Gadgetory

I think it's pretty safe to say that anyone who's purchased an electronic doodad of some sort has experienced performance degradation over time how's that iPhone for runnin for you these days but what exactly causes your devices to go from hero to zero over a span of just a few years cooller masters master case maker five features they're freeform modular system allowing you to customize adjust and upgrade make it yours at the link in the video description so today's investigation was actually inspired by a conversation thread that I saw over on reddit about the Radeon R X 480 graphics card announcement video we did with Raja coterie from AMD where one of the commenters suggested that AMD's practice of loaning graphics cards to reviewers then asking them to send them along to another reviewer could hurt their benchmark scores due to the cards becoming worn out the back and forth discussion that followed is something that I've seen a fair number of times in the context of whether or not it's safe to buy used computer parts especially cards that have been used for cryptocurrency mining but it's one that I've never seen actually tested now the problem is that new hardware is impossible to go forward in time and make old so no investigation into like a GTX 1080s performance degradation over time can really be done and that old hardware is very very difficult to find in still brand new condition that is to say unless you've got friends in low places like EVGA x' Warehouse for example where just such a thing was found by my bud Jakob over there this is a brand spanking new still sealed reference GTX 480 a six-year-old graphics card and this is a reference GTX 480 that was extensively used for benchmarking moved to my personal rig then used for benchmarking some more with plenty of rough Linus tech kids handling in between so if there's any card that could have degraded due to hard use mistreatment or heat this GTX 480 is it so let's unbox the new one and see if this one's performance has degraded this is not my most graceful unboxing ever that's alright stop you're leaving point to the video and it's so crazy to see a failed product new packet yeah there you have it brand-new no hmm I just ate a brand new shaggy and you could tell if they had packaged up a used one and send it to me because the thing about for ATS is this surface stains when you touch it so you can tell this is legitimately brand new and has been sitting in that box for somewhere between four and a half to six years because it is pristine so there it is that's our card so I'm back from all my testing and let's run through the results here for my test bench to avoid any hardware bottleneck so that's still running warm I'll be using a very different class of hardware than what was available in the GTX 480 era a core i7 59 60 x8 core Extreme Edition 128 gigs of DDR for RAM and all of that running on an Asus x99 deluxe 2 motherboard I'll be beginning this then with a look at temperatures and rock clock speeds compared to what is advertised if the card is actually throttling down while under heavy load then a discrepancy here could save me a lot of trouble running any other tests for this I used our Crysis 3 skybox thermal test which is both real-world and one that puts the card under 100 percent load spiking it up to almost 90 degrees on the GPU core even on an open-air test bench with a fan blowing down on it a reminder to the fanboys out there that life is regrettably not as simple as AMD cards run hot or nvidia has better drivers it varies significantly from product to product anyway speaking of varying significantly they didn't both cards behaved identically here after 10 minutes with our brand new card requiring 1% more fan speed for the same 701 megahertz core clock and 90 degree operating temperature let's move on to other tests then 3dmark usually has some variation from run to run but both of my 4 80s got it on just about equally with future mark comparing our rig here to a gaming laptop from 2013 in spite of the beefy CPU but let's run some real games then Crysis 3 at high details and textures shows us that the GTX 480 is still a reasonably competent gaming card whether it's brand-new or very old and I guess this test is also a testament to the repeatability of our Crysis 3 benchmark run because they came in pretty damn near the same the canned benchmarks in Batman Arkham origins and Grand Theft Auto 5 tell a similar story leading us finally anticlimactically to the conclusion other than their cooling fans which will whine or stop outright when they fail video cards like most computer hardware have no moving parts and therefore do not generally suffer from gradually declining performance from use over an extended period of time in the same way that lets say a stick of chewing-gum wood which does not mean that they don't wear out electron migration momentum of electrons eventually causing atoms to move can cause circuits to fail and this is made worse by heat or by overclocking it's just that the way that they fail is not generally gradual or predictable it's more like the way that the roof of your house would fail it totally works until such time as it doesn't totally work and you get water on your head and it's time for a new one so if your iPhone or your laptop like a video card doesn't have any moving parts then based on our testing today the reason for its slowdown that is to say if it's storage device is still running well is more likely to do with software with bloated applications like anti-malware packages or malware itself pick your poison right running in the background and operating system updates that are designed with more overhead for newer faster hardware being the most common culprits so as you can imagine for a technology YouTube channel use technology here in our office to improve efficiency a lot from the inventory system that we added when we moved into the new office so we don't have to just be like oh hey does anyone have the 4790k to the much improved tracking system for all of our videos ads vessel releases YouTube releases etc that has replaced the old whiteboard and handwritten notes so just as we are improving efficiency in our office using technology HP is using new printer technology to help improve your office experience so they're featuring the pagewide Pro MFP 477 DW which has best-in-class printing speeds prints four times more pages than standard cartridges with their page wide extra high yield cartridges and allows you to save on printer ink on electricity cost and on time because the best possible printer in my mind is the one that sits in the corner and is completely invisible except when you need it to work and just freakin works because you don't have time to tinker around with something like this when you need oh I don't know talent release forms for a shoot that you're running out the door to do or whatever the case may be so if you want to learn more check it out at the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys that this video sucked you know where that button is but if it was awesome get subscribed hit the like button or even consider supporting us directly by buying a cool shirt like this one or with a direct monthly contribution through our forum also please note that we'll have an Amazon link in the video description where you can check out any of the products that we featured today now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top right corner to check out our latest video over on channels super-fun