Beginners Guide to understanding Video Cards and Settings

[Music] what's up everyone welcome to the 31 days of tech miss with js2 cents i'm going to do a video today that's a little more educational um yeah right i know i know okay just i was privy to a twitter conversation that took place recently that made me realize with the amount of people that are buying graphics cards or trying to buy graphics cards or maybe finally getting into graphics cards because of the popularity of computers today the way this particular conversation went down made me realize i need to do a refresher course on the basics of graphics cards because there was some real bad misinformation regarding what to expect whether or not it's power limited whether or not you need a bigger power supply so figure today we'll do that corsair's 4000d af delivers optimized front panel airflow and maximum cooling for your pc and with its built-in rapid route cable management keeps your system looking tidy while also staying extremely cool the equip corsair 120 air guide fans provide directed air flow allowing you to fine tune the components you want to keep cool to see the full list of features and configurations for the corsair 4000d and 4000d af click the link in the description below so for today's video i really just grabbed a graphics card at random which happens to be the rog strix 3070. yes i know us youtubers are spoiled why do we get these cards we don't deserve them i guess you don't deserve this information either but whatever um so let's talk about a few things i'm going to talk about some hardware specs and what they mean then we'll load it up [Music] it's not like an old guy trying to get it for me getting it from a cat i'm not old don't say jay is an old guy all right so let's talk about some hardware specs um this is going to apply to pretty much all graphics cards the only thing that's going to be able to be a little bit different is some of the readout and understanding the way the card behaves between nvidia and amd amd's driver also includes something very similar to like what you would see with afterburner nvidia's newer geforce experience also includes that however i don't use geforce experience i don't like it therefore i don't use it so but amd's driver no matter what is going to include it man that's such a chunky boy it's like this generation of graphics card was just like go big or go home so the main three specs that you're gonna care about when it comes to the graphics card is the amount of vram so that's either gonna be the eight gigabytes the 11 gigabytes or amd 16 gigabytes or whatever there's another subset of that which is the generation of memory that it is the only thing running gddr6x is the 3080 and the 3090. okay so g6x or this gddr6 or like sixth generation basically of ddr is uh essentially what most these graphics cards have the 30 70 also being the same the only difference between the x and the non-x realistically is going to be the amount of memory bandwidth and the speed of it for the most part people just getting into this don't need to really concern themselves with well is this one of gddr6 is this one 6x it really doesn't matter because the only two graphics cards like i said that are running 6x right now 30 80 30 90. it's just a faster amount of ram the other thing is going to be the amount of cuda cores or stream processors or tmus there's a lot of different things that you'll see them called for the most part too people really don't care about that especially with the fact that the 30 series cards now are almost running like a hyper threading kind of a deal on the course so even then the core count on those cards kind of has an asterisk next to it but at the end of the day those specs for the for the person buying a card it really doesn't matter the only other physical spec that you're probably gonna care about is the size of the graphics card so hopefully you've done your due diligence and making sure that the graphics card you buy or attempt to buy isn't too big for your case so before we fire it up let's go and talk about one more thing to physically keep in mind when it comes to your graphics card i see a lot of people still confused about whether or not you need a pcie gen 4 motherboard to use a pcie gen 4 graphics card 30 series graphics cards as well as the new 6000 series graphics cards from amd are both listed as pcie gen 4. all that means is that it will allow the pcie lanes to run at their fastest speed however graphics cards these days are not fast enough to max out that amount of bandwidth so you're not going to see a difference of running it on a gen 3 or a gen 4 but the confusion i see from people is whether or not you have to pair them gen 4 to gen 4 the device will communicate with the motherboard and everything is fine so it's one of those things you don't need to confuse yourself or get concerned about whether or not you have to match a graphics card brand with a bra you know the graphics card manufacturer that's the same like amd to amd it really isn't going to matter that's changing a little bit though this time around because of stuff like smart access memory where if you pair an amd graphics card with the latest 500 series chipset with amd you get smart access memory where the cpu gets a little bit of a speed bump because it can access the gpu memory we haven't done our video yet about what the improvement is of that i can tell you it's low single digit improvements so i wouldn't even look at that as being a factor as to why you should buy a certain graphics card buy the fastest graphics card you can afford for your budget that the graphics card can provide not the ecosystem that's something that we'll mature and we'll talk about that more in the future especially since nvidia has their version coming out as well let's go and fire it up and show you guys uh what software to use to monitor your graphics card um what how to understand the things that you're seeing and then hopefully get people to realize uh it's a lot simpler than a lot of people are making it all right so let's talk about the software now to kind of show all this in in practicality we've got three pieces of software i like to use that's free we've got tech power up gpu z this will tell you everything about your graphics card the bios version the boost clocks all that sort of stuff the driver date what driver is installed this is heaven i like to use heaven because it runs full speed in the background it will um load the graphics card enough to get an idea of what's going on but the problem is graphics cards are getting really fast now versus when this benchmark came out and so it's hard to get 100 load out of this but you can use it with any graphics card most people running average mid-range graphics cards will get fully loaded by this test and then msi afterburner just allows us to adjust some sliders here so we can see how they relate to the performance of the graphics card when the sensor tab of z will tell us exactly what's happening here let's kind of work our way from the top to the bottom quickly here um you can see our core clock right now it's at 1905 because the graphics card is set to performance mode so it will keep the core clocks up so here's our memory clock uh remember it's this number essentially times eight now um which is really weird gpu temperature fan speed so you can see the rpm and all of that uh gpu load this is going to show you the amount of load on the graphics card um other things that we want to point out today is board power draw this is the entire board that's everything that gets power from the graphics card the lighting the fans the memory the core itself any auxiliary things plugged into it some graphics cards now have another rgb header so that they can all tie in with the graphics card they have additional fan headers so you can have case fans plugged into it keep in mind anything you plug into your graphics card is going to rob power available to the gpu because it's all coming from the same source so it doesn't allow you a higher limit simply because you plug more things into it nope you're literally stealing power from the core and if you're trying to overclock and get max stability i don't recommend plugging things into the graphics card uh you can see right here the total board power though that's currently at 50 watts because we are ramped up on our clock speed you can see the chip power draw is responsible for you know more than two-thirds of that number so you can see the core is clearly what's using the most power on the card this particular card and this isn't going to be the case for all graphics cards but the asus card does report back pcie pin eight pin power draw so we can see how many watts and how many volts each eight pin power plug is drawing power consumption this is essentially just like the board power the total board power but it's represented in a percentage so when it comes to power here we'll just throw some numbers here it's gonna be different for every card manufacturers can raise and lower that number depending on the silicon quality depending on the binning of that gpu the power delivery they put on there the cooler they put on there so it's customizable by the manufacturer so let's say 220 watts total power draw is 100 then we would be using 18 of that 100 available to us so think of 100 as your rev limiter in your engine you hit that number that's a hard stop it's not going to go farther it'll hold there but it won't go farther that's the same reason why i just said i don't recommend plugging additional lights fans or other things to your gpu where available because that's all factored into that same 100 power limit then we can see here our gpu voltage this is uh what the voltage is currently at the gpu this would have come down if we weren't under an idle it says it's idle right now but we're not we've clearly brought the core clock up as you can see so jay you've told me what that is so what does all that mean let's go ahead and start with the reason a graphics card stops clocking higher so we're going to go ahead and put a load on using afterburner we've got 8x msaa or anti-aliasing we've got tessellation on extreme ultra quality we're trying to put as much load on our graphics card as possible so now we can see our clock automatically boosted up to 2025 but jay that's higher than the 1905 it shows over here absolutely that is gpu boost in effect on nvidia and amd is very similar they have another sort of a system that works basically says if our power limit is not maxed out and our temperature is not maxed out and voltage is also one of those those things um go higher but there is a hard stop there is a max to that otherwise it would literally go until it crashes which is kind of what some of the early early 30 series adopters dealt with with the early bios and stuff or early drivers where some cards were going farther than they could go not all gpus are created equal this 3070 may go higher than some but not as high as others that's silicon lottery you've heard that phrase before that basically says that core will go really high because it won the lottery or it won't overclock at all because it lost the lottery it's just the luck of the draw so we pushed all the way up to 2040 now without me touching anything because our temperature is only at 51c the core clock won't even start dropping rules real dramatically until we get close to that 83 number spoiler alert the strix cooler will never let it get a higher than about 60. and our power limit is also still stuck at 100 because we didn't touch anything so it auto boosted 105 megahertz or now 120 megahertz above this number because of gpu boost so i've seen some people ask me why why is my card doing why is my card overclocking is it going to void the warranty is it going to break well i would normally say no but we saw with the 30 series cards some were crashing but they fixed it through a driver to keep the gpu boost from being so aggressive but this is good this is you getting more for your money because it recognized it had more available to it and this is auto overclocking essentially so that's why it's important to point out when we do these reviews like we kind of keep an eye on what the core clocks do because we want to make sure that we're not giving an unfair advantage to any card by allowing it to boost higher that's also why we do a heat soak get the card nice and hot then do these things that way the cooler temperatures don't affect it just a running temperature then we run our tests a little bit of a behind the scenes there let's look at what the sensors are saying though but let's look at our gpu load our gpu load is at 97 i've seen some people go jay why doesn't my gpu ever go to 100 well realistically you're never gonna see it really hit a hundred and stay there it's always gonna stay a little bit below that i'm not sure what the reason is but that's just the way it is 98.99 is great 95 and up is pretty normal total board power is currently drawing 232 watts so that tells us that our board total power is probably somewhere around 220 to 230 watts it's constantly going to fluctuate i've seen people ask me why this number is moving around is something wrong no the scene is changing as the scene changes so does the load so does the math so does the watts being drawn this number is usually directly related to the gpu though so as you see the gpu come up above 97 we might see that number come up let's see if it does it so it hit 95 and it went down to 205 97 back up to 220. see in between the scene how it drops because there was no load so that number is usually gonna be directly related to this number right here let's talk about power draw on our plugs though about 100 watts is coming from eight pin one about 90 watts is coming from eight pin two that's more than 150 watts that is the spec for one of the pcie power plugs that is why we don't recommend using daisy chains have a dedicated cable where possible it will probably still work in fact i think we need to revisit this topic because i've done it in the past with older cards that didn't draw as much power as newer cards are drawing it ran didn't overclock as far for obvious reasons but it's something worth talking about but you can see you can easily pull more than the spec power consumption here so under load you can see we're pulling about 82 of that 100 available to us now this is telling us right here perf cap reason there was a discussion that i was tagged in on twitter that someone was using gpuz and they saw the perfcap reason say pwr which stands for power and their understanding of that was i think i need a new power supply it says i'm power limited i thought a 950 watt power supply would be enough and that's literally the conversation that triggered this video because i went okay with the amount of people buying new graphics cards i want them to understand these things when they see them and not freak out and start unnecessarily spending money on parts that will have zero effect on what it is that they're seeing here pwr or power limit simply states that the power supply built into the graphics card aka the voltage delivery system has been essentially maxed out so what we're seeing here right now is the reason that we're limited so v stands for core or voltage rel sends reliability over here now for a second we saw voltage operation so that's telling us two things we have reached our max reliable voltage and we've also reached our max available voltage to the core voltage is our limit power limit simply states that that total board power that i explained fans lights core memory things plugged into it has been reached the maximum that's been reached now you can adjust that here in afterburner that's one of the reasons why i like afterburner is this is the 100 right here so if we go okay let's allow more power to it let's allow 25 more power that's what the 125 is we hit apply yes nothing happened literally nothing happened because the reason we're limited is not power it's voltage reliability that means we have reached the max amount of voltage the core is allowed to draw remember that thing i said earlier components will draw power not receive power they're not like being pushed powered by the by the power supply now i mean there are devices you can push power to things uh we don't recommend them around here anyway if we were power limited we would see pwr so let's go ahead and artificially limit our power here so power limit on msi afterburner we can drag this down we're currently at about 80 right so let's go below that number and see what happens let's go to 70 watch the core watch right here see we just lost core clock more importantly there's a new reason we're limited here power so that's what caused some people to be confused thinking the amount of power the graphics card needed from the power supply was limited thinking that the power supply wasn't giving enough and that's not what what happened here the amount of power the graphics card is allowed to pull was exceeded or reached that's what is is actually happening when you see power as the limit there and because of it you can see we dropped our core clock about 100 megahertz our temperature came down too because power does equal heat but if we go ahead and push that down even farther let's just go 35 power is all it's allowed to draw look at that look how far it fell 100 watts total board power only 66 watts is going to the gpu so the only way i could reduce the amount of power that it was pulling was to reduce the voltage and by reducing the voltage because there's a table that says at these volts you're available to run this much frequency it all comes down as a system reducing the total board power so if we just put this back to default by hitting a little refresh button look at that everything went back up 2010 megahertz our temperature will start climbing with it and we're back to voltage reliability and don't think of voltage reliability as saying uh oh your voltage is unreliable no it's just saying it is within the reliable range of which it's allowed to pull voltage and it's not going farther otherwise it would become unreliable now let's talk about afterburner because you can see we changed what happens here with afterburner this is this is our our knobs and our dials this is just sensor reading i've had some questions people going is it safe to overclock with afterburner will i break my gpu the first thing i'll tell you is you cannot physically damage your gpu by moving any of these sliders what damages gpus is voltage and you have no control over that on this card uh pretty much all cards on the market with the exception of something like the kingpin card or any ln2 specifically designed graphics card for like world clock you know world record attempts has locked voltages and even the kingpin card requires a new bios and a controller through the manufacturer to unlock those things you have to basically request it so you cannot really i'm going to go out and limit and say you can't break your graphics card by using msi afterburner because these limits are in place by the bios the bios determines how far you can go with this stuff not msi afterburner so if you're gonna do something like overclocking i would always recommend maximizing the power limit for the reasons we already showed and temp limit because temperature is a reason why it can also reduce clocks we talked about the trifecta right power voltage and temperature as gpu boost this will allow us to now start playing with our clocks and i already know where this card will essentially go let's go two five 125 on the core you can see it's now 21.45 that is a really good overclock out of the box for 37. i'm telling you right now the strix card asus did not pay me to use this card didn't even ask me but you know what if you want to pay me for saying that go ahead i endorse this card if you can get your hands on it because holy cow is it cool 56c 2145 out of the box with no voltage control and over 2000 on its own as you saw okay jay that's that's fine and all but i'm still worried about breaking something let's go ahead and show you what happens if you push it too far this button right here is the only one that could cause you some problems startup that basically says if that's clicked when windows boots apply this overclock whether msi afterburner is open or not it basically essentially writes it to the card if you will it's not really ready to the card but it will automatically apply the overclock when windows has started if you push the overclock too far and allow me to show you right now what happens plus 1 000 that's going to be a pretty hardcore crash right watch this uh oh and that's where people freak out they go what just happened so right now because i did not have that check the system fully restarted that is a hardcore crash okay it basically went the core freaked out so bad the only thing the motherboard board knew to do to try and fix this situation in the os was trigger restart so the os went this is irrecoverable let's just restart the system as you can see we're back we'll open up msi afterburner so and you can see our numbers are back to stock but let me show you what happens here if i just let's just move the power sliders and let's go 100 on the core enable startup what can happen here is if i had that restart button selected which says apply that number at restart you'd get the bios screen like you see right here and you'd get to the desktop and as soon as the desktop loads you get the same reaction you just got shut off restart and or just black screen or crash and nothing happens and that's where people think they broke their graphics card now what happened is they they broke the setting and so what they have to do then is load their system into safe mode uninstall afterburner go back to the normal mode and you'll fix it it's kind of annoying but it's the only way to fix it so as you can see now if i come back to afterburner you can see those are still applied right plus 100 and there's our core even though i have no profile saved and afterburner did not start on its own because i don't have it disabled essentially it applied these numbers at the start so there you go hopefully i didn't confuse you too much but hopefully i also shed some light on how some of this stuff works as a system because that's what you have to understand is how all of this works as a system at the end of the day it's really hard to break a graphics card if i haven't broken my kingpin card now with as much water as i have soaked it with with condensation and freezing the pcia slot solid with ice you're not going to break your graphics card with afterburner but it's important to understand the settings and what they do if you guys enjoyed this kind of video and you have a topic you think we should cover in this same beginner's guide too let me know what you think we should cover down in the comments below don't forget to get your very own js2 sense merch this stuff is seasonal it is going to be going away and you won't be able to get this design again and we'll come up with new stuff in the future so if you like what you see hit the description below you guys will find a link to download it yeah download our merch you wouldn't download a shirt thanks for watching we'll see you in the next one

Channel: JayzTwoCents

Views: 1,125,284

Rating: 4.9537868 out of 5

Keywords: gpu guide, beginners guide, beginners guide to gpus, best gpu guide, how to tune a gpu, how to tune a video card, video card tuning, understanding video cards, understanding gpus, what settings mean, gpu settings, video card settings, how to set your video card, how to get the most out of your video card

Id: U90bCcPAtMo

Length: 21min 58sec (1318 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 06 2020

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