Gadgetory

it's finally that time we'll be doing the used PC build of the month for September even though it's now October so we're running a little bit late but better late than never because this month we have two gtx 690 s which are actually two graphics cards on one PCB so we've got essentially Quad SLI in this whole build which is going to come under five hundred US dollars I believe when I've tallied up all the costs because these costs three hundred Australian dollars we'd pick them up on a deal on gumtree and the used parts hunt and I'll put the link in the description below for you guys if you want to check out that video where I actually go these graphs guys for a really good deal and then we've got here the arrow strike X we got this for fifty Australian dollars and also put all the prices here for you guys so you can sort of weigh up all the relative costs and an interesting thing is a new cooler from Aliexpress this has two fans it's also like a quite a big cooler we've got this for twenty five US dollars so this thing's going to be kicking it pretty hard and then moving on to the main dish this is the Zeus rogue Jean Z Maximus for motherboard we got this for ten US dollars in Japan when we're at bargain hunting and mantels it needed was to bed pins to be fixed and it's working perfectly fine I already tested that in a previous video and the CPU in it is the i7 3770k when we're in Japan again we picked this up for a hundred us so absolutely incredible value for money Ram we've got a gigabytes of memory which I've got two sticks one which I hunted down recently another which I got in the past and then we've got a used harddrive here this is a 500 gigabyte hard drive and we've got this for a pretty good deal and now the last part that's gonna make this build all tick is a gold rated power supply from FSP we got this in Japan for around about 50 USD back home Asti over a year ago I believe now it's been crazy how long I've had this thing for and we actually had to solder some SATA cables on there because we didn't have any of the connectors however we will need an extra PCIe connection to make sure this build is working however I'm not positive if this is the one that is going to work as you can see it's kind of a weird fit doesn't fit all the best so we're gonna test this out on a really old graphics card first just to make sure it works before we put it on a 690 and make sure we don't blow one of them up but without further ado let's get on to putting this build together so we've come into a dilemma actually we've got two dilemmas the first being that this needs ad lib the 3770k because it was the first generation of Intel CPUs where they stopped using the solder between the IHS and the dye but another problem we had here is that this connector actually isn't giving out the proper voltages in its configuration in other words the FSP power supply is sending out 12 volt signals to the ground wire instead of the 12 volt wires on this cable so a way to get around this is I didn't want to do this but I think it's the only way we're gonna get this bill done is if I hack this cable up test out where the 12 volt is coming out of that VGA connection on the power supply and then rewire this connector so it doesn't not work though the good news is however is that nothing blew up here I was actually afraid hence why I use this graphs card though the power supply is to thank for that it must have some really good short-circuit protection built in that tripped before any damage could be done because I've already put the otherwise hook the original wires coming out of the power supply off and the graphics card still works perfectly fine so we'll come back to the office and the first problem we fixed by just quickly popping in to Bunnings and using their awesome devices they've got some really expensive ones and they do a great job of deal it in your cpu the next problem here is we've used now a digital multimeter and we were able to test out which of those connections on the power supply is spitting out a negative or a positive 12 volt and we've actually figured out that our connector is not suited as it was out of its standard configuration so we have to switch this positive wire here with this negative wire and then hopefully we should have PCIe power out of this power supply which is using its good old proprietary stuff which makes things very difficult but we'll get there in the end so we've used a multimeter to test out all the voltages on this power supply and we can see here we had to switch around two of the wires and now all we have to do a solo that back together and tape it up and we should have the power supply ready for this build oh yeah so we're just about to take the coolers off this GTX 690 s or actually GTX 619 and they've got like these screws that hexagonal they kind of remind me of smartphones screws so we're unfortunate gonna have to head down to Bunnings yet again and try and see if we can get a tool that will fit that so we can unscrew these and change the thermal paste around okay so here's another hiccup along the way of this build so we turned it on and basically one of the GPUs wasn't being registered nor what's the fan spinning up and what's happening on this bottom eight speed PCIe slot and damn you can see in there that the it's gonna get in as closer than a can be you can see that the pins are actually munted on this PCIe slot so I don't think I can actually get this build working on this motherboard I can only get one graphics card working maybe on the top so unfortunately this Quad SLI build is not gonna be so quite this time with that said let's go ahead and see what a gtx 690 can do and then I'll probably make a follow-up video where I put it on another motherboard and then make it a gtx 699 nine nine nine nine so then we have a guy's the bill is now complete however we did run into some problems along the way and the biggest one being that the Quad SLI actually doesn't work on this motherboard for some reason I checked around and I guess it's because it doesn't natively support quite a lot and he supports two-way SLI on the bottom PCIe connector is only eight speed and so initially the fan would even boot up but after investigating that bottom slot it appeared that some of the pins were in an awkward configuration they were just a bit munted so I got out my trusty tweezers flattened them out and then put only the GTX 690 in the bottom slot and it actually turned on and was recognized in Windows on that bottom slot however again once we put in both the graphics cards and we checked all the options there was just nothing I could do to make four GPUs or the four gtx 680 s in the two on the two 690 PCBs work on this particular configuration so after that we then had to start testing with one gtx 690 and the results were pretty good I mean there was only one game out of the games that I tested here that would just not work with the 690 in sli mode and that was csgo and I mean csgo itself doesn't really need any graphical power really to play as you guys noticed in the past I've had that thing running perfectly fine on a 9800 GT which is a very old graphs good so going through the results however with one 692 this date on some titles like for honor it was running really well until you got to some parts of the map where there was some slight stuttering and the experience was definitely not as good as one single GPU solution and keep in mind the GTX 690 is the last solution that was released from the video that was two GPUs on one single PCB so I guess they stopped that because of these frame times and you can actually see it when I'm even doing single-player benchmarks on the live frame time map there's just spikes however the temperatures on these GPUs let's talk about that a little bit because we did change thermal paste and it was crusty it was old and it wasn't working up to pi however once we replace it with some TMX for the temperatures were now really good we're going into the mid-70s on the sli configurated set up on one gtx 690 as opposed to before we're getting into ninety degrees so the temperatures were a big difference after we changed the thermal paste and also on that note we had to go into Windows to enable the six 90s to work in SLI beforehand they just worked off one GPU itself and in the fire strike scores this represented the scaling before and after before we're getting around 8,000 points after we're getting around 14,000 points so we were getting about 80 percent scaling however in some games for instance like for honor we were getting near a hundred percent scaling so it was great to see that an old card like a 690 was still performing very well in some of the titles that were released this year and then we look at another title for instance like Far Cry primal where I thought and the results aren't gonna be too good here again they're actually very good and we're getting very good frame rates at 1080p very high setting and then we move over to another title like Tom Clancy's the division and the frame rates were actually very good however all three games on the Ubisoft titles did have frames spiking and this is indicative of an SLI setup in all three titles when I was testing it with the live monitoring again there was frame spiking and then the next game we tested was pub G and this was the worst by far sli just wasn't working that well it was really bad really unplayable in my opinion on the dual 690 SLO ever changing over to a single 690 actually better performance I'm very low even though the frame rates weren't as good we were still getting less frame spike so that wasn't looking too good for the GTX 690 s so if you are an older graphics cards putting them in SLI is really not optimal for a good experience despite the increase in overall frame rates especially pub G which I believe is one of the most popular titles today though what about the vram buffer on the 690 interesting configuration we've got two gigabytes and two gigabytes technically it should be four gigabytes right and the answer is no especially on dx11 titles and a lot of titles out there at the moment even when dx12 don't support that full scaling feature of utilizing all the vram on the gratis card so what we had here was effectively 2 gigabytes of vram to work and it was pretty limiting even at 1080p on a lot of the titles coming out in 2017 you're still gonna run into problems so my suggestion would be if you want to get something like a GTX 690 and run it as a gaming graphics card if you pick up one for a bargain then I would suggest turning down the settings to maybe medium even very low in some cases but some games will run absolutely fine on 1080p high settings so do guys today was not the best showcasing of the GTX 690 s I was hoping to get quite SLI working but unfortunately it just wasn't happening on today's build so the good news however is that we can drop the build by around 150 AUD or 120 USD of our initial estimate since we're not actually using this graphics card anymore and that'll bring the build cost down to a relatively cheap price of around around 350 USD which is very good for the performance it was getting and now speaking of the performance that 3770k that ID littered man that thing was just absolutely insane on the performance we're getting this thing up to 4.8 gigahertz on a 25-dollar aliexpress cooler and the temperatures were actually very controlled the ambience in here at the moment around 23 degrees I believe and the performance was just insane 4.8 giga it's 70 degrees at all times even on a stress test gaming the performance was really good something like this for $100 is definitely kicking it in today's games but don't know that you'll be able to edit videos even 4k videos if you have enough RAM on something like the 3770k and honestly overclocking this thing was really easy however I did try to get it to 5 gigahertz but it just wasn't happening it just wouldn't boot into Windows it was refusing to get there though it was booting initially up to the load screen it was just crashing out and so I had to settle on 4.8 gigahertz so I know guys that's today's build done and dusted I hope you enjoyed this video if you did then be sure to give it a big thumbs up and let me know in the comment section below what you want to see when I actually get these up and running in Quad SLI that video is coming let me know what grabs card you want me to compare it to maybe like a 1070 or something like that and I'll get that done in a future video I've just got to get a motherboard that supports Quad SLI so that's an upcoming video coming to you guys in the future and also today's build it was one of the most time can Schumi because that every single hurdle there was a problem I had to overcome I mean first we started with those power connectors and just didn't have enough connections and they were really proprietary so I had to change them around and then do a multimeter to test out the points it was just an absolute headache and then in the end we didn't even need to do that because one of the gtx 690 s didn't work in the Quad SLI configuration and then of course after that we came into some problems with that bottom PCIe slot and then of course we had to deal with the 3770k but in the end we got through it all and today we have a build that is running really well and actually the aro cool strike ax case is even though it's really big the airflow on this thing is extremely good that top 20 centimeter fan draws air down you've got a fan covering your hard drives and dress s these if you put them in there and you will get really good performance and low temperatures anyway guys I'll catch you in another tech video very soon peace out for now bye