim's very much a straight shooter very technical doesn't mess around or beat around the bush just gets straight into the information so maybe that's a nice sort of joke around a bit more maybe a bit more lighthearted I think that's possibly also an age thing like I said I'm almost about 11 years older than Tim so yeah I think when I was younger like Tim I probably would've been a bit similar to Tim but yeah not sure what to take away from that one but I do like to joke around and mess around a bit and be a bit light-hearted and you know because it is very technical stuff and sometimes it can be quite serious I try to have fun with it and you guys seem to enjoy that and Jim does do a bit of that as well but yeah I I don't really have an answer for that question so maybe tim has more insight I don't know wish you was here because he'd really enjoy that one I think yeah so we'll move on I think it's fair foxes the next one it's an about size one and a half font here we go how many hours do you guys play video games on a monthly basis well we've answered this one before though I don't think I've answered it probably as well as I could have I had a bit more of a think about it because it really depends on when you're asked I think last time I was asked to this question was in summer I was doing a lot of fishing building things outside and I really wasn't playing many video games occasionally I'd catch up with some old friends and we play some games but yeah quite rare over summer however now we're in winter and I found myself playing daily quite a bit probably not much over the next few weeks again it depends what we have work load wise but certainly I play more over winter I would say on average at least one hour a day I think Tim plays more than that all year round I don't actually remember his answer but I'd say it's a couple of hours for Tim but again it depends on his workload but he probably averages an hour or two every day maybe more maybe he can even drop a comment below to to clear that one up but anyway sad Tim's not here missed him on this one tomorrow I will have a part to QA and that will be answering our patreon questions there's a heck of a lot of those so hopefully I can get through all of them by myself hopefully there's not too many monitor related questions that I'll need Tim for maybe I can get him to write a script for me or something if there is but anyway that's that's part one of this month's Q&A so hopefully you guys enjoyed that hopefully I answered your question or a question that you wanted to see answered and hopefully the next two weeks aren't too brutal on the benchmarking but I'm keen to get into it and I'm really excited to see what we have in store with Zen to Navi and whatever it is in video have planned as well no real details on that yet either at this point so yeah anyway thank you for watching I'm your host Steve like subscribe support us on discord if know support us on patreon if you want access to our discord and monthly live streamers which we were meant to do today but Tim six so sorry patreon members we will make it up to you with a bonus one in the next few weeks alright thank you for watching I'm your host Steve I'll see you again next time