Gadgetory

hey guys how's it go and welcome back to probing Paul this is episode number 30 this is my monthly Q&A where i answer tech questions or random questions or what have you I've been doing this for quite some time now look this is the thirtieth episode there's a look back at the probing Paul Bley lists so if you want to go back and look at other questions I have responded to feel free to do so today I have some questions that were posted in last month's video so leave questions down in the comments section below if you want me to potentially answer them in next month's December episode but for now let us begin with the first question this is from Sawyer he asks why our monitor names always so long and hard to remember so let's double check Sawyer and we're looking at new AG and check what some typical monitor names are the del se two-to-one 6hv that's catchy the HPV for g-46 a 8 a sir EDC oh this has a series the Edie series Edie 3 2 2 Q now this is applying two monitors here but we can actually apply this to pretty much the whole wide range of PC components that you could potentially buy now here is an actual monitor that does have a brand name the asus rog swift because asus is done licensing for these brands rog republic of gamers is a brand that they own swift is a series of monitors that they specifically went through the process to create a brand for pay for the licensing I don't know the details that go into that but I know it's an additional process so the short answer is money it costs more money to go through the branding process to create a brand it's just a word instead of a string of letters and numbers the cost involved the cost of keeping up with that brand and making sure you protect it out in the wild and then also you have to bear in mind that when it comes to computers there's lots of smaller companies that develop and manufacture the parts that go inside and those companies aren't always large enough to absorb the cost that goes into a branding initiative so they stick with letters and numbers so that they can sell you the products at a minimal margin and keep the price low so that they can be more competitive in that way and apparently this has been a financially reasonable solution for a lot of manufacturers when it comes to the wide range of products that they bring to market because it doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon next question here is from Cory W who says Paul would you suggest buying a second 1070 TI for an SLI setup or buying a single 1080 TI for 1440p gaming and fresh Street I like your resolution sir I like that you're playing on a high refresh rate and a 1070 a 1070 TI is a perfectly adequate card for that that said if you're looking for more frames SLI is a potential solution but I would recommend that you opt with going for a single faster card rather than adding another 1070 TI to your setup however you should reality check and to that end I have linked a review by babel tech reviews in this video's description which is a 50-game gtx 1070 TI sli review this is from back in January so it's a little bit dated but this should give you a better idea of the wide variety of games and the performance you should expect they tested at 1080 1440 and 2160 and over on the right side here in the yellow column you can see the percentage increase in performance they got or in some cases negative performance or in some cases just like practically nothing 1.6% 23.1% this is why we usually recommend people go with the single card versus two card is because there's simply a wide variance in the performance you would expect to see that said if you happen to be a huge fan of like three or four games in particular and you look at this chart and you're like wow they all scale really well with SLI then maybe that is a good solution for you so generally speaking I would say no opt for the fastest single card you can get rather than going with an SLI setup but in some specific scenarios if you can see the game that you want to play most and you can see the performance increase is there in that game then I would actually say go for it in that situation next question from zip zo lock I am surprised no one has ever asked this but do laptops have a UEFI menu like desktop motherboards do during system boot up on laptop I've never seen it's a press a certain key to enter your BIOS and this will vary pretty significantly actually from laptop manufacturer to laptop manufacturer laptop manufacturers often produce their own motherboards but they do all have some means of accessing a pre boot environment UEFI typically and you can often access that by pressing a key on startup I've seen a bunch of different varieties on it whether you're talking about like an Acer or an Asus or a think pad or something like that they all have different means you can usually check your manufacturer guide info like they might have a PDF guide that you can download from the website or documentation that came with a laptop in order to tell you the specific means for your specific laptop of doing that it's harder because laptops are usually a lot less amenable to stuff like overclocking or changing settings in there but it can often be useful if you can't find your documentation or if you just want an easier way check out the video I posted just last week about the best way to access your bass or UEFI just hold the shift button while you go click restart and that will allow you to access the advanced startup menu and from here you can just tell it to go ahead and boot to the UEFI firmware settings which will automatically restart the laptop and boot into that environment and then you can play around your I don't know why you want to access that but there are reasons why you might want to I guess I'll leave that to your discretion next question here from Jamie do youdo Ghaderi I'm sorry I'm probably mispronouncing that but I did my best but he says hey Paul is it safe to use a blower on a vacuum cleaner to clean off the dust from computer components such as motherboards and laptops and then by the way thank you for making the videos you're very welcome and thank you for the question the answer is yes but you should be very careful there's a couple of reasons why you might not want to use a vacuum one is that some vacuums especially if you're in a very dry and static rich environments can actually move so much air especially again if it's dry hot air that it can develop static charges that can potentially discharge in damaged components that's a real rare scenario I haven't seen that actually happen personally it's just something I've been warned about in the past the other thing I warn you about is if you have case fans or system fans or CPU fans any fans that are inside the system fans like these have a maximum rpm rate and if you blast a bunch of high-speed air through them with a vacuum or a blower or something you can actually over rotate them to the point where the engine or the motor inside is damaged and you don't want to do that you can of course prevent that by simply doing something to keep the fan blades from spinning as you blow the air onto them or if you are cleaning out computers often you might consider investing in something like a datavac I don't have one of these personally but Cal has one and he swears by it it's about 70 bucks on Amazon so I'll link this in the description but beyond that yes you can use a vacuum just again be careful of those two potential situations that can occur oh I would say one other thing if you have a vacuum on suck mode and it's a very strong vacuum there are situations where you can actually suck components off of a PCB so I would be very careful about going right up against something like that to because they're not really me to withstand that level of pressure positive or negative next question from site Punk to15 hey Paul I understand a lot of PC builders like to show off their gear with the side panel window while hiding the cable clutter on the other side of the case but lately everyone seems to be mounting their SSDs on the hidden side are we ashamed of the SSDs are they more ugly than closed loop coolers and how do you choose which components you want to show off and what you don't I've had this situation happen to myself several times because I'll build a system and oftentimes if it's got a power supply shroud it might have SSD mounts on the top of it and it's a very nice location to drop an SSD or you might have a situation like I have with this SL 600 n that has mounts right here for SSDs with plugs that you put on the back but where the actual connector is is a factor here this connector is actually on the right side with the Samsung Drive so if I mounted it there the wires would be coming out on the rights but the SanDisk drive I had was actually printed the other way so if I put it that way the writing would have been upside-down and that was enough for me to not want to put it there because I didn't want the cables coming out on this side and I don't want the writing upside down if I have to flip it so because of that I moved it to the rear mount so that said the way I decide whether I'm going to display a product in a build prominently so that people can see it through a side panel is usually just how it looks and how it matches with the rest of the system this is a Seagate 600 Pro which you can't get any more they discontinued them but this has like a pretty standard metal surface and this I might remove the label from and have in a prominent position if this sort of metal finished matched with the aesthetic of the rest of my build this Toshiba TR 200 we have done some ads for and it's a very solid performing drive itself I don't like the sticker on here that much I mean if you're going with the green gray and black build and maybe it matches but anything else you'd probably want to remove that beyond that though it does have sort of a textured finish so that's not too bad either but a lot of these are just housings the actual SSD inside is fairly small so it's up to the SSD manufacturer whether or not they want to make something that has sort of a cleaner finish like the Samsung 850 Evo here pretty color neutral you could put this wherever and then anyone looking at your system who knows about SSDs or whatever be like oh that's a nice assist e or you can go completely the aesthetic side and have something like these team group SSDs which have RGB LEDs in to them which you may love or may hate depending on your love of aesthetics with computers and whether or not you have RGB LEDs but these it would be a travesty to purchase and then not place somewhere that were somewhat visible so you have a wide range of SSDs and I think what I like most about SSDs is just they're very flexible since they're small and thin and even if you don't have an amount somewhere you can just get some velcro adhesive strips and put them on the back and then stick it wherever you want so SSDs they're super convenient next question from George Noren and this is a longer one so I'm going to try to paraphrase but he has a rise in 2700 and as rack x4 70 Taichi motherboard with 2 m dot 2 slots one is Gen 3 by 4 and one is Gen 2 by 4 which has significantly less bandwidth he has a WD nvme 500 gig storage drive and he's just asking about that second slots he's looking specifically for Gen 2 by 4 SSDs but they're very expensive and he's just asking what the difference is between those 2 slots and if it really is that significantly worse if you were to drop an SSD into it I'll link you to a tweak town review this is a by my boy Steve over there so he always does a great job with those but you can find of course pictures on here and this is where I was just doing some double-checking beforehand about the MDOT 2 slots this is the lower MDOT 2 slot and it shares bandwidth with this PCI Express slot which is wired up you can kind of see here 4 by 4 so the PCI Express Gen 2 by 4 band width of this PCIe slot will be diverted over to the m dot 2 slot if that is what you decide to populate now there's different ways of setting up a motherboard in different ways of wiring things and you have PCI Express Lanes that come directly from the CPU and then you also have a chipset which has a peripheral controller hub and that has more PCIe lanes allocated to it and it essentially acts as a switch I can't say this for absolute sure because I haven't looked at the actual block diagram of this motherboard but I'm pretty confident that the PCIe Gen 2 by 4 connection from this motherboard is coming from the PCH from the chipset rather than directly from the CPU that means that you might suffer from a little bit of latency problems with this but then of course you also have the issue that it is PCIe gen - rather than gen 3 and you can also check out the PCI Express page and Wikipedia which I'll also link in the description if you want to check that out it goes over lots of stuff like the pin outs and everything like that I want to scroll down to this chart right here because we can see the actual bandwidth that's available with PCI Express you have theoretical throughput or transfer rate and that's in Giga transfers per second because it's bi-directional and then you have actual throughput how much performance can you actually get out of a device that's connected to this and here we can see that with Gen 2 by 4 you have 2 gigabytes per second whereas with Gen 3 it pretty much doubles to about 4 gigabytes per second so going back to one of your original questions is it worth it to invest in a PCIe Gen 2 by 4 SSD no it's not remember PCI Express is backwards compatible you can take a Gen 3 m dot 2 SSD and slot it in there and it will simply cap the bandwidth so you won't get the maximum amount of bandwidth so all you have to do is check how fast the SSD is that you want to connect the WD black 500 gig is a very fast time dot 2 nvme SSD 3400 megabytes per second so we can pretty clearly see here that if you were to plug that drive into a Gen 2 by 4 connection that caps at 2 gigabytes per second you'd be significantly hampering the overall performance of this drive and that is not even including again the potential little latency hit that it might see going to the PCH rather than directly to the CPU stepping back a bit though to answer your other question which is why do they include these well specs on a motherboard are often a big selling points and then also you could potentially get a less expensive SSD that slots in there and it would it does give you more bandwidth and more performance than a typical SATA connection so I'd rather have it there than not but I completely understand if you're a little bit confused as to those 2 slots and the difference between them and I hope this explanation has helped you a little bit my last questions here in reference to last month's so this is actually the last two months we've been talking about the difference between fan sizes the key to air power here which is a very appropriate name is pointing out that my mat my fan math is wrong because I did the dimensions of the fan itself a vertical horizontal getting the entire area here with they're pointing out is if you really want to compare the difference between fan performance you need to use PI and PI R squared you need these you need to use some higher-level math which I can do but not off top of my head to get the area of the fan the circular area of the fan and then you have to subtract the area of the fan hub and that will give you the effective area of actual gap here that the fan is effectively pushing air through so I appreciate that being pointed out as well I think we have beaten that horse to death so let's move on but I do appreciate the clarification there this one is about the migrating windows question that was asked last month and I pretty much answered that by saying I always do a clean install that's my recommendation but there is some more nuance to that and I'll Pierce who asked the question was replying to be 28 UB would it be and thank you to both of you for responding to each other and helping each other out also total insanity for here who is pointing out a Cronus basically and a Cronus license is often included with an SSD and if I am forced to do a migration an operating system migration from an existing drive over to a new drive if I'm upgrading a system drive or something like that a Cronus has always been my go-to it has worked most consistently for me so that is where I would direct you if you're looking to do an actual migration and then the other thing I was going to point out here just to follow up that as well if you have a hard drive an existing mechanical hard drive in your computer and that's what your operating system is running off of and you want to upgrade to an SSD do not use this method because there are differences with the actual Windows installation between a spinning mechanical hard drive and an SSD you want to clean install on an SSD for the first time so don't use it in that situation but upgrading an SSD yes and a Cronus is totally a viable option for you finally James Bustan says I watched this with some sony 1000 XM 3s on and couldn't hear hero at all this is a follow-up to last month's question about the audio solution I've been using so thanks to you guys for that I have been using some of your suggestions for this past month so we've been doing a little bit less background music when it's just me up here talking and hope you guys appreciate that and maybe it's improved things just slightly one last thing to point out guys if you watch our live show I mean what helps send something in for me to open up live on the show during mailtime Paul's Hardware peel box for 3:00 to 5:00 feel free to send me stuff we open packages usually every two three four weeks on the live show depending how much stuff we have coming in so thank you guys for your support thank you guys as well for watching this video hit the thumbs up button and for leave me those comments in the comment section below for me to answer next month we'll see you guys next time