179: The World’s Largest Graphics Card

00:00SPEAKER- Brad, someone new has moved into my house.

00:02SPEAKER- Wait, what?

00:03SPEAKERYou got roommates now?

00:04SPEAKER- I walked out on the front porch yesterday

00:06SPEAKERand a bird flew down from the eaves

00:08SPEAKERdirectly above the front door.

00:09SPEAKERAnd I looked up and there was a bird nest

00:13SPEAKERright above the front door of the house

00:15SPEAKERwith a bunch of little,

00:16SPEAKERthere's a lot of peeping coming from it

00:17SPEAKERin the mornings and the evenings.

00:18SPEAKERSo I'm assuming we have a family of birds

00:21SPEAKERliving in the front porch.

00:22SPEAKER- You're renting out an in-law unit now?

00:24SPEAKERIs that thing up to code?

00:26SPEAKERIs that regulation?

00:27SPEAKER- Look, I didn't,

00:28SPEAKERI don't believe in hostile architecture,

00:30SPEAKERso I didn't put anything mean up there

00:31SPEAKERto keep the birds from living up there.

00:33SPEAKERIt is living on top of my fiber.

00:34SPEAKERThe nest is set up right across the top of the fiber cable

00:37SPEAKERwhere it goes into the house,

00:38SPEAKERwhich makes me a little bit anxious.

00:39SPEAKER- That's true.

00:41SPEAKER- But yeah, no,

00:42SPEAKERI got a cheap security camera from Amazon

00:45SPEAKERthat is arriving today that I'm gonna set up

00:47SPEAKERso I can aim it down into the bird's nest

00:49SPEAKERso we can watch the baby birds.

00:50SPEAKER- That's great.

00:51SPEAKERThat's an awesome idea.

00:52SPEAKER- I think I can even stream it to Twitch,

00:53SPEAKERbut I'm not sure about that.

00:54SPEAKER- You should do it.

00:55SPEAKERDo you know what kind of bird?

00:56SPEAKER- Looked like some sort of house friend or something.

00:58SPEAKERIt wasn't anything fancy.

00:59SPEAKERI didn't get a good look at the bird, the mom.

01:01SPEAKERShe was, when I opened the front door,

01:04SPEAKERshe was surprised and seemed pretty upset with me,

01:07SPEAKERso I didn't hassle her too much.

01:09SPEAKER- I get it, I get it.

01:10SPEAKERLook, if you were regurgitating food

01:12SPEAKERinto your children's mouths

01:13SPEAKERand somebody walked in on you, how would you feel?

01:15SPEAKER- Look, I've done it before.

01:16SPEAKERWe've all been there.

01:17SPEAKERIt's, how did the pigs get fed?

01:21SPEAKERApplesauce.

01:22SPEAKER- I'm not gonna answer that question.

01:24SPEAKER- Lemonade, I don't know, man.

01:28SPEAKER(upbeat music)

01:54SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.

01:56SPEAKERI'm Will.

01:57SPEAKER- I'm Brad.

01:59SPEAKER- Brad, we have, I saw you in person this week.

02:01SPEAKER- That's true.

02:02SPEAKERWas that too much?

02:03SPEAKERWas that, I haven't done an I'm Brad in a couple of weeks.

02:05SPEAKERWhat's that?

02:06SPEAKERDid I give it a little too much?

02:07SPEAKERI'm not sure.

02:07SPEAKER- Well, this is the longest I've gone

02:09SPEAKERwithout recording a podcast

02:10SPEAKERsince we probably started doing this podcast.

02:12SPEAKER- Yeah, we haven't missed a lot of weeks

02:14SPEAKERin the last, God, almost four years.

02:16SPEAKER- Four years, yeah.

02:18SPEAKERI went to Tahoe.

02:20SPEAKERWe had some snow.

02:21SPEAKERThere was an unbelievable amount of snow in Tahoe,

02:24SPEAKERlike a truly mind bending.

02:26SPEAKERI stood in front of a bank that was five feet above my head.

02:30SPEAKER- Wow.

02:32SPEAKER- There's enough snow up there

02:33SPEAKERthat you can walk on the ground

02:35SPEAKERand the snow is hard and crunchy

02:37SPEAKERand you don't need snow shoes or anything.

02:39SPEAKERIt was a lot of fun.

02:40SPEAKERI did a ropes course.

02:41SPEAKERI hadn't done a ropes course since the '90s

02:43SPEAKERwhen they were new.

02:45SPEAKERThey have all sorts of technological things now.

02:46SPEAKERSo you just put a cable on at the beginning

02:48SPEAKERand then you trolley that along.

02:49SPEAKERThat's your zip line cable and the whole thing.

02:51SPEAKERIt's like one cable for the whole deal.

02:53SPEAKERSo you don't have to be supervised.

02:54SPEAKERNo active belays.

02:58SPEAKERWhat else?

02:59SPEAKERI did some sledding.

03:00SPEAKERNothing really exciting.

03:01SPEAKERNothing technology related.

03:02SPEAKERI was offline almost entirely that week.

03:04SPEAKERIt was really nice.

03:04SPEAKER- What is that like?

03:07SPEAKER- It was pretty good.

03:09SPEAKERI was a lot less angry.

03:11SPEAKER- I bet.

03:11SPEAKER- I played werewolf with a bunch of kids.

03:13SPEAKERThat was fun.

03:15SPEAKER- I like how the lot less angry

03:17SPEAKERjust kind of sailed by unremarked upon.

03:20SPEAKER- I think it's assumed at this point.

03:22SPEAKERYou spend less time online, you're gonna be less angry.

03:23SPEAKERThat's how it works.

03:24SPEAKER- Yeah, no, I get it.

03:26SPEAKERWell, I have failed to do that on my week off.

03:29SPEAKERI have not managed to get away as much as I might have.

03:34SPEAKER- Letting the internet angry up your blood?

03:37SPEAKER- Yes, in every respect.

03:38SPEAKERBut yes, we did make physical contact.

03:41SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

03:42SPEAKERI saw you-

03:43SPEAKER- I don't know if we actually touched each other,

03:44SPEAKERbut we were in the same room.

03:46SPEAKER- Yeah, but I mean, we see each other,

03:48SPEAKERlike we see each other in front of your apartment

03:49SPEAKERkind of regularly, it turns out.

03:51SPEAKER- You roll by once or thrice a year for five minutes.

03:57SPEAKER- Yeah, but we went to PC World to do a PC build

04:03SPEAKERfor the people, but more specifically for you.

04:05SPEAKER- Yes, the long awaited build.

04:08SPEAKER- I mean, I went back to look at the replay

04:10SPEAKERof the early podcast and we literally were talking about

04:13SPEAKERhow you needed to upgrade your PC

04:15SPEAKERwhen the first Zen 3 CPUs came out,

04:21SPEAKERthe Ryzen 5800.

04:22SPEAKER- Yeah, so we started the podcasts, was it August 2019?

04:25SPEAKERAugust, September, around there?

04:27SPEAKER- Yeah, something like that.

04:27SPEAKER- I believe.

04:29SPEAKEROkay, so you know what?

04:31SPEAKERGod, first of all, how the hell has it been

04:33SPEAKERalmost four years since we started this podcast?

04:36SPEAKERI know exactly how.

04:37SPEAKERIt's because we started it six, eight months

04:39SPEAKERbefore the pandemic started and then-

04:41SPEAKER- Yeah, two of them, just two of those years

04:42SPEAKERjust evaporated and the third is not doing great.

04:46SPEAKER- Then we all entered the pandemic time warp.

04:48SPEAKER- Yeah. - So, but like,

04:51SPEAKERGod, at the time that we started this podcast,

04:54SPEAKERit had only been a year and change

04:55SPEAKERsince I bought the 7700K, that's how long ago it was.

05:00SPEAKER(laughing)

05:02SPEAKER- That was okay.

05:03SPEAKER- Right, yes, yes, it's ridiculous.

05:05SPEAKERBut that was an upgrade for an existing machine.

05:07SPEAKERI built the machine as a 6700K in 2016.

05:11SPEAKER- Yeah.

05:12SPEAKER- So that was like three years out

05:13SPEAKERfrom building the machine in the first place at that point.

05:16SPEAKER- I guess my i9-9900 was pretty new at that.

05:21SPEAKERI built that in probably 2018 would be my guess.

05:24SPEAKER'Cause I think I got that as for doing an Intel LAN party

05:26SPEAKERor Intel streaming event or something,

05:28SPEAKERthey just sent me a free CPU for showing up.

05:30SPEAKER- That sounds right.

05:31SPEAKERI mean, the only reason I had a 7700K

05:33SPEAKERis 'cause I repurposed the 6700 for something else

05:36SPEAKERand it was just like, well, what's the fastest thing

05:38SPEAKERI can put in this board?

05:39SPEAKEROh, there's a lightning deal on that

05:40SPEAKER'cause it's kind of old, I'm just gonna grab it, so.

05:43SPEAKER- Yeah, if I remember right, you hit the,

05:46SPEAKERthis is old enough that it's cheap,

05:48SPEAKERbut not so old that it's expensive window

05:50SPEAKERreally nicely on that one?

05:51SPEAKER- Yes, what happened was I was about to buy an i3.

05:54SPEAKERI had an extra Z170 board, it came in a bundle from Newegg,

05:59SPEAKERjust sitting there, which became my first NAS.

06:02SPEAKERI was going to buy an i3 to put in that board

06:05SPEAKERand make an NAS out of.

06:07SPEAKERAnd then I happened to see that lightning deal on that 7700.

06:09SPEAKERI was like, oh, well, that's cheaper than i3 today only.

06:12SPEAKERWhat if I just bought that and put it in my gaming PC,

06:14SPEAKERmoved the 6700 over the NAS, that's how that played out.

06:16SPEAKER- But this whole thing is our long way of saying,

06:21SPEAKERhey, Brad, you finally built a new PC.

06:23SPEAKEROur friends Adam and Gordon over at PC World

06:25SPEAKERinvited you to come in and build up a computer.

06:29SPEAKER- Thank you so much to those guys

06:30SPEAKERfor all their help and hospitality.

06:34SPEAKERIt's just fun going in that studio, man.

06:36SPEAKERIt's like, I love talking to those guys.

06:39SPEAKERI can just get as deeply nerdy about PC hardware

06:42SPEAKERas humanly possible, and it's the place to do that.

06:46SPEAKER- Well, and the thing that's fun,

06:48SPEAKERwell, okay, so first off,

06:49SPEAKERif there's a video on PC World's YouTube channel,

06:52SPEAKERyou can go look at it.

06:52SPEAKERIt's like, what, four hours long of us

06:54SPEAKERputting together your computer.

06:56SPEAKERI came over 'cause Gordon had to be out.

06:58SPEAKERYou and Adam were like,

06:59SPEAKERhey, why don't we see if Will's available?

07:00SPEAKERAnd I trucked into the studio

07:02SPEAKERto be the third person in the room.

07:05SPEAKERAnd Gordon was able to zoom in

07:07SPEAKERfor a large portion of the stream.

07:09SPEAKER- Glad we were able to get some of Gordon's commentary.

07:12SPEAKERThank you for coming in.

07:14SPEAKER- Oh, of course.

07:15SPEAKERBut it's not like an instructional how-to.

07:18SPEAKERIt's not like a, here are some people.

07:21SPEAKERImagine Adam said, hey, why don't you come over

07:25SPEAKERto my basement, and we're gonna build,

07:27SPEAKERto build your new PC, and we're just gonna hang out

07:30SPEAKERand drink some beers and have some snacks.

07:33SPEAKERAnd it's like working in the garage

07:38SPEAKERin the '60s on your Mustang.

07:39SPEAKER- Yeah.

07:41SPEAKER- So that video's up, you can see it.

07:43SPEAKERBrad, what'd you end up putting in the PC?

07:46SPEAKER- So it is a 7950X3D, a Ryzen.

07:50SPEAKER- That's the fancy new gaming performance Ryzen

07:53SPEAKERwith the weird fabric cache thing.

07:55SPEAKER- Yes, the 16 core, it's the 16 core Ryzen

07:58SPEAKERwith, yes, one half of those cores

08:00SPEAKERhave double the L3 cache,

08:04SPEAKERbecause they found a way to stack cache on top of cache.

08:06SPEAKER- Yo, dog, I heard you like cache.

08:08SPEAKER- Uh-huh, 64 gigabytes of memory.

08:11SPEAKERIt is DDR5 6000, which not quite your 7600,

08:15SPEAKERbut apparently 6,000 is about as high

08:18SPEAKERas you're gonna get on AMD right now.

08:19SPEAKER- My understanding, generally speaking,

08:21SPEAKERis that your spikes, you can't go quite as fast

08:24SPEAKERwith the RAM on the Ryzen processors in general.

08:27SPEAKER- Yes, that seems to be the case currently.

08:30SPEAKERThere is a 4090 in there.

08:33SPEAKER- Okay, that's a fine, did you get one

08:36SPEAKERwith a modest tiny video card?

08:40SPEAKEROr did you get the seven slot ultra cooler video card, Brad?

08:46SPEAKER- It is, so I have not triple verified this.

08:49SPEAKERIt is the MSI, what is it?

08:51SPEAKERThe MSI Gaming X Trio, I believe is the model.

08:55SPEAKEROne review I looked at for that card said

08:57SPEAKERthat at least at the time of that review,

08:58SPEAKERit is the biggest 4090 on the market,

09:01SPEAKERwhich again, that may have changed since that review.

09:03SPEAKERI don't know, but if it's the biggest 4090--

09:08SPEAKER- That means it's probably the biggest video card.

09:09SPEAKER- Doesn't that mean that I have

09:11SPEAKERthe world's largest graphics card in my PC?

09:14SPEAKER- Brad, there are a lot of things.

09:15SPEAKERIf there is a theme of your build,

09:17SPEAKERit's yo, this thing is big.

09:20SPEAKER- Dude, that was like, I mean,

09:22SPEAKERthe specs of this thing are a beast.

09:24SPEAKERLike it is a hell of a machine,

09:26SPEAKERalthough I haven't had a chance

09:28SPEAKERto put it through all of its paces yet.

09:30SPEAKERI think we'll revisit that probably

09:32SPEAKERmaybe in a couple of weeks in terms of actual performance.

09:35SPEAKERI have played some games that we'll talk about.

09:36SPEAKER- Yeah, we had initially kind of planned

09:38SPEAKERto go through how this all came together and all that,

09:44SPEAKERbut you haven't had as much time as you'd hoped this week,

09:48SPEAKERthis weekend to kind of get into it.

09:49SPEAKER- Yeah, there's just a couple of roadblocks,

09:51SPEAKERsome troubleshooting.

09:52SPEAKERI haven't done a lot of the big performance type testing

09:55SPEAKERI would have liked to have done,

09:56SPEAKERbut we will talk about the game stuff a little bit.

09:58SPEAKERAnyway, what I was going to say is the specs are a beast,

10:00SPEAKERbut I think the real eye-opening moment of that stream

10:06SPEAKERwas when we unboxed the case,

10:09SPEAKERlike that was the actual jaw dropper,

10:11SPEAKERwhile also getting the graphics card out

10:12SPEAKERand showing that off as well.

10:14SPEAKER- Your accessory box for the case,

10:17SPEAKERyou got a fractal, what was it?

10:19SPEAKERA fractal-

10:20SPEAKER- It is a fractal define seven XL.

10:23SPEAKER- Yeah, they aren't kidding.

10:24SPEAKERYour accessory box is as big

10:26SPEAKERas my meshify compact, basically.

10:28SPEAKER- I believe that, sure.

10:30SPEAKER- I think it's a little bit thicker, my case, but not much.

10:34SPEAKER- What is the meshify compact?

10:36SPEAKER- It's the smallest case I've seen

10:39SPEAKERthat will fit a micro ATX board.

10:43SPEAKER- Oh, oh, you have micro ATX?

10:46SPEAKER- Hold on.

10:48SPEAKER- Hang on, I'm looking.

10:50SPEAKERI think that's full ATX, right?

10:52SPEAKER- Is it full ATX?

10:53SPEAKERI thought micro ATX is what everybody uses.

10:55SPEAKER- Oh, micro ATX is dying, that's on the way out.

10:58SPEAKER- Oh, micro ATX is the weird one with only two slots.

11:00SPEAKER- Yeah, it's not a micro ATX.

11:01SPEAKERIt's either a mini or a standard.

11:05SPEAKER- It's pretty much full ATX and mini ITX these days

11:07SPEAKERfor big and little, micro ATX being in the middle

11:11SPEAKERis kind of just getting squeezed out of the market,

11:14SPEAKERit seems.

11:14SPEAKER- Anyway, this is one of those places

11:16SPEAKERwhere having never covered motherboards,

11:18SPEAKERI don't actually know what the spec sizes are.

11:20SPEAKERI always have to look it up.

11:21SPEAKER- So I guess now there's EATX, which is what my board is,

11:24SPEAKERbecause like you said,

11:25SPEAKERI got the biggest of everything humanly possible.

11:28SPEAKER- Yeah, that's, E is for extra, I think.

11:31SPEAKER- Probably, or extended ATX.

11:33SPEAKERAnyway, E and regular ATX are the full-size boards.

11:36SPEAKERMini ITX are the tiny ones

11:37SPEAKERthat go in small form factor shoebox PCs.

11:40SPEAKERMicro ATX is the traditional like kind of mini

11:43SPEAKERin the middle size

11:45SPEAKERthat they're just not making many of anymore.

11:47SPEAKERI think that form factor is on the way out.

11:49SPEAKER- Yeah.

11:49SPEAKER- Anyway. - That makes sense.

11:51SPEAKER- Anyway, this case is huge.

11:53SPEAKER- Yeah, it's a big chonky board.

11:54SPEAKERMy board is a full ATX, regular ATX.

11:57SPEAKER- Yeah, that's what I thought.

11:58SPEAKER- So that accessory box, again,

12:00SPEAKERyou can see that on the stream, but.

12:02SPEAKER- Like I've had pizzas that were smaller than that thing.

12:05SPEAKER- It's, dude, it's like,

12:06SPEAKERI think I might've said it on the street.

12:07SPEAKERIt looks like a Little Caesars pizza box

12:09SPEAKERbecause it's a gigantic rectangle.

12:11SPEAKERLike it's, if you were to get a large rectangular pizza,

12:13SPEAKERit would fit in there maybe.

12:15SPEAKER- It does have some real La Petite Cesar vibes.

12:18SPEAKERThat is very true.

12:21SPEAKER- I brought that thing home.

12:24SPEAKERThere are enough accessories in there

12:25SPEAKERthat I'm not going to use

12:26SPEAKERbecause this case has a lot of options,

12:27SPEAKERa lot of A, B sort of options.

12:30SPEAKERAnd I'm not going to use enough of those

12:32SPEAKERthat they need to be stored in there.

12:34SPEAKERAnd I was just like, just idly musing like,

12:36SPEAKERwhere am I going to put this?

12:37SPEAKERAnd my girlfriend was just like, wait,

12:38SPEAKERyou're going to keep that?

12:41SPEAKERThere's no where to put that.

12:42SPEAKERYou need to get rid of that box.

12:44SPEAKERI'm like, where are all these accessories going to go?

12:46SPEAKER- You could just keep the pancake box.

12:47SPEAKERThe pancake box will be fine.

12:48SPEAKERThe case box has to go.

12:50SPEAKER- Oh yeah, yeah, that's, well,

12:51SPEAKERthat'll get broken down and shoved in the closet.

12:55SPEAKERYou don't keep your case boxes?

12:57SPEAKER- Nope.

12:57SPEAKER- Really?

12:58SPEAKER- Nope.

12:59SPEAKER- What if you move?

13:00SPEAKER- I will carry it gently by rapid.

13:03SPEAKERAnd look, my case is,

13:04SPEAKERI specifically purchased to fit underneath

13:07SPEAKERthe secret compartment in the back of the bolt.

13:09SPEAKERSo if I move, we'll put the cases flat,

13:12SPEAKERput a blanket on top of them,

13:14SPEAKERput the lid back on the secret compartment and drive away.

13:16SPEAKER- Secret computer.

13:18SPEAKER- Secret computer.

13:20SPEAKERSo yeah, like the build, the build went pretty well,

13:23SPEAKERI would say, everything posted nicely.

13:28SPEAKERYou've been kind of put in here.

13:29SPEAKERLike you have some lane, there's some lane,

13:34SPEAKER'cause you brought some old hardware from the old machine,

13:37SPEAKERthe capture card and your fast network card.

13:39SPEAKER- I've got an Elgato capture card

13:41SPEAKERand that Mellanox high-end data center network card

13:44SPEAKERthat I use to connect to my NAS.

13:46SPEAKERShould we get into that stuff now?

13:48SPEAKER- We can, I mean, I think we can talk about it.

13:49SPEAKERLike the lanes, the PCI express lanes have been fraught

13:52SPEAKERfor me for the last like three PCs I've built.

13:54SPEAKER- Yeah, so I have the dual problem of,

13:58SPEAKERI had the specs wrong on that network card.

14:01SPEAKERI've read the wrong, what do you call it?

14:05SPEAKERConfiguration?

14:05SPEAKER- Yeah, PCI express configuration is what I would call that.

14:08SPEAKER- The PCI generation and number of lanes collectively,

14:11SPEAKERI guess you call that the config or whatever.

14:13SPEAKERAnyway, I had the PCI config wrong on that card.

14:16SPEAKERI thought it was a gen three by two.

14:19SPEAKERAnd on top of that, the bigger problem is that post build,

14:23SPEAKERI have finally learned a shocking,

14:27SPEAKERa startling fact about PCI express

14:29SPEAKERthat I probably should have learned 15 years ago.

14:32SPEAKER- So yeah, so here's the thing.

14:34SPEAKEREach generation of PCI express is basically

14:36SPEAKERtwo times faster per lane, right?

14:40SPEAKERAnd the lanes are the physical wires

14:43SPEAKERfrom the slot on the motherboard

14:45SPEAKERor the M2 slot in cases now to the chip set or the CPU,

14:49SPEAKERdepending on how the motherboards configured.

14:51SPEAKER- So the physical lane constraint

14:53SPEAKERis the part that I had had wrong,

14:56SPEAKERthe part that I had made some very poor assumptions about.

14:58SPEAKERI assumed that like, if you could achieve,

15:01SPEAKERif you could achieve a given bandwidth at one generation,

15:03SPEAKERyou could also achieve the same bandwidth

15:05SPEAKERat the previous generation.

15:07SPEAKER- With fewer lanes.

15:08SPEAKER- I assumed that like the lanes

15:09SPEAKERcould be electrically reconfigured somehow.

15:12SPEAKERLike I was just like, I was like,

15:13SPEAKER"Oh, well if later generation lanes are higher capacity,

15:16SPEAKERthen can't they just like double as the older lanes."

15:19SPEAKER- One would think that, but no.

15:21SPEAKER- That was, yeah.

15:22SPEAKERSo the upshot is like, if you have a, as I do,

15:25SPEAKERa gen three by two slot and you put a gen two card in there,

15:29SPEAKERit can only ever be a gen two by two.

15:30SPEAKER- By two, yeah.

15:31SPEAKER- At most, and not a gen two by four, like I assumed,

15:33SPEAKERwhich I'll work around it.

15:37SPEAKERI'll find a way to work around it,

15:38SPEAKERbut it was a rude awakening on some of the card configuration.

15:44SPEAKERThen again, that's something that I just like,

15:46SPEAKERI could have read an article 10 years ago

15:48SPEAKERand fully grasped that and just never bothered to.

15:51SPEAKER- Literally that is a thing that when PCI express by two

15:54SPEAKERcame out like 14, 15 years ago, whenever it was,

15:57SPEAKERwe did a what's up with PCI express version two.

16:01SPEAKERAnd Gordon explained that in the article then.

16:03SPEAKERAnd that was, that's the only reason I know that it is,

16:07SPEAKERyou kind of expect things to degrade gracefully.

16:10SPEAKERAnd also like you hit a problem,

16:13SPEAKERlike you and I have a similar problem

16:14SPEAKER'cause we both have multiple cards on our computer.

16:17SPEAKERAnd I think that's a pretty unusual configuration these days

16:22SPEAKER'cause most people have a video card and that's kind of it.

16:26SPEAKERThe number of PCI express slots is waning

16:30SPEAKERin favor of more M2 slots.

16:32SPEAKER- Yes, absolutely.

16:34SPEAKER- Because those lanes are often hardwired

16:37SPEAKERor plugging things into one PCI express port

16:40SPEAKERwill turn off other things like SATA ports

16:43SPEAKERor USB ports or whatever,

16:46SPEAKERdepending on how the chip sets wired up.

16:49SPEAKERLike you could end up in a situation where you have,

16:51SPEAKERit looks like you have the right number of slots

16:53SPEAKERand they're the right shape slots,

16:55SPEAKERbut they're electrically not.

16:57SPEAKER'Cause the situation you have just to be clear is

17:00SPEAKERyou have three by 16 PCI express slots on the motherboard,

17:05SPEAKERbut they're mechanical by 16 slots.

17:08SPEAKERThey're actually only electrical by four and by two slots.

17:11SPEAKER- That's correct, that's correct.

17:13SPEAKER- Which is a choice.

17:14SPEAKER- So yeah, what you're, yeah, it is for sure.

17:16SPEAKERI mean, some of the other boards out there

17:18SPEAKERtake the opposite tack of like, oh, this can be an X8 slot,

17:22SPEAKERbut if these other things are populated,

17:24SPEAKERthen it goes down to X4 or might be disabled entirely.

17:28SPEAKERSo different strategies for different port designs.

17:32SPEAKERSo like some things it's an either or,

17:34SPEAKERsome things it's, hey, everything you see is what you get.

17:36SPEAKERIt's just that some of these are pretty reduced

17:39SPEAKERto begin with.

17:40SPEAKER- Well, and just to be clear, a lot of times,

17:43SPEAKERfor example, on my i9 board,

17:45SPEAKERmy video card ran as a by eight for years and years,

17:48SPEAKERbecause it was a PCI express 3.0 card in a 3.0 slot.

17:54SPEAKERAnd running by eight was basically as fast

17:56SPEAKERas the machine could feed anything to it anyway.

17:58SPEAKERSo it was fine.

17:59SPEAKERAnd that was an intentional choice

18:01SPEAKERthat the motherboard manufacturers

18:02SPEAKERand the CPU manufacturers would make at the time

18:04SPEAKERto cheap out on the number of lanes they provided

18:07SPEAKERor in Intel's case, make it a marketing choice

18:09SPEAKERso they could sell you more expensive CPUs

18:10SPEAKERif you needed a bunch of lanes.

18:13SPEAKERAnyway, luckily we're mostly past that time,

18:16SPEAKERbut at the same time, you're getting hit by this problem,

18:18SPEAKERwhich is, hey, there aren't enough,

18:21SPEAKERthere just aren't enough slots on the board.

18:26SPEAKER- You are not going to find a motherboard

18:27SPEAKERwith more than three slots out there.

18:28SPEAKERA lot of them only have two at this point.

18:30SPEAKERAnd to compound the problem that you mentioned,

18:32SPEAKERnot only are there fewer slots,

18:34SPEAKERbut even the slots you have,

18:36SPEAKERmost of those lanes are going to the M.2 at this point.

18:39SPEAKERSo that's how I ended up with a slot

18:41SPEAKERthat's only got two lanes to it

18:43SPEAKERbecause there's a bunch of M.2 on this board

18:45SPEAKERthat are eating up most of the lanes.

18:47SPEAKER- And then the other issue is that

18:49SPEAKERif you want to get a board with a bunch of slots,

18:52SPEAKERyou have to look at workstation boards

18:53SPEAKERand then they're not,

18:54SPEAKERlike you're into a whole different class of CPUs

18:57SPEAKERand the workstation boards are,

18:59SPEAKERthey're more expensive than the high-end gaming boards,

19:01SPEAKERwhich are already really expensive.

19:03SPEAKER- They are.

19:04SPEAKERWorkstation boards, I went down a whole rabbit hole

19:07SPEAKERof looking at workstation boards,

19:08SPEAKERless for this build and more for when I had to rebuild

19:10SPEAKERmy NAS last year when the motherboard died and that.

19:13SPEAKERAnd I was, the reason I was looking at workstation boards

19:15SPEAKERis because I wanted ECC memory.

19:17SPEAKERAnd that's kind of the only place

19:18SPEAKERyou're going to get that these days.

19:19SPEAKER- Yeah.

19:20SPEAKER- Yeah, like those, A, like all the Super Micro Type

19:23SPEAKERand Asus, like the Proline or whatever,

19:25SPEAKERtheir workstation boards are like $600.

19:28SPEAKER- They start at 600 bucks, yeah.

19:30SPEAKER- Like thousand dollar boards.

19:31SPEAKERAnd the other thing is you can't just buy them,

19:33SPEAKERby and large, like you can't just go to B&H or Newegg

19:37SPEAKERand order them.

19:37SPEAKERIn a lot of cases, it's like you need,

19:39SPEAKERlike they're expecting to sell them in bulk to Enterprise

19:41SPEAKERor whatever, you know.

19:42SPEAKER- Or to builders, yeah.

19:44SPEAKER- Right, like you have to order them

19:45SPEAKERa hundred at a time or something.

19:47SPEAKER- Or you have to go through a screwdriver shop

19:49SPEAKERlike Central or something like that.

19:50SPEAKER- Yes, yes.

19:51SPEAKER- It'll sell you individual parts.

19:52SPEAKER- Yes, yes.

19:52SPEAKERThe other, real quick, the other thing I noticed,

19:54SPEAKERa lot of those workstation boards

19:57SPEAKERstill have PCI slots on them.

19:59SPEAKERLike a lot of them have one or two regular PCI slots

20:02SPEAKERtaking up space.

20:03SPEAKER- Yeah, that's because often they're like designed

20:05SPEAKERto go in with a piece of like mechanic,

20:07SPEAKERlike factory equipment that has a PCI express interface

20:10SPEAKERfor, I mean, sorry, a PCI interface,

20:13SPEAKERliterally a 30 year old car that needs to plug into this

20:15SPEAKERto make the $500,000 machine work.

20:18SPEAKER- Yeah, PC compatibility has gotten very complicated.

20:22SPEAKER- I've increasingly, as I get older,

20:24SPEAKERI'm increasingly of the opinion that Apple is right

20:26SPEAKERto just throw everything out every 10 years.

20:28SPEAKER- You know, I can certainly see the purity

20:30SPEAKERof that approach at this point.

20:33SPEAKERFor sure.

20:34SPEAKER- So, so, okay, so we've talked about how it's going.

20:39SPEAKERYou're still kind of setting up.

20:40SPEAKERYou've done, we have like 30 or 40 minutes left

20:44SPEAKERat the outside and I want to talk about what's changed

20:47SPEAKERbetween now and the last time you built a PC.

20:50SPEAKER- Okay.

20:51SPEAKER- But like, how's it going?

20:52SPEAKERJust so people know, like you played some games,

20:54SPEAKERyou got stuff running, you got windows on the machine.

20:57SPEAKER- Yeah, you know, I was a little spooked

21:00SPEAKERby all the talk about AM5, AM5 is the new socket

21:04SPEAKERthat the new Ryzons are in, the Zen 4 Ryzons,

21:06SPEAKERlike they'll talk about that and DDR5 being a little iffy

21:09SPEAKERand like early BIOS quality not being great and stuff.

21:11SPEAKERLike generally have not run into that too much

21:14SPEAKERwith the exception of, I can't tell if it's resolved itself

21:17SPEAKERor not, but I was having an issue with soft reboots,

21:20SPEAKERjust kind of like going to black screen,

21:22SPEAKERnot actually rebooting and having a hard power cycle

21:25SPEAKERof the machine.

21:27SPEAKERNow that I'm in windows, I think that seems

21:30SPEAKERto have pretty much gone away.

21:32SPEAKERI don't know, I did have to clear the CMOS once

21:35SPEAKERand it seemed to get better after that.

21:38SPEAKER- Sometimes, I mean, one of the things that's changed

21:40SPEAKERis that some of the boards and the CPUs are smarter

21:45SPEAKERabout janky memory now in a way that sometimes

21:48SPEAKERthey just are like, hey, we gotta like,

21:50SPEAKERwe'll automatically adjust what we're doing

21:53SPEAKERaround this place where the memory is causing problems

21:57SPEAKERor whatever and I think AMD actually does

21:59SPEAKERlike a training thing now, right?

22:00SPEAKERWhen you first put it? - Yeah, Intel Buzz 2.

22:03SPEAKERYou'll see that on Intel boards as well.

22:05SPEAKERMy Z690 board that's in my NAS

22:08SPEAKERwith an Alder Lake chip does the same thing.

22:11SPEAKER- That's nice. - Yeah.

22:14SPEAKERWhat else is going on?

22:15SPEAKERYeah, so anyway, yes, I've gotten into windows.

22:17SPEAKERI haven't activated windows yet.

22:18SPEAKERIt's still very much a fresh,

22:21SPEAKERI just wanted to poke around at stuff,

22:23SPEAKERkind of see how the drivers were going to shape up

22:25SPEAKERand stuff like that.

22:26SPEAKER- Well, you're still in the maybe

22:27SPEAKERI'm going to reinstall windows phase to install, right?

22:30SPEAKER- Yes, and also, you know, trying to figure out like, okay,

22:32SPEAKERdo I definitely want to stick with 10?

22:34SPEAKERI think so, but let's just poke around.

22:36SPEAKERAnyway, it's nice how freely you can just

22:39SPEAKERinstall windows these days.

22:41SPEAKER- Well, the thing about, yeah, and even if you activate it,

22:45SPEAKERlike when you reinstall windows on top of that,

22:48SPEAKERon that same hardware and you log in with your windows,

22:52SPEAKERwith your Microsoft account, it'll be like,

22:53SPEAKERoh, hey, I recognize this hardware.

22:54SPEAKERIt's this key and then it doesn't even bother you.

22:57SPEAKER- It's really nice.

22:57SPEAKER- Yes, yeah, and I just wanted to make sure

22:59SPEAKERthis build is stable, that I'm not going to have to

23:01SPEAKERswap the motherboard out or something like that

23:02SPEAKERbefore I, 'cause you can move license to a new motherboard.

23:06SPEAKERIt's just a little bit more work.

23:07SPEAKER- It's a, yeah, they will hassle you.

23:09SPEAKER- Anyway, I downloaded a bunch of ray tracing stuff.

23:12SPEAKER- Oh.

23:13SPEAKER- I got that portal RTX mod.

23:15SPEAKER- Yeah, I played most of that.

23:17SPEAKERThat looks nice.

23:18SPEAKER- It looks nice.

23:19SPEAKERIt's like, I think Vinny might've also said this

23:22SPEAKERon an X-Langar podcast at some point,

23:24SPEAKERthe very evenly lit sterile setting of portal

23:29SPEAKERturns out to be kind of a muted way to show off ray tracing

23:32SPEAKER'cause there's just a lot of light from every angle

23:34SPEAKERand everything looks a little flat by design.

23:36SPEAKER- The thing I will say is I felt like when I went back

23:40SPEAKERand looked at what it looked like before,

23:42SPEAKERI don't know that it's an actual improvement,

23:45SPEAKERlike the ray traced lights versus like in an aesthetically,

23:48SPEAKERI think that a lot of thought went into the way

23:50SPEAKERthe lighting worked in that game originally.

23:52SPEAKERAnd I don't know that it's necessary,

23:55SPEAKERlike I don't think it's a necessary thing to go back in.

23:56SPEAKERAnd it's not like where Quake was flat lit

24:00SPEAKERand had all the, Quake 2 had all the weird color lighting

24:02SPEAKERand stuff like that in 1998 or whenever it came out.

24:05SPEAKERThis doesn't feel like, portal is from an era

24:11SPEAKERwhen the game still looks pretty good

24:13SPEAKERif you just run it at a high resolution

24:14SPEAKERwith like AA cranked all the way up

24:15SPEAKERand an isotropic filtering.

24:20SPEAKER- I would agree with Vinny that the sterile environment

24:23SPEAKERof portal is not maybe a great showcase

24:26SPEAKERfor shadows and reflections.

24:28SPEAKER- Yeah, there's just, it's a little too uniform.

24:30SPEAKERThere's not enough variation in the lighting.

24:31SPEAKERThere's the geometry is extremely angular and flat.

24:35SPEAKERI mean, I do wonder, at the end when you see

24:39SPEAKERbehind the curtain, when you start going outside

24:40SPEAKERof the testing environment,

24:42SPEAKERI bet there's some cooler looking stuff then.

24:45SPEAKER- I played all the way up to that point and it doesn't,

24:47SPEAKERit's like, there's not that much outside

24:49SPEAKERthe testing environment in that game.

24:50SPEAKERThe stuff you remember as being outside

24:52SPEAKERthe testing environment is mostly in portal two.

24:55SPEAKERLike there's a third of the game after you reach

25:00SPEAKERthe final testing chamber where you're traversing stuff,

25:04SPEAKERbut it's not, it's still like offices and like,

25:07SPEAKERyou're not seeing like all the girders and the weird balls

25:10SPEAKERand all the legacy of apertures past and all that.

25:13SPEAKER- Sure, sure.

25:14SPEAKER- I don't know, I was like, I don't wanna diminish the work

25:19SPEAKERthat went into that 'cause I know that people

25:20SPEAKERspend a lot of time on it and like, it's cool that it exists.

25:24SPEAKERI'm happy with, yeah.

25:26SPEAKER- Well, the other thing is that it was made with RTX remix,

25:29SPEAKERthat tool that lets you kind of bolt ray tracing

25:31SPEAKERonto old games and so, you know, I don't wanna say

25:35SPEAKERthat tool is limited necessarily 'cause we haven't seen

25:37SPEAKERa lot of its output yet.

25:39SPEAKERIt's still not out, they had said the beta for that

25:41SPEAKERwas gonna be out a while ago.

25:43SPEAKER- This year I thought, yeah, or last year I thought.

25:46SPEAKER- It was like November last year.

25:47SPEAKERI think they said the beta and I don't think those tools

25:49SPEAKERhave actually been released yet.

25:50SPEAKERAnyway, point is like that, that was the furthest thing

25:53SPEAKERfrom designed from the ground up for ray tracing

25:56SPEAKERthat you could get, right?

25:57SPEAKER- Yeah.

25:58SPEAKER- So I could see it being a little limited.

26:02SPEAKERQuake 2 runs at 200 frames a second now, like I couldn't,

26:10SPEAKERon my old machine with a 3080, I think I could barely

26:13SPEAKERhit some 60, maybe not even 60 with DLSS at 1440p.

26:18SPEAKERNow I'm at 1440p native without DLSS

26:21SPEAKERand 200 frames a second on this card, it's ridiculous.

26:24SPEAKER- Yeah, I feel like when I played that on the 3080

26:26SPEAKERon my 9900K, it was pretty performant,

26:31SPEAKERbut not 200 frames a second performant probably native,

26:35SPEAKERprobably had DLSS on.

26:37SPEAKER- Well, that's on the new machine.

26:38SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, no, no, I'm saying, I'm saying like to like,

26:42SPEAKERyeah, that's-- - Oh, yeah, yeah, yes, yes.

26:45SPEAKER- The intermediate was, like when it launched,

26:47SPEAKERit was pretty good on a reasonable CPU and GPU at the time,

26:50SPEAKERwhich is by a 3080.

26:51SPEAKER- Yeah, ray tracing is actually pretty CPU taxing,

26:54SPEAKERis my understanding, and so that may have accounted

26:56SPEAKERfor some disparity there.

26:57SPEAKERAnyway, it's just crazy to see something like that

27:01SPEAKERjust running at that speed, and then I mostly have spent time

27:05SPEAKERjust wandering around in Cyberpunk, which looks ridiculous.

27:09SPEAKER- I was gonna say, I downloaded that overdrive update

27:13SPEAKERand the new drivers for that right before we recorded,

27:15SPEAKERso I could kind of poke at it a little bit,

27:16SPEAKER'cause I played a fair amount of that game

27:19SPEAKERwith the DLSS3 frame generation patch,

27:25SPEAKERwhich their first implementation of ray tracing

27:27SPEAKERwas like shadows and reflections basically,

27:29SPEAKERso it was kind of like control.

27:31SPEAKER- Yeah, I think it was a little more robust than control,

27:35SPEAKERbut not a ton.

27:36SPEAKER- Well, control did emissive light too,

27:38SPEAKER'cause it had all the red lights were all ray traced,

27:40SPEAKERI believe, as well.

27:41SPEAKER- Okay.

27:43SPEAKER- And there may have been some lights in the initial pass,

27:46SPEAKERbut it looked good, right?

27:49SPEAKERIt is a fine looking game.

27:52SPEAKERI didn't see a ton of like super noticeable difference

27:57SPEAKERbetween the old ray tracing and the new ray tracing,

28:00SPEAKERbut the new ray tracing is actually,

28:01SPEAKERlike all lighting in the game is ray traced now, right?

28:03SPEAKER- It's fully path traced now,

28:05SPEAKERit's every light in the game is equally simulated,

28:08SPEAKERand like the shipping ray tracing

28:12SPEAKERonly did like single bounce and only on some lights,

28:15SPEAKERlike it was pretty limited.

28:16SPEAKERThis is multiple bounces

28:17SPEAKERfrom literally every light in the world.

28:22SPEAKERYou should do some side-by-side, it's super apparent.

28:24SPEAKERI have to salute their rendering engineers at CD Projects,

28:28SPEAKER'cause you can flip between literally every preset

28:31SPEAKERin that game from low raster all the way up to ultra,

28:35SPEAKERto Steam Deck, to all the ray tracing modes,

28:37SPEAKERto the path tracing mode,

28:38SPEAKERlike no render or restarts, no nothing, it is instantaneous.

28:41SPEAKERLike every graphic setting you can fiddle with in that game

28:45SPEAKERgoes into effect. - Oh, I didn't notice that.

28:47SPEAKER- Yeah, it goes into effect as fast

28:48SPEAKERas you can escape out of the menu,

28:49SPEAKERso it's super easy to do side-by-sides.

28:51SPEAKER- Oh man, I wish they'd give us a hotkey

28:53SPEAKERso we could switch between them.

28:53SPEAKER- Literally what I was about to say,

28:55SPEAKERthey made me wish for the days of like the Quake console

28:58SPEAKERwhere you could just bind all those functionality

29:01SPEAKERto hotkeys.

29:02SPEAKERThere may be a way to do that, I would like to try it,

29:04SPEAKERbut like go into some corners, some alleyways,

29:07SPEAKERsome like under overpasses and stuff like that,

29:10SPEAKERand flip back and forth

29:12SPEAKERbetween like the rasterized ultra setting

29:15SPEAKERand the path tracing.

29:16SPEAKERIt is extremely apparent what it's doing at that point

29:19SPEAKERin terms of everything going from just like really flat

29:22SPEAKERand fake looking lighting to, you know,

29:25SPEAKEReverything is getting shadows that are like

29:28SPEAKERphysically correct for some reasonable definition

29:30SPEAKERof physical correctness.

29:32SPEAKERLike everything is shaded like you would expect it to be.

29:35SPEAKER- The places it looked best,

29:37SPEAKERso my save started me in a bar,

29:39SPEAKERand the bars are dingy and dark,

29:42SPEAKERbut also really neon-y and lit

29:43SPEAKERand like didn't notice an immediate difference there.

29:47SPEAKERWhen I was running through the alleys,

29:48SPEAKERthe alleys looked crazy good.

29:50SPEAKER- Yes, I had the same experience.

29:52SPEAKERThat bar that they start you in

29:53SPEAKERis like the worst place to see this in action

29:55SPEAKERbecause that type of lighting

29:57SPEAKERis done really well with raster.

29:59SPEAKER- Yeah.

30:01SPEAKER- But yeah, there's, yes, the more you wander around

30:03SPEAKERand look at side-by-side stuff,

30:04SPEAKERthe more you see what it's doing.

30:05SPEAKERBut like, I've kind of thought this from day one,

30:08SPEAKERthe ray tracing is not about like flashy,

30:10SPEAKERit's about mundane, you know,

30:12SPEAKERit's about making everything uniform

30:14SPEAKERand like lots of real life is kind of mundane looking,

30:16SPEAKERbut like doing that mundane stuff

30:19SPEAKERin a correct believable way is what's cool.

30:23SPEAKER- Well, there's also a real benefit

30:25SPEAKERon the development side too,

30:26SPEAKER'cause then you're not,

30:27SPEAKERyour spins between builds don't require light maps

30:30SPEAKERand stuff like that, which take a lot of time to generate.

30:32SPEAKER- Yeah, I have seen a lot of developers

30:34SPEAKERtalk about their excitement from an asset pipeline,

30:38SPEAKERfrom an artistic, like creative standpoint,

30:40SPEAKERbeing super excited about just having

30:42SPEAKERa unified lighting model

30:43SPEAKERwhere they can just light things naturally.

30:45SPEAKER- Yep.

30:46SPEAKER- Yeah, it's going to be exciting when we get there.

30:48SPEAKER- The number of cheats that you do in any like UE4 game

30:52SPEAKERto make the game look right is substantial, so.

30:57SPEAKERAnd in every game ever, really.

30:59SPEAKER- Yeah.

31:00SPEAKERLast thing, of course, probably goes without saying,

31:02SPEAKERlike that mode runs shockingly well on this,

31:05SPEAKERI mean, of course it does on this hardware.

31:07SPEAKERI'm so surprised.

31:08SPEAKER- But, well, but they were out there,

31:10SPEAKERyou know, Nvidia was out there going like,

31:11SPEAKER"Hey, at 4K, this runs at 18 frames a second on a 4090."

31:15SPEAKERBut I'm at 1440p and the LSS quality or balanced,

31:20SPEAKERI think I was using balanced,

31:22SPEAKERlike getting like 80, 90 frames a second,

31:23SPEAKERlike without frame generation, like it's quite playable.

31:27SPEAKER- With frame generation on my machine at 1080p with HDR on,

31:32SPEAKERI was getting like between 120 and 200 frames a second,

31:36SPEAKERdepending on whether I was inside or outside.

31:37SPEAKER- Yeah, the little bit I played with frame generation on

31:41SPEAKERfelt a little bit weird and swimmy.

31:45SPEAKERIt was almost like looking at a motion smooth TV

31:48SPEAKERa little bit.

31:49SPEAKER- You want reflex on, if you're using,

31:51SPEAKERI think reflex has to be on for frame generation to work.

31:53SPEAKER- Okay.

31:55SPEAKER- And I did not notice a swimminess, so.

31:59SPEAKERI also was playing with a game pad, so I might not have.

32:01SPEAKER- Interesting.

32:02SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't know, I'll fiddle around with it some more.

32:04SPEAKERI feel like I might be more inclined to drop the DLSS

32:08SPEAKERquality than turn on frame generation, personally.

32:12SPEAKER- I like the frame generation,

32:13SPEAKERbut I also find I'm pretty,

32:17SPEAKERI notice micro stutter in a way that I'd rather have

32:20SPEAKERthe swimminess occasionally than the micro stutter.

32:22SPEAKERAnyway.

32:23SPEAKER- Sure, yeah.

32:25SPEAKER- Okay, so it seems fast.

32:28SPEAKER- Yes.

32:29SPEAKER- Big surprise.

32:29SPEAKER- Yes, early impressions of the gaming performance,

32:31SPEAKERquite good.

32:34SPEAKER- Like boot time.

32:35SPEAKERI suppose you haven't installed any heavy apps

32:37SPEAKERand stuff like that yet.

32:38SPEAKER- No, I haven't done anything that would stress multi-core

32:40SPEAKERat all, or like heavy multitasking.

32:43SPEAKER- Steam updating, like it's funny,

32:45SPEAKERsteam updates make this band spin up on my old PC.

32:48SPEAKER- Yes, same.

32:49SPEAKER- Yeah.

32:51SPEAKER- I haven't tried a lot else.

32:53SPEAKER- You went with air cooling instead of water,

32:54SPEAKERis nice and quiet as expected.

32:56SPEAKERYour team beige is sounding good.

32:58SPEAKER- So the case is still in like a state of disassembly.

33:02SPEAKERSo I can't say what the fully closed up sound levels

33:06SPEAKERare gonna be yet 'cause panels are still off the side

33:09SPEAKERat the moment, but like reasonably quiet,

33:11SPEAKEReven for hanging open.

33:12SPEAKER- Okay, sounds good.

33:14SPEAKER- Yeah.

33:15SPEAKER- Well, so we'll do, like in a couple of weeks

33:17SPEAKERwhen you get everything all set up

33:18SPEAKERand you're comfortable with it, we'll do a revisit,

33:23SPEAKERmaybe a part one, part two, kind of look at how it's going.

33:27SPEAKERDo you wanna switch over and talk about what's changed

33:29SPEAKERsince the last time?

33:30SPEAKER- Sure, we talked about like the M2 cards

33:32SPEAKERand the SATA cards and the push pull

33:34SPEAKERand the number of PCI express lanes that are available

33:37SPEAKERto motherboard manufacturers.

33:38SPEAKERAnd the only other thing I'll add to that

33:40SPEAKERthat I was gonna say earlier is the reason

33:45SPEAKERI never took the time to understand that stuff in the past

33:47SPEAKERwas 'cause you kind of didn't have to until recently.

33:49SPEAKERLike generally any card, like let's say, I don't know,

33:53SPEAKERseven, eight years ago, plus any card you bought,

33:57SPEAKERyou were probably going to have a slot

33:58SPEAKERthat had enough lanes to just do it

33:59SPEAKERbecause where else were those lanes gonna go, right?

34:01SPEAKERLike before you had a lot of M.2,

34:03SPEAKERlike I'd never run into a situation where I had cards

34:06SPEAKERthat were too, that needed a more robust config

34:10SPEAKERthan what I had.

34:11SPEAKERSo I just had never bothered to learn it, right?

34:12SPEAKER- Well, yeah, if you have like ninth generation Intel CPUs

34:16SPEAKERor earlier, you were probably limited on them,

34:18SPEAKERthe number of lanes you had accessible,

34:20SPEAKERunless your motherboard did something weird

34:22SPEAKERwith lanes into the chip set or something like that,

34:25SPEAKERwhich meant, which is why most motherboards

34:27SPEAKERonly had one M.2 slot, frankly.

34:31SPEAKERBut you could get in a situation

34:32SPEAKERwhere you would plug in an M.2 card

34:35SPEAKERand all of a sudden your SATA ports would stop working

34:36SPEAKERor something like that, which still happens.

34:38SPEAKERIt's still, it still is unclear.

34:46SPEAKERGenerally speaking, the thing I wish I had known

34:48SPEAKERthe last time I had to move an M.2 machine

34:50SPEAKERto another M.2 machine,

34:51SPEAKER'cause we're getting into the era now

34:53SPEAKERwhen people will have like their C drive on an M.2

34:55SPEAKERand they're building a new machine

34:57SPEAKERand like it's, especially if you only have one M.2 slot

35:00SPEAKERon your motherboard or a limited number of M.2 slots,

35:02SPEAKERor you don't wanna have to disassemble the whole machine

35:05SPEAKERto migrate data off your old drive,

35:08SPEAKERyou can buy an M.2 reader for like 20 bucks from Amazon

35:11SPEAKERthat you just plug the old drive in

35:13SPEAKERand plug that into USB port and then you get full,

35:16SPEAKERlike it shows up just like a USB drive on your machine,

35:19SPEAKERwhich makes pulling stuff off of old drives much easier

35:22SPEAKERand doesn't require like network transfers

35:24SPEAKERand stuff like that.

35:25SPEAKER- That very much feels like something

35:27SPEAKERthat anybody who does a lot of PC stuff

35:28SPEAKERshould just have on hand at this point.

35:30SPEAKERI should definitely get one of those

35:31SPEAKERbecause yeah, having to open up a machine

35:35SPEAKERand especially all the disassembly you have to do

35:37SPEAKERon a lot of machines these days

35:38SPEAKERto even access the M.2 sockets,

35:41SPEAKERlike having to do that every time you wanna read something

35:43SPEAKERoff of a spare drive, that's not fun.

35:45SPEAKER- That was, I literally spent 20 bucks on one

35:48SPEAKERjust so I don't have to like take apart a machine

35:51SPEAKERto see what's on M.2 drives that are sitting around my desk.

35:55SPEAKER- You have to buy, the kicker is if you have M.2 SATA drives

36:00SPEAKERwhich are pretty rare these days,

36:03SPEAKERthen you'll need a different reader for that

36:05SPEAKERthan M.2 NVMe drives, so you might need to buy two.

36:09SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't think SATA's got a lot of life

36:12SPEAKERleft in it generally.

36:13SPEAKER- Well, M.2 SATA drives would be from like pre-2014 I think,

36:18SPEAKERthey're mostly laptop drives, like older laptop drives.

36:23SPEAKERThere wasn't any reason to put an M.2 SSD

36:26SPEAKERon a SATA, M.2 SATA interface on a desktop PC

36:31SPEAKER'cause they keep room to put real SATA drives in.

36:35SPEAKERI think SATA is probably, like we'll continue to see SATA

36:41SPEAKERfor spinning rust drives.

36:44SPEAKER- Yeah, for sure, yeah.

36:45SPEAKER- Not for, I mean, they're gonna keep being around for SSDs

36:49SPEAKERsuch as people can jam them into old PS4s

36:51SPEAKERand the millions of places that have a SATA port.

36:55SPEAKER- Yeah, but you're starting to see fewer SATA ports

36:57SPEAKERas I looked through boards, like there's a lot of boards

36:59SPEAKERout there that only have four SATA ports on them now.

37:01SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.

37:04SPEAKERLet's see, there's a note here

37:05SPEAKERthat says putting the CPU in is still scary.

37:07SPEAKEREverything else has gotten easier.

37:11SPEAKERLike plugging hard drives in,

37:14SPEAKERnot having to deal with SATA and SATA power

37:16SPEAKERand screwing them in and all that stuff,

37:18SPEAKERand just like slotting like a chewing gum stick-sized

37:23SPEAKERpiece of ROM, of flash into the motherboard

37:28SPEAKERis way easier, I think.

37:30SPEAKERBut the CPU is still fricking scary.

37:32SPEAKER- Yeah, is it land grid array?

37:35SPEAKERIs that what they've all moved to now?

37:37SPEAKER- Yeah, land grid is when the pins are on the motherboard

37:39SPEAKERand the lands are on the socket.

37:42SPEAKER- I somehow, I find that scarier

37:45SPEAKERthan when the pins were on the chip for some reason.

37:47SPEAKER- Well, so the reason they switched that for two reasons.

37:50SPEAKEROne is so that if you bent a pin,

37:51SPEAKERyou destroyed the cheap thing instead of the expensive thing

37:55SPEAKERbut that was also in a world where the CPUs were $1,000

37:57SPEAKERand the motherboards were 200

37:59SPEAKERand now they're basically the same often.

38:03SPEAKERThe other thing is the density is a lot higher

38:06SPEAKERon those LGA sockets than it is on the pins on the CPU.

38:13SPEAKERSo it's not a great interface.

38:22SPEAKERYou have to line it up and you have to drop it straight down

38:24SPEAKERand the potential for failure that's heartbreaking is there

38:28SPEAKERand you just have to be careful and take your time.

38:30SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, if you're careful, you get it in there once,

38:34SPEAKERdrop the retention mechanism, you're probably fine.

38:38SPEAKER- Yeah, the important thing is to make sure

38:40SPEAKERthat you don't do anything goofy.

38:41SPEAKERLike if you have to swap out a cooler or something later,

38:43SPEAKERyou wanna make sure you warm up your goo

38:45SPEAKERso that it doesn't cause you a problem

38:51SPEAKERand stick to the...

38:52SPEAKER'Cause the surface tension of the cooling paste,

38:55SPEAKERif it's cold, is such that it'll not...

38:59SPEAKERYou have to kind of twist and lift

39:01SPEAKERwhen you're lifting off your cooler, so be careful.

39:04SPEAKER- Oh yeah, I use that Raph iPad instead of paste.

39:06SPEAKER- Oh yeah. - For doing this build.

39:08SPEAKER- Yeah, how are your tips?

39:10SPEAKERYou haven't checked yet?

39:11SPEAKER- I've been looking at them, the thing is, like I said,

39:13SPEAKERthe sides are still off, so it's not really accurate

39:16SPEAKERto what it's gonna be in normal operation.

39:18SPEAKER- Well, inside the CPU, the interface between the CPU

39:22SPEAKERand the cooler is such that it should be

39:25SPEAKERabout what you would expect.

39:26SPEAKER- It's been idling in the 30s to low 40s.

39:29SPEAKER- Okay, that seems good.

39:30SPEAKER- Which I think is decent for these chips

39:31SPEAKERrun pretty hot to begin with.

39:32SPEAKERThe highest I've seen it in games is like 65, 70 so far.

39:37SPEAKER- Yeah, that's pretty good.

39:38SPEAKER- So feeling okay there.

39:41SPEAKER- I'm interested when you install fan control,

39:44SPEAKERwhich we'll talk about in a minute,

39:45SPEAKERwhich of the temperatures you use for your CPU temp.

39:49SPEAKER- Yeah, I will go get that thing and mess with it.

39:51SPEAKERI'm curious 'cause you've spoken so highly of it.

39:53SPEAKERI mean, the motherboard does have pretty robust

39:56SPEAKERfan curve control to begin with,

39:58SPEAKERbut curious to see what else you can do.

40:02SPEAKER- Yeah, the big benefit, well, we'll talk about it in a minute

40:05SPEAKERbut with also, I think they need a better name

40:07SPEAKERthan fan control.

40:08SPEAKER- It's really hard to Google fan control, it turns out.

40:11SPEAKER- Yes, it's really hard to talk about,

40:12SPEAKERmake it clear you're talking about the software.

40:15SPEAKER- I was to say, we talked a little about memory training,

40:17SPEAKERwhich is like a first boot thing on newer motherboards,

40:20SPEAKERnew CPUs, where it basically just,

40:22SPEAKERI think it just runs through the whole available

40:24SPEAKERaddressable RAM and does like a mini mem test

40:28SPEAKERor something on it so it knows what's up.

40:30SPEAKER- That's what I ended up having to do

40:31SPEAKERon that Alder Lake board for my NAS

40:33SPEAKER'cause I had four sticks of the same model of memory

40:36SPEAKERbut from two different kits bought three years apart.

40:39SPEAKERAnd I couldn't, obviously that was another lesson

40:41SPEAKERI had to learn on the spot of like the XMP

40:43SPEAKERis slightly different for every kit.

40:45SPEAKER- Yep.

40:46SPEAKER- Even though it's the same model.

40:48SPEAKERSo XMP wasn't gonna cut it for all those.

40:50SPEAKERAnd so I set everything to auto.

40:52SPEAKERAll I did was manually set the speed on those DIMMs,

40:56SPEAKERwhich was 2,400 and left everything else at auto

40:58SPEAKERand then rebooted and it kind of--

41:01SPEAKER- Did it sing?

41:01SPEAKER- It did 60 seconds of black screen and a couple of reboots

41:04SPEAKERand then it came in and had timings

41:06SPEAKERthat have been super stable for all of those.

41:09SPEAKER- The knowing which fan headers to use now on a motherboard,

41:15SPEAKERI mean, I don't know if this is a fancy motherboard thing.

41:17SPEAKERIt kind of is 'cause cheaper motherboards

41:19SPEAKERtend to have fewer fan headers.

41:21SPEAKERBut it used to be that you had a CPU fan header,

41:24SPEAKERmaybe a pump fan header,

41:26SPEAKERprobably a system fan header for the rear exhaust fan

41:29SPEAKERand then maybe a couple of fan headers in the front

41:31SPEAKERand newer motherboards have,

41:33SPEAKERmy motherboard has like eight fan headers on it

41:35SPEAKERor something like that.

41:36SPEAKERSome of them are tied to each other,

41:37SPEAKERso it'll run the same speed as one of the other headers.

41:42SPEAKERSome of them are specifically for the pump.

41:43SPEAKERSome of them are always full speed for the pump.

41:46SPEAKERThere's a bunch of options.

41:47SPEAKER- Yes, that's exactly how the board in my NAS is an ASUS

41:51SPEAKERand it's got CPU fan and CPU opt, which I assume is optional.

41:56SPEAKER- I think, yeah, I think it's for,

41:58SPEAKERI think that's for like if you have an additional fan

42:01SPEAKERon your CPU cooler is the idea there.

42:03SPEAKERSo yours is specifically like your Noctua cooler

42:06SPEAKERis that situation.

42:08SPEAKER- So I was on that ASUS board,

42:09SPEAKERthe CPU opt is tied to running at the same speed

42:12SPEAKERas the CPU fan.

42:13SPEAKER- Okay.

42:14SPEAKER- You can't change that and it's got a,

42:17SPEAKERI believe it's labeled like AIO pump or something

42:19SPEAKERand that one runs at full speed,

42:20SPEAKERthat one you can't set a curve on.

42:22SPEAKER- Yeah, which is fine 'cause the pump you can run

42:24SPEAKERin the pump at full speed, it doesn't have anything.

42:26SPEAKER- This is the gigabyte board that I've gotten

42:28SPEAKERin this new build seems to let you set all the curves

42:32SPEAKERindependently for everything no matter what they're,

42:33SPEAKEReven though half of them are labeled pump,

42:35SPEAKERhalf of them are labeled sys fan,

42:37SPEAKERthere's a CPU opt on there.

42:38SPEAKER- They're all wired up so you can control them all.

42:41SPEAKER- Yeah.

42:42SPEAKER- That's nice.

42:45SPEAKERI think the ASUS thing, I think that's an ASUS thing

42:47SPEAKERis that the opt and the CPU fan are tied to each other

42:50SPEAKER'cause my ASUS board is like that.

42:53SPEAKERThe other thing is like given the complexity

42:58SPEAKERand depending on how complicated

42:59SPEAKERyour fan controller situation is

43:01SPEAKERand the number of fans in your system,

43:03SPEAKERit might actually make sense to have a fan controller now

43:05SPEAKERin a way that it didn't necessarily before

43:07SPEAKEReven with all these boards on your,

43:09SPEAKEReven with all these boards on your board.

43:10SPEAKER- So you see here we are already running into the problem.

43:12SPEAKERWhen you say fan controller,

43:13SPEAKERdo you mean a physical mechanical one?

43:16SPEAKERYou don't mean fan control of the software package?

43:18SPEAKER- I mean both.

43:19SPEAKERI mean a hardware device that fan control

43:21SPEAKERcan interface directly with and control.

43:24SPEAKERYeah.

43:25SPEAKER- So this case does come with a fan controller?

43:27SPEAKER- So the fractal controllers that come,

43:30SPEAKER'cause they'll often include like an RGB controller

43:32SPEAKERand a fan controller.

43:34SPEAKERThey're often very stupid in that they just run

43:36SPEAKERat specific speeds and you can't control the curves

43:39SPEAKERor the RGB independently.

43:41SPEAKER- The fan controller in this 7XL I think can take nine

43:44SPEAKERor 10 additional fans.

43:47SPEAKER- That's a lot of fans.

43:48SPEAKER- But yeah, you can only,

43:49SPEAKERI think they all have to run at the same speed.

43:50SPEAKERYou can't control them independently.

43:52SPEAKER- Yeah, but I mean, which just to be clear,

43:54SPEAKERlike if you wanna turn one port on your motherboard

43:56SPEAKERinto a radiator port, it's fine to do,

43:59SPEAKERlike that's a fine way to do it, right?

44:01SPEAKERAnd run three fans on your radiator off of that or something.

44:04SPEAKER- Yeah, you'd want all those fans

44:05SPEAKERrunning at the same speed anyway.

44:06SPEAKER- Yeah, but if you like, yeah, that's it.

44:11SPEAKERThat's the long and short of it.

44:14SPEAKER- The one weird behavior that I ran into there

44:16SPEAKERwas I had to put one of the case fans in a pump

44:19SPEAKERand in a header labeled pump and the pump ones

44:22SPEAKERturned out to be tied to the CPU speed.

44:27SPEAKER- Oh, okay.

44:28SPEAKER- And so that was only one case fan

44:29SPEAKERthat was on a pump header, the rest were on sys fans.

44:31SPEAKERAnd so I kept having this weird behavior

44:35SPEAKERof like this super loud fan spinning up and down constantly.

44:38SPEAKERI was like, man, like, is that graphite pad crappy?

44:41SPEAKERIs my CPU overheating?

44:42SPEAKERWhat the hell is going on in here?

44:43SPEAKERTurned out it was just one of the case fans

44:45SPEAKERwas behaving like the CPU fans,

44:46SPEAKERwhich are much bigger and quieter.

44:48SPEAKER- Got it.

44:49SPEAKER- So it's totally fine.

44:51SPEAKERYou just go in there and change which sensor

44:53SPEAKERit's kind of attuned to.

44:55SPEAKER- In the BIOS, right?

44:56SPEAKER- Right, but it was just like,

44:57SPEAKERand it was like, oh, that's why those are all pump headers

44:59SPEAKERbecause they all default to paying attention to the CPU.

45:03SPEAKER- Well, and I was gonna say the interesting thing is

45:05SPEAKERthe fan header is like, you wanna do that BIOS work

45:08SPEAKEReven if you're gonna install fan control later,

45:10SPEAKERbecause there is the time between when the PC boots up

45:13SPEAKERand when fan control takes over after Windows starts

45:16SPEAKERthat you wanna have, like, you don't want your fan,

45:18SPEAKERyou don't want the machine to be running at 500 frames

45:21SPEAKERat full speed or else it'll make you crazy when you reboot.

45:26SPEAKER- I also learned during your build

45:27SPEAKERthat you can split PWM fan headers.

45:29SPEAKERI didn't know that you could do that until I saw

45:31SPEAKERthat Noctua includes a splitter in their box.

45:34SPEAKERI guess I should have known that

45:35SPEAKER'cause my fractal fans have ins and outs

45:37SPEAKERand you can pass through on those.

45:40SPEAKER- Yeah, I think Noctua puts that splitter

45:42SPEAKERin basically every fan they sell,

45:44SPEAKERat least all the ones I've gotten.

45:46SPEAKERBut what they'll do is PWM is the four pin fan to be clear.

45:50SPEAKERAnd only one of these split cables will have all four pins.

45:54SPEAKERThe others will only be three.

45:56SPEAKER- So basically what the others

45:58SPEAKERare just running at the same speed.

46:00SPEAKERThe signal comes back from one fan

46:02SPEAKERand then the same voltage goes out to the other.

46:05SPEAKER- Right.

46:05SPEAKER- The PWM's go out to the other fans.

46:06SPEAKER- Yeah, 'cause you couldn't report RPMs

46:08SPEAKERor whatever other information

46:10SPEAKERfrom multiple fans over the same pin.

46:11SPEAKER- Yeah, that makes sense.

46:14SPEAKERThere's new stuff to install on the Intel side at least.

46:16SPEAKERYou have to install that Intel management software,

46:18SPEAKERIntel management engine software.

46:20SPEAKERThe IME is basically a little standalone, real low power CPU

46:24SPEAKERthat manages the rest of the,

46:26SPEAKERit's like the brain for the computer.

46:28SPEAKERI don't know.

46:29SPEAKERMaybe that's not the brain,

46:30SPEAKERit's like the hypothalamus or something.

46:34SPEAKERBut it does like housekeeping stuff

46:37SPEAKERand make sure that threads go to the right places

46:40SPEAKERand all that kind of stuff.

46:41SPEAKER- Interesting.

46:43SPEAKER- Brad, you wrote cases are just so much better now.

46:46SPEAKER- Yeah, you know.

46:48SPEAKER- I think you bought a nice case too.

46:50SPEAKER- Well, I did, but all of them are nicer.

46:53SPEAKERI saw some other cases in their office.

46:55SPEAKERI worked with a torrent a little bit,

46:57SPEAKERwhich is another fractal.

47:00SPEAKERThe days of just rough industrial metal are kind of over.

47:05SPEAKERYou're probably not gonna cut your hands up that much.

47:08SPEAKERGenerally, the routing options are pretty intelligent.

47:11SPEAKER- That's true.

47:13SPEAKER- A big part of me writing that down

47:14SPEAKERwas because this is my first case

47:16SPEAKERwith screwless side panels.

47:18SPEAKER- Oh yeah, so I'm up and down on those honestly.

47:21SPEAKERMy fractal has those too.

47:23SPEAKERWhat's not to like?

47:24SPEAKER- On my case, which is a little smaller,

47:27SPEAKERthe back panel, I have to actually do a really good job

47:30SPEAKERon the wiring or else the backside pops off.

47:32SPEAKER- Oh no.

47:33SPEAKER- Well, I mean, it's not an issue

47:34SPEAKER'cause I did a nice job with the wiring.

47:36SPEAKER- Okay, I see what you're saying.

47:37SPEAKER- But it is like a consideration that I have to not,

47:41SPEAKERlike I can't just do a quick tidy.

47:44SPEAKERI can't chuck something in there

47:46SPEAKERand then just slam the case on

47:48SPEAKERand bust those screws on to hold it in place.

47:50SPEAKERI have to actually do it right,

47:51SPEAKERwhich is both a pro and a con, I think.

47:53SPEAKER- What if you had an obscenely unnecessarily large case?

47:57SPEAKER- I mean, look, your case had a three inch,

48:00SPEAKERlike a two inch separation between the door

48:02SPEAKERand the back of the motherboard tray.

48:04SPEAKERNever seen anything like it before.

48:06SPEAKER- Cable management will not be an issue in there.

48:08SPEAKER- Well, also you don't have a window,

48:10SPEAKERso it doesn't matter.

48:11SPEAKER- I literally had that thought

48:12SPEAKERas I was wiring all these system fans up.

48:14SPEAKERI was using the, the Noctua case fans I've got

48:17SPEAKERhave like shockingly short cables on them.

48:20SPEAKER- Yeah. - And I assume that's because,

48:21SPEAKERyou know, if you mount them near a header,

48:23SPEAKERyou don't want a ton of extra slack.

48:24SPEAKERSo they throw a big extension cable in with each one.

48:27SPEAKERI had to use all of those extension cables

48:29SPEAKERbecause the case is so big.

48:31SPEAKERBut as I was, as I was wiring all those things up,

48:33SPEAKERI had the thought of like, man,

48:34SPEAKERI sure am glad I don't have a window on this thing

48:36SPEAKERbecause I can just do this wiring

48:38SPEAKERin as ugly a fashion as I want

48:40SPEAKERand nobody will ever see it.

48:41SPEAKER- Well, you, so also you could have daisy chained

48:43SPEAKERthose Noctua's on the front.

48:45SPEAKERSo you could have used the splitters

48:46SPEAKERto do that on just one long extension across.

48:49SPEAKER- True, maybe I could, I actually could still do that.

48:52SPEAKER- Yeah, I, I like the, look,

48:57SPEAKERthe wire, the case window keeps me honest.

49:00SPEAKERThat's the way I like to think of it.

49:01SPEAKER- I get it. - So, so this way I don't,

49:03SPEAKERlike if it were up to me,

49:04SPEAKERI would have a couple of dangling SATA SSDs

49:06SPEAKERjust hanging up over the CPU there.

49:08SPEAKER- Yeah.

49:09SPEAKER- It'd be really key in there, so.

49:10SPEAKER- Well, also, I mean, if you have,

49:12SPEAKERif you have the megalomaniacal urge

49:14SPEAKERto plaster your own face on your water block,

49:17SPEAKERthen I can see why.

49:20SPEAKERYou might need some visibility in your case.

49:22SPEAKER- I don't know what you're talking about.

49:23SPEAKERIt says it's 46 degrees in there right now.

49:26SPEAKER- Is it a photo or is it your little,

49:27SPEAKERlike, illustration of you?

49:28SPEAKER- It's the illustration that my friend Mike Mitchell made.

49:31SPEAKER- That's more like a logo, really, that's fine.

49:33SPEAKER- Yeah, it's, it's tasteful.

49:35SPEAKERI like, I like to think at least.

49:37SPEAKER- Yeah, oh, those, those,

49:38SPEAKERthose LCD water block screens are cool for sure.

49:41SPEAKER- I, I have to say, I have to send my LCD water block back

49:47SPEAKERbecause there's a little bit of a,

49:50SPEAKERthat has a firmware problem.

49:52SPEAKER- Yes, we do.

49:53SPEAKER- And the inability to fix the firmware problem

49:55SPEAKERwithout pulling the whole radiator and water block

49:57SPEAKERis a little bit of an annoyance.

49:59SPEAKER- Well, we talked about that during the stream a little bit,

50:01SPEAKERbut that's, that is the kind of theoretical reason

50:04SPEAKERI didn't go water in the first place.

50:06SPEAKERLike, air is pretty dead simple.

50:08SPEAKERAnd I just, you know, it's just, it's just something,

50:12SPEAKERit's one less complications you have, you know,

50:14SPEAKERone less point of failure for me.

50:15SPEAKER- Not that, not that like, you know, fans can't fail,

50:18SPEAKERbut you know, this, this, this Noctua tower cooler

50:22SPEAKERdoes not have firmware, you know.

50:24SPEAKER- If it does fail, you just have to pull the, you know,

50:28SPEAKERpull the cooler off, which is big,

50:29SPEAKERand like you're gonna need a jack or something

50:32SPEAKERto get it out of there, but.

50:33SPEAKER- Yeah, probably just replace a fan, right?

50:35SPEAKER- Probably just replace a fan.

50:36SPEAKER- I know, I know the water has gotten very good these days.

50:38SPEAKERLike I'm not, I have nothing against it.

50:40SPEAKERIt's just, you know, one less thing

50:42SPEAKERto not worry about for me.

50:44SPEAKER- I mean, there's an option to keep it

50:46SPEAKERjust a tiny bit cooler, which I like.

50:48SPEAKERAnyway, the, let's see, other stuff.

50:53SPEAKERThe fancy, oh, Windows Update.

50:58SPEAKERWindows Update during install.

51:00SPEAKERLike, I think my recommendation on Windows 11 installs

51:04SPEAKERespecially is to do an offline install

51:07SPEAKERso that you don't have the risk of installing

51:11SPEAKERyour desktop documents and documents folders

51:15SPEAKERto OneDrive by accident, which is what I did

51:17SPEAKERon this install, and it's probably gonna,

51:19SPEAKERagain, it's such a pain in the ass to fix post-install

51:22SPEAKERthat I might end up having to just

51:24SPEAKERreinstall Windows to fix it.

51:25SPEAKER- Yikes.

51:27SPEAKER- It also pulls drivers from Windows Update,

51:30SPEAKERso if you don't wanna have the three-year-old

51:32SPEAKERWindows Update drivers for some stuff on your machine,

51:35SPEAKERyou might wanna hang back on that front as well.

51:38SPEAKER- Yeah, I might actually do a reinstall as well

51:40SPEAKERand do it offline so I don't pull because I, sure enough,

51:43SPEAKERI did in fact pull three-year-old drivers

51:45SPEAKERfor almost everything in this machine.

51:48SPEAKER- Yeah.

51:49SPEAKER- I've been aware of Windows Update pulling

51:51SPEAKERlike Nvidia drivers for a while.

51:52SPEAKERLike, they've been doing that for ages, I guess, right?

51:54SPEAKERWhere you'll be like, hey, I didn't go

51:56SPEAKERmanually download Nvidia drivers,

51:58SPEAKERand yet here is the Nvidia control panel.

52:00SPEAKER- Yeah.

52:01SPEAKER- But they're doing that for kind of everything now,

52:02SPEAKERwhich is a little strange for me.

52:03SPEAKERLike, I literally first log in on this new install.

52:08SPEAKERI got a pop-up from the Gigabyte control center

52:10SPEAKERlike the second I logged in, and I was like,

52:12SPEAKERwait, I definitely did not go install that.

52:14SPEAKERWhat in the world?

52:15SPEAKERSure enough.

52:16SPEAKER- Well, they've done it for everything for like,

52:18SPEAKERyou've gotten like CPU, chipset drivers,

52:22SPEAKERstuff like that for a long time.

52:24SPEAKER- Yeah, for me, it's stuff like that control center.

52:27SPEAKERThat's kind of an extra layer of like,

52:29SPEAKERthe device drivers I get,

52:31SPEAKERbut the sort of intermediate layer management stuff.

52:34SPEAKERLike, I would prefer to opt into that

52:35SPEAKERthan have it install everything

52:37SPEAKERwithout asking.

52:38SPEAKER- Yeah, but I mean, I feel like the Nvidia control center

52:40SPEAKERis kind of a part of the driver at this point.

52:42SPEAKER- Nvidia is fine.

52:43SPEAKERThe Nvidia one is fine.

52:44SPEAKER- Yeah.

52:45SPEAKER- And you're gonna replace that anyway.

52:45SPEAKERIt's more like, hey, I don't need the motherboards,

52:48SPEAKERlike, automatic, all-in-one driver updater thing.

52:51SPEAKERI can just go get drivers myself.

52:53SPEAKER- Yeah, I generally would rather handle

52:55SPEAKERthe motherboard drivers myself,

52:57SPEAKER'cause this is where I land as well.

52:59SPEAKER- Yes.

53:01SPEAKER- So, this is also your first fancy board, I think, right?

53:05SPEAKER- Yes, it's the first high-end board

53:07SPEAKERI guess I have ever owned.

53:08SPEAKERI've always just been a, look,

53:10SPEAKERI came up in the days of motherboards being 100 to $150.

53:14SPEAKER- You're a meat and potatoes guy, Brad.

53:15SPEAKERDon't apologize.

53:16SPEAKER- It was hard to get away from that for a long time.

53:19SPEAKERLike, I've just always bought them,

53:20SPEAKERnot like the super cheapest,

53:22SPEAKERbut the kind of, you know,

53:23SPEAKERthere is a workhorse intermediate range of motherboard.

53:27SPEAKER- Yeah.

53:29SPEAKER- I mean, it's been a while for me,

53:30SPEAKERbut like I would say 150, 200 bucks the last time I built

53:34SPEAKERis generally the type of one that I would go for.

53:37SPEAKER- This is the first, like,

53:38SPEAKERthis is not the highest end gigabyte by any means,

53:41SPEAKERbut it's definitely getting up there.

53:43SPEAKER- It's a fancy board.

53:45SPEAKER- Yeah, it's the X670E Aorus Master.

53:48SPEAKER- So, as it's, yeah.

53:51SPEAKER- The difference is profound.

53:53SPEAKER- As somebody who's lived in both of those worlds

53:54SPEAKERoff and on over the years,

53:56SPEAKERboth the high-end and the, I don't know,

53:59SPEAKERI want to call it like enthusiast mid range, I guess,

54:01SPEAKERis probably where I would put that.

54:02SPEAKERIt's not like the bare bones.

54:06SPEAKER- The high-end boards actually do feel like

54:08SPEAKERthey have things that are worth paying for now.

54:11SPEAKER- Yeah.

54:12SPEAKER- In terms of like the number of connector,

54:14SPEAKERof fan headers you get,

54:16SPEAKERthe stuff like the power button wired on the board

54:18SPEAKERso you don't have to short out a header with a screwdriver.

54:21SPEAKER- Yeah, well, there's actually,

54:22SPEAKERthere's something kind of fun

54:23SPEAKERabout shorting the pins to turn it on, I think.

54:25SPEAKER- Fair.

54:27SPEAKERThe debug screen, honestly,

54:29SPEAKERis the one that I miss the most

54:31SPEAKERwhen I don't have a nice board.

54:32SPEAKER- Yeah, so like, on the one hand,

54:35SPEAKERI'm really enjoying a lot of the amenities

54:36SPEAKERon this nicer board.

54:37SPEAKEROn the other hand,

54:38SPEAKERand I think I have some of like

54:39SPEAKERkind of tech YouTube channels

54:40SPEAKERI have seen complaining about the same thing,

54:42SPEAKERlike some of this stuff should be more universal than it is.

54:45SPEAKER- Yeah, like--

54:46SPEAKER- Stuff that is just very directly diagnostic in nature,

54:48SPEAKERthings that help you solve problems

54:50SPEAKERshould not be limited to boards that are four or $500.

54:54SPEAKER- I mean, I feel like the debug code readout

54:57SPEAKERis one of those things for sure, right?

54:59SPEAKER- Yes, for sure.

55:00SPEAKER- Like having a number,

55:00SPEAKERit's the debug code readout on most boards,

55:02SPEAKERif you don't know,

55:03SPEAKERit has like two LCD,

55:07SPEAKERit's like a two-digit LCD display

55:09SPEAKERthat gives you like an error code

55:11SPEAKERyou can then go Google

55:12SPEAKERand find out where exactly your machine's hanging,

55:15SPEAKERif it's hanging on post or something like that.

55:17SPEAKER- Yeah.

55:20SPEAKER- There's some stuff that I'm kind of up and down on,

55:21SPEAKERlike the metal,

55:23SPEAKERdo you have the metal line PCI Express connectors?

55:28SPEAKER- I think the top one is.

55:29SPEAKER- Yeah, so they're like reinforced

55:31SPEAKERso that the board doesn't bend

55:32SPEAKERwhen you pull out your RAM

55:34SPEAKERor your PCI Express cards, stuff like that.

55:37SPEAKERI quite like that.

55:38SPEAKERThat to me feels like it's okay to be a high-end thing

55:40SPEAKER'cause like most machines,

55:43SPEAKERyou don't need to design it

55:44SPEAKERto pull hardware in and out constantly.

55:46SPEAKER- No, I will say though,

55:47SPEAKERactually like the thing,

55:49SPEAKEReven more than like the debug diagnostics,

55:52SPEAKERthe power button, the X, Y, and Z feature,

55:54SPEAKERthe thing that has stood out to me the most about this board

55:57SPEAKERis just how much like higher quality

55:59SPEAKERand easier to work with all the basic connectors are.

56:02SPEAKER- Yep.

56:03SPEAKER- Like the 24-pin ATX power,

56:05SPEAKERit's like butter sticking the connector in there

56:08SPEAKERand pulling it out again.

56:08SPEAKERIt's like I've had boards where it is so good.

56:11SPEAKERYou feel like you're gonna like break the board.

56:13SPEAKER- I literally had a board

56:14SPEAKERthat you could never get it to snap in place.

56:16SPEAKER- Right.

56:17SPEAKER- Never, it's just held in with friction.

56:18SPEAKER- Or like once you get it in there,

56:20SPEAKERyou like a bloody your fingers

56:21SPEAKERtrying to get it back out again,

56:22SPEAKERlike all of the power connectors, the like USB,

56:26SPEAKERlike every port on this thing

56:28SPEAKERjust has a quality feel to it

56:30SPEAKERthat the boards at the next tier down do not.

56:33SPEAKERAnd I mean, I get it, it's a premium product and all,

56:37SPEAKERbut like, I feel like I, frankly,

56:40SPEAKERlike working with this board,

56:41SPEAKERI have kind of felt a couple of times

56:43SPEAKERlike I stumbled into the executive washroom a little bit.

56:47SPEAKERIt's just like, oh, huh, okay.

56:49SPEAKERThis is like high society.

56:51SPEAKER- How much do you tip your fan header?

56:53SPEAKER- It's like, right, it's like, oh man,

56:56SPEAKERyou have caviar or just, wow.

56:58SPEAKER- The other thing I like is that they generally,

57:01SPEAKERI mean, I don't use the onboard audio,

57:03SPEAKERso it doesn't really apply,

57:04SPEAKERbut generally the onboard audio is a lot less noisy

57:06SPEAKERon an expensive motherboard than it is on a cheap one,

57:08SPEAKERjust because they have more layers on the board.

57:11SPEAKERSo there's more room to route those wires

57:12SPEAKERaway from noisy stuff.

57:15SPEAKER- Apparently with the advent of DER,

57:17SPEAKERfive higher numbers of layers and boards

57:21SPEAKERis kind of more mandatory than it used to be.

57:22SPEAKER- I think that is the case, yeah.

57:25SPEAKERI mean, just in general, the boards are more complicated

57:27SPEAKERnow than they were five, 10 years ago.

57:30SPEAKERYou also get a lot better control

57:31SPEAKERover kind of the more esoteric settings.

57:33SPEAKERSo if you have memory instability in a cheap board,

57:36SPEAKERyour kind of choice is to clock it down.

57:39SPEAKERIf you have memory instability in an expensive board,

57:41SPEAKERyou can literally just go in and adjust every single voltage

57:44SPEAKERfor all the different rails that the memory uses.

57:46SPEAKERYou can cause yourself real problems

57:49SPEAKERif you don't know what you're doing,

57:50SPEAKERbut if you do know what you're doing,

57:51SPEAKERthen you have the option to not have to turn that memory down

57:56SPEAKERwhich is nice, and then stuff like dual BIOSes

58:01SPEAKERand stuff like that that make it easier to recover

58:03SPEAKERif you mess something up, which is also convenient.

58:07SPEAKERBut yeah, I think that's, I don't know.

58:11SPEAKERYou're driving a Cadillac over there, Brad.

58:13SPEAKERYou feeling pretty good?

58:14SPEAKER- Yeah.

58:15SPEAKER- I think so.

58:15SPEAKERI mean, is a Cadillac a nice car still?

58:16SPEAKERI don't know.

58:17SPEAKER- I don't know.

58:18SPEAKERProbably.

58:20SPEAKER- It seems like maybe no, I don't know.

58:23SPEAKERWe were gonna do, let's do like two minutes

58:25SPEAKERon the stuff that I installed when I did my new PC

58:28SPEAKER'cause you're getting ready to do your new PC.

58:29SPEAKERAnd without a doubt, you need to spend some time

58:32SPEAKERwith fan control.

58:33SPEAKERIt's a piece of software.

58:34SPEAKERWe'll put the link in show notes,

58:35SPEAKERbut if you search for fan control GitHub,

58:37SPEAKERit takes you right to the project page for it.

58:40SPEAKERAnd it's basically a front end for libhardwaremon,

58:43SPEAKERwhich is a big hardware interface library,

58:45SPEAKERopen source hardware interface library

58:47SPEAKERthat has plugins for liquid control

58:49SPEAKERand all sorts of different things

58:50SPEAKERthat let you basically have a holistic view

58:53SPEAKERof your cooling in your PC,

58:56SPEAKERbut then also set rules on which fan curves apply when.

59:00SPEAKERSo a fan curve lets you say, okay, at this temperature,

59:04SPEAKERI want this fan to spin at this speed

59:05SPEAKERand adjust that as you go up.

59:07SPEAKERWhat fan control does that I'd never seen before

59:11SPEAKERis it lets you say, okay, I want you to monitor

59:13SPEAKERthe GPU temperature and the CPU temperature.

59:17SPEAKERAnd when the GPU temperature is higher,

59:18SPEAKERI want the fan to work on this curve.

59:20SPEAKERAnd when the CPU temperature is,

59:21SPEAKERI want it to work on this curve.

59:23SPEAKEROr you can do crazy stuff like take averages

59:25SPEAKERor subtract one curve from another

59:27SPEAKERand all sorts of weird and wacky stuff.

59:30SPEAKERYou can sync, you can bundle up different fans

59:34SPEAKERwith different into one kind of virtual fan.

59:40SPEAKERSo you can say, okay, I have individual dressing

59:42SPEAKERof all three fans on my radiator,

59:44SPEAKERbut I wanna actually, I only need to have two of those

59:47SPEAKERindependent of each other and stuff like that.

59:50SPEAKERIt is an incredibly powerful piece of software.

59:52SPEAKER- I just pulled up the GitHub repo

59:54SPEAKERand like when you say open source,

59:55SPEAKERI envision like manline utility or like,

59:59SPEAKERoh, maybe it's got some janky half-assed gooey or whatever,

1:00:01SPEAKERbut at least based on this one screenshot,

1:00:03SPEAKERthis is like a real ass thing.

1:00:04SPEAKERLike this looks-

1:00:05SPEAKER- Oh, it's fabulous.

1:00:06SPEAKER- This looks very nice and very comprehensive.

1:00:09SPEAKERI'm definitely gonna have to grab this.

1:00:10SPEAKER- It is a much better way to manage your fans than any,

1:00:15SPEAKERit's more powerful than any software I've ever used for this.

1:00:18SPEAKER- Yeah, like I've been using venerable old HW info

1:00:22SPEAKER64 hardware, which is fine.

1:00:24SPEAKER- Which is good.

1:00:25SPEAKERI mean, it's good for just the sensors only readout

1:00:27SPEAKERif you just kind of wanna see numbers for everything,

1:00:29SPEAKERbut it is a little busy and dense.

1:00:32SPEAKERLike this is like kind of a nice visual layout for like,

1:00:35SPEAKERhere's all the temperatures on your CPU and GPU

1:00:38SPEAKERand everything, here are what all the fans are doing,

1:00:40SPEAKERhere are the curves.

1:00:41SPEAKERLike it looks like it's presented in a nice gooey kind of way.

1:00:45SPEAKER- It is very powerful and very good.

1:00:50SPEAKERAnd it even gives you control over like hysteresis,

1:00:54SPEAKERI think is how you say it,

1:00:55SPEAKERbut like how much of the variability in the fan speeds,

1:01:01SPEAKERin the temperatures affects the fan speed.

1:01:03SPEAKERSo you don't get those like weird spikes

1:01:04SPEAKERwhere it spins up for like half a second

1:01:06SPEAKERand then spins back down.

1:01:08SPEAKERSo you can say, okay,

1:01:09SPEAKERI wanna only play this on the way up

1:01:11SPEAKERand not on the way down.

1:01:12SPEAKERYou can say, I want to not adjust fan speeds

1:01:15SPEAKERuntil the temperature is held for three seconds

1:01:17SPEAKERor five seconds or 10 seconds.

1:01:19SPEAKERIt is a really lovely piece of software.

1:01:22SPEAKERIt's an active development.

1:01:25SPEAKERYou can even now, the new version,

1:01:27SPEAKERI hadn't noticed this yet,

1:01:28SPEAKERbut they have time average custom sensors

1:01:32SPEAKERthat are a mixture of,

1:01:35SPEAKERthat takes a running average basically

1:01:37SPEAKERof the thing that you want.

1:01:41SPEAKERSo it will spin up to like,

1:01:44SPEAKERbasically that's you anticipate increasing temperatures

1:01:46SPEAKERbefore they happen.

1:01:47SPEAKERSo you can spin up the fans a little bit in advance

1:01:50SPEAKERand then it'll keep them from getting hot.

1:01:51SPEAKERIt's fricking rad.

1:01:53SPEAKERIt's really a cool piece of software.

1:01:55SPEAKER- I could definitely see with water

1:01:57SPEAKERwhere you have a pump and more behavior to play with.

1:01:59SPEAKERI can definitely see why that would be fun to configure

1:02:01SPEAKERand kind of script behavior.

1:02:03SPEAKER- Yeah, and the pump is like the pump,

1:02:05SPEAKERI don't actually adjust the pump temperature all that much

1:02:08SPEAKERor the pump speed all that much,

1:02:08SPEAKERbut I do adjust the radiator fans a lot.

1:02:12SPEAKERAnd it lets you do things like,

1:02:14SPEAKERfor example, on my Founders Edition GeForce,

1:02:16SPEAKERit has one fan that blows straight through

1:02:19SPEAKERand one fan that exhausts out the back.

1:02:21SPEAKERIt lets me adjust the exhaust on that back fan

1:02:24SPEAKERindependently of the interior inside fan.

1:02:26SPEAKERSo I can spin up the back fan.

1:02:28SPEAKER- That's crazy.

1:02:29SPEAKER- Yeah, right?

1:02:31SPEAKERYeah, it's nuts.

1:02:32SPEAKERIt's a really cool thing.

1:02:34SPEAKER- Yeah, that is neat.

1:02:36SPEAKER- Open RGB is really neat.

1:02:39SPEAKEROpen RGB is an open source controller

1:02:43SPEAKERfor basically all the lighting stuff in your computer.

1:02:46SPEAKERAnd it is independent of the built-in utilities.

1:02:49SPEAKERSo you don't have to install the motherboard one

1:02:52SPEAKERand the one for your video card

1:02:54SPEAKERand the one for your desktop keyboard and mouse

1:02:57SPEAKERand all the 50 different things

1:02:59SPEAKERthat you have on your computer.

1:03:00SPEAKERYou just install it and it uses an open source library

1:03:04SPEAKERto talk to all that stuff directly.

1:03:06SPEAKERAnd it just works.

1:03:08SPEAKERAnd they have nice presets for everything

1:03:10SPEAKERand download stuff, download presets other people have made.

1:03:13SPEAKERI know that doesn't apply to you,

1:03:14SPEAKERbut it's a really handy piece of software.

1:03:18SPEAKER- Yeah, that sounds cool.

1:03:19SPEAKERHey, PCs, they're back.

1:03:21SPEAKER- Yeah, and then the other thing I was gonna say is,

1:03:24SPEAKERI wanna hear, I think I talked about it a little bit before,

1:03:26SPEAKERbut I did a D drive with folders

1:03:29SPEAKERfor the different types of projects

1:03:30SPEAKERand then some folders for the projects,

1:03:33SPEAKERmy projects inside those.

1:03:35SPEAKERI think I'm gonna flip flop that

1:03:36SPEAKERand have all of my Stray Bomb Bay stuff

1:03:38SPEAKERand all my Twitch stuff and all of my podcast stuff

1:03:41SPEAKERand all of my laser cutting stuff as the top levels

1:03:44SPEAKERand then have the utility.

1:03:47SPEAKER'Cause I initially thought it would be nice to just say,

1:03:49SPEAKERhey, have my video editor always save in this folder.

1:03:54SPEAKERBut it turns out I always have to just move it anyway

1:03:56SPEAKER'cause I'm moving into the project folders, so.

1:03:58SPEAKER- Anyway, then you have to sort projects

1:04:00SPEAKERfrom five different sources, right?

1:04:01SPEAKER- Yeah, it's complicated.

1:04:05SPEAKERBut yeah, we'll talk about that in an upcoming episode

1:04:07SPEAKERonce you get everything up and running

1:04:09SPEAKERand are happy with your setup.

1:04:12SPEAKER- Yes, I wanna play around with the multi-core behavior

1:04:14SPEAKERon this thing and sign in games to the correct CCD

1:04:18SPEAKERon this horizon and all that stuff.

1:04:19SPEAKER- Yep.

1:04:20SPEAKER- Process assignment and so forth.

1:04:22SPEAKER- I wanna hear what you think about fan control.

1:04:25SPEAKER- So that'll do it for us this week, I guess.

1:04:27SPEAKERAs always, you can find out more about the podcast.

1:04:31SPEAKERAs always, the Tech Bot is a 100% listener supported podcast.

1:04:35SPEAKERThat's what I usually say.

1:04:36SPEAKER- That's right.

1:04:37SPEAKERIf you would like to join the ranks

1:04:38SPEAKERof our wonderful patrons,

1:04:41SPEAKERyou can go to patreon.com/techbot.

1:04:43SPEAKERAnd for five bucks a month,

1:04:45SPEAKERyou get access to the monthly patron exclusive podcast.

1:04:49SPEAKERYou get access to the fabulous Tech Bot Discord.

1:04:52SPEAKERYou get to hang out with some really smart,

1:04:55SPEAKERwonderful people on the internets,

1:04:58SPEAKERwhich is my favorite part of the whole thing.

1:05:00SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:05:01SPEAKER- And yeah, that's pretty much it.

1:05:04SPEAKERSo you can go to, again, it's patreon.com/tech.

1:05:09SPEAKERIt's been so long since we've done this,

1:05:10SPEAKERI forget what I say, it's been two weeks.

1:05:12SPEAKER- Like your podcast muscle starts to atrophy.

1:05:14SPEAKER- I know.

1:05:16SPEAKERAgain, it's patreon.com/techbot.

1:05:17SPEAKERAnd as always, we like to thank our executive producer

1:05:20SPEAKERto your patrons every month, including Nick Johnston,

1:05:23SPEAKERPaddle Creek Games Makers of Fractured Veil,

1:05:25SPEAKERAndrew Slosky, Brad's Midsize Hoodoo Voodoo Switcheroo,

1:05:30SPEAKEROcto Thorp Bunny Crimes, Just Wedge, Joel Krauska,

1:05:34SPEAKERTwinkle Twinkie, David Allen, and James Kamik.

1:05:36SPEAKERThank you all so, so much.

1:05:37SPEAKERWe appreciate you.

1:05:39SPEAKERAnd I guess that'll do it for us this month.

1:05:41SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:05:42SPEAKER- A week.

1:05:43SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:05:44SPEAKER- This is a weekly show.

1:05:45SPEAKERIf you didn't listen to it last week,

1:05:46SPEAKERmake sure you listen to that Raspberry Pi episode

1:05:47SPEAKERof the FOSBOD.

1:05:48SPEAKER- Yes.

1:05:49SPEAKER- It's exceptional.

1:05:50SPEAKER- We were very fortunate to get to talk to Eben Upton.

1:05:53SPEAKER- Yeah.

1:05:53SPEAKER- Who is as central to Raspberry Pi as it gets.

1:05:56SPEAKER- Yeah, and an all around genuinely delightful

1:05:59SPEAKERguided chat with, so.

1:06:00SPEAKER- Fascinating conversation.

1:06:02SPEAKER- Yeah, and you can find that at FOSBOD.content.town.

1:06:05SPEAKERWe will see you all next week.

1:06:06SPEAKERIf you have questions about Brad's new computer,

1:06:08SPEAKERsend them in the Question Seeking Answers channel

1:06:10SPEAKERof the Discord.

1:06:11SPEAKEROr you can post them to the email address

1:06:15SPEAKERat techbod@content.town.

1:06:17SPEAKERAnd make sure you check out that PC World build video

1:06:20SPEAKERif you wanna hang out with us for a few hours.

1:06:21SPEAKERWe'll build Brad's new computer.

1:06:23SPEAKER- Yeah, that was a good time.

1:06:24SPEAKER- We did a fake cold open and everything was

1:06:25SPEAKERlike a real tech bot episode almost.

1:06:27SPEAKER- We tried.

1:06:28SPEAKER- Yeah, we tried.

1:06:29SPEAKERIt's weird to do a cold open

1:06:30SPEAKERwhen it's in the same room with you, Brad.

1:06:31SPEAKERI don't know how to use it anymore.

1:06:33SPEAKERWe'll see you all next week.

1:06:34SPEAKERThanks for listening, everybody.

1:06:35SPEAKERBye.

1:06:36SPEAKER(upbeat music)