Best Programs for Your Gaming PC: How to Check Thermals, Bottlenecks, & Use Command Prompt

this is where with these types of tools you'll know enough to be dangerous today we're working on a subject we don't talk about a lot on this channel and that's software software is every bit as important or sometimes more important than the hardware that builds the computer and if you've been waiting around to get more components and you want something to do with your system in the meantime we have a list of software that we use professionally every day and some of our expert advice on how to use that software not just what it is but the best way to make use of things like hardware info 64 so you can figure out if your system's throttling or overheating or anything like that and we'll be talking about best ways to do some extremely basic testing to establish a baseline where your computer is today and where it will be in the future so that you know when it's time to repaste or make changes to the system at a lower level so this is going to be our expert advice on the best or the must-have software for your pc whether it's new or you're just trying to stretch out the life of an older one before that this video is brought to you by corsair and their 5000d airflow the corsair 5000d airflow is an atx tower with high material build quality and a focus on cooling performance with attention paid to small details the case has a unique look with deeply indented cooling pathways on the sides of the front and top panels and has carefully matched colors across the case available in both white and black learn more at the link in the description below so the reason we're tackling this subject today is actually speaking of tackling because i was speaking with hank baskett who's a former nfl player and was on the evga live stream with us previously when we did the uh rip j stream and did a big overclocking battle with the 3090s back when those were a lot newer and i was talking to him and and he said he liked the tutorial videos and sort of the introductory videos we've done in the past and made us realize we haven't really done one of those in a little while so that's what this is but we have some advanced information in here as well if you are an expert user already and our choices here uh just quickly we have hardware info 64 we're going to talk about how to best use hardware pro 64. a lot of people know about it it is a very good monitoring utility it's free and we use it for a lot of our overclocking streams for example to show you some of the numbers while we're overclocking but there are some specific tools within hardware info 64 that if you don't know how to use them you're missing out on a lot of the advantages of the software so we'll go through that also be talking about cpu-z it's an old one but very useful gpu-z as well another useful one for logging but there are some tricks and pitfalls to some of these utilities because with monitoring they're trying to read sensors on hardware but they're not always accurate when they read those sensors and the interpretation isn't always correct so it's important that you understand when the numbers being presented are not actually useful to you this has happened in the past for example with one of the amd radeon cards in the past more recently i think it was vega 56 and when that came out a lot of people thought that they were getting overclocks that were just completely impossible in every stretch of the way it was just literally impossible to get that kind of frequency on the gpu and it's not because the gpu is bad it's because the software had no idea what was happening and was reading numbers that were much higher than reality so we'll be talking about some of those pitfalls uh also going through some more standard stuff notepad plus plus 3d market superposition light shot command prompt have some suggestions for really useful commands in there we use that almost every day and prime95 and a couple of other ones was that the power supply yes another bonus of software for today's video that we didn't consider was that it doesn't blow up not in the same way so i i just had to run out of the shot here in the middle of shooting this video to go see what stone was working on because i heard a power supply explode in the other room that'll be in a different video we're testing some power supplies right now that are questionable at best and uh we got an explosion so i ran out of the shot to check that out okay let's get back to this coverage uh we we will stop interrupting the software side of things for the hardware side of things but make sure you subscribe and check back for the power supply explosions it was insane i looked at the slo-mo footage on his phone and uh absolutely insane how fiery that explosion was that was pretty cool okay hardware info 64. let's get back to this so our first recommendation is for hardware info 64. it's free and very easy to use in a sense for the basics but easy to misuse in other ways like when you're looking at numbers that might not be accurate to reality so try to make sure you have the most recent version at least whenever you build the system or get the parts in there that you're going to be testing and then you can probably keep using that version because using an older software for monitoring very regularly delivers inaccurate temperatures frequency all kinds of stuff and it's just not useful in that instance the biggest thing with hardware info 64 is it looks intimidating when you first scroll through it and see the seemingly endless list of sensors each grouping is sectioned into things like motherboard cpu and gpu sensors so that helps a little bit once you understand the hierarchy but sometimes you'll see two different reports for one item like you might see vcore a couple of times the motherboard versus the cpu hence understanding how to read it is helpful depending on your board a recommendation there would change some of the boards don't report it the same way some of the most useful areas to pay attention to on hardware info 64 would be these first of all if you're using an amd cpu t die or core temperature for an intel cpu very useful for getting a good look at whether your cooler is working as expected whether it's mounted well and you can check for thermal headroom if you're overclocking core temperatures are useful for plotting core to core deltas we'd recommend running a known unchanging workload for when you first build your system or when you first start logging it so that you can then reference back to this in the future to see if the cpu cooler is aging or if the paste is aging or if there's some kind of problem popping up it makes it easier to know when it's time to do maintenance instead of just throwing a dart at the wall the yes and no limit fields are also extremely useful in hardware info 64 and they're regularly overlooked if you're overclocking or you're playing around with power limits or you're trying to understand why your cpu is throttling these will trigger and make it very easy to identify which limits need to be disabled or changed in order to bypass them you'll typically see current limits getting triggered where you can go into bios vrm settings and disable those but sometimes it'll show you thermal limits too if you are bumping against the tj max values frequency is the next one this is useful for determining if the cpu is throttling if it's running as expected we publish a frequency graph in all of our cpu reviews so you can check that for how it's known to be functioning or supposed to be functioning in a stock condition a hardware info 64 more recently added effective frequency and the other one just called perf or per core frequency we typically would recommend using the perf or per core frequency because it's easier to work with load percentage is another one you can use this for trying to determine which component is the most limiting in your use cases you're always going to have something bottlenecking that's the nature of how computers work but this will help you identify what that is if you don't have any other tools to do so this is where with these types of tools you'll know enough to be dangerous but the dangerous part is mostly to yourself because things like voltage for example can misreport or can report in ways that are a little bit confusing so if you're idle on desktop and the voltage is showing something like 1.5 there's a few reasons that might be one of them it's not doing anything so there's no current to accompany the voltage and it's very unlikely that this is a high risk scenario this was something that came up a lot previously another reason though that you might see a high voltage or numbers high frequencies that are not actually active on the cores currently is because it might be the previous interval that was reported to software before the cpu entered into some form of low power state now this isn't as common today as it was a couple of years ago but it used to be the case that depending on the power state you have enabled in windows and the power states you have in bios you might see the last known reported interval or metric rather than the current one because it is now in a lower sleep type of state an active idle state so that's something to keep in mind if you see high numbers it doesn't necessarily mean it's bad you can cross check the the voltage for example with the temperature and or the current value it's not always accurate though and try to get a better reading for it generally speaking it's pretty uncommon that we have issues with accuracy and hardware info at this point but it is very common that we see people misinterpreting the data that they're given by hardware info so just keep that in mind next one is cpu-z this is a very useful one so cpuz is an ancient utility at this point it's by cpu id it is still very useful and we'd recommend it for a few key reasons one of them is it gives you a hard spec sheet for your cpu so it makes it easy to check the specs of your cpu to ensure that everything's working properly that it's detected properly if you had a bent pin this will help you know whether or not that pin has been successfully unbent you should also see the code name here which is useful as the system ages just for remembering what guides you might want to look up when trying to figure out how to overclock it later for example skylake rather than whatever number might be associated with that particular version of skylake cpu-z shows the stepping of the cpu as well so for times when differences in bin quality emerge you can tell which one yours is cbz also shows the instruction set that your cpu is capable of you might see avx sse3 and things of that nature avx 512 maybe and we also like cbz for the memory tab this will tell you if all the channels are detected and what speed your ram is running so remember that dram frequency will report at half of the number marketed on the kit itself if your ram stick says 3200 megahertz and you're running it at 32 in bios then it'll show us 1600 in cpuz this is normal the channel number is an indicator in the top right for checking if all channels are present this is a great utility we've used it a lot because it's common that bent pins or obstructed slots or paste thermal paste in a ram slot will end up presenting fewer channels than it should because they're not detected you can also use cpu z to save out a full report of the system hardware we actually do this on our test benches these days when we run benches we will save a report from z with everything that way if we ever need to refer back to the system in the future we have all the info we need we have the memory timings to some extent actually pretty good extent we have the channeling so however many sticks were in there and channels active we have the motherboard information uh some of the cpu hard specs all that stuff saved in a simple file so that we can check in the future we'd recommend saving one of these when you first build your system that way if in the future you think things are running a little bit weird you can reference back to that file save a new one today and then run them in a compare tool like win merge or something and look at if there have been any changes over time that might be the root cause of the issues you think you're experiencing today today being in the future in this instance the next one is gpuz is actually not related to cpu z it's not the same developer it's made by uh wizard from tech powerup and gpuz is extremely useful for everything to do with the gpu except it also has a logging and monitoring utilities we like gpu-z for a few reasons one it can rip v-bios easily for backups prior to flashing it gives the current v-bios version the gpu revision information is in there the memory type is in there if you're ever confused about that and it even has a simple built-in test utility things like memory type are sadly pretty useful because if you end up buying a gt 1030 say used and they the seller doesn't know what kind of memory is on it or claims they don't then when you socket it short of opening the thing up or looking up the part number you can get that information immediately in gpuz it's very simple and you'll know that you got ripped off and got the ddr4 version of it but it's useful for knowing that we use the sensors tab almost every day on gpz this can be useful for check and gpu frequency during workloads it's useful for fan rpm and fan ramp and for board power consumption a couple of tips on this one though memory used is another one of those you know enough to be dangerous categories it doesn't show how much memory is actually being used on the gpu but rather what has been allocated by the os and the software so it's not a good gauge for figuring out if you're near the limit separately the power consumption report is not always accurate it depends on the card generation more recent generations are close to reality here so those are useful but older stuff is all over the place with the power number that it shows frequency is also variable dependent on the application for instance you shouldn't use fur mark to check frequency and then compare it to a game because they'll be significantly different they're not comparable the drivers are built to intentionally drag down the frequency and fur mark and so they'll report differently and so if you look at two different applications for frequency you might get numbers that aren't the same and that's fine login is also available to make it easier to track gpu thermals or performance so same as the hardware and foot stuff we were saying it's useful to create a log early on in the life of the system so that in the future if you feel like i think my gp is a little hot you can then rerun the same test that you ran let's say two or three years ago when you built the system in the same way the same test pattern same fan rpm there has to be control and then determine okay maybe it is the thermal paste or i i was imagining things so it's very useful for that the next one will keep short its flashing utilities for v bios so video cards like a motherboard have their own bios on them they have firmware it's typically referred to as vbios and some video cards just like some motherboards have multiple v-biosis so they'll have a switch where you have typically two options on the higher end cards and before we get into this section a safety note never flash more than one bios at a time you should basically always leave one alone i personally leave one completely unmodified on any card that i might be messing with because you always want to have a fallback v bios that you know was shipped with the card from the manufacturer v bios flashing is a completely different topic we actually have a video on it for the 5600 xts when those launched and the same stuff applies here for the most part might have been 5600 but same information applies nvidia and amd just use slightly different tools but all the same safety tips apply so utilities are nv flash there's an ati flash or an amd flash tool and then there's also more power tool which is a different thing but still useful in this category before doing any bios flashing always save the existing bios on there so you can put it back on if you only have one v bios make sure you're not putting any other v bios on there that the card is not rated for unless you have enough experience to know how to revert the change if you end up with a black screen so people will talk about cards getting bricked from a bad v bios flash it's possible but typically what they're referring to is the card being unusable for putting out display but you can often still flash it back to a known good v bios if you have a good way to do it in the past we've done things as simple as putting a batch file on a desktop that once you boot to windows without a password or anything you can type in the beginning of the file name you know just as you would do to jump to a file name in a directory for example you just start typing on desktop and it'll jump to the file and hit enter and if you set it up right you can give yourself a fall back in the event that the flash goes poorly but for the most part just only usb bios is that the card is cleared to work with anyway envy flash is a useful one for this make sure you look into the safety of not breaking your card if you're going to use any of these tools they all have warnings envy flash is run from command prompt and it can be used to backup or apply vbios to a video card we often use to back them up if we're gonna be using a card for a long time running nvflash64.exe with a flag for save will save the rom and that should be kept somewhere safe a flag for six will flash a new rom though you may need to use a flag for protect off first amd flashing utilities are also available and we have a full guide on that more recently finally for amd users more power tool is pretty fun it can be a little dangerous if you don't know what you're doing but it's a fun enthusiast class overclocking utility made available for radeon gpus distributed by igor's lab more power tool will allow you to push more power through the gpu and fine tune it without needing the flash v bios but you do need to be careful to not damage the card by pushing too much power through it this mostly uses registry entries and hacks them to give you a boosted power limit next up our recommendation for some software is something replicable that you can use for gpu overclocking or cpu overclocking if you do any tuning or even just any frequency or thermal logging for future comparisons as the pace or the system age then you'll need easily replicable test scenarios using different games today than three years from now is not like for like so your data would be useless pick something that can be repeated easily for stability or any long-term thermals this can be a game as long as you keep everything as the same as possible but a benchmark application is easier 3dmark and superposition are both good for this we like the 3dmark suite a lot we've used it in a lot of competitive overclocking but access to the full suite does require a purchase it's on steam though for anyone more serious about overclocking it's a worthwhile purchase because it makes scoring and overclock validation easy it's easy to think you've improved the clocks while actually making things silently worse because modern gpus will just silently throw errors and drop frames and so consistent scoring applications can prevent falling into the trap of thinking you've improved something while accidentally causing a bunch of memory errors superposition by unigine has a free trial version this is another one we've used for just running a gpu hot and it's very useful for that application our next suggestion isn't really about hardware but just general usability of the system the whole team uses notepad plus plus on a regular basis for one thing or another this is a more advanced simple text editor that has tabs and color codes the uh the data that's in there if you end up working with ini files for hacking a game changing the game settings or if you're writing a batch script of some kind notepad plus plus makes things a lot easier it can also undo more than once unlike actual notepad light shot is another one that we like and we use regularly light shot got somewhat supplanted by the windows snip tool but we still like using it it's a bare bones application you hit print screen and you select the area you'd like to screenshot then you can either copy that to the clipboard or save it basic ms paint style editing tools are made available so you can quickly draw arrows or icons and make other quick modifications but other than that it's pretty bare bones and that's why we like using it prime95 also gets a shout out we've mostly stopped using prime95 internally and we replaced it with more realistic applications like blender for thermal and power testing but it's still useful for anyone who wants a predictable workload that can be run with a few clicks rather than navigating through game loading menus and things like that prime95 has non-avx versions that you can use for testing stability of your overclock and it applies towards games you just go to the drop down these days in the modern version of prime95 and disable the avx test it that allows you to rapidly test overclock stability in the absence of other applications that are more difficult to set up prime can run endlessly and is useful for overnight validation and you'll still need avx stability and it can do that too but for most gaming only use cases the non-avx testing will serve for validation of a stable overclock and then you can use avx offsets if it's unstable once testing with avx workloads up next is fast stone image viewer this is just useful in general if you do anything with photography or just a lot of images at once so we like fast on image viewer because it can do batch renames batch watermarking batch crops batch resize batch file conversion and compression does really good work with compression and it has a free version and that'll do everything you need so you can just use that but if you do anything with photos we like this tool next one command prompt comes with windows easily overlooked extremely useful though for a lot of stuff command prompt is probably the number one utility for troubleshooting problems as you're working with a system and it's just a matter of knowing how to use it a lot of the stuff you can do in command prompts in windows these days you can do through other windows as in panels but they're kind of difficult to navigate to they don't give you unfiltered information and using something like pin or trace route or anything of that nature in command prompt is extremely useful for determining the root cause of a problem this is something everyone in our audience should be well versed in for at least the basic commands so the first step for command prompt is to launch it as administrator type in cmd right click it launches admin and then you can do what you need done if you don't launch it as admin you'll run into all kinds of other issues depending on the commands we use command prompt nearly daily at this point we'd recommend learning some basic commands we'll put them on the screen throughout this so that you can write useful batch files or do useful tasks on your own a simple example might be a shutdown command for instance if you're planning to have your pc download call of duty while you leave your house for the next six months because that's the file size games are now you might want to give it a shutdown command sometime after the download completes you can either write a simple file or you can just do this in command prompt and tell command prompt to force a shutdown after let's say 12 hours and as long as you run it as administrator walk away give it all the flags it needs to shut down regardless it'll shut down another good use would be task kill sometimes task manager can't successfully kill a process that's stuck in the background so elevated command prompt with task kill slash i am slash f and the name of the thing might do the trick if you're a photographer and you regularly need to create a set of folders or projects as another example you can make a batch file to make dur and then the folder name all in one go that way if you have let's say a cropped 1080p version of the file a raw version and a lightroom edited variant of each photo you can have folders pre-created each time if you want to get more advanced you can even filter for the file extensions and then automatically move them into those folders you can basically create your own simple application without needing to go somewhere else for it we love command prompt for this reason we'd strongly recommend studying some basics we'll put those back on the screen now and again pin and traceroute are great for common network troubleshooting as well most isps will have you run those when they're doing their own troubleshooting over the phone the last couple here are pretty simple and obvious for overclocking precision and afterburner for gpus makes sense precision is good for nvidia gpus afterburner will work with both it is agnostic towards amd and nvidia and these are just tools for offsetting the frequency the power limit the memory clock and you can save profiles and sometimes they have on-screen displays as well both of these in fact have on-screen displays if you want some of the metrics from your gpu on the screen while you're playing games like frequency temperature things of that nature it's not as good as logging the data but if you want a quick glance at it just for well for user use as opposed to for reviewer use where you need hard data for everything then it's fine for that and it's pretty useful and the last one goes back to gaming obs shadow play and relive are the tools we would recommend depending on what how you're doing the capture to use for capturing gameplay footage if you want to do any simple edits and cut together clips of gameplay or something like that then these tools are good for that obs has additional capabilities it's a very popular platform for live streaming that's what we use when we do live streams it can do more advanced video capture and it's a lot more advanced in general if you want something simple then shadow play for nvidia or relive for amd both very good utilities but shadow play we have actually a lot of problems with these days that relate to needing an account to use which is insane that shouldn't be required at all and nvidia uh you're terrible forever requiring that but whatever these two tools also have a retroactive recording function so if something has already happened in the game you can then go capture it in the past by pushing whatever the hotkey is it's interesting technology it came out several years ago we talked about it to complete videos on both of these utilities if you want to watch them but they are core gaming utilities at this point for anyone who shares their gaming adventures with friends or otherwise so that's it for this one thank you for watching as always if you want more information like this and you're not subscribed make sure you subscribe but otherwise you can check out the channel for the the gigabyte exploding power supply piece that we're still working on you saw a quick clip of that today otherwise subscribe for more go to store.gamersnexus.net to help us out directly by buying things like our modmaps or toolkits shirts or other items or you can go to patreon.comgamersnexus to grab some of our wallpapers we've just released or behind the scenes videos thanks for watching we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 266,341

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, best software for gaming pc, overclocking software, how to overclock, benchmark my computer, check temperature of gpu and cpu, check cpu temperature, hwinfo64, gpuz, cpuz, what cpu do i have, command prompt guide, overclocking guide

Id: XqY-BL5pLjQ

Length: 24min 48sec (1488 seconds)

Published: Wed May 12 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Roseysdaddy]

All I want is to be able to launch a game on my TV as a second monitor and it not be all fucked up. Sometimes it takes the taskbar with it. Sometimes they refuse to go to the second monitor. Sometimes they max out at 3440x1440 (resolution of monitor 1) while on my 4k monitor 2. It's such a clusterfuck.

[u/Techboah]

An unusual video from GN, but it's really good, Tech Jesus giving everyone a good advice on some nice-to-have software for your PC.

[u/JoshuaCalledMe]

That meek and frightened 'yes' was classic. Love how he immediately goes to check things are ok.

[u/UnknownOverdose]

Nice