bmichaels556

Update... Applied new paste and lowered temps only about 1 degree C. Looks like it's definitely the case. I hadn't taken much of a look at the case in all honesty, but there's really very little intake OR exhaust on the thing, which definitely isn't helping! I do notice with the slight decrease in temperature, clock speeds have improved slightly. Still have that issue of temperature difference between ~100% fan speed, and leaving default (runs about 66% and slightly hotter, about 84C) is just showing such a tiny difference in temps / clocks. VERY small. In my mind, that's telling me that the card is probably just receiving its own hot air from inside the case, so cranking up fan speed is having minimal effects on temps/clocks. Really appreciate your guys' help! Personally, I think I'll just stick with letting the card run basically stock at lower fan speed. I feel like I'd rather it be 1C hotter (and still within safe temps from what I know), than be in the room with a jet engine and killing my fans at the same time. I wonder if I drill some holes in the case...? LMAO. I also saw one guy take off the interior part of the side panel since it's mostly just blocking air flow and not really dust or anything. Or maybe fasten a small case fan to the side, I think that would actually be the biggest game changer. Anyway... Given how bad the airflow is in this case, I'm surprised everything is doing so WELL. Sorry for the essay again, and thanks for your guys' help!

Will give it a try. Thanks!

Definitely makes sense... Despite being a "Mini" model, it felt reasonably beefy, but that still leaves the other two issues. I think in my mind, I'm just comparing to a giant full-tower case with not much going on in there, and then being naive to think this will be comparable.

TLDR: Cooling performance way under what is expected. Fans running way too high, and performance is being left on the table. Case is tiny, but opening side panel completely didn't show much improvement and want to just replace thermal paste maybe. What else could the issue be..? ----------------------------------------- Recently got a great deal on a 2070 Super. It's a Zotac "Mini" and I'm really liking the massive uplift in performance from my old system! Unfortunately, this thing is running pretty hot. It's in a case without a whole lot of breathing room though - specifically a Dell 8920 w/ i7 8700 (non-K) with all their crappy cooler goodness I've come to know and love. In Dying Light 2 just as an example, I'm hitting 83 to 84C with a pretty aggressive fan curve in MSI Afterburner (running 100% at these temps). Actually, I raised temperature limit and lowered power limit way down, but honestly, the latter hasn't even mattered because it can't boost up fully for very long and stretch its legs anyway. It's floating around 135-140w at around 1750 / 7000 MHz. If I first start up a game, it can go way up to like 1950+ MHz, but not for long, since it hits that 83-84C pretty quick. Also, I notice that just going back to default in Afterburner doesn't really change temperature much. The fans seem to be at more like 60%+ with clock speeds a BIT lower, maybe around 1700 MHz, but that's about it, which I found very weird. I'll probably just apply new thermal paste anyway. I did try just straight up taking my tower's side panel off to see how it did. It ran with SLIGHTLY higher clock speeds and about 1 or 2 C lower temps, but the difference was negligible considering how much more open cool air it had access to..? That makes me think applying some new paste will help some and maybe it's not just the case, but every video I look at with this model seems to imply it has quite a bit better cooling than I'm experiencing, and definitely some more headroom for boosting up. Mostly I'm worried about longevity of the fans here, but all around better performance is nice too! What are your thoughts? ---------------------- P.S. - It looks like in MSI Afterburner than lowering voltage is also tied directly to clock speed, but I'm not used to this, especially coming from AMD not that long ago. Is that just how Nvidia cards in general are? P.P.S. - This also has nothing to do with anything, but Magix Vegas is terrible at using this thing, and rendering with NVENC (if it's even properly doing this) is giving extremely lackluster performance. Is that expected? Is there ever any possibility that programs can render as fast as these cards can say, record at high resolution? Or will rendering always be slower? Seems like Vegas is partly using CPU, QSV as well as NVENC when rendering "with NVENC". On the other hand, rendering with QSV is giving slightly better performance (about 35FPS for 4K60 outputs) but seems to be also using full CPU, QSV (part of it anyway), as well as some "3D" and "NVDEC" on the Nvidia card. Actually, I had this same issue with a GTX 1060, but when I was using an RX 480 I never really checked in depth because 1080p performance on all of these is better and that's what I was exporting as, so it never mattered..? But my old CPU AFAIK didn't have QSV anyway and didn't seem to want to use so much CPU either when rendering using AMD VCE, so I'm kind of at a loss. I was figuring a 2000 series (certainly a 3000?) would be able to render out 4K60 in real time, but like I said above, I just might be misunderstanding the difference between just screen recording, rather than exporting video like that...

Oh for sure, that wasn't exactly what I was getting at, but you're definitely right... Although I've heard they're not too bad, so as long as it's not throttling, it shouldn't be too much of a problem. And I always undervolt as aggressively as I can and underclock a bit as well..

So I've been a long-time AMD user, but based on my research on things like NVENC and also DLSS capabilities for situations where maybe even FSR 1.0 won't be available, AND because a couple programs I use can actually take advantage of Tensor cores... I've decided to go with Nvidia for the time being. My original choice was definitely going to be a 3060 Ti, but the way the market has been, I wondered "Why not step down to a 3060 for significant savings?" But now I've walked it back even more and figured "Okay, if I go with a much cheaper 2060 Super instead of a 3060, I'm paying like 2/3 the price for ~90% of the performance". The problem is I haven't been able to snag a nice deal on a 2060 Super. I was trying to see if I could grab one up for like $225 give or take, and that might be possible soon, but they're generally seeming to be quite a bit more than that. Probably more like $250-ish out the door it would seem. I happened to just luck into a second chance offer for a 2070 Super at $275 which seems to meet or slightly exceed a 3060, but it's a Founders Edition and I'm seeing other models that I presume will have better cooling generally for like $10-15 more, but THEN we're approaching 3060 prices that'll likely have a lot less mileage on them anyway. Well... Okay, there seem to be some sketchy listings for sold 3060's for really cheap, but generally speaking, they're actually quite a bit more than a $275 2070 Super... Do you guys think that's worthwhile? Should I maybe just hold out for a sick deal on a 2060 Super, or hell, even a 3060 to get closer to my price target if they creep down enough? Kind of torn on this one. If I didn't have a use case for RTX card features, I'd probably have just jumped on an RX 6600 for similar price, but again, you end up with benefits of less mileage on the card, and if you spend a little more and go new, at least you're getting a warranty, although I guess some cards' warranties transfers but yeah... What are your guys' thoughts? I've been holding out for something new for so long. Current GPU is a 1060 6GB (formerly an RX 480 8GB), and 3060 performance is a REALLY nice uplift over this thing... Not as impressive looking at the 2060 Super. I guess maybe 60%+? Man, it's tough.

So I was running a Westmere system (dual Xeon X5675's) and now on i7 8700 where I want to clone my old drive over to the new NVMe drive. I booted into the old drive through USB (on the new system) in order to clone to the installed NVMe drive. I didn't have any other way to do it, since I don't have a way to connect the NVMe drive to the old system, so this was the next best I could think of..? I'm using Macrium Reflect and I've done this a bunch of times in the past, but something isn't working quite right, probably because of legacy boot stuff that I don't properly understand. What I'm seeing in Macrium Reflect is... Well, if I try to clone to the new drive, it just fails. But the other thing I notice is a bunch of other "drives" with like... 1 million TB of space and a bunch of partitions and it's really weird and I don't recall ever seeing this before. Not sure if they're related to the other USB drives I attach to the system normally but they don't APPEAR to be. They include a 4TB USB HDD that I use for various things like games, recordings etc. As well as a couple smaller drives for misc storage... Below are the two proper drives I'm obviously trying to work with: And here you have this weird crazy stuff showing up: I can't seem to actually do anything to them though. I'm not sure if this is some issue between MBR and GPT stuff, which like I said, I don't know enough to fully understand or navigate here... But I have a feeling these weird partitions have something to do with failing to clone the drive. I might just be confusing the issue and they could be related to the other drives I normally connect, so I'm not sure. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated! Thank you!

VERY useful, thanks! Yeah, I think it's fair to say I'm overestimating value in some areas, but underestimating GPU value... Although then if I figure $200 for GPU (and actually, I see Dell's 1060's going even for over $200), I could be paying more like $350 out the door for the other parts... But then even if I pay a little more for main components, they're also new... But then the above prices also discount case and PSU, although I have a spare so that may not even matter... It's really a tough balance lol, mostly because I'm strapped for cash at the moment. Crap, this is tough.. Although actually, I do use optical drive more than a lot of people still, and a built in card reader is nice as well, which I didn't put a ton of consideration into before, which certainly count as added value here... I feel like the more I think about it, maybe I should just go with it for simplicity..?

I'm not 100% sure if you understood the point of the post tbh. I'm long-winded to be fair... Configuring the HP prebuilt to be comparable to the Dell system as far as core count, SSD, RAM etc... It'd be priced at basically $900. Even if I sold the included GPU that I wouldn't need (let's say an additional $20 for the 1650 super for total of $920), I'd recoup like $200 for a total out the door price of about $720. If I sell the included 1060 in this prebuilt, I'm basically paying $400, even slightly less out of pocket for a comparable system. So I'm not really seeing the comparison here, unless I'm missing something obvious.

TLDR: Have a shot at an i7 8700 system that is probably worth much more than I'm paying with the only MAIN drawbacks basically being PCIe 3.0 (but doesn't seem to be as bad as I originally thought), and that it's a prebuilt, but PSU can be easily upgrade, I checked. Total value something like $750+, but basically costing me $400 after I sell the included GTX 1060 6GB... Should I worry a whole lot about the 8700? Primary purposes are gaming and video editing etc and almost exclusively using GPU for encoding, but might mess with Intel QSV... I don't think there's anything too big holding back, but anything I could be missing is super helpful! Thanks! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Hey gang, could use a quick eyeballing of a PC I just won on Ebay. After everything, $550. Prebuilt Dell (but compatible with other PSU's etc, so not much problem generally for me..) but let's say I'd be paying $50+ on the cheap for a small PSU. - i7 8700 (non-K), (I'll price it as a Ryzen 3600, so $150, but these do go for more) - A 3600 or similar is where I was prob gonna' go anyway. - 32GB RAM (I figure ~$150) - 500GB NVMe SSD (figure $50+?) - GTX 1060 6GB (don't need it, but $150 considering falling prices..?) - Motherboard (solid $100?, ballpark? I know, it's not going to be an epic premium motherboard, but whatever.) - Case (I'm picky, so I'd probably be spending $100+ on a case, but this looks pretty sharp!) I mean, if you subtract the 1060 6GB and figure on $150, it's basically ~$400. Actually pricing out the components if building myself, this seems like a solid value, I'd be spending a solid $750+. And I know there are other factors, but I'd actually say the 8700 would be better for me than an R5 3600 because of something like Intel QSV. I do have an extra PSU fit for something like a 3060Ti (or more, but haven't been able to get my hands on one, yet.) The highest I'd go with RTX 4000 is a 4060Ti, or Radeon equivalent at 1440p-ish. Barring any issue with PSU I'd have to dink with.. I was thinking PCIe 3.0 would hold me back, but I saw a very interesting post at Tech Powerup showing very little bottlenecking of an RTX 3080 even on PCIe 2.0, which is staggering. I also doubt I'd notice slower NVMe SSD speeds, generally speaking... Overall, I'm not sure I see a ton of downside here to use this as my main rig for a couple years at this point. My current rig is... Very old, I'll say that. Lots of cores, but SO lacking modern features. It technically does do everything I need, but slowly. Not snappy for sure, and at this point, I'm tired of "bottlenecking" my work flow, whether it be with video editing, lack of Intel QSV (which would be a nice addition), yes it's that old LMAO (Westmere). Am I missing anything? This FEELS overall like a no-brainer. Thanks! P.S., I put this in CPU, Motherboards, Memory section mostly because CPU is probably my biggest question here, other than overall value.

Probably cable management more than anything... To the point where I've done some pretty sloppy jobs just to have things "good enough" and not too obstructed and just called it good. I'm almost ashamed to post a pic of my most disgusting management. Actually, my original PSU had died at the time. I left it in and left the wires all over, and then just used a new one externally and plugged everything in. So I had multiple tentacles of wires overflowing out of the case LMAO

Gotcha... Had to look up SMR, but that rings a bell. Lots of awesome info, thank you! I was mostly using this particular drive in a pinch, but I wanted to be sure I got drives that were good enough for my uses where I could just buy several and not worry too much. It was more all around cost, speed, etc, rather than speed being absolutely the most critical. It seems like the aforementioned drives might be the ticket for what I need.

Great suggestions, thanks! Yeah, those look like the kind of drives I'm looking for. I messed around with turning on write caching... So "Better performance" gave me ~250 MB/s burst but with those low sustained speeds... Checking "Write Caching" gives me the same high burst speed and then about 30 MB/s average, with some spikes to 40+, and also some dips down to those low sustained speeds I mentioned, like 1-2 MB/s... And then checking "Turn off write cache buffer flushing" once again gives the high burst, then a sustained 30 MB/s+ without those weird dips. Does that sound about right? My WD MyBook external 4TB through the same USB 3.0 expansion card is giving me more like ~100 MB/s sustained speed give or take, no weird drops and that's with the quick removal option. Also gives an incredibly quick burst speed. The 2.5" is a "Seagate Mobile 2TB" and I assume it's a combination of it being 5400RPM (I assume the MyBook, whatever is in there, is in fact running at 7200RPM because of external power)? But at face value, it seems like the Seagate 2.5" should be doing better. Could cache for example, make the difference between 30 MB/s+, vs ~100MB/s? Even then, I'm not getting those weird slowdowns. Maybe the Seagate 2.5" is just on its last legs. I could swear I got it refurbed a couple years ago and have been using it on my Xbox One X until I needed it in a pinch the last number of days.

Awesome, that's super helpful, thank you! Um... If I were to put several of these on a dedicated machine w/ shared folders over the network, should I then be looking more at WD Red, Seagate Ironwolf NAS, etc? I'd only be moving files over the network to them, not recording directly to them over network or anything, which sounds like a bad idea, but I'm no expert...

Very cool... Love to see stuff like that! I remember, especially back in the day, I would almost NEVER shut off my Xbox 360 if I was on a GTA V binge, just to avoid the damn loading screen.

Hey gang. I'm wondering what drives you'd recommend as a "set and forget" option, preferably 4TB+ that are great for both price and performance, for very large video files? Also, I was eyeing a Sabrent USB 3.0 dock as well. Any good? Should I just stick with something in the WD Blue-type class? Upgrade to Blacks? As far as I know, cache is king, but I also notice a lot of slowdown for large files after a while. I've seen this explained a number of different ways, but something about write buffer or something? I'll have like a 50GB file and it'll transfer at 30-40 MB/s on a particular 2.5" 2TB HDD with one of those Ebay dongles... But then it'll plummet to like 1-2 MB/s until I guess the next file is coming through. Any way to alleviate this? Is it faster HDD's (minimum 7000 RPM) with more cache that I'm looking for, or some other problem, or a combination of several things I can change? I'm actually looking to revamp my entire setup. I'm using an old dual Xeon X5675 and installed a USB 3.0 expansion card and a lot of this is transferring that way, between multiple drives connected to it. Most things are fine, but several minutes / minute of 4K30 video is going to really slow down the whole production pipeline and that's a real problem. I'm almost contemplating using my old T440s to render stuff on the side just not to hog my main rig for so long while recording and whatever else I'm doing, not to mention this dual Xeon setup ain't that efficient. Ideally, I'd like to be doing HEVC for smaller files and maybe as good as 1:1 per minute of video, but even 2:1 with 4K HEVC stuff would be acceptable if only for more efficient file sizes and I wouldn't have to buy like 97 HDD's or constantly just delete things. I could, but I'd like to be able to archive things more properly... I'm eyeing maybe a 3700X w/ 32GB RAM, a good size NVMe drive, all that good stuff. Does that sound like it's going to give me what I need?

To be honest, I'm a total layman with this stuff under the hood, but from the little I know, ARM processors are absolutely insane... You'd basically have what, mid to high-end x86 desktop performance in a 15W TDP laptop? Far as I know, smartphones are not far from a decent desktop just processing-wise. I do wonder how well they scale up to using more power, higher frequencies etc. Like, would a 100W ARM processor with an insane amount of processing power be feasible, or is there any kind of limitation? I guess you could add a metric shit-ton of cores, but surely you're going to hit a clock speed limit just due to the silicon? I'm pretty interested to see where this goes though. If they're going to do it, then others will have to make moves too. What would it look like for everything on the desktop we're currently using? Could an ARM port of Windows use emulation to run pretty much any x86 programs?

I ended up pulling the trigger on a Thinkpad T440s (w/ i7-4600u and 8GB RAM) I found for a good price and put in a Crucial BX500 2.5" SSD (240 GB). IIRC, this laptop does actually have an M.2 slot (I think) but I had the BX500 on hand for another project I didn't bother with. Problem is, it feels quite slow. All the benchmarks I'm looking up are showing significantly better numbers than my drive in both CrystalDiskMark and AS SSD Benchmark. Actually, the benchmarks I had taken when I first got the drive (basically empty, after new Windows 10 install), The numbers seemed to be where they were supposed to. For AS SSD Benchmark - Now at about 56% full (installed a number of games to dink around with for no reason), 4K 64Thrd is down to like 1/3 of where it was, and write latency has tripled! Is this normal? I know a fuller drive doesn't perform as well, but that seems like a massive performance disparity. For CrystalDiskMark, things actually look fairly good, mostly where I'm seeing the numbers from what I'm looking up. But I dunno, something about it just seems kind of sluggish and I don't know why that is. Even my old Dell i3-4010u with some an ADATA SU630 felt as fast or faster than this thing. Chrome also acts weird and I get weird video freezes and audio glitches, would could totally be a driver thing. I mean overall I like this laptop. It COULD be the case that because I have all the Intel power saving stuff enabled in the power options but I've tried all of these things both plugged in and unplugged. What are your guys' thoughts on this? My desktop is a dual X5675 w/ 24GB RAM and an RX480 and this thing generally feels blazing fast. I figured despite only 2 cores 4 threads, the T440s would be pretty damn snappy since it's what, three generations later? I wonder. Should I pull the trigger on a cheap NVMe drive? IIRC, this laptop only has two lanes for it (maybe a Haswell thing?) but I wonder if it's worth going that route.

Bump.

Thank you!

Wow, those numbers are impressive! Really efficient, that's crazy. I really need to pick up a 5700XT once I update my setup. Are you able to check your sustained clock speeds in Radeon Settings or whatever other program?

Hey LTT gang. I'm looking to get a good amount of info on the PPD you're getting with assorted hardware. CPU, GPU, settings on them and so on. My experience with my RX 480 8GB (got rid of many others I had, so no chance of testing with multiple cards) is that I'm seeing about 425,000 PPD stock (it's a Sapphire Nitro). After lowering power limit 40%, I was doing about 365,000. After just a bit of tweaking (raising memory clock to about 1900 or more while leaving the -40% power limit) is giving me an amazing 390,000+ PPD with only about 82 watts of power usage. I'll probably fiddle with things a bit more to see if I can get even more points per watt but I'm already impressed with this thing. In fact, I did even better. Small undervolts along with the aforementioned settings are giving me right on the edge of 400,000. CPU results have been interesting. I'm using dual Xeon X5675's (12 cores, 24 threads total) and I'm more or less seeing the same numbers with either 12, or all 24 threads folding. I wonder if maybe it's cache-related or something like that? Similar results on my laptop (i7-4600U). One thread is giving me well over 5,000 PPD. Two is giving well over 8,000. Three and four shows absolutely no increase. If anything, all four might be showing a decrease. But that's not too crazy considering it's a 15W TDP processor. I'm really curious what numbers others are seeing and would love to collect a lot of that info for the last two gens of both AMD and Nvidia cards (and your settings and PPD with different settings you've tried), along with any CPU's you might be running, how many cores/threads and so on. I'm mostly just trying to collect this information for my own curiosity more than anything. Like, literally any hardware you've tried to fold on would be awesome to know about! Older stuff included. I just happen to predict that the older stuff, maybe R9 200 series and prior HD 7000 series are probably not as attractive, maybe with the exception of the 290 and 390. But I'm rambling. Thanks guys!

Hey gang. Anyone have a big list of PPD for different cards? Hopefully from the last gen or two of hardware from both AMD and Nvidia? But any of that info would help me out, even if it's a little incomplete.

Seeing awesome answers here! I think it comes down to this: With Ryzen in particular, if you're using something like 2133 RAM, you're gimping your system for quite literally no reason. I believe after ~3200MHz, the performance increase is close to zero and cost is too high. But for a new system, it seems that 3200 is a nice place to just "set and forget" for best overall performance increase, at least from the data I've seen! I think Tech Deals did a really good comparison from what I remember.

... I can't even get my 1 GPU and two CPU's to receive work and fold and send and be credited correctly... "How dare you!?"