Gadgetory

pretty much everything I buy nowadays in the tech space at least has something to do with computers and that's great for taxes but it's also great for satisfying our morbid curiosities and I'll be honest I had a lot of hope going to this one at least you see I've been preaching the used graphics card market for months videos like these have been popping up in the channel a lot recently the cryptocurrency craze is settled essentially miners are selling off in large quantities and that's dropping prices all across the board with respect to graphics cards up to about three generations back now I just bought four rx5 80s I made no secret of that on Twitter and what I'm gonna do in this video is run two of them in crossfire and yeah we're gonna see how that goes this video is brought to you by privacy calm in a nutshell privacy calm allows you to purchase things online using virtual debit card numbers instead of real ones this is useful especially if you plan on ordering some sites with questionable security standards and it's still peace of mind for the popular online retailers like Amazon and Newegg privacy calm boasts the same security standards as your bank and split key encryption ensures no single person can access your data by the way you can download the browser extension and have it autofill the info for any of your virtual cards like this it's super simple secure and best of all 100% free since they make money on the merchant side like that of credit card companies you have to try via the link below or by visiting privacy comm slash science studio for a free five dollar credit toward your first purchase the word crossfire probably triggered some of you as with the acronym SLI and the tech has a bad rap for a reason noteworthy titles have avoided adding the support altogether and it's a shame really because III thought that I had something here in this video so here was my goal I talked about the gtx 1080 in the past and how they're going for around 300 bucks on ebay they still are by the way but i was interested in pushing the value notion to the brink at what point you stop seeing huge returns like these for 300 bucks this is an insane deal but how cheap can we go a hundred bucks 200 bucks we on to the 200 ollar gtx 1070 rocks socks off of any budget build it's a heck of a value if you're willing to take that risk but there aren't many other cards used or new that can compete at that price point the only options in my mind involved SLI and crossfire this is where the rx5 80s came at now not pating on our x5 IDs individually they're great cards but you shouldn't go into this thinking that you can throw to our x5 80s into a rig you know pair them with a motherboard that sports crossfire and somehow expect to receive double the frame rate that's just not how it works doesn't work that way with NVIDIA and SLI and AMD is no better in this regard so i'd around a hundred bucks each again these cards are absolute steals I should however note that brand new rx 570s can be had for around 150 bucks on newegg again it just depends on how risky you want to be but to date I've yet to see a card I bought on eBay kick the can gonna knock on wood there these are excavators in particular our four gig variants which you'll find it's plenty for most 1080p in 1440p games at a certain point these cards themselves can't really keep up with the bumps and textures tessellation and anti-aliasing all of which eat up the RAM and in my testing it takes a heck of a lot to max four gigs in 1080p you'll also see shortly why adding a second card to the equation really changes nothing with respect to my opinion on this matter but again we gotta wait a little for that so push the worst case scenario I bumped the resolution of 1440 P and in my testing I ran these cards with crossfire both enabled and disabled COC 3 charts here the latter of which though will effectively remove one card from the equation so we'll have a GTX 1080 while have a single rx 580 I know that comparison and I myself is a little unfair but we want to see under the best-case scenario how close a crossfire 580 config can get to a stock GTX 1084 about 300 bucks so $200 all in 4 to 5 ATS versus a single $300 card I had in my mind the idea that these cards were gonna somehow compete with $300 core now it's gonna conclude this video by saying yeah by 2 RX 5 80s because they're cheaper and yeah low consume more power but you'll get more performance and that's really what most people care about at the end of the day but yeah that wasn't the case and I'll admit it had been a while since I had run anything in crossfire so there was a bit of a learning curve I was also surprised by just how many games lacked crossfire support in the first place especially considering the value proposition from the red team I that you would think AMD would be pushing the developers to roll out games with crossfire support native crossfire support but I just in my Steam library all the games we typically test here on the channel very few of them performed even somewhat decent with both cards active so the first game I tested was pub G where the GTX 1080 obviously fared admirably granted this is an Nvidia optimized title I expected the game to pull resources from the 580 and slightly faster rate than it was so a little supported there again though not really AMD's fault and this really shouldn't be too surprising the margin here the two cards are different categories different price categories and thus have different target markets but what shocked me to a greater extent was how horrible this game ran with crossfire enabled we dropped from a low to mid-60s PS framerate down to a mere 42 or so after enabling it making the game unplayable in its current state very choppy we had a lot of frame skips and yeah just a horse state overall and I mean come on pub G's one of those games you want running it as high a frame rate as possible and you know the mid 40s was just not gonna cut it especially when you're getting by with about 60 to 5 to 70 or so with a single card so for this game disable crossfire that doesn't make any sense but do it because you're gonna get a better result which means technically speaking this was $100 completely wasted in this case so either send the $200 into a used gtx 1070 or by a single RX 580 and pocket the difference let's move on to a different game shall we how about shadow of the Tomb Raider in this instance we noticed a considerable jump in framerate using the dx12 API and now I'm well aware this is also technically an Nvidia title given the fact that it was showcased and promoted by Nvidia during one of their key nodes but this game actually favors to an extend AMD even the dx11 API so that's something to note my Vegas 64 outperforms my GTX 280s in both the X 11 and 12 but that's a different story for a different video on average though the single rx 580 pulled roughly 62 FPS and the ultra preset in 1440p and then adding a second card bumped us to about 80 which is about a 30% improvement or 1% lowest frame rates drawn revealed a similar story by the way now moving on to fortnight similar story to pub G unfortunately the Unreal Engine doesn't support crossfire SLI natively under really any circumstance so we're stuck with this nearly identical frame rate with and without the second card activated but hey I mean at least it's not as large deficit as pub G's you don't have to manually disable crossfire when you want to play fortnight whereas with pubs you definitely want to do that because the framerate asperity there was just abysmal with that second card active I don't normally test fortnight since it tends to run fairly smooth on even cheaper hardware the potential customers with SLI or crossfire in mind it should instead forego these features all together and stick to a single card next up is GTA 5 and I always test this one because it handles both Nvidia and AMD Hardware fairly well by comparison this time with very high settings in 1440p the crossfire rx 580 pair edges out a slight improvement over the single car config really not what I had hoped for but it's at least something I should also know that SLI scales significantly better in this title so at this point the prospect of crossfire really isn't looking too bright GTA 5 was where I really hoped this would kind of pull ahead all the games we tested this far either had you know no bump in performance or just a tiny bit with the setting enabled with crossfire enabled so you're better off sticking with a single card in my opinion I think it's pretty obvious in fact I had to hunt specifically for crossfire optimized titles an attempt to shift the narrative ever so slightly toward neutral ground so games like dirt rally which is AMD optimized dying light which is technically Nvidia optimized and the metro 2033 and overwatch tend to exhibit excellent scaling by these after mentioned standards but this is cherry picking I mean if I wanted to point out games that run crossfire very well I mean we could completely change the narrative of this video but I'm just going by what we typically benchmark on this channel and I can tell you straight up that of all the games I have in my Steam library well most of which I don't even benchmark with of all those games about six of them utilize the second graphics card on average maybe twenty to thirty percent of the time nothing really used it more than that that second card and in most games were either having that second second card Pegasus Eero percent or between zero and ten percent I was using Whatman by the way AMD's own proprietary software to check those things you tend to have conflicts when you install MSI Afterburner with AMD cards with the new drivers it's kind of a convoluted thing but yeah just sticking with AMD for all of these measurements by the way SLI it's the same story with respect to my Steam library so this isn't me hating on AMD again I just happen to be using AMD cards for crossfire versus you know GTX or r-tx cards for SLI or be linked whatever you want to call that so it's just it just happens to be AMD that is the subject of this video but the story really extends to both technologies because neither of them scales very well and this isn't really the fault per se of the manufacturer of the cards the developers of the cards but more or less the developers of the video games designed to utilize the hardware at their disposal the the API soon extent are also to blame but the engines ultimately are going to control how effective crossfire and SLI are and most of them just don't do a great job because devs don't expect most people to have two or three or four graphics cards in their systems in fact I I haven't looked this up recently but I do recall on a steam surveyed a number of people using more than one graphics card or more than one GPU to be more specific was under 3% if I'm wrong I'll put something down here but I'm pretty sure it was around 3 or under 3% which is a very small fraction of the gaming community and that makes sense and you can't really blame devs either even though it is technically their fault for not including optimization with the engines they're using they just they don't need to because most of the hair consumers aren't running more than one card so why would they go through the hassle of adding something that might cripple single card users if most of their users are in fact using just one card so like the reason why this video exists is somebody could go out today and buy two rx5 80s or four eighties or whatever pop them into a rig and assume the best ignorance is bliss right but the truth of the matter is that nothing from what I've seen this experiment points toward promoting SLI or crossfire unless you're applying a very specific set of games and you've done a heck of a lot of research it's just not worth it now if you've been around a while this should really be no surprise right I'd never recommend buying two of the same graphics card unless it was for very specific say productivity work or if you just had cash begging to be spent that's the real truth of it and I'll admit I wasn't this hard up about the whole ordeal until now until realizing just how piss-poor pub G handled the crossfire config and for - just how other games either neglected to acknowledge the second GPU altogether or failed to utilize it passed maybe 10 or 20 percent which is I mean that's 20% of an rx5 80s like a GT 730 like do you really want to spend a hundred bucks on a GT 730 that's how I see it and it just isn't worth the money and that brings us to the ultimate take away don't go into this thinking the crossfire SLI is truly worth it for the average gamer especially in a budget build right where money is tight we're trying to just get the most out of every dollar spent I mean that money could be spent better on a 500 gig SSD like a Samsung 860 Evo or a killer case an RGB lighting kit if you're an aesthetic person like me or a better CPU or an extra 8 gigs of ram assuming you're only on 8 to begin with or how about this spending the saved money on a better graphics card to begin with how about instead of buying to rx 5 ATS you buy a single gtx 1070 or maybe a gtx 980ti i've discussed and benchmark both in previous videos like this one right here and while they don't always outperform a dual rx 5 ad setup again very few cases in which that happens I can almost guarantee you that they're gonna outperform most to her ex 5 ad setups that's just how it is because again most games don't like crossfire and SLI that is the blatant truth of it they're just better buys in my book the 92 TI in the 1070 this is an AMD small per se and I want you to you know include us-ally in the conversation by default since the story really doesn't change much for that case either but we've got to work with what's at our disposal and by the way if you're just wanting like a more affordable setup in general an rx 580 as a standalone card is one heck of a deal for a hundred bucks you know used or new in my opinion and like I said earlier all four of these are x5 ''tis you're saying here we're used for mining all four of them work all for sellers disclose the fact that they were mining cards and I've had no issues so far I will say that I want to close though with this I don't want you to take anything negative regarding the rx 580 from this video they're excellent cards for the money and better buys in my opinion over say a gtx 1060 assuming you don't have a preference for nvidia titles or software but buying these two cards or any card for that matter for the purpose of I don't know boosting your frame rates of your entire Steam library by even 50 percent which in my opinion is still pretty conservative that is a huge stretch and a huge overstep in my book what do you think by the way I still have the two rx5 eighties in this this right here I'm taking them out immediately I'm gonna put the cheetah X 1080 back in the system not because you know I just want better frame rates overall because it's just generally unstable trying to game with two rx5 ATS most of the games I play pub G especially it's it's annoying having to go through you know crimson drivers AMD drivers whatever they're called now we're using the adrenalin drivers I think at this point I don't like going through and manually disabling crossfire to play a game I shouldn't have to do that and I'm not gonna do that because I'm gonna take them out I'll run a single rx 580 and a more affordable rig in the future but for now a single graphics card is gonna cut it for me something just a little more expensive in the use market will go a long way what do you guys think again comment section below I will be checking that out I also again want to thank privacy dot-com for sponsoring this video give this one a thumbs up you thought it was cool thumbs down for the opposite click that red sticker I'm choking myself I've been really sick today yeah it's been like it's really a tough day yesterday my throat was just so swollen I couldn't even talk so yesterday filming I wasn't gonna happen but yeah it's been really tough to even film this video so I apologize I sound a little nasally if I sound like I'm choking if I feel like I'm joking but anyway I appreciate you bearing with me click that red subscribe button if you're feeling special feel lucky and I'll catch you in the next video this is science studio thanks for benchmarking with us