We THOUGHT this $40,000 PC would break records...
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,431 words · ~12 min read
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So I was looking through the 3DMark leaderboards
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the other day because Steve over at Gamers Nexus
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was talking some smack about our benchmarking skills.
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I didn't see it though, I don't watch his videos.
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As usual, Kingpin from EVGA is way up at the top
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holding the record in 3DMark, Time Spy,
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Xtreme and all that stuff.
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But when I looked a little closer, I saw what's this.
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He's only using a 7980XE 18 core processor
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with four GTX 1080Ti graphics cards.
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And I thought, this is my opportunity.
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My one shot, my mom's spaghetti.
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I can't beat him with liquid nitrogen cooling
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and like sawed off graphics cards
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with custom power delivery boards
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soldered to the back of them.
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But what I do have is better hardware than that.
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So my plan is to use 56 CPU cores
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in our ASUS C621E650.
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This is the product I bought and it's my challenge.
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I'm not going to pay you by the way.
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I'm just going to do a quick test.
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I'm going to do a quick test.
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Let's see how far they go.
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We're going to do a little test.
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It's a pretty tight nose test,
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but it's going to be sort of a rough test.
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This is a built-in built-in CPU.
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It's not even a full series.
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So we'll test that out today.
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First we'll test out the chips,
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which are my favorite chips in the market.
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This is what an old chip looks like.
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I'm gonna throw in a quick spoiler alert here. My dastardly plan to troll you guys with this setup
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didn't work out, but it's still worth going through the process because it is a pretty unreal rig.
1:53
So problem number one, SLI support for gaming on Quadros. The GV100 with its high speed
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HBM2 memory and massive 5376 CUDA cores should be a little faster than a Titan V,
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which is faster than a GTX 1080 TI or Titan XP, right out of the box. So even though I can't
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liquid nitrogen cool these things, I should be able to make up a lot of the difference
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in just outright faster hardware, except for one problem. These cards don't support three-way or
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four-way cards. These cards don't support four-way cards. These cards don't support four-way cards.
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SLI. So this right here is called an NVLink connector, and it is only designed for these
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cards anyway to put two of them together at a time. So while you can actually run SLI over NVLink,
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it's not really intended for that. It's more for resource and memory sharing in 3D modeling or
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compute applications. Fortunately though, I do have a way around that. So this is a Quadro Sync 2 board.
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And you'll probably recognize that if you've watched one of our many K, like 16K gaming videos,
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where we've used it to game on an array of as many as 16 monitors at once. Now this thing's purpose
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is primarily video display walls, like giant digital signage deployments, for example, to keep the monitors
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from getting out of sync, which would cause weird tearing issues. But we already know that it works for gaming.
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But we already know that it works for gaming, as long as you have a very small amount of time on your computer.
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But we already know that it works for gaming, as long as you have a very small amount of time on your computer.
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But we already know that it works for gaming, as long as you have a very small amount of time on your computer.
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long as the resolution we're running at isn't too much
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for the frame buffer of each individual card.
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So that got me thinking,
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what if instead of plugging multiple monitors
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into each one of the cards,
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because remember the more pixels each card drives,
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the harder it is for you to run the game.
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What if instead of that,
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we just ran a single 1080p display out of each one
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in a two by two grid for a total of 4K?
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Well, these are each 32 gig cards, so should be just fine.
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Bringing us to problem number two,
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even if you had a monitor like this one, it's 1080p,
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it's got super thin bezels, it's inexpensive,
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you still have a problem.
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Nobody wants to game where four bezels intersect
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because that's right where your crosshair is.
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This was by far my favorite part of my idea for this video
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and what prompted me to go ahead with it.
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Now I had intended,
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like I said, to troll you guys
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with some unbelievable benchmarks
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with like a test bench under a sheet or something
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to make you guys think
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that I had RTX cards early or something,
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but you'd never buy that
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if I had four of these monitors on an ARM,
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like we did back when we did our first 8K gaming setup.
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So what if we used LG's 43UD79?
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It's 43 inches, 4K,
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and thanks to its four separate inputs,
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it could be split into quadrants.
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So let's get it set up, shall we?
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One thing I should do while we're setting this up
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is give a massive shout out to Benny over at Memex
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who did a personal favor,
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hooking me up very last minute with one of these guys,
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actually two of them, DisplayPort to HDMI 2.0, Active.
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Adapters.
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The Active part's important because,
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well, for one thing,
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these Quadros don't have HDMI,
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so you have to run DisplayPort,
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and we've only got two DisplayPort inputs on this monitor,
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only one of which is actually usable because it's a Type-C,
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and you can't adapt this to that.
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There are cables, but they are directional cables.
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They don't go both ways.
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The Quadro Sync 2 card here only works
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if every one of these cards,
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is hooked up to the same type of display.
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The card has to think it's DisplayPort,
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so that's why the Active signal adapter is important,
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so every card thinks it's hooked up to DisplayPort.
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Just the amount of hassle that I went through
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to get this thing working, just, you know.
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But it was totally worth it, sort of.
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Here's an example of one of those directional cables.
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They only go from a Type-C output,
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like on your laptop or something,
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to a DisplayPort monitor.
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They don't go the other way.
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Oh, it totally makes sense.
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It's just not something that I thought about
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when this video was in the early conceptualization stages.
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Can we all just stop and appreciate for a moment
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that this is $36,000 worth of graphics cards here?
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I guess, you know, props to NVIDIA for lending them to us,
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even though we're totally not doing
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what we said we were gonna do with them.
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NVIDIA gets real cagey about, you know, this.
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NVIDIA gets real cagey about, you know, this.
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NVIDIA gets real cagey about gaming on Quadros.
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They just, they don't like people talking about it.
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Okay, so, HDMI 4, HDMI 3, that's right.
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Boom, boom, done, finish.
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And you can see how seamless it is as you move between them.
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See, you'll get a little bit of tearing.
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We got a little bit vertically there.
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Generally, actually, that's probably
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about the worst I've seen.
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But then you can see here, moving between these two,
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we get nothing.
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Oh, and now.
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You can see its behavior.
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Oh, yeah.
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So, it's not perfect,
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but I figured it would be good enough to trick you guys.
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Bring up some 3D Mark here.
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And there it is, Time Spy Extreme.
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I think this would have been believable.
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Yeah, you can see.
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The character's walking right through the intersection
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of all four of them, and you can't see any tearing.
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Pretty mean.
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Yeah.
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So, that's pretty underwhelming.
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But, perhaps, but, perhaps,
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if we weren't so CPU bottlenecked.
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So, while our CPU score is actually really good,
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like 10,000,
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that's just because we got a great score in the CPU tests,
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not because that CPU is actually not causing a bottleneck
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for our overpowered graphics setup.
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So, maybe what we can do is transfer the whole thing
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onto a bench with a 7980 XE.
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So, why don't we do that?
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Maybe we can alleviate the CPU bottleneck a little bit
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because we've got lots of cores here,
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but they're not particularly fast.
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You know, you do enough bench swaps,
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you get pretty fast at it.
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And, as expected, this is really not a lot better.
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Also, I'm having another weird issue
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where the color is a little bit off
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on the bottom left quadrant for some reason.
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I've actually run this before on both of these setups.
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I have no idea what it's doing.
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it's doing this time.
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As you guys can imagine, by this point
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in this whole process, I was feeling pretty discouraged
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because we are a far cry from the results
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that I was expecting.
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I mean, it's not like the entire thing is terrible.
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Like here, we can fire up a game here
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and see that actually like in-game performance
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looks pretty darn good.
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We're just gonna ignore this weirdness
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because this is the first time I've seen that.
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But this is not the benchmark breaker
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that I was really hoping that it would be.
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Oh, I know what it is.
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It's the whole zero to 255 versus 16
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to whatever black depth thing.
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How do you adjust that?
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You know what, I bet I have to break down the mosaic.
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You can see not in mosaic, I'm not having the issue.
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So I think it's just a matter of like,
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it just went wonko.
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For a second there.
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Yeah, see, it works perfectly this time.
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So let's run a game or two on this thing.
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Not bad.
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So what I can hope for here is that
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we will get some pretty awesome frame rates in GTA V.
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Why is this game so bad at running in full screen?
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Hey, Anthony, can I borrow you for a minute?
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No, I don't wanna, like, can I just change more things?
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GTA V is so horrible.
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There's more things than one at a time, like.
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Okay, how do you crank it?
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All the settings first before resetting it?
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You can't.
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You can't.
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You can reset it if you say no.
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So the good news is throughout the process
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of getting all of our GTA V settings cranked,
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this tearing line down the middle is gone.
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So that's pretty cool.
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Now we can see if our 4K performance is impressive
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because we have got this thing dialed in to hurt
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anything other than a godly graphics card setup.
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Why is that off?
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Did it even, oh, it did.
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It registered everything else, just not the MSAA.
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So that's neat.
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Multiple reboots later, we've got all that on.
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Yes, I wanna keep the new settings.
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Yes, yes, yes.
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And then we should be able to do
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extended shadow distances now.
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Now let's find out if in a situation
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where we're not quite so CPU bottlenecked, this thing can.
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Knock our socks off.
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Anthony, are you ready?
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Am I ready?
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Yeah.
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Are you ready?
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Are you ready?
12:18
I'm ready.
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I'm ready.
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It's loading still.
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So what would you expect?
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I would say this will do.
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You think so?
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Yeah.
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Yeah, that's stuttering.
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It's suffering.
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So I still maintain this was a pretty cool idea.
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Perhaps works in GTA V, DX11, yeah.
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Yes.
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Let's just throw it on here.
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Okay.
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So how impressed are you?
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How impressed are you for a $36,000?
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All right, let's see what it's actually running at here.
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Yeah, no, no, it's just only running at like 30 FPS.
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Okay.
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What is a Peltzer V8 something or other?
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Oh, 15 FPS.
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Oh, oh, oh, okay.
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Well, I mean, that was clearly the frame rate drops.
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This is very realistic car physics we've got going on here.
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I'm saying that they probably wanted this car in their pool
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and I'm doing them a favor.
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So basically between the amount of GPU horsepower,
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we have and the difficulty of synchronizing them
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and managing resources between them,
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there are many, many bottlenecks
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that prevent this theoretically cool setup
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from actually performing well in the real world.
13:36
Speaking of performing well in the real world,
13:38
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14:21
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In the video description.
14:25
Thanks for watching, guys.
14:26
If you just liked this video, you can hit that button.
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But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed,
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