Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unboxed it is time for the october QA so we've asked you guys to ask some questions and we've picked about 20 of the most popular ones and will answer about half of those in part one and then part two will probably be in a few days because we're currently at the pax Australia pax so we're doing all that kind of coverage yeah but we thought we'd start the monthly QA squeeze it in between there before we get benchmarking next week so anyway let's get into the questions okay we've got Tim all pumped up he's ready to go so we'll get into the first question this one is from element 86 so that is a discord member he bought me those cool she's near the harbour unbox back plate my Master's pretty cool I may ask how you got that so I have to speak to him and see if we can order one of the one for Tim a mass but anyway his question is I noticed Tim's seat our sorry set has some nice-looking seats now your seat doesn't ever sit you set up some seats what are they and are they comfortable though these are them we put these together yeah when we built this we did it behind the scenes video for that did you I was gonna film the final destination so I spent a couple weeks painting the final desk so I wanted to get that done factum so that will be coming I think I mentioned in the last Q&A but we're yeah these are the Corsair they caused the exact mold of them yeah they caused a tea to race up yeah yeah so here we go you ready whoa but they're pretty cool they've got just nearly knocked an x-wing off a table yeah well yeah some wheels on the bottom rollerblade wheel tuck things they're fully adjustable I did I think you've lost was it last month QA that I did the old recline all the way back yeah yeah they are actually they're very comfortable they're very very nice these I think it's the I said t2 did not yeah yeah so I've got the tea or one race in moisture I think yeah the teacher Road Warrior something like that but yeah the the t1 is much more narrow and hugs you a lot more so this is the big man nice negative stylus nice and white yeah it's good it's really yes so Corsair t2 to answer your question is what we're using a course they sent a pair of those for Tim and I to do our live stream in QA so yeah they're nice okay I'm not a discord based question here any plan on testing new gtx 1066 gigabyte gddr5 x and what about the other 1066 gigabyte that apparently are based on some GP 104 iteration yeah well I've been out of the loop on that news I didn't even hear about that I heard about the gddr5 X version no and yeah well we'll definitely benchmark that ii we can get our hands on it see what difference there is I'm not sure I haven't done we recently did the memory scaling video with the RT X 2070 2080 and 2080 Ti and we noticed yes some interesting results there with your if you have a clocked in memory while keeping the cause stop there is a bit of a performance uplift in some games not amazing but a little bit some games nothing the GTX 1060 I've personally haven't really done much testing so it came with eight gigabytes per second memory initially didn't it and then it got a nine gigabits per second version when the RT X 580 launched yeah and from memory that was more of a gimmick it didn't seem to make much difference despite the fact that some people claim that it's heavily memory limited and that overclocking the memory on the GTX 960 really helps I'm not saying that's not true it just didn't seem to be when they're nine gigabits per second version you make much difference but yeah we'll test it you're nothing add to that GP 104 iteration we're not sure whether that's because of the gddr5 X whether it's related to the gddr5 X version or not but as far as testing that that one should perform exactly the same because I'll just cut everything down to exactly the same as JP 106 assuming that the yeah the coup de coeur counts the same and everything else memory bus width and all that I mean it seems like they might be doing that to sort of get rid of the Pascal inventory that competes with cheering that's been some people's thoughts on why they might be well TP one oh this is this is all news to me my thoughts straight away after hearing this just moments ago would be that they've got a lot of a lot of dies that are more effective or so defective if they can't be GTX ten 70s yeah I mean that's the obvious thing that they usually and they don't have a 1060 TI that's based on that die so yeah they're just I don't I don't have a problem with that that's fine as long as it's the same spec and you get the same performance power consumptions much the same pricing ends up being much the same then as far as I'm saying that is still a gtx 1060 okay next question is from sal Kagan again another patreon member what would you guys like to see from motherboard vendors in the future given the sort of issues said 390 appears to be having okay we just talked about this at length on our patreon livestream so I'm gonna let you take this one to begin with yeah what do we want to say well I think s we've got to start with have this kind of like the - Intel specifications of you've got your your base frequency your TDP you got sort of your limits you know some other boards obviously at the moment we've discovered hit that 95 watt limit after a short period of time I in sort of your longer workloads so yeah and then on top of that you got your higher end specification that's for example running at the all core maximum turbo frequency for an unlimited amount of time that's what we tested personally with our 900k testing so it seems like we're in a situation where some boards can only do that minimum specification because if they're VRMs aren't up to scratch or they've got you know just some sort of configuration that's limiting them there and then there's some boards that can do your maximum spec like what we tested so it seems we're in a position where it needs to be made a bit more clear from other board vendors whether they're going to support that minimum spec or this point the maximum spec so some sort of yeah into fire with I suppose we'll just focus on the Zed 390 example because this sort of bleeds over into other platforms a little bit but this is a more extreme example I suppose with the Intel spec being so broad yeah you know you can have a board that we'll all call boost the 99 or okayed a 4.2 or possibly less 4.7 is what you'd expect to do because that's what it should do without any overclocking so I think the main thing from board manufacturers we'd like to see is what everyone's been talking about now for a while is actually find what a phase is and don't call an eight phase-- or don't call a four phase mother born eight phase motherboard just because there's a doubling of components without doublers so legitimate you know phase counts that would probably help for a start yeah because a four phase board probably won't handle the noise owner cave that well especially overclocked for a long period of time that's a lot of stress on the VRM so get define that correctly and then tying him with what Tim was saying if the board is limited to 95 watts say yeah it's it supports ninth gen processors its support to the 900 K at 95 Watts yeah and then it this is this sort of comes back on Intel a bit I'd like them to have it as a configurable TDP so the 900 K is either a 95 watt to one 45 watt part yeah that make a lot more sense yeah and it also would give motherboard manufacturers a reason for people to buy a more expensive board because then you'd have your low tier boards that are your 95 watt boards and then they could say you know well we've got our premiums at 390 board that's you know if that supports the same CP 141 so you get more performance and that will give people a reason to sort of spend that a little bit more to get their upper tier products which are better suited to those CPUs that's a much much more friendly approach for the buyer because if you know that there's so many boards that you're looking gigabyte asrock MSI any when you look at the whole slew of boards and it might be the difference between spending you know $30 more we'll get you a board that has no problem running the CPU at full performance whereas if you saved $30 then you've got to manually remove the limit and then all of a sudden it's running a bit hotter than it you'd probably like it to especially if you're doing a lot of things like rendering and stuff like that so you did bigger problem than has ever been with motherboards and the wide variety of stuff that Intel allows you to do within their specification we really need to sort of be you know testing motherboards more and making it more obvious for buyers what a motherboards actually providing you it's no longer the days we could just buy one off the shelf and they'll work the same there is definitely differences between each one so absolutely yeah a lot of work to be done there mm-hmm okay next question this looks all it's been directed at both of us from a patreon member but I think this is one for Tim because covers both of the things you like to look into do you know why there aren't laptops with VA panels that's very much a Tim question yeah I thought about this for a while and there's sort of a few things I had sort of thought of I think the most sensible explanation for this is simply that their panels aren't made in super high densities so for example you can't there's no 4k VA panels of a monitor size at the moment for TVs there are but four monitors typically we're seeing them top out at about 1440p 27-inch 32 inch that's the most common configuration for VA so it seems like there is potentially that sort of density issue they can't make like a high resolution laptop size display using VA technology whereas IPS for example which is kind of that equivalent for laptops you know you can make a 5 inch phone display at 1440p using IPS LCD technology so yeah yeah that's why I was sort of like I'm not 100% sure I haven't asked any manufacturers yes so yeah comment on that but I was thinking there's no real other reason why VA couldn't be useful that drops the power consumption compared to IPS is very similar it's got good viewing angles which is another reason why you'd use IPS for laptops so yeah I think it just comes down to however they've designed this sort of crystals in there not being able to get to the densities that you need for a 13 inch or 15 inch laptop screen ok next question do you think that AMD will be able to compete with the art x20 atti or will they play it safe and offer something competitive with the r-tx 2080 like they did with vega 64 like they did with the vega 64 i mean it's interesting question I think that yeah they should be able to compete on 7 nanometre with Navi hope so with the ITX 2080 I think with Vega they were limited by the process technically they decided to use for Vega which I believe was 14 nanometers so the issue that they has that that a very wide CPU design there's a lot of stream processors in the Vega design but they couldn't clock it as competitively as they could as Nvidia could with their chips that used a different process tech yeah so they certainly do have a design that if they could get it to clock higher would be competitive with today's top end chips but with the future technology when we're most likely will have both Nvidia and AMD on TSMC 7 nanometre we're going to be in a situation where yeah both companies should be able to make very competitive shoebox as one on one in another so yeah I would expect definitely that with Navi we should be getting 20 atti from like performance what do you reckon very much hope so I would think so it's kind of like it's why those situations we saw with the FX series coming to horizon we all hoped horizon would be good but there's always doubts yeah no I wasn't comfortable this way I never thought it would turn out as well as it has yep so hopefully nabhi is the same situation okay question here could you make a video exploring under vaulting CPUs in today's age it seems like everyone wants to overclock I'd be interesting to see what kind of performance their most power consumption you can get from something like an a 700 K or a 2700 X at 0.9 volts yeah that's definitely something we could do yeah I haven't really thought about it too much interesting question I've actually been doing a lot of under vaulting on my 9900 K I've taken that as low as it'll possibly go well maintaining some sort of stability to see what they if I could get the power draw down to what we were seeing on some of the 95 what limited boards that wasn't the case yeah that's definitely something we could look into sort of separate video they're looking at under vaulting CPUs and people that want to be efficient yeah well it's and it's basically it's an under clocking but it's the same rules as overclocking so just because I can under volt to a certain level doesn't mean you can yeah it's still a silicon lottery thing but interesting all the same so don't thing I have too much more to say on that at the moment but yeah something we can definitely look into all right another question from YouTube does the performance gain by using 3200 CL 14 versus CL 16 for rise and justify paying so much more for a 16 gig kit well I'm yeah just going to assume that it is a lot more I don't know the exact price but let's just say it is a lot more does is it justified well first of all it depends on what you're doing and what you're doing it with I suppose so if you're doing productivity type tests rendering and coding all that kind of stuff no is the answer it won't really improve in coding time by a whole lot I haven't done any recent tests but is that your experience you know a huge amount of advantage there I know when we did the sub timing stuff which really helped gaming had very little impact on productivity the next part of that is okay so let's say this is a gaming related question what are you gaming with if you're game with an RT X xx atti then yeah you'll probably see a nice performance uplift 10-15 percent if you go with the GTX 1060 then know you'll see no performance uplift in pretty much any game so yeah it really comes down to what you're gaming with and if you're game with an RT X if you don't say a GTX 1080 or higher than spending the extra whatever it is on faster memory is a non-issue so I have to assume that you're using a sort of mid-range to lower end card so in that case not doesn't matter just get your CL 16 stuff and you can also tune your memory yeah so you might be able to add that downer cell to 15 this the secondary time as you can probably tune up a bit so you can probably get pretty close to stock sale 14 performance there anyway okay why does SLI slash crossfire need to be optimized for by developers could it be standardized and native to the operating system and to applications okay so that's like a DirectX 11 DirectX 12 photo yeah so yeah it is kind of split between the DirectX 12 and DirectX 11 conversation because on DirectX 11 if you go into the driver seat you can actually force SLI on familiy much every game it just doesn't necessarily dictate how well it works yeah could buy this game it's just that you can actually enable it because it you know uses certain types of rendering technologies yeah and I guess the reason why it needs to be optimized is that there needs to be a lot of resource allocation between the you know getting everything synced up nicely and game engines are very different very different between each different games so it's not necessarily the case that a game that has great scaling could be applied to every single game engine by just like some sort of operating system native standardization methods so yeah because of that it's it's similar to any game really you know even if you're not running SLI a game needs to be optimized for the hardware at hand so sy just know step needs to be optimized for that as well yes just another feature yeah and if if SLI was the thing that for some reason everyone used everyone had to graphics cards then you would see it pretty much in every game yeah but it's because it's so nice that developers don't feel the need to optimize for and on dx12 it's a different sort of story because for that developers have the control over the true GPU setup so they can control exactly what they use each GPU for they don't have to necessarily be both doing the same thing they could a yeah a lot of work so yeah that as I was just about to mention yeah a lot of work involved with that so and again another step of optimization you have to optimize DirectX 12 for you know the exact game engine that you have so I get it one way to look at it is that the game developer cares about as Matt walk has the same care factor for someone with the to RTX 28 et eyes as it does with someone with the gtx 750ti because you've both paid the same amount of money for their game and their work yeah so they have real no interest in looking after personal money exactly it's just about making sure that their game works on a large variety of hardware and it'll still work on georgie-poo systems you might not be able to run it and enjoy cheap you configure as long as it works the game developer will be happy yeah it was always more of an incentive for Nvidia and then AMD to sell more yeah you actually they know that I once they've sold the GPS don't really care that much how well it works and clearly it doesn't really matter for most people if they've got money to burn on to high-end GPUs they will regardless of seems just for 3dmark school ok next question here do you think Nvidia is knowingly increasing the prices saying there is no competition if yet what's your opinion about the future market for gamers Wow okay where do I even begin with this one well they obviously want to make as much money as they can per GPU there's a couple of things I've lost the question on my phone but anyway I'll work off it wasn't that complicated churring isn't it big die it's expensive to make so if they want to make anywhere near the same margins they were with Pascal they've got to charge a lot more it's that simple unfortunately we're not getting a lot more performance because a certain percentage of reasonable size of that die is for your arty cause and your tensor cause which we aren't currently using don't know if we'll be able to use those but they're there and they're not really adding a lot of benefit I think like we said two months ago more than a month before they were released in videos just capitalizing on the position that they're currently in they want to push rate racing they want to employ that in their GPUs and if they did that at a time when AMD's very competitive they would have to absorb that cost to remain competitive but there they found themselves in this position where they have no competition at the moment they'll probably have competition next year so rather than wait next year for that node trip they thought well we can do 12 no meters now we can make a big huge GPU we can charge a ton of money for it we can push it as being this amazing ray-tracing thing get get the gamers to pay for the introduction of ray tracing and we don't we don't absorb any of that cost okay next question here how totally you both you all seem tall I'm that 6-1 yeah I'm about 511 so 179 180 centimeters yeah yeah a lot of people joke and say well they say about me mostly but did Tim and Steve have legs because we're normally sitting at the table so but I got up and showed you the chair before and I was using my legs didn't enjoy it but I was using them so we do not to use them yeah we have legs I just prefer not to use them so it's that simple okay next question you ready for it I am ready go show him we're sleeping on it in your personal opinion do you believe the r-tx technology so ray-tracing will be widely popular in the next one to two years or do you believe it will take longer than this to become mainstream you're the RT X fan I wouldn't call myself a fan for myself when you fart who's been covering on the channel so long yeah it will be widely popular the next one to two years I'd certainly expect there to be more games but I wouldn't say they'd be widely popular and certainly would not be a mainstream in one to two years the issue is you know as we've seen it looks like performance will be absolutely awful even on the high end cards to n8 when you enable ray-tracing so you think one to two years might get you good performance at the high end and then you have to add on even more years before that comes down to Main Street which is when it might be popular and then on top of that how many games will integrate rate racing even when it's mainstream so when you have all these things adding up it's kind of like you know one to two years for it to get good on high hand another two years to get it into the mainstream and now that may be two years for to become widespread in games and game engines yeah we're looking at a lot longer than one to two years yep pretty much nailed that I'd liken it to DirectX 12 implementation basically yeah takes a long time how long ago it's a long time ago now that we first heard about DirectX 12 it was going to revolutionize games and be amazing so it the adoption so slow over such a long period that by the time it actually gets to where it was promised all those years ago you don't even notice yeah it's like watching a tree grow almost it's like a no to you okay another question other than graphics cards high in network cards and the occasional sound card what our expansion slots even needed for these days well all the things you just mentioned I guess additional expansion slots where are you usually on a mainstream platform you get about what three yes are you x 16 slots and a couple of one time slots which admittedly can support sound cards and things like that yeah there's tons of things like well we have PCI Express capture cards I'm not saying that that's a common thing but as streaming and stuff like that becomes more popular yep capture cards are a thing store storage is a big thing so obviously you've got your MDOT twos on most boards but there are drawbacks to em two slots on motherboards well first of all you only have so many of them but using PCI Express expansion cards adapter cards you can have better cooling so you can put an m dot 2 card on those and they won't be under a component where they can heat up and stuff like that so yeah there's other things you can use for the storage as well so that's not just that but your storage would be one thing capture cards probably stuff that yeah oh it's it's just that's the whole thing that's a PC it's the ability to expand and do whatever it is you want to do if you need something that's niche you know yeah you can do it imagine you didn't have that expansion slot yeah it'd be every bad so I think it has helped a lot with your USB and that's sort of thinking a lot faster that you can first stuff that doesn't necessarily need the bandwidth the PCI you can run a lot of expansion stuff just over USB but certainly there are some things that need more that's right back in the day you didn't have that so much with you with computers it was the PCI slots and stuff like that are very important ok well some pretty interesting questions there hope you guys enjoyed our response and you're looking forward to part 2 which will be on the channel in a few days time like I said we'll probably squeeze a pax video in between because we do have quite a bit of content we've got to get done over the weekend period so anyway thank you for watching like subscribe do all that good stuff me laughing at and we'll see you next time