Gadgetory

in recent videos you guys have asked me how I benchmark games especially for things like graphics card reviews and also CPU reviews so today I'm going to go through everything I do and also not only how you can apply these things to benchmarking your parts in your computer but also diagnosing problems as well if they exist but with that said let's check out the test bench what's in there and then get on to benchmarking but before we do share the skill set today's video is brought to you by skill share the online learning community where you can learn real-world skills and I've always found it easiest to learn by watching others and with skill share you can do exactly that for instance I'm still a noob at social media and taking photos for Instagram so I'm doing an online course covering social media and how I can improve on providing a better experience for those that check out my socials though there's so many other courses available like film marketing finance and budgeting and everything that can help you in your day to day activities now if you're a techie yes city viewer you can get access to two months of Skillshare premium free if you use the link in the description below however this offer is only available for the first 500 users that sign up using the link below so with that said let's get back now to the check yes benchmark class so here's my benchmark setup here where I've got a XIII 90 99 hundred K and currently 16 gigabytes of ddr4 platinum now I did have 32 in there then you can get higher speeds with just two sticks and so we're just using 16 gigabytes and since we're only just testing games we don't need more memory and so now we've got an RT X 27 installed for today's video and here's the beauty about this benchmark rig I can quickly change graphics cards to any other Nvidia card in this case because I've got the Nvidia SSD over there setup but if I'm changing over to an AMD graphics card and then change the SSD to an AMD install and then I can test those AMD cards out in terms of the upcoming x5 70 AMD processors if I want to test them out I can then just quickly take everything off the test bed here and then put the new motherboard and CPU on and then use the same memory and we're good to go so definitely a benchmark setup like this saves you a lot of time so what we need to benchmark our software now is three different applications two of these applications come in the same package that is MSI Afterburner and also river tuna statistics now for this you will want to get the latest version and actually keep this program up to date because if you don't then games like Apex legends for example can lock you out and the program won't work if it's not the latest version I had this problem and then I updated it and the problem went away now we'll get on to heaven later but this is a fantastic utility for overclocking and quickly getting over clocks as well as just checking things out because if things crash then you can quickly reload heaven I find it very efficient and easy to use and with that said though all these three applications are free to download and use so I'll put the links in the description below for you but let's get on now with MSI Afterburner the first utility and it's so powerful for not just benchmarking but also telling you and diagnosing problems with your system but we'll get onto that later let's start the tutorial and how I do things and I'm just going to go through the settings and if you guys have any problems and be sure to drop a comment in the comment section below if there's something you don't understand and just holler at me any time and I'll get back to you but here we go to start up we want to left-click this I like this program loading when windows loads up well then left-click on the COG wheel here now they've got all these little hints and tips I'm just gonna quickly turn them off so they don't distract the tutorial as I'm gonna be explaining things myself but what we want to go to now is just the general settings tab and we want to start with windows start minimized as well as for me personally since I overclock and I use this program to overclock I'm gonna unlock voltage control and unlock voltage monitoring and then we're gonna click apply and then we're just going to restart the application load back in and then left click on the cogwheel again and then go over to the monitoring tab which is the most important part with this software if you guys see in the top left hand corner of the screen all that fancy information that a lot of benchmark is use this will be because of this monitoring section here in conjunction with River tuner but basically before gaming today we're just going to show you the most important stats then you can have up while you're monitoring as well as some additional things that you can do with this software but what it's worth I'm just going to monitor and keep on GPU usage GPU temperature also memory usage and core clock as well as memory clock itself so we know how hard our graphics card is going and if you're on a potato then you will want to disable as many of these as possible so the software isn't causing any issues with your benchmarking we've also got a 16 threaded CPU here the 9900 K but I only am interested in monitoring the CPU temperature as well as the CPU clock speeds and also the usage rather than monitoring every single individual thread it's just going to take up a lot of clutter and since I know the 9900 K or 5 gigahertz pretty much the best gaming CPU can get that's not gonna really cause a problem at least in today's tests we've also got RAM usage as well I like to keep this up here to know if a game is utilizing RAM or if any background applications come into play then we'll be able to monitor that too now here's a tricky one here with this software this is actually pretty important if you're doing time to benchmark runs like I'm doing a lot of people like to just enable framerate average as well as the 1% in point one percent lows but I actually just clicked the framerate here and then I click showing on-screen display then I click left click here go graph and then I click the three dots I like to scroll all the way down to the bottom here and then go to graph and click the little drop down menu and change that to diagram and graph style click OK and then we can go back and all these other ones that we left checked we can then click left click showing on-screen display and so what this is gonna do is it's going to now show up when we launch applications in the top left hand side so we can run a quick test once we've enabled showing on-screen display on all these different settings here and just to test if it's working so then click apply click OK and then in the case of UniGene heaven just make sure that it's running and yep we can see straight away that we now have the information being displayed up here in real-time and that is essentially the first stage to benchmarking but again there's so much more we've got to do in order to get benchmark runs so let's get back to that quickly and get back to that cogwheel left click here and then what we want to do is go over to on screen display and now I like to hotkey this to f12 and so this enables me to if I'm capturing gameplay and I don't want these settings sort of getting in the way if we got menu items and we're looking at menu items in game then I can quickly turn the software display off by hitting f12 that's how I like to do things of course I like to show on screen displaying caption videos turn that off as well click apply then go over to the left click the benchmark tab and I like to set my begin recording and end recordings to different hotkeys so I use f7 in this case and f8 to stop the recording in the case of ending the recording you will want to tap that twice so then it logs the data into your benchmark folder so what we're gonna do here is left click browse and go to the desktop left click desktop and I've got a folder here so make a new folder and call it bench armed Kay's said if you want to follow me and then just open your folder in there and then click apply and that's where now our benchmark numbers are going to be saved for later use now also what you can do with this program is profiles go over to the profiles tab here and this is for me it's important when I'm doing overclocking settings I like to set f5 and f6 to two different profiles and we'll see why this is so powerful in a second because I click apply and what we've got here now is afterburner itself with our overclock settings so we can drop core voltage back down when we just drop it back down to defaults and then click Save to profile 3 now for overclocks I have overclocked this card already and off the top of my head I believe it was at 34 millivolts and the levels were about I think 188 or something like that and then the memory clocks were just under plus one gigahertz and then 80% fan speeds so we can have overclock profile like this save that to four and now if we hit our hotkeys we can see that we can quickly change between our over clocks that easy so when we're benchmarking we've done our three runs with these stock settings if I'm getting overclock numbers for you guys I can then quickly just change to my overclock profile and then run the benchmark three more times hence why I really like this program it's just simple straight down to business and it's very efficient to use so that's the first stage done we've got overclock blocked in and in order to get your overclock numbers guys that is a different topic for a different day if you want to see a video on that I can do one for you on how I fast track over clocks but that's the other clocks locked in that is msi afterburner it's ready to benchmark but let's go over now to the next program here and that is river Chenab so this one here is very powerful it's pretty much the bread and butter to afterburner without this you're not going to be getting any numbers because this is actually the backbone where all the code is so I like to start this with Windows as well application detection level I have never come into any problems leaving this on low so I usually leave this on low and I've not come into one problem yet now if you're on a potato leave this on vector 3d me personally I've got a decent computer I can turn it to raster 3d left click that little icon and I can customize the text if I want to I like verdana bold so we'll leave it on that on-screen display coordinate space leave that on viewport and then you can also have your own on-screen display shadow right here now show under statistics I like to leave this on and also I like to at 1080p make the size of this graph a little bit bigger than the default setting so make sure it's just a little bit big I can see my numbers if you're at 1440 PM h to make a bigger 4k yet again bigger again because once you up the resolutions this actually gets a lot smaller so for 1080p i like to just make it a little bit bigger 1440p there for K bigger so that's usually how that works now everything is ready to go I accept I think setup we can also display the maximum frame rate which is important we'll talk about that after we run some benchmarks and also we can take off the enable frame rate limiter and then click OK and now we're ready to do our first trial run with MSI Afterburner let's left-click that Run button here so now a new 2g in heaven we can simply hit f7 start our benchmark and we can see here we've got all our stats live while we are benchmarking now this is the most important reason why you turn off frame rate average as well as 17.1% lows in the actual afterburner monitoring if you leave them on this is not going to display here and why this is so important is it actually gives you a timer for how long your benchmark is running for and so with that I can leave it running for 32 seconds and then I can hit f8 right on 32 seconds and then I can hit it again to save that text in the folder and so that's one benchmark done we can then repeat this another two times for you guys so after we've done that we can then left-click on our folder that we created before with our text folder that we created before as well then we see here that the three runs that we did are now logged in to this file then from there we can use that data for our benchmark so ever with the heav'n benchmark you'll notice here that we tested at three different places so the FPS is on three different settings so it's not accurate and this is the thing with benchmarking we'll see this soon when I test the games you want to test apples to apples to apples across all different benchmarking results that you do and then you want to monitor these numbers to see if there's any outliers now with inbuilt benchmarks before we move on to the games maximum frame rate is very important I like to keep this setting up here especially if we're checking out those in-game benchmarks which I do use because they are simple to use you can do other things while you're just watching that benchmarking you know your system is 100% the one thing to look out for with those is the maximum frame rate to make sure they're not skewing the results either towards AMD or Nvidia and a game that I know in particular that used to do this with shadow of mordor their inbuilt benchmark had really stupid maximum frame rates at some quick points for the AMD graphics cards and so when I tested in game I got different numbers to that of the actual inbuilt benchmark itself but if you run this through on say for instance shadow of the Tomb Raider you'll see that there's no funny buggers going on then you can reliably use that benchmark to give people numbers for GPUs 1% 0.1 % lows are very important just for seeing if there's any stuttering and if say for instance drivers that come out are unstable for that particular game but also for CPU testing as well to see especially if we're testing like csgo for example if there is any stuttering and if that's due to your CPU and your configuration itself so now what we will do is we'll run through three different games here and show you how I benchmark in game and get the numbers that I get both normal and overclocked so we'll start off with Resident Evil 2 and just quickly go through the settings here which will be 1080p hi and just that directx12 and they jump straight into the game and we can see automatically that my cpu is not being utilized hardly at all so it's actually clocking down to 4.7 Giga it's at some intervals which isn't a problem because the frame rates aren't being affected here we can see what the frame times everything is very smooth if that does spike you'll be able to see that in this graph you know that it maybe there's some stuttering or something's going on but what we've got here is I like to walk to an area where I can test straight apples to apples so that benchmark is going to be pretty much the exact same across all different hardware that I'm testing so I like to run over here and there then resets the screen to the same area where I can then just hit W and f7 at the same time and then just walk along here for 32 seconds the magical number test that three times now also hello Brad speaking so now we've finished three different benchmarks on three different games getting both these stock and overclocked figures we can see here that we can separate the games and the actual runs with stock settings and then our overclock settings we see here that we're getting pretty accurate results but in this case I would select the median out of these results you can average the results if you like two of these three runs but again then you're making up a number that actually didn't happen on that particular hardware so in this case we'd pick the one hundred and ten point six and this one would pick the ninety seven point seven and that would be our stock and overclocked figures keep in mind this RT X 2017 that we have here this particular sample does run pretty well when it's overclocked as we can see here with all the numbers dirty Raley 2.0 is we're getting a sizable boost from overclocking and we see with the 1% in point one percent low numbers to that everything is running really smooth nothing's out of the ordinary same with Resident Evil 2 we're getting very high FPS numbers but do keep in mind when you look at these results and say for instance if you pull up these results compared to another benchmark run that I've done they're actually not comparable because I do forget what settings I use in older benchmarks but when I run all my benchmarks for a particular video I'll keep that in a sandbox closed world and that'll be apples to apples to apples with in that video and it's the same with other benchmarks you can't go grab my numbers and go compare them to other people's numbers and say that this particular person is right is getting more numbers or is getting better results than you when they could have tested different settings I could have had window mode open versus full-screen mode the list goes on on what can happen but one thing you do want to do with your numbers and when you're running them for giving people advice is make sure everything's apples to apples within that scenario but with that said what can we do now with afterburner to make sure everything is running right with our system well here's where we can go a little bit further in depth with the main monitoring settings themselves so if we left click the cogwheel and go over to monitoring we can then click these three dots here and this will enable us to bring more information so if we left click Perth County here this is giving us access to all the settings that Windows has and we can monitor them live within After Burner itself for some reason with the recent patch update from Microsoft Windows like I've been using this software for years now but for some reason just before I made this benchmark video Windows introduced an update and now my hard drive usage won't show up so that's just super annoying like thanks Microsoft but other than that once that gets fixed hopefully it gets fixed soon we can then add other additional parameters in here and I'll show you guys soon like so many different things and it's very powerful for instance if we want to see if our CPU is running in full state all the time we can then unlock the percentages of C 1 C 2 and C 3 States and then add them in and then see when we're benchmarking if the CPU is idling or going into any of these states then with our rig we may then have to on top of that disable any turbo settings you can also use the network QoS policy here to monitor packets that are dropped or dropped per second so if you guys are having stuttering in online games but not in single player games then you may wish to enable these settings and monitor how many packets are being dropped while you're playing games that way you can see if you've got an internet problem or a problem on your neck or a problem in the line and the list goes on if we look at all the settings that we can play with here there's just so much we can doing it actually in itself opens up Pandora's box in relation to cache settings and other certain access that we can get in relation to CPUs so one thing I'm going to be looking at when we look at the Verizon 2000 version is the new 3000 series which will be released later this year as I'd like to go a little bit deeper into these settings here but of course time limits me from doing these things as you guys see the channel is just so busy at the moment but that's essentially what you can do with this software and why it's so powerful in essence to not only just monitoring your game and getting benchmark figures but also diagnosing problems too as we can see here now these new settings see three times C two times and C one time are displayed I used to have hard drive displayed as well but that's gone now unfortunately and that was useful if you're running a potato hard drive and you want to see if that is getting in the way of any benchmarking that you're doing because a lot of people complain to me my brakes stuttering why is it stuttering this is one of these settings that can just eliminate that and you can monitor real-time so if we see here those C 1 C 2 and C 3 states we can see how much time is being spent in those and we can see if these are getting the zeroes are changing in these and we may have to change some settings on our rig if the stuttering is a problem or if the 1% point one percent lows are quite low and so if they aren't low in this case all the benchmarks we ran here today was silky buttery smooth so everything is running well on this rig well that said let's move over to a conclusion now you guys when it comes to benchmarking that's how I get things done efficiently effectively for you guys and I hope this tutorial helps you also cross check numbers with us reviewers we aren't right a hundred percent of the time and God knows when I get these new products in and they've got such small deadlines I'm very prone to making mistakes as we have such a short time to get out results and then cut the whole video and make it for you guys and try and get it done by NDA time especially nowadays with some of the times that we get like two days before at least sometimes I even get them on the day they're supposed to be released in that case I am late with the NDA time but I do get things done now with what I've said also in terms of how other tech reviewers are doing their benchmarks and methods they use I actually don't know when I haven't talked to other tech reviewers on how they do their benchmarking I just think with afterburner it's so much better than fraps it's so much more powerful because it can inject itself into dx11 dx12 and also things like Vulcan and I've never had a problem with it it gives me the 1% point 1% lows straight then and there I don't have to do anything else I get my 32 second bench it's done and everything is home and hosts so easy to use so effective so efficient but you guys know that's how the yes-man rolls I've got to be efficient otherwise techie Oh City unfortunately will drop off and join the dark side if that happens that's just the way YouTube is in 2019 and I hope you guys enjoyed this video if you did then be sure to hit that like button if you have any questions or comments about today's video methods of benchmarking tips and tricks that also you like to use with MSI Afterburner as well maybe some font suggestions for river tuna which you can change things around if you want to then be sure to drop a comment below also if you haven't already check out today's video sponsor skill share you get two free months included if you sign up using the link in the description below and with that said I'll catch you in another tech video very soon peace out for now bye you