Performance degradation - is it real?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,456 words · ~7 min read
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I think it's pretty safe to say that anyone who's purchased an electronic
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dudad of some sort has experienced performance degradation over time how's
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that iPhone 4 running for you these days but what exactly causes your devices to
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go from hero to zero over a span of just
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a few
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years cooler Master's master case maker 5 features their free form modular
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system allowing you to customize adjust and upgrade make it yours at the link in
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the video description so today's investigation was actually inspired by a
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conversation thread that I saw over on Reddit about the Radeon rx480 graphics
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card announcement video we did with Raja caduri from AMD where one of the
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commenters suggested that AMD's practice
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of loaning graphics cards to reviewers then asking them to send them along to
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another reviewer could hurt their benchmark scores due to the cards
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becoming worn out the back and forth discussion that followed is something
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that I've seen a fair number of times in the context of whether or not it's safe
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to buy used computer parts especially cards that have been used for
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cryptocurrency mining but it's one that I've never seen actually tested now the
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problem is that new hardware is impossible to go forward in time and
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make old so no investigation into like a
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GTX 1080s performance degradation over time can really be done and that old
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Hardware is very very difficult to find
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in still brand new condition that is to say unless you've got friends in low places
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like evga's warehouse for example where
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just such a thing was found by my bud Jacob over there this is a brand banking
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new still sealed reference GTX 480 a
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6-year-old graphics card and this is a
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reference GTX 480 that was extensively used for benchmarking moved to my
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personal rig then used for benchmarking some more with plenty of rough Linus
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Tech tips handling in between so if there's any card that could have
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degraded due to hard use mistreatment or heat this gtx480 is it so let's unbox
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the new one and see if this one's
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performance has
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degraded wow this is not my most graceful unboxing ever it's all right
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it's not really the point of the video man it's so crazy to see uh such an old
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product new
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packaging yeah there you have it brand new no hm
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no I just ha taking that off brand new shiny and you could tell
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if they had packaged up a used one and sent it to me because the thing about
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480s is this surface stains when you touch it so you can tell this is
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legitimately brand new and has been sitting in that box for somewhere
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between 4 and 1 half to 6 years because
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it is pristine so there it
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is that's our
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card so I'm back from all my testing and
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uh let's run through the results here for my test bench to avoid any hardware
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bottlenecks oh that's still running warm I'll be using a very different class of
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Hardware than what was available in the GTX 480 era a core i7 5960x 8 Core
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Extreme Edition 128 gigs of ddr4 RAM and
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all of that running on an ASUS 99 Deluxe 2 motherboard and I'll be beginning this
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then with a look at temperatures and raw
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clock speeds compared to what is advertised if the card is actually
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throttling down while under heavy load then a discrepancy here could save me a
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lot of trouble running any other tests for this I used our Crisis 3 Skybox
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thermal test which is both real world and one that puts the card under 100%
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load spiking it up to almost 90° on the
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GPU core even on an open air test bench
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with a fan blowing down on it a reminder
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to the Fanboys out there that life is regrettably not as simple as AMD cards
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run hot or NVIDIA has better drivers it
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varies significantly from product to
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product anyway speaking of varying
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significantly they didn't both cards behaved identically here after 10
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minutes with our brand new card requiring 1% more fan speed for the same
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701 MHz core clock and 90° operating
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temperature let's move on to other tests then 3D Mark usually has some variation
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from run to run but both of my 480s got
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shot on just about equally with futur Mark comparing our rig here to a gaming
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laptop from 2013 in spite of the Bey
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CPU but let's run some real games then
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Crisis 3 at High details and textures
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shows us that the gtx480 is still a reasonably competent gaming card whether
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it's brand new or very old and I guess
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this test is also a testament to the repeatability of our Crisis 3 Benchmark
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run because they came in pretty damn near the same the canned benchmarks in
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Batman Arkham Origins and Grand Theft Auto 5 tell a similar story leading us
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finally anticlimactically to the conclusion
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other than their cooling fans which will whine or stop outright when they fail
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video cards like most computer hardware
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have no moving parts and therefore do not generally suffer from gradually
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declining performance from use over an extended period of time in the same way
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that let's say a stick of chewing gum would which does not mean that they
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don't wear out electron migration the moment mum of electrons eventually
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causing atoms to move can cause circuits
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to fail and this is made worse by heat
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or by overclocking it's just that the way that
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they fail is not generally gradual or
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predictable it's more like the way that the roof of your house would fail it
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totally works until such time as it
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doesn't totally work and you get water on your head and it's time for a new one
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so if your iPhone or your laptop like a
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video card doesn't have any moving parts then based on our testing today the
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reason for its slowdown that is to say if its storage device is still running
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well is more likely to do with software
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with bloated applications like anti- malware packages or malware itself pick
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your poison right running in the background and operating system updates
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that are designed with more overhead for
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newer faster Hardware being the most common
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culprits so as you can imagine for a technology YouTube channel we use
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don't have time to Tinker around with something like this when you need oh I
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don't know Talent release forms for a shoot that you're running out the door
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you want to learn more check it out at the link in the video
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