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i am hands-on with the Intel arc a770

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this is their top spec gaming GPU and it

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is very much an unreleased product that means that our test systems needed to be

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disconnected from the internet data collection needed to be disabled and we

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will definitely need to avoid revealing

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any FPS counters so that we don't leak any sensitive performance numbers if i

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care about keeping my promise

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with that out of the way is Intel arc good should you be excited for when they

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launch probably soon and should you listen to this segway to our sponsor

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Linus we're going to have that linked down below

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i guess we can drop the pretense right behind me are two systems with identical

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specs running the same game one would expect then for them to have the same

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level of performance but clearly based purely on my eyes and not on the

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clearly visible FPS counters this one is performing a lot better

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so what's going on here the performance

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disparity between these two systems is actually a big part of the reason that

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Intel flew up here to show us the current state of things the one on your

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right is running in directx 12 mode while the other one is in directx 11. so

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rather than let me puzzle over why this would be our good friends ryan shrout

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and tom peterson sat down with us to talk about the state of things the arc

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team targeted new standards hard we have av-1 decode and encode support and our

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lightweight driver is very good at speaking directly to the GPU hardware in

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dx12 and vulkan making full use of its capabilities by the way the water in

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this insulated bottle is both cold and refreshing lttstore.com

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i made him say that the part i'm not going to make him say remember my

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promise is that in directx 11 and 10 and 9 and etc

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that's not really the case the thing is in those earlier versions

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of directx to ease development there are loads of apis and driver baggage between

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the game and the GPU now the performance can obviously still

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be good but it takes a lot of tweaking

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in the drivers and the game before it all works great which competitors like

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NVIDIA and AMD have had literally decades to work on

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so the short version of the bad news then is that in a lot of situations a game

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won't be taking full advantage of an arc GPU and one of the worst examples of

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this is here in shadow of the tomb raider where they drop

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half of the performance going from dx12

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to dx11 sorry excuse me my promise they

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double going from dx11 to dx12

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the point is however they want to spin it there's a lot of work to be done and

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this optimization dance isn't one that can be done alone putting Intel in a

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very challenging predicament the cold hard truth is that unfortunately for

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team blue gamers do not exclusively play

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directx 12 and vulcan games making arc

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a bit of a tough sell until it's more optimized as for game developers well

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why would they optimize for arc unless there's a large enough install base

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see the chicken and egg problem here let's talk about the three-tier strategy

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that Intel is planning to use then to beat this chicken and egg into a

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delicious omelet at what we're calling tier one we're going to kill everyone in

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price to performance and in these tier one titles that work really well on arc

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we've already revealed some of them we're going to be best in class

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performance outright just like that Floatplane has the best behind the

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scenes and exclusive LTT content Floatplane.com

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let's take a look then at some of those tier one games here's cyberpunk running

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at quick preset high and

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1440p oh wow okay that's a higher resolution than i was actually expecting

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them to want to show off here oh no i don't have an FPS counter but i could

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probably approximate it oh it's hard for me to tell for sure this has got to be

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somewhere in the like 50 to 65 FPS range if i had

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to guess cyberpunk's a little chunky and a

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little teary and we're not using any kind of variable refresh rate right now

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i'd say it's actually higher than that alex what do you think

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uh i agree you agree

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thanks i fortunately turned on my FPS counter well i'm just running a

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benchmark but you know that's that's my job in f120 21 we're getting 180 FPS at

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1440p highest settings which is impressive but

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f1 2021 is a lighter title honestly i'm

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more impressed by the fact that cyberpunk is running at all given what a hog this game is

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now these are tier 1 games though they're not going to let us show you any tier 2

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games yet so i have banished them from hosting

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any more of the video but i am at least allowed to talk about

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them the second tier is your less

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optimized games but ones that are built on modern apis like directx 12 and

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vulcan these are still going to perform pretty well for the reasons that we

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discussed before tier 3 is where things get

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a little dicey in direct x11 or earlier

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arc doesn't always do very well and while we sorry i had something in my eye

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there weren't able to run any tier 3 games ourselves on the a70 there have

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been enough arc performance leaks out there to show you that yeah it can be a

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little rough but Intel has no illusions

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about this reality and they know that gamers expect to play a wide variety of

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games that they can download at random out of the literally tens of

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thousands of titles on steam fire it up and get acceptable bug-free

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performance so being self-aware that there are going to

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be some arc compromises and that there are some silicon surplus issues to work

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around they have a bold plan and the

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actual real buckets of money to turn that bold plan into a reality

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you guys ready Intel is going to be basing their

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pricing off of their internal testing of

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third tier games

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now they still won't tell us how much the a7d is going to cost but what we do

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have is some data points that lead us to believe there are going to be some

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pretty happy gamers first up is the general state of the

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industry rumors abound that NVIDIA is

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trying to cancel or at least delay manufacturing of a large chunk of their

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upcoming 40 series gpus and it's pretty safe to say that given the recent mining

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crash AMD is probably in a similar boat we guessed then that Intel probably also

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overproduced arc silicon based on projections that they might have made

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during the surge in demand for gaming pcs during the extended coveted

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lockdowns over the last couple of years i think then that it's pretty safe to

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say that aspirations for a large install base aside

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they just plain have some inventory to move

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next while the a70 especially this sexy

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limited edition RGB card doesn't have an announced price or launch date they have

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actually launched smart silicon this is the a380 and its performance

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isn't particularly exciting but its price is

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starting at 129 usd msrp with six gigs

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of gdr6 memory and enough performance for 1080p gaming and light titles this

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thing would have been an absolute godsend during the shortages and still

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even without the shortages presents a value proposition that i wouldn't have

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thought possible it's an entry-level GPU that you're not a complete idiot for

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buying next up is the rapidly improving state

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of arc on the software side the last time we looked at it we said and rightly

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so sorry that Intel should be embarrassed

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to launch a product in that state but in the three short weeks since then they

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have fixed almost every issue we raised

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and we have some background on what happened with a couple of them

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first up was the problem with Windows update constantly rolling back our

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drivers so what happened was there's all this

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random hardware on your platform like all these chips all these cards right

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and everything has an id that Windows uses to find the right driver for your

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hardware every manufacturer has their own id it's

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a four digit string fun fact Intel's is 8086 and then there's also an id for the

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device itself so that's easy then right this driver

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goes with this pair of ids

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well on laptops there's kind of two manufacturers if you think about it and

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therefore two sets of ids one for the silicon

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vendor and one for the system maker now

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there's a good reason for this historically oems like dell or hp needed

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to have unique ids for their implementation of hardware like a GPU

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say to specify any power constraints or display output capabilities

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that means that when Windows update found two driver matches for our GPU one

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from Intel directly and one specific one from hp

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with both sets of ids it made sense that

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it would prefer the hp specific one to avoid any unintended driver woes for the

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user the long-term fix for this then is that

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Intel's first party driver will need to take precedence and all oems will have

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to get on board wow it must be nice to be Intel as for the battery life issues

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that's a bit more complicated and has to do with power states

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g2 is a high power idle state about 40

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watts and that's where we were stuck now arc supports g8 which is more like a 10

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watt idle power state but unfortunately they were in the final stages of

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enabling that state in the driver and so

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it wasn't there yet it will be along with other fixes in

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august even with future driver updates though

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there are some caveats that you potential art customers should be aware

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of and i'd say the biggest one is your system's support for resizable bar

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it's a feature that you enable in your bio so you can go check if it's there

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and it's a bit complicated so i'm not going to go into the full details right

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now but basically an arcgpus memory

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controller benefits a lot from being able to execute fewer larger data

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transfers rather than many many smaller ones when it's loading textures shaders

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geometry or anything else that goes from the CPU to the GPU with that said arc

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also has some competitive advantages that we touched on in our last video and

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they haven't gone away when it works it is an encoding

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powerhouse i mean av1 encoding in particular is the kind of thing that

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you're unlikely to care about today but could actually be the difference between

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this thing is a paperweight and i could still use this in my secondary

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machine or my plex server five six seven

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years from now it also has a lot of dedicated silicon for machine learning

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driven features like ai upscaling though i wasn't able to test that either

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what i can test is overclocking

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performance tuning performance tuning now do note that they they screwed it up

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and they don't have an apply thing so just it's it's a live slider it's a live

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slider oh better better not you know

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the performance boost it basically it changes your vf curve am i right yep

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yeah okay so if you have better again

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it's a little early but go for it you know okay yeah if you have better silicon than normal you might be able to

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just okay boost it up a bit i just like fire my game back up and i might have

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like boosted performance oh i guess we can actually see our clocks am i i'm am

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i allowed to show those i'm not sure if that's working right but

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oh yeah it seems to be locked the GPU temperature is locked at 69 degrees

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celsius there's no way i believe that's no no i think that's true that's true

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you think that's true yeah nice i don't think that CPU activity is

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right at four percent though yeah that's good yeah that's probably a little wrong

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i can't tell is this placebo or is this actually a little faster

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i think it is i'm getting less tearing i think it might actually be faster i

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think it's working okay you told me this wasn't going to work did it just crash it more and then

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you'll crash it well there's no reason to have a temperature limit i don't care about any of that okay should i turn the

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power limit up yeah why not i mean yeah should be

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fine right yeah what could go wrong yeah what could go wrong so none of that

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changed yeah also i think i'm getting more tearing

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which doesn't necessarily actually mean that performance is worse tearing is a

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function of your frame rate versus your refresh rate and it's a little more

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complex than just better FPS tearing go away

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but what i am seeing is looked like i was getting multiple tears

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for a second there which could actually mean that our FPS went up you saw that

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yes are you sure you hit alt-eye again you can do it in game and you'll get a

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big display oh it's working oh wait it's working yeah oh this is this is working

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yeah oh oh well that's cool it's very clear that this is definitely

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performing better than we started so the overclocking utility works far

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better than alex told me it was i mean should we give her more beans

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sure what a great idea oh

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oh ah see that means it works though

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video i'm gonna try something new and three to a different channel these gents

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were actually just up visiting our friends at gamer's nexus as well and

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it's definitely a worthwhile watch if you want to learn more about what makes

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arc tick