Gadgetory

what's up guys JC sends here with the recent launch of the AMD rx 500 series of graphics cards and the launch of the 1080 Ti the anticipated launch for Vega my inbox is exploding with people asking me about graphics cards and they just are confused but all the different things happening here and I just don't know what to buy so the goal of today's video is to arm my new and inexperienced viewers with information they need to make an informed purchase bring out the bling in your PC with Corsairs new Vengeance RGB series ddr4 memory with its hassle free lighting controls in superior overclocking performance put the link in the description to learn more so if you're an experienced builder or a veteran of this channel this is all going to seem very basic to you so I'm actually talking to the beginner here because trust me I'm sure you remember what it was like trying to sift through all this to try and figure out what was the best now we're going to talk about a few different things here and I'm going to start off with reference versus AIC you'll hear referred to as AIC aib or add-in card add-in board those are the partners the brands that remanufacture the the manufacturers brands that make sense so we've got two manufacturers here and we'll start we'll start by getting some of these out of the way here we have got an Nvidia card right here this is the founders GTX 1080 I'm going to say reference for the sake of simplicity they do call it founders just know that founders means it's a reference design okay AMD has the same thing this is actually an AMD card imma set that down now what that means is there are only two manufacturers of the GPU cores that go into all of the graphics cards that you guys are using there's Nvidia which makes their cores which are based on the cuda architecture known as AMD which manufactures their core using something called a stream processor so there are two different types of approaches to the same the same end goal so essentially what happens here is the manufacturer in this case Nvidia took this 1080 and said here is the blueprint or the reference and they provide these to their partners now the partners can either choose to remanufacture that we manufacture this exactly as you see it throw their coolers on there and then call it a day or they can take the design for the core architecture with the way the memory interfaces with the core and then they can take that and improve upon it which gets you something like this this is the asus strix 10 ETI this is based on the same reference for the 1080 TI but it has there does their flavor their touches added to it so what they've done is they've taken the core architecture and then they built around it their engineers have built around it to try and take this and make it even better okay J so the manufacturers are the ones that are making the reference cards why do they get such a bad rep well typically the reason why people will say the reference cards are something you should skip and not purchase is because typically they run louder they run hotter and they don't have as much overclocking Headroom or at least that was the case until about the last year and a half as the core architecture has gotten smaller and overclocking Headroom has gotten more consistent across the board that doesn't hold as true anymore but what typically people will complain about is the cooler on a reference card now you'll hear a lot of people that will say oh and under no circumstances should you ever buy a reference cooler they're terrible they're hot they're noisy but they actually have their place reference coolers are typically they work like a turbo they suck our in magic happens and performance comes out the same happens in the graphics card air goes in grabs heat and exhaust it all out of the back of the case well about 95 percent of it some of it escapes through the cracks and then some heat is radiated off the back of the card now the reason why Nvidia and AMD still use and yes by the way I want to pause there for a second I did indeed see that the rx 580 literature from AMD is showing a dual card design sort of sort of like this not exactly the same but sort of like this and I saw a lot of folks saying look AMD is ditching the blower style guys I asked him about that that's a render that's not a real cooler it was just a computer rendered image that doesn't really exist at least that's what they told me when I asked them about it the reason why they do this is because the card is less reliant on the cooling capabilities of the chassis the manufacturer cannot build a card that has a multi fan setup like this guy right here and apply for a habit of work in every single chassis exist on the market so at least doing it this way gives them the best consistent performance variable that they possibly could so I hope that makes sense now with that I'm going to say that this graphics card with this blower style cooler they do have you know plastic shrouds and some of the manufacturers will take a reference PCB and put a cheaper cooler on there has its purpose they belong in small form-factor cases home dear PCs things where there's not a lot of volume of air that the crap the graphics card can use to keep itself cool now another argument people will use to kind of poopoo on the reference cards and this is a valid argument by the way it's not only a hot and noisy they also are sort of bare-bones they have less power phases they have less power plugs a lot of times in our back plates Nvidia actually does but which means that it could equate to lesser Headroom when it comes to overclocking so not everyone is an overclock of tho but there are benefits to go in with a custom card so I'm going to set this one aside and we're going to take these Strix for instance here this is a triple fan design which means that you have a lot more airflow blowing down in the card you've got this giant heatsink array on here with a bajillion fins that's the official number a bajillion and the more surface area you have the more dissipation of heat you have which means cooler temperatures cooler temperatures mean better performance for GPU boost where it's going to ramp itself up automatically overclocking as far as and temperatures one of those things that keep it from going as high as it can so the lower the temp it'll go higher these cards are also not nearly as loud as the reference counterparts even when they're overclocked so there's an acoustic benefit and there's a cooling benefit but there's also a size requirement as well so if you kind of hold these up against each other you can see just how much bigger the Strix is versus the custom card put on top of each other so you can kind of get an idea there it's longer it's taller it's definitely going to have some additional chassis requirements now speaking of chassis we have all of this air being pulled in from the environment or the envelope of the chassis pushing down this graphics card it's coming out the back besides the bottom it's coming out of all four sides of this card which means your chassis has to be able to do something with that hot air so that's where the blower Styles come in the chassis isn't exhausting the hot air the card is but if you're going to be having a cooler like this that all that hot air is just kind of being pushed into the case the case has to have adequate cooling ventilation so if you try and run a card like this in a case that doesn't have adequate cooling the card will continue to get hotter hotter and hotter as that hot air is recirculated back through the card instead of out of the case and it's not getting a fresh air supply which means it will eventually slow down as the thermal limits of the card are reached and yes that can happen put this card inside of a case put no case fans on the case and close it up and watch how fast a thing thermal throttle is it what happened pretty damn quickly now another benefit to the custom cards or we're going to call them a ICS stands for add-in card is they had multiple power connectors now I want to dispel a myth here real quick a myth is if it has more power connectors it's a better overclocking card which I've heard a lot of people say well the GTX ten-eighty only has a single power pin so clearly it can't be a very good overclocker so when you take the custom card and it has additional power pins clearly it's going to be a better overclocker that's not true I can tell you right now that my GT X 1080 founders edition card is one of the fastest 10 eighties that I have now not only is that because you know Nvidia bend the GPUs but it also is because of the fact that we are getting better performance in the core architecture where things like power delivery and temperatures are not as important as they were even two or three years ago but that doesn't mean that they're not necessary to run additional power plugs what the manufacturers are doing is they are allowing the card to draw as much power as it needs without over saturating in a single power pin now although the reference cards are getting more efficient they're not needing additional power pins these cards are designed to go balls to the wall as fast as they possibly can they're going to self overclock farther they're going to stay there longer because of the additional cooling but not only that most of the custom cards have additional power phases on them you can kind of see the back of the power phases right here but they're taller PCBs as well because they're fitting more power phases on there so the reason why you have the extra plugs is because you're getting a clean constant power delivery if you're running a GPU at its limit and there's any sudden dip of power then you're going to have instability issues so just because it has to eight pin power plugs doesn't mean it draws twice the power we're just making sure that there's enough power making to this card without one eight pin PCI Express cable being over saturated something else to keep in mind too is the custom cards are usually taller and longer than the reference cards so you want to make sure that you look at the specs of the card you're shopping for and make sure it's going to fit in your case they're longer to account for much longer coolers and they're taller as I said to account for the extra power delivery or the power phases which usually stacked up and down you put more of them in there you need a taller card a taller card also means you can space them out a little bit more and have a little bit less crosstalk crosstalk is where the components are so close together they give up a little RF interference and then they start to kind of interact with each other in a negative way and so having a bigger PCB reduces that now each brand has their own flavor of custom cards right this is the Strix it's available in both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs because Asus is agnostic same thing with MSI this is the gaming X this is the 390 so you've got the same cooler style though on the GTX 1080p I think I have one right here yeah so here's a 1080i version of it they look the same but they're not always built identical there's some variance between them depending on the power requirements and the cooling requirements of the GPUs now something else I want to keep in mind it's a little bit less important today as it used to be since motherboard manufacturers are now spacing out the cards as far as possible they're not sandwiching them together anymore so you can have more flexibility in which PCI slots you use a lot of cards now to account for the giant coolers are going to what's known as a slot and a half so not only is the card taller and longer it's also fatter so as you can see right here this is a dual slot when it comes to mounting but it's actually a two and a half slot because the cooler is actually taller you know wider than just these two slots so if you had an old-school motherboard and you had to squish these up against each other you actually wouldn't be able to because the cooler as you can see is just so much thicker and if you can actually see that that's going to close that with overclocking guys overclocking is not guaranteed silicon Lotteria what that means is the quality of the silicon inside of the GPU that you know the chips the dye it's going to have a ton of variance across the board they manufacture these things from giant wafers and then they're cut down and put into the additionally all of the GPUs so the quality of that wafer and imperfections that exist on that wafer mean that you're going to have a ton of variants in terms of overclocking ability now most of the time these manufacturers are really good at bending these GPUs binning means by basically putting them in bins theoretically where the best overclockers or the best performers go over here the ones that are not is good to go here a little bit lesser ones go here and so you end up with ten eighty ten seventy you know etc so ten seventy GPU is actually the same as a ten eighty GPU it just has CUDA cores that are locked because it didn't perform and meet the standard that's what bidding is now the manufacturers kind of do the same thing they kind of will test the GPUs themselves as well and the better Clockers or the better overclockers will get put in the more beefy cards and then as the card series goes down to a little bit less of a price premium they will typically have GPUs that are not as good but that doesn't necessarily mean they're not going to be good overclockers again it just literally is a lottery that's why it's referred to as a silicon lottery you win and you lose and trust me I've been on both sides of that I feel bad when someone tells me they bought a custom card and they can over only overclock it like 20 megahertz before it starts crashing it's unfortunate but that's just the way it is anyway guys I hope this videos helped again this is just a talking head video with some visual references here but I wanted to at least put some information out there as there's a lot of people shopping for graphics cards right now and I wanted to at least kind of give you some things to think about as you're looking for your graphics cards so if you know someone shopping and they're just confused and pulling their hair out trying to decide which card is for them show them this video maybe it'll help them if you have something you want to add to this video put it down in the comments there's a lot of information into that there's over a million people following this channel and that's a lot of collective brains and knowledge so if you think there's something important that I missed put it down in the comments of this video and maybe I'll make it in the next one I haven't done one of the videos for a couple of years so I hope this was kind of a fun little refresher and it gave me an opportunity to just kind of play around with graphics cards on the table here because I don't have enough computers to use them all all right time to go guys thanks for watching and as always I'll see you in the next also to down the description of this video there is amazon links to graphics cards so take you to the graphics card section of amazon it helps the channel if you want to help out that way you buy something a little portion of that goes back to the channel where I can keep making content for you guys alright time to go thanks for watching see the next