Are "Gaming" Parts ACTUALLY Faster?? - Final Answer
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,220 words · ~6 min read
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is it just me or does it feel like gaming has been slapped on pretty much
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everything at this point i mean we're talking from stuff that makes
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sense like mice and video cards all the way to glasses or chairs
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but does using gaming components actually
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make your pc better for gaming well
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we built these two pcs and tested them head to head to find out
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and we're going to tell you after these messages from tunnelbear tunnelbear
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thinks the internet is better when everyone can openly access the same
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content try tunnelbear for free at tunnelbear.com
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LTT
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so our methodology was pretty simple we started with a well-balanced machine
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core i5 8400 16gb of RAM gtx 1070 m.2
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SSD etc then we replicated the exact
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same config as closely as possible
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except that to the best of our ability we replaced every
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single component with a gaming version
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of the same thing so if it didn't have something about powering up your squad
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or just gaming right in the product name it was out it actually ended up being a
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lot easier than we thought so we have not only easy ones like gaming
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graphics card and gaming motherboard but also a gaming SSD a gaming power supply
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gaming aio cooler even our case fans are all gaming doubt
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i mean look at this look at this packaging according to these blurbs from the
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manufacturers their hardware will deliver upon us a new era of gaming it
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will bring a real body blow to your opponents
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attack its weak point for massive damage
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and even enable one to master the decisive moments and succeed in all
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attacks wow that sounds great
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let's fire up some synthetic tests to oh
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no well this can't be right why why
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all these numbers are within three percent of one another
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whatever in the world could be happening i was promised a new era of body blows
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and decisive moment mastery success
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hmm maybe to have the amazing gaming
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experience advertised on the box i have to play real games
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no no again this is consistent with what we got
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earlier on just what in the hell
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is going on here okay
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in all seriousness though let's talk about what happened here many of you
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probably saw this coming but it turns out that slapping a gaming moniker on a
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product and adding some RGB and fancy styling does not make it magically
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perform noticeably better the only things that affect the performance of a
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pc are its actual specs the clock speeds of the given products
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inside it and potentially cooling
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for example when we clocked our reference non-gaming gtx 1070 graphics
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card to match the speeds of the gaming version the results equalized so why is
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everyone putting gaming in their product names well our first guess was that they
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wanted to charge suckers more for it
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but while your mileage may vary depending on the particular models you choose and how
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much you're willing to drop on additional enhancement elements like RGB lighting
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and custom power supply cables our gaming machine ended up costing
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about the same as our vanilla one and
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actually included some tangible benefits
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first up our GPU came with a higher boost clock out of the box which it was
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easily able to maintain thanks to its enhanced cooling gaming class cards also
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tend to come with extras like multiple temperature sensors or oc switches that
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make kicking them into a higher gear a one-click affair
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second yeah we have to bring it up style our gaming machines looks
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immediately tell us what she was built
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for some manufacturers like ASUS even
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enable you to sync your system and graphics card lighting via their
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software with that said more and more these days even vanilla
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parts like the ASUS prime z370a in our non-gaming machine come with RGB
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capabilities so some people like a nondescript box tucked under their desk
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turning out damn frames while others prefer the other this one is clearly
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subjective but we had to mention it bringing us to number three
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gaming parts often come bundled with game codes or paraphernalia like do not
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enter i'm gaming door hangers and gaming related stickers
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and that's it that's about all we came up with our two
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systems cost about the same perform about the same and their quality is
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about the same so then why dump so much money into the
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development and marketing of these products if they perform the same
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why does rog even exist
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well because even though the base level
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of these gaming branded products do actually cost about the same
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what these brands do are a couple of things
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number one is they allow companies to create halo models that do sell for a
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lot more for the people out there who value bragging rights above performance
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per dollar and the number two is that even for that regular stuff that
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doesn't make more money as marketing strategies go it seems to be working
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really well when we did our last audit of orders through our amazon affiliate
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code we actually found that even for a category like video cards which never
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used to have gaming in the name since i think the manufacturers figured it was
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implied gaming models were outselling their
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non-gaming counterparts significantly
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so there you have it gaming doesn't make it faster
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but it also doesn't necessarily make it slower so
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i think the real takeaway here is um
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come to think of it what did we learn today
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to have that linked below so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you
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know what to do which was awesome get subscribed hit the like button or check
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out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description we'll have both versions down there for
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the uh more gaming aesthetic inclined and the less so also linked in the
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description is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally
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join