I think it's pretty safe to say that anyone who's purchased an electronic
dudad of some sort has experienced performance degradation over time how's
that iPhone 4 running for you these days but what exactly causes your devices to
go from hero to zero over a span of just
a few
years cooler Master's master case maker 5 features their free form modular
system allowing you to customize adjust and upgrade make it yours at the link in
the video description so today's investigation was actually inspired by a
conversation thread that I saw over on Reddit about the Radeon rx480 graphics
card announcement video we did with Raja caduri from AMD where one of the
commenters suggested that AMD's practice
of loaning graphics cards to reviewers then asking them to send them along to
another reviewer could hurt their benchmark scores due to the cards
becoming worn out the back and forth discussion that followed is something
that I've seen a fair number of times in the context of whether or not it's safe
to buy used computer parts especially cards that have been used for
cryptocurrency mining but it's one that I've never seen actually tested now the
problem is that new hardware is impossible to go forward in time and
make old so no investigation into like a
GTX 1080s performance degradation over time can really be done and that old
Hardware is very very difficult to find
in still brand new condition that is to say unless you've got friends in low places
like evga's warehouse for example where
just such a thing was found by my bud Jacob over there this is a brand banking
new still sealed reference GTX 480 a
6-year-old graphics card and this is a
reference GTX 480 that was extensively used for benchmarking moved to my
personal rig then used for benchmarking some more with plenty of rough Linus
Tech tips handling in between so if there's any card that could have
degraded due to hard use mistreatment or heat this gtx480 is it so let's unbox
the new one and see if this one's
performance has
degraded wow this is not my most graceful unboxing ever it's all right
it's not really the point of the video man it's so crazy to see uh such an old
product new
packaging yeah there you have it brand new no hm
no I just ha taking that off brand new shiny and you could tell
if they had packaged up a used one and sent it to me because the thing about
480s is this surface stains when you touch it so you can tell this is
legitimately brand new and has been sitting in that box for somewhere
between 4 and 1 half to 6 years because
it is pristine so there it
is that's our
card so I'm back from all my testing and
uh let's run through the results here for my test bench to avoid any hardware
bottlenecks oh that's still running warm I'll be using a very different class of
Hardware than what was available in the GTX 480 era a core i7 5960x 8 Core
Extreme Edition 128 gigs of ddr4 RAM and
all of that running on an ASUS 99 Deluxe 2 motherboard and I'll be beginning this
then with a look at temperatures and raw
clock speeds compared to what is advertised if the card is actually
throttling down while under heavy load then a discrepancy here could save me a
lot of trouble running any other tests for this I used our Crisis 3 Skybox
thermal test which is both real world and one that puts the card under 100%
load spiking it up to almost 90° on the
GPU core even on an open air test bench
with a fan blowing down on it a reminder
to the Fanboys out there that life is regrettably not as simple as AMD cards
run hot or NVIDIA has better drivers it
varies significantly from product to
product anyway speaking of varying
significantly they didn't both cards behaved identically here after 10
minutes with our brand new card requiring 1% more fan speed for the same
701 MHz core clock and 90° operating
temperature let's move on to other tests then 3D Mark usually has some variation
from run to run but both of my 480s got
shot on just about equally with futur Mark comparing our rig here to a gaming
laptop from 2013 in spite of the Bey
CPU but let's run some real games then
Crisis 3 at High details and textures
shows us that the gtx480 is still a reasonably competent gaming card whether
it's brand new or very old and I guess
this test is also a testament to the repeatability of our Crisis 3 Benchmark
run because they came in pretty damn near the same the canned benchmarks in
Batman Arkham Origins and Grand Theft Auto 5 tell a similar story leading us
finally anticlimactically to the conclusion
other than their cooling fans which will whine or stop outright when they fail
video cards like most computer hardware
have no moving parts and therefore do not generally suffer from gradually
declining performance from use over an extended period of time in the same way
that let's say a stick of chewing gum would which does not mean that they
don't wear out electron migration the moment mum of electrons eventually
causing atoms to move can cause circuits
to fail and this is made worse by heat
or by overclocking it's just that the way that
they fail is not generally gradual or
predictable it's more like the way that the roof of your house would fail it
totally works until such time as it
doesn't totally work and you get water on your head and it's time for a new one
so if your iPhone or your laptop like a
video card doesn't have any moving parts then based on our testing today the
reason for its slowdown that is to say if its storage device is still running
well is more likely to do with software
with bloated applications like anti- malware packages or malware itself pick
your poison right running in the background and operating system updates
that are designed with more overhead for
newer faster Hardware being the most common
culprits so as you can imagine for a technology YouTube channel we use
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47.9k to the much improved tracking
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experience so they're featuring the pagewide pro mfp
477dw which has best-in-class printing speeds prints four times more pages than
standard cartridges with their pagewide extra high yield cartridges and allows
you to save on printer on electricity cost and on time because the best
possible printer in my mind is the one
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work and just freaking works because you
don't have time to Tinker around with something like this when you need oh I
don't know Talent release forms for a shoot that you're running out the door
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