Gadgetory

so when you when you uh game tested this this map was it just the eight of you in the Quality Assurance section that joined the map was like oh yeah gunship works oh yeah tanks work well let's push it out hey everybody Jay's two cents coming at you once again with some mediocre gameplay covered by some epic commentary continuing on with our series of things to know before you buy or build or AMD vs. Intel we're now going to talk about things you need to know when buying a new video card video cards are one of those things that you have to have in your computer especially if you want to play games just integrated graphics just are not going to cut it you're not going to be able to play the latest games at even low settings you're just it's you just can't do it so the first thing you need to ask yourself when buying a new video card is what games am I going to play what games am I currently playing and what games do I think I'm going to play and what do I mean by do I think I'm going to play if you find yourself playing games that you know are just not very graphically intensive you know minecraft or let's say World of Warcraft or even Diablo 3 or those types of games then you need to know that you do not need a very powerful graphics card to run these games these games are programmed to run on a wide variety of systems including laptops and and other portable type computers that just do not need that much power if you play games like Metro 2033 or battlefield 3 or Call of Duty on PC or any other graphically intensive game the better the video card the better your experience is going to be those games rely more on your video card than your processor so you don't want to scrimp when it comes to your graphics card the next question you have to ask yourself is how much do I want to spend there's a lot of price brackets and price points when it comes to graphics cards for instance you can buy a graphics card today for a hundred bucks or you can go out there and blow $1,000 on a single card so the range is very wide and the brackets tend to be between 1 and 1 d 150 250 250 350 and 350 and up so when it comes to how much you're going to spend you really need to be honest with yourself because you don't want to do what I tend to do and it really really pisses my wife off we're all going I'll buy something and I'll say uh you know what I'm gonna get a step down from what the best is today because I'll save a little money and you know what I don't really need that you know I don't really need that extra power and I come home and I install it and I play with it and she can see immediately by the look on my face that I am just not happy with the graphics card so what do I do take it out I put it back in the box I box it up I Drive all the way across town I spend time and gas to go and exchange it for the model that I should have got to begin with so make sure you're honest with yourself on what you need and how much you're going to spend because in the end you're either going to be happy or you're not and you want to make sure you make the right decision the first time another thing that's really important when it comes to buying a graphics card is how long do you think you're going to have this card before you upgrade again if you find yourself on the common three-year PC cycle or every three years you find yourself upgrading components which is a very common upgrade schedule you're going to want to get a better card because you're going to want it to last you longer if you find yourself doing an annual upgrade you can probably get away with medium grade card or maybe even the one step below the best available for whatever brand you tend to go with so you can get away with spending a little bit less today because you know tomorrow or you know metaphorically tomorrow twelve months from now or less you're going to be buying another graphics card it's going to get expensive to spend $500 every 12 months on a graphics card by itself because chances are if you're upgrading your graphics card that often you're probably upgrading other things in your computer to be a little bit easy on your pocketbook and instead of going with fad gtx 680 maybe go with a 670 save yourself a hundred bucks you'll thank yourself later now kind of circling back to the what games will I play you're probably going to have a hard time determining what's too much power or what's too little power for example I have several messages sitting in my inbox as I do this recording asking a specific question of which graphics card is better X or Y and they'll name the particular models that they're currently looking at I'm here to tell you right now when it comes down to it the better card is the higher number so if you're comparing a 670 to a 680 the 680 is better if you're comparing a 7950 to a 7970 the 7970 is better it doesn't lie in terms of the numbers the shear hardware between the two is going to be better with the higher number now the question you should really be asking yourself is which is better for me to answer that you've got to circle back to the first question we started this video with what games are you going to be playing if I play minecraft I don't want to run out there and get a 680 that's just silly you can easily get away using a mid end card or even the low end card depending on what games you play now one thing I would like to explain to people who aren't too familiar with graphics cards on why you have these varying models of the same technology and let me explain what I mean by that the 600 series for NVIDIA is known as Kepler that's the code name for the processor that's used inside the graphics processing unit but at 680 compared to a 670 compared to a 660 and a 650 are all GTX models of the new Nvidia Kepler line what's the difference between them I can tell you right now they all use the same processor people right now I know are going what what do you mean they use the same processor this one shows X minus Q decors this one has a higher number of CUDA cores there's different memory bit memory bandwidth you know going on there between 192 bit or 256 bit or whatever here's the way it works when they manufacture these cards they have a particular spec range that the processor has to fall within to be considered either a grade A grade B grade C or even a grade D processor and right off the bat you have CUDA cores which are like tiny little processors that make up the entire processor itself there's no such thing really as a perfect processor when you're dealing with nano technology like that that is so small there is a failure rate the way it works with these processors is the entire thing doesn't fail but some of these cores within the processor may fail so the ones that perform the best they set aside and say okay these are our flagship models these chips perform as expected or above spec so we're going to stick them in our high-end cards the ones that then fail with inless I'm just around a number here I don't know the exact science a lot of this is actually kept secret let's say processors that are within a 90 to a 95 percentile on performance then gets stuck in the B grade and then down and down CDE so what happens is they determine okay this processor is not performing up to spec with all cores unlocked however if we lock a certain amount of cores and it runs stable at a certain number then we've brand it and we stick it in our lower end graphics cards the same thing happens with memory chips so they'll take the piles they made with let's say grade A through D and separate them out and they do the same thing with the memory so then they match them up and there you go 680 at 670 is 660 and as you go down the line they have lesser performance because the processor wasn't up to snuff okay so that's why you'll hear somewhere along the neighborhood of my 670 is within 10% performance ratio of a 680 which is very true because Kepler has a very great ratio of performance to failure rate so what does that mean it means the processors that they're sticking in the six 70s we're so close to the 680 that they're getting very similar performance but all the cores may not have passed QA so they had to be stuck in that in that B grade pile so with that explanation I hope it makes more sense to what the difference means between the numbers they are all the same processor they just have different components within them either locked or unlocked and as the card goes down and the processor becomes less intense there's less hardware that needs to support it whether it be you know the memory bus or the speed of the memory or the MOSFETs or whatever are on the board so that's why you tend to find $100 shift between each card the final question that people tend to ask is Nvidia or AMD well I'm going to tell you right now the way it's gone in the past is these two companies are constantly trading blows it's not like AMD and Intel where Intel has just been on top for the last six years and hasn't been able to be toppled AMD came out with the new 28 nanometer chip sooner than Nvidia Nvidia released it three and a half months later however they took longer to perfect it so whereas the 7970 was the fastest graphics card on the planet for about three months once Nvidia released their card it was $50 cheaper it was 20% faster than the flagship model for Indy's what at AMD do they reduce the price of their card now whether or not you go AMD or nvidia that's truly going to come down to taste you're going to have a lot of competition or a lot of debating regarding which is better and graphics cards are not like processors it's not as cut-and-dry you're going to have people whose graphics cards perform beautifully and they're going to have those that mage has gotten a dud so when it comes to brand go with what fits in your price bracket and what you feel is the better model for your money I hope you found today's information regarding GPUs useful and it helps you make a decision on which graphics card to upgrade to or in the future click the video on the left to see my latest production about what I do and a piece of equipment that I own fails and click the video on the right to determine whether or not AMD or Intel is right for you when it comes to PC gaming and of course as always please subscribe like this video and share it with your friends