perfect completely unresponsive hard lock system this is great I finally
finish the Intel Arc challenge I go back to my RTX 39 I'm like yeah I'm going to
have a stable system again and actually had nothing but problems with it but I
told myself between NVIDIA's price hikes and their attitude I am skipping the 40
series which leaves me with what for options I mean Once Upon a Time 15 years
ago I daily drove the radio on 3870 but I haven't touched an AMD GPU at least
not in my daily driver system for 15 years have they reached the point where
they're usable they've certainly reached the point where they're my only feasible
option for an upgrade so this is it that's right folks it's time for the AMD
challenge sponsored by cic I will be
running AMD for the next 30 days and I
will be bringing along with me two of my very picky Tech enthusiast friends Jake
and Luke to share with you our experience so come along for the ride
and uh I hope you've got a great power supply did I mention this is brought to
you by seic because whether you're team green or team red these
days you're going to need something pretty
powerful in all seriousness I am not really expecting this to be as much of a
Gong Show as the Intel version was AMD
unlike Intel has been doing dedicated graphics for well ever since they
acquired ATI which is I guess over 15 years now but in that time their
software team has made enormous strides in terms of both compatibility and
performance that is at least if the community's reviews of radi on graphics
cards are anything to go by they've certainly ran into some challenges with
the 7,000 series they had some issues with defective Vapor Chambers causing
unusually high temperatures but that shouldn't affect me because I'm not
using an AMD reference card so with confidence I'm going ahead to why is
this still on you guys watched me turn it off what can I say I'm just a lot
better at turning things on than turning them off all three of us went with the
R9 7900 XTX so the more premium version and you
know normally you don't look at the top tier card and go hm yeah that one's
probably the better value but somehow AMD managed to pull it off the 7900 XT
is cut down so much that for the $100 you're saving compared to the XTX it
really doesn't look like a very compelling option the XTX on the other
hand as long as a major Focus for you isn't Ray traced titles its performance
in traditional games is extremely compelling you can get more details
about it in our full review of the 7900 series that we uploaded a little while
back now of course the card that we were covering was the reference card from AMD
this one uh is quite a bit beefier to
the point where oh God we might actually have a clearance issue here oh god um
Jake can I help you what I'm just ohing for the same reason you're o goting
we've come up with a solution massive thanks to Gigabyte for sending over this
aors card but I guess I get to use a reference card now the last thing we
want is for any of this coolant to get into our highquality seic power supply
did I mention they sponsored this video so I'm just going to put this
highquality ShortCircuit hoodie very absorbent in the way and make sure that
we don't get any water in it oh this is going to be so easy because AMD's
drivers are not going to be a problem at
least that's my hope because in my review of this card I kind of committed
to switching to team red so I really regardless of whether it's an aorus card
or a reference card I really need this thing to be good it uses amds rdna 3
architecture which is all new for the 7000 series it brings with it a huge
uplifting clock speed cus or compute units AI accelerators and perhaps for me
most importantly their video encoding engine has gotten a complete overhaul
including support for av1 which isn't supported on streaming platforms like
twitch yet but will hopefully be coming very very soon one of the other things
that's really cool about AMD's rdna A3 cards is I mean not necessarily going to
excite you from a performance standpoint but could excite you from a cost
standpoint instead of building these cards using a monolithic or a single
large die they used a chiplet approach similar to what they've done with their
ryzen CPUs so instead of using the
latest manufacturing process for the entire Die they actually used tsmc's 6
nanometer for their memory and cache dieses since they found that there
wasn't really a benefit to shrinking it down and then they used their 5
nanometer process for their compute die so so that's where you're actually still
getting good scaling in terms of power consumption and performance I mean
they're still really expensive but like
guess we'll take the little W's when we can get them another thing we can do
while we wait is refill the loop because the parts aren't actually here for
my 79 50x upgrade I'm just going to be
running a bypass so the GPU will not be water cooled during this experiment this
also allows me to like just go back to the 30 90 if I decide yeah you know what
it's really not worth the extra performance Jake we cheated a little bit
he's actually already done his upgrade we're shooting out of order he says it's
pretty good though right off the bat I'm running into a bit of an issue because
my current graphics card this RTX 380 from EVGA rest in peace just barely fits
fortunately it's close this
guy not even close so I think what I'm
going to do there's a little bit of extra space on this bracket I think I'm
going to take the pump out and this bracket and drill new holes just about
that much higher so that the GPU in this slot can clear
it hello wait
no is that the one L of stripped damn
it hey who know it could be this much work
just to swap an air cooled graphics card
originally the pump Circle bracket thing was using those two holes but what I
found out is there's an extra set of holes in the middle so if I put the
bottom holes of the Ring thing in the
middle hole then I probably don't even need to drill anything I'm I think I'm
going to anyways but um I could just put
those two screws in and that would probably be
enough look at that a hole which
hopefully hits the screw it looks mint I mean the
holes were a little too close
together but it'll work and that's that's what matters hi AR and there it
is the top of the res hits these tubes
it's only screwed in with the top two holes here which don't line up with
anything on the bottom because all of the holes are stripped out and now
theoretically this
fits hey it works I don't know why the lights
are in like seizure mode right now but we can get that sort of this is less of
an installation video and more of a aftermath explanation video I decided
that either the GPU or the reservoir was going to have to go and as the GPU going
was less work that was kind of where I landed so I got this really long PCI
Express Riser cable and decided to mount
the GPU on top of the computer so the
graphics card just sits there except that it was overloading my power supply
all the time so there's another power supply in the back powering just the
graphic card and it's all mounted on the top would C Sonic trust someone
irresponsible enough to pour water over a powered on computer stop it's fine
they make high quality power supplies great efficiency long warranties super
quiet IP can't go wrong well no not that
thing no matter what your computer is SE Sonic's got you covered even if you got
a big Power hog like this thing no that's a only reference one we have a
very bad idea hope you catch it oh my gosh it would have come right out like
it just opens
Jake these people set me up for failure you know doesn't take much holy crap is
this still too long Jake it's too long hold on okay no it fits it fits is it
too tall though oh no it's not too slots
it's two and change oh no we have to use
the Riser all along wait what no oh no no no no we're
not using a riser I'm not catching that
okay it's just going to hit you then I got another one here you
ready oh no fine oh my God that's the only one we
have F that way I get to use the cool aorus one too dual bio so you got the
silent and the OC version triple fans
yeah triple fan I mean they're both triple fans but this one's triple fans
on a big fat heat sink are you going to
secure that GPU down how am I going to secure the GPU David do you ever think
of that double-sided tape honestly what
I was planning to do was put it right here really I mean on top of the water
tube well why not it's a it's a solid it's a Hardline water cooling tube yeah
until you put too much pressure on I was thinking just kind of like that and just
put it on there that is significantly better than what you had
before all right I'll allow it what is postcode F3 I'm looking it up F3 blah
blah blah blah turn it on like while it's Q flash something something F3 we
got it what did you change nothing I plugged in a keyboard I didn't change anything maybe F3 means plug in a
keyboard do F3 just mean keyboard not found why would the system not post over
that well hold on that's probably just cuz you turn it off a bunch of times oh
uhoh uh oh no I bet the BIOS reset and
I'm using like stupid AMD stupid NVMe
stupid raid I better not have just lost my boot OS I vote we go to BIOS for a
moment okay and we look at the PCIe
device and maybe one of your nvmes just happened to die in this
process did you raid zero of them yeah
why for Speed it's like single threaded anyways
AMD raid is garbage so it's not even a the card doesn't even have raid it's
just one of those four oh my god oh lonus I know what the problem is
you turn the power off like multiple times while was trying to do Windows
updates you yes you did no I didn't it
was trying to do Windows updates I turned the power off one time oh thanks
Windows good timing Windows update yeah but then remember when you're doing the
maintenance you turned it on and off and on and off like a bunch of times I guess
this shouldn't be on right now okay just power it off a why is this still on I
think you corrupted your own Windows install got a Windows install
disc it's just it's one of those things where like
honestly I don't know 95 times out of
100 you interrupt a Windows update It'll like figure it out
except when you're trying to film a video and you have a GPU on a rise or
outside your computer and you've got water potentially dripping and it's
after the end of the day and it's overtime
now here's the update we have a completely different GPU with a
completely different drive we have removed the drive that we think has the
corrupted Windows on it and we are still getting that same error you know what it
reminds me of it's behaving like the bootloader is on one storage device but
then the actual operating system files are on another on two drives yeah which
I've SE yeah which I've seen a lot of times but the problem is that I don't
have two storage devices in here no so
what is happening I don't know I'm at a loss man total loss especially since we
put the 3090 back in like in the slot and still didn't
go it's like an hour and a half later I
think and the computer's working now so what ended up being the problem I'm
pretty sure is there was some weird configuration in the BIOS because of the
raid setup so I ended up taking the camos battery out putting it back in and the system booted right up installing
the drivers went totally fine we had to install chipset drivers since this is
from an Intel system that also went fine so it seems like everything's working
great it looks like there were two contributing factors one I think Jake
was right there must have been some kind of BIOS corruption and two he might have
been also right about this it looks like there was a PCIe resource allocation
problem so in order to get it to boot up reliably I not only had to enable above
4G decoding but I also had to remove
both my network card and my Thunderbolt card so I only have that carrier card
for the 4 m.2 ssds and my GPU in here
I'm using these Optical USB things from
um uh iicon to handle USB and then I'm
just running an optical DisplayPort cable straight up here Thunderbolt is
not working at all after a couple small issues with the optical DisplayPort
cable that's running downstairs to the gaming room I've got it running here so
that seems to suggest there's no incompatibility with optical cables but
I'm running into something entirely new
um let see if I can get my mouse here here we
go USB is just cutting out for you know
3 to 5 Seconds at a time periodically here I'm moving my mouse
continuously should there it goes yeah see hello
nothing there it is and it's not just the mouse it's the keyboard as well just
USB connectivity cuts out devices don't they don't disconnect and come
back they just gone so I'm going to try a chipset driver update okay Mouse
working fine chipset drivers who are what did the
trick there it is wait what no
um okay I
mean I'm pretty sure this is running higher than I had it before with a 3090
well I haven't played in a while that's for sure got him got him got him let's
go no performance issues no hitching no
nothing let let's go come on
ah okay that was three ball kills though I'm feeling pretty good about that
where's a ball someone have it what the hell are you guys
doing bloody hell stop putting it
down he threw it at me it's a bloody
objective map you don't just go for kills what sucks is my teammates aren't
even that bad from just like uh playing FPS standpoint they're just not playing
the objective do these idiots not understand how the mode works hold the
ball what where are you going can't blame my GPU game ran
great just like this great segue to our sponsor all right well regardless the
computer works but there's no segue to a sponsor cuz it's sponsored by seic so
thanks to seic check them out on the link in the description if you liked
this video maybe go watch the Intel AR
one cuz that was just as much chaos I
don't actually know if it no it wasn't as much this is
awful no none of this has been AMD's fault so far the actual AMD experience
has been totally fine