Gadgetory

so you've been breaking your back all summer long working hard saving money and it's time to upgrade or build your computer and you've been picking all your parts and you've gotten to the part where you have to pick your video card and you're just lost you don't know what to do it's overwhelming and you're like oh my god why is this have to be so hard graphics cards typically aren't cheap and it's an important decision you need to make because it makes well all the difference when it comes to your gaming experiences on your computer so today we're going to go ahead and talk about graphics cards we're going to talk about what a lot of the different types of specs mean and hopefully by the end of this video you will be a entry level expert on what video cards are and you should hopefully be able to make the right decision for you when it comes to buying your next video card now my job today if I technically have a job is not to pick the graphics card for you and say hey you James why don't you go ahead and just pick up at r9 280 brah that's going to be the card for you that's not what I'm doing today what I'm going to do today is if you were finding yourself in a pickle where you don't know what a lot of the terminology means and you don't know what some of the basics are of graphics cards it's going to be impossible for you to pick your card so I'm going to arm you today with the information of what a lot of the specs and a lot of the terminology means so that you can then start hunting with armed with some information and it will start making sense to you now the first thing I want to go ahead and cover is the cooler the cooler is quite often referred to either as a custom cooler or a reference cooler when I'm holding right here is the reference gtx 780 cooler designed by nvidia for well you guessed it the gtx 780 and this is an all nvidia design if you did design this cooler to go on their card that's why it's referred to as reference this is the reference sent over by nvidia to the bar board partners all these guys behind me here and they are going to basically use this cooler on the graphics cards that they're just following the blueprint sent over to them quite often they're going to say well you know we don't necessarily want to do the blower style they're hotter they're noisier and they just don't want to do that they're going to come up with some sort of a custom which is what I'm holding right here gigabyte is very well known for their wind force edition it's got more fans slower rpms bigger heat sinks and they run an awful lot cooler now often times reference coolers are also going to be mated with a reference PCB what does that mean well the PCB guys that's the circuit board that's this guy right here on the back now that has a blueprint that goes along with it it's sent over by the board designers again AMD at ati or nvidia and then the board manufactures msi visiontek EVGA XFX gigabyte they are taking the blueprint and actually building the card believe it or not these cards are not built by Nvidia or AMD they're built by the partners putting their name on them they're just taking the blueprints and building it now custom PCBs is when they take the blueprint and they make their own in-house changes the gigabytes 970 is a fully custom PCB fully custom cooler every single component on here the capacitors the power phases the VRMs the heat sinks everything on this is completely built in-house designed in-house and really the only thing it shares with the Nvidia design at all is the fact that it's running a GK 204 GPU on the inside that's really it in fact GPU stands for graphics processing unit I might have wanted to start a little more basic with something like that now the logical way of thinking would be well if it's better in every way why on earth would I want to go with a reference model it sounds amazing it's cooler it's quieter it's faster at overclocked better higher quality components it's going to last longer hold its value better why on earth would I not want to go with that well quite often guys that comes with a price premium it's going to cost more often times 30 40 50 or $100 more depending on the model so really it comes down to price now there's another aspect that you may want to consider maybe you want to water cool the graphics card in the future if that's the case you're going to have a hell of a time trying to find a water block for this guy or many of the other custom PCBs because they're much narrower portion or market share there's not as many of these on the market there for tooling and building custom water bucks for a card that is very very small in terms of percentage of the market that has this card it's not going to be lucrative or worthwhile for these waterblock manufacturers to actually build blocks for them if you own a windforce card and you've wanted to water cool any version of the wind force card you know exactly what I'm talking about so reference PCBs make more sense because reference PCPs are what the blocks are being made for now with that said I'm gonna go ahead and point out that I've got my three GTX 980 s right here and people have asked me J why did you go with the reference style and not the for the wind or classified or whatever that's because if I want a water cool these bad boys I've got to go with the reference PCB now oftentimes you'll find an aftermarket cooler on a reference PCB and that's what we have right here from EVGA the GTX 980 there's a number backplate it's kind of goofy but it's a reference PCB this is all reference with their component that they picked usually higher quality capacitors and things like that with their own custom cooler on there so you kind of get the best of both worlds you keep the reference PCB quiet cool and you can water cool it if you want so that's why I went with those now when it comes to the amount of VRAM that you need people tend to really get caught up on that and I seem to think oh my god if I don't have enough vram my computers going to explode I've actually seen some comments where people have said I'm not even kidding guys I have seen the blind leading the blind I have seen some people say no you need to have X Y Z amount of VRAM because if you don't then your computer's going to suddenly shut off and that sudden shut off could trigger your power supply to catch fire and burn your house down guys I'm not making this up I have seen that comment in my own videos and it brought and it brought a very disappointing tear to my eye guys if you don't have a VRAM what's going to happen is your frames per second is simply going to cap out and won't go any higher now let's talk about vram real quickly Ram is video RAM for video memory gddr5 currently and people seem to think that you have to have gobs and gobs of it well that's true to an extent if you're running a 1080p panel at 60 frames per second or 60 Hertz chances are you don't need more than 2 gigabytes of vram 1080p is not using that much vram unless there's always an unless right got to be the bust burster of bubbles the unless being if you're running custom texture packs or high amounts of MSA a or anti-aliasing that really eats up vram like the shadow of Mordor game they have a texture pack that apparently requires six gigabytes of vram and there's only a couple of cards on the planet that have six gigabytes of vram available to it the other thing that tends to eat up via RAM as I mentioned is high amounts of MSAA turning up to 2x or 4x or even all the way up to 8x it's just multi sampling and it's going to cause the RAM to be chewed through like crazy so if you can get two gigabytes of vram for 1080p that's usually going to be enough most graphics cards now we're going to be offering three gigabytes or higher but like the 760 right here has got two gigabytes the r9 285 right here has two gigabytes the 7 or the 270 has two gigabytes you can kind of see what the cards and where they're designed to really run that that's kind of a telltale sign of it being a 1080p card if it only has two gigabytes of vram now if you're gonna be running higher resolutions like 1440p 1600 P or 4k yeah you want to pack as much vram on there as you can and a lot of the custom PCBs will also come with higher amounts of VRAM so often that's kind of killing two birds with one stone but once again when you start dealing with these custom cards that have more vram usually there's a pretty hefty premium on there as well one of the benefits though to running high resolution monitors is you don't need to run as much MSAA because MSAA is designed to make the edges more less jagged not more jagged less jagged because the lower resolution means you'll get smooth edges and high resolution by default is giving you smoother edges you don't have to run as much MSA a the last thing I want to talk about here is there seems to be this common misconception of it's better to get to lesser cards and run them an SLI or crossfire than it is to get a single high-end card guys here is my professional opinion and I'm speaking of someone who has multi-gpu configuration has been dealing with them for a while it is always always always better to get the highest single card that you can get and then SLI across fire that later don't make a conscious choice now to get to lesser cards and run them in a parallel SLI or crossfire config thinking you're going to get better performance more often than not to lesser cards are going to match the performance of a single card but introduce other things like possibilities of micro stutter higher power supply requirements games that just simply don't scale are gonna give you the same performance as one card in your left going why the heck am I only getting 50 frames per second or 60 frames per second I have two cards I should be getting a bajillion frames per second this doesn't make any sense it does make sense to people designing the games and the people designing the cards have to create profiles for the cards to even know what to do in tandem and if those don't exist you're not going to be benefiting from going with a multi GPU configuration anyway so my recommendation on this one go with the single GPU and the highest and single GPU that you can afford you'll thank me later I promise I know the other question is just on all of your minds and you're dying to ask it and you may have already typed it before even getting to this part of the video and if you did shame on you you should always watch the entire video before commenting you guys want to know AMD or Nvidia what I can't answer that in this video I just can't I've done videos in the past by AMD versus Nvidia I will do future videos AMD verses in video but in this video today I can't answer that both sides offer great offerings to the community AMD is really pushing mantle although DirectX 12 is supposed to be kind of the global version of better API when it comes to hardware and software utilization guys I can't answer that both of them have their great offerings and they continue to trade blows and they continue to get stronger and Trump the other and all I can say is that's great for the community it is great for pricing and it's great for the consumer if you guys are team red go with an AMD graphics card more power to you if you guys are team in green good for you as well it's great to have community support just remember guys we're all PC gamers and as a whole we are we belong to one big giant collective and that is PC gaming and we should all be happy that we just have our gaming PC's to begin with whether they be AMD or Nvidia but it's going to take a whole nother video to talk about pros and cons of either versus the other we're not going to tackle that with a 25-foot pole today so guys it's been Jays two cents I hope I've given you some information to make it a little bit easier making your choice you're still stuck with that AMD versus a video question but hopefully you guys can make some informed decisions and as always if you guys have any questions or something I missed put it down in the comment section or follow on that their Twitter I'm very active up on that Twitter and I don't know why will sudden a third talk a lot of southern but we did now I'm stuck so this is probably the best time to end the video the people from the South don't like when you pretend from the South although I am from Southern California you can't deny me my southern southern blood alright guys see you next be huh you