The world of computer hardware and software is vast and complex, with numerous tools and utilities available to enhance performance and troubleshoot issues. In this article, we'll delve into some of the most popular and effective software utilities for managing graphics cards, overclocking processors, and more.

One such utility that stands out is RivaTuner, which has been a stalwart in the gaming community for years. This powerful tool allows users to monitor various statistics such as frame rate, CPU frequency, and GPU frequency, among others. What's impressive about RivaTuner is its ability to hook into other software, including Hardware Info, to provide an accurate picture of system performance. The utility also boasts a wide range of customization options, allowing users to personalize the display of their statistics and change the color scheme, size, and layout to suit their preferences.

Another popular utility that warrants mention is Afterburner. This software has been optimized by MSI, a manufacturer known for producing high-performance graphics cards for both AMD and NVIDIA platforms. As such, Afterburner offers seamless support for MSI-branded graphics cards, allowing users to easily monitor and adjust settings such as GPU clock speed and fan speed. While it may not offer all the features of more advanced overclocking tools, Afterburner is a reliable and user-friendly option that gets the job done.

One notable limitation of Afterburner is its compatibility with non-MSI graphics cards. While users can still utilize the software to adjust settings like GPU clock speed and fan speed, they may find that some features are missing or not optimized for their specific card model. In such cases, using a dedicated overclocking tool from the manufacturer (e.g., NVIDIA's Precision X) may be a better option, as these tools often include proprietary features and plugins tailored to specific card models.

In recent years, other manufacturers have entered the market with their own overclocking utilities. For example, ASUS has developed GPU Tweak, while Gigabyte offers its own utility with the same name. Meanwhile, Zotac and Galax also offer software solutions for managing graphics cards and adjusting settings. While these tools are often effective in their own right, they may not quite match the polish and feature set of Afterburner or RivaTuner.

For users seeking a robust and user-friendly overclocking experience, MSI's Afterburner remains one of the top choices. The software has been refined over the years to offer an intuitive interface that makes it easy to navigate even for novice users. Moreover, its compatibility with MSI-branded graphics cards ensures seamless support, making it an excellent option for those looking to optimize their system performance.

Interestingly, some users have discovered that holding the Shift key while selecting "Restart" in the Windows shutdown menu can prompt a full system shutdown instead of just putting the computer into hibernation or standby mode. This subtle feature is often overlooked by new users, but it's an excellent way to ensure that your computer actually shuts down properly, especially when dealing with critical updates or maintenance tasks.

As we wrap up this article, I'd like to mention one more tip that has received considerable attention from our viewers: using the "Troubleshoot" option in Windows settings. By accessing this menu and then clicking on "System Info," users can gain access to a range of useful information about their system, including details about their UEFI firmware version, display driver version, and even diagnostic information for potential hardware issues.

In conclusion, the world of computer software utilities is vast and constantly evolving. From RivaTuner to Afterburner, there are numerous tools available to help users optimize performance, troubleshoot issues, and customize their system setup. Whether you're a seasoned enthusiast or just starting out, there's always something new to explore in this space.

Lastly, I'd like to remind our viewers about an article we published last month called "The Best Way to Access Your UEFI." While it didn't receive the views we had hoped for at first, it has since gained traction and received several comments from users who appreciated the tips and advice presented within. We're glad that YouTube took notice of this video and decided to promote it, as it's helped us reach a wider audience.

If you're interested in checking out our UEFI access article, please feel free to visit our channel page or head over to the link provided in our description box below. As always, we appreciate your feedback and support, and we'll see you in the next video!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey guys this is a probing paul video my monthly q a and i'm going to get to that in a second but i wanted to start with a quick note about some of the stuff that's gone on over the weekend with the rtx 3090 two-way sli overclocking excellent i buy power wanted to make an affordable custom liquid-cooled desktop pc with hardline tubing three things allowed them to do it in the now available element cl first a custom front distribution plate holds the pump and reservoirs for standardized tube routing second sliding mechanisms built into the front panel and cpu block allow the element cl to support different motherboard and gpu layouts and third specialized push to connect fittings save time during assembly if you want i buy power to build you a customized elementcl gaming pc click the sponsor link in the video description first off i wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who's been watching and engaging with this little bit of friendly competition because it's been a lot of fun and then i wanted to say what an honor it is to accept uh the first place prize in the first round of this competition that being the air cooled competition jay posted his video with his air cooling results this morning and it seems like if you're looking at just the air cooled results i'm on top i'm going to credit my win with the structural support and all the engineering and design that went into my cardboard shroud here as well as of course the jankiness of the setup because as we all know a janky setup is going to produce better results even jay was forced to go with a bit of jank in his setup in order to get things going but i am really happy to say that uh jay i gave him a little bit of a hard time in this first round and he bounced around between a few different test beds and you can probably see jay eventually did go with some ac assisted cooling and the shroud which he also bedecked with rip gn and ripped paul appreciate that so my initial top score was 27 402 and as we can see jay ended his video with him beating me with a score of two seven four thirty one however that was not the end of the story you see the very night he posted this score of 27 431 beating me out i went and followed up and i posted a score of 27 453 a small margin of error perhaps but a win nonetheless and that got me back into second place i also want to point out that this is all air cooling here uh this tech lab result is with ln2 and kingpin of course he's using his crazy ln2 setup that he has as well but believe it or not i was not even finished uh i was actually sandbagging a bit i had a score of 27 595 that i did not upload and i was kind of hoping jay was going to come back and do a little bit more air cooling and maybe beat me by 50 or 100 points and then i can immediately have answered back with this however it seems that jay has switched over to water cooling so he is now in second place with a really really nice score of 28 773 and make no mistake uh he absolutely deserves this number two spot there however i do want to point out once again that these scores up here are ln2 and then jay is using a setup with water-cooled evga cards although i don't know the other details surrounding that because he hasn't posted a video on that and of course that's to be expected jay does a fair amount of water cooling for round one with air cooling with ac assistance though i do believe 27 595 would be the score to beat so i challenge anyone to beat that without removing the cooling solutions from your cards but i don't know if fourth place is going to cut it for me so i'm going to do a little bit more testing with these cards this week i will make a video on it i might succeed i might fail who knows i do not have water blocks for these so i'm gonna have to figure something out but my main goal really is just to have some fun with it so that's what i'm gonna try to do and i'll have more content on this coming up this following week uh whether i succeed or whether i fail for now though back to your regularly scheduled probing poll so if you're not familiar with the series it's a pretty standard q a answer tech questions for the most part but random stuff as well and all the questions from this month were taken from last month's probing paul in the comments section so leave me a comment down there if you want me to answer it next month here's a look back through past probing paul's and uh i'm kind of i feel like i want to zoom in enhance to get like all the way down that tunnel we'll see back to the first one but it's getting further and further away now sometimes i make other statements at this point in the video but uh don't have much to add for today so let's get right into the questions joselino junior serrano joselito i'm sorry i don't know how to pronounce that but anyway thank you for your question good day paul i'm just wondering does thermal paste still inside the container have an expiration date and if it does is there a huge temperature difference between before and after it expires just bought thermal paste but still haven't used them all sorry if this question's already been asked i don't think it has but i feel like thermal paste is one of those things a lot of people get concerned about because they're not sure about it especially for someone who hasn't gone through and like assembled the cpu cooler on the cpu or who's never like disassembled a graphics card if the thermal paste goes bad people get a little bit sketchy about doing that disassembly and re-application process that said once you sort of try it out it's really not too difficult but i think i'm getting ahead of myself because you asked about thermal paste that's still in the little container and i will admit i've got this baggie of thermal pastes that i've collected over time for quite some time i've got some pretty sketchy stuff in here too like this thermaltake tube that i feel like has been in here since i was still back at newegg so the manufacturer response that you will get if you ask them is that thermal paste has about a three to five year life span and that's a generic answer for a question that has lots of potential nuance to it because there's lots of different mixtures that go into thermal paste they're not all the same a lot of them have different materials that are used in them but most of them like this mx4 compound that arctic makes that i use pretty often will come in like a tube-like syringe like this so as long as you're using it properly you should get a fair amount of life out of it because they will pretty much always have some sort of cap so make sure to put the cap back on after you're done with it if you squeeze paste out of the tube don't like pull the plunger back out because that will introduce air to it you want to not expose it to air but once you've used what you need and recapped it it's best to store it kind of like you would a fine wine put it in a bag keep it out of sunlight you don't want light hitting it if you can avoid it and keep it in a cool dry place in particular for storage it's best to keep it from getting really really hot so this baggie that has been in my garage for a long time especially over the summer it has gotten very hot different times i wouldn't necessarily trust but there is a real world test you can do with thermal paste to see if it's still viable or not it should have a smooth consistency and if you squeeze some out of the tube it shouldn't look like it's gunked up or separated in particular if it is you should toss it and get some new thermal paste if it's still squeezing out normally and the consistency still seems appropriate to you then you should be okay to still use it if you're worried about thermal paste that's already installed on something like a graphics card for example there will pretty much always be pace between a cpu and the cooler or between the actual gpu itself on a graphics card and the cooler and that can dry out over time as well and that's the main thing that causes thermal paste to fail is it drying out so for that i would just monitor temperatures and if you notice temperatures increasing significantly over time and if you have a piece of hardware that's been in use for three to five years or more then it's worth considering that the thermal paste might have started to fail or might have started to dry out and in that case you pretty much don't have any choice but to disassemble the thing clean the thermal paste and replace it but if you like tinkering with pcs then that's kind of a fun task to do anyway but hopefully that answer helps you out and thank you very much for the question next question is from claymore who asks do the 3080 founders edition fans spin at idle i live in a dusty environment and this is very important to me i am happy to report that none of the rtx 3080s or the 1390 that i've tested so far have fans that spin at idle as long as the gpu temperature is low enough the fans do not spin and it's actually something that i intended to bring up in my review but it's just something that got kind of lost in the mix as i feel like the rtx 3080s in particular are kind of aggressive about keeping the frequencies down thus keeping the temperatures down when you're not doing 3d rendering so anytime that you're just showing 2d stuff on the screen and that includes a few alt tab out of a game so it's not doing the 3d rendering there anymore i saw the gpu frequency drop to 210 megahertz and it would just sit there wouldn't change at all no matter what you would do unless you would load up a game again in that states all of the gpus including the founders edition just don't spin their fans at all so they don't make any noise at all and a side benefit for you if you live in a dusty environment and you're concerned about dust buildup over time and minimizing that or if like me you have like a home theater pc that doesn't have a case or enclosure around it and you just want to minimize the dust build up over time going fanless is a good option and these are essentially fanless when the fans aren't running technically saying fanless is probably a bit of a stretch there but the point is the fans don't spin so uh answer to your question is no no they don't spin at idle next question is from chris macarthur hey paul love the channel thank you chris i was wondering if you have a tv with one hdmi variable refresh rate port so that would be freesync or g-sync can you use an xbox and a computer with an amd gpu in this case with it with an hdmi switch do the switches support variable refresh rate do you think nvidia will support variable refresh rate over hdmi that last question i can answer definitively yes they already do and in fact there's a fair amount of lg tvs that already support nvidia g-sync over hdmi and in particular if you're looking for hdmi 2.1 support i did a video on the lg c10 65-inch tv a month or two ago so check that out if you want a little bit more to answer the question though i did a little bit of searching and i was not able to find any hdmi switches that seem to indicate that they support variable refresh rate in particular if you're looking for higher refresh rate in general it's difficult to find an hdmi switch that specifically says it supports that wendell at level one tx has actually developed i believe a displayport 1.2 kvm switch that i believe does go up to 144hz but if you're specifically talking about gaming and you want to get a tv that's one of the newer tvs that supports variable refresh rate and you have a pc that you want to plug into it and you have an xbox or another console that you want to plug into it and both of those have variable refresh rate options that you want to take advantage of i would absolutely make sure that your tv has multiple inputs that support variable refresh rate because that's going to be the best solution for you is a direct cable going from your graphics card or your game console to the tv even if there was an hdmi switch that did support variable refresh rate which i'm almost positive that there is not right now it would introduce some sort of lag or latency and if you're gaming you really want to minimize and reduce that or get rid of it as much as possible so adding another device between your source and the tv would add some amount of additional latency and and you just don't want that so if you have multiple devices that need to connect to a single tv and they both need variable refresh rate support i would be absolutely sure that when you're buying that tv it has multiple inputs that support variable refresh rate and i believe speaking specifically about the tv i recently reviewed in the lg c10 that has multiple hdmi 2.1 inputs and i believe any of those will support g-sync here's sort of a follow-up question to that last one from delcio gorjev hey paul long therm fan and i love your work i'm also thermally in love with you friend i have no idea what i'm saying i don't know what a long-term fan is but uh i appreciate you nonetheless i want to ask you will with the new hdmi standard and new gpus sorry there's some funny typos in this but with the new hdmi standard and the new gpus do i need to buy a new hdmi cable or will the old one work just fine and i believe i've brought this up before but i'm going to mention it again for anyone who is managing to get their hands on an rtx 30 series graphics card and does want that full hdmi 2.1 experience with 4k 120 hertz and hdr you need an hdmi 2.1 cable uh one of the old hdmi 1.4 or 2.0 b cables or whatever will not work well it'll work but it won't work for the updated standard with the increased bandwidth to 48 gigabits per second fortunately those are already available on sites like amazon and i just did a search here i'm not vouching for these products by the way but it looks like you can find hdmi 2.1 cables for around 20 to 25 dollars not too bad i'd make sure that the product you're buying actually says hdmi 2.1 on it because there is a certification process by the hdmi triumvirate or whatever they're called and they should all uh list this support 48 gigabits per second which is the raw bandwidth for hdmi 2.1 uh and by default with those specs you should also get support for everything else like erc and vrr and everything but i will post a link to that in the description if you guys are interested next question from sylvia alcantara paul sylvia have you asked the question before your name sounds familiar anyway uh paul i have a question whatever happened to the x299 platform thank you for all your videos silvio a good question and uh you know for anyone who follows the high-end desktop space it might seem like the x299 has just sort of evaporated and gone away over the past few years and it kind of has but it is still around it is still intel's high-end desktop platform they haven't replaced it with anything except maybe uh the platform that you can run an intel xeon w175x processor on because this is sort of their top consumer slash prosumer processor with 28 cores and everything this is what they're putting up against threadripper but these don't work with x299 which is uh socket lga 2066 these are socked lga 3647 so there's a limited number of motherboards that work with these well first off in 2017 there was kind of an amd kill shot that came out of nowhere from it which is the launch of the original threadripper which was in august of 2017 about three years ago that one blew a lot of people away because ryzen was expected a lot of people saw ryzen coming in the refreshed desktop platform and everything and it took i'd say you know a good year before that really started to gain traction and then things improved with the 2000 series ryzen and everything but then suddenly as ryzen was coming out they're like oh and we also have this new high-end desktop platform how about that and that used the x399 chipset and the original threadripper socket and right out of the gate there they had the 1950x which was a 16 core 32 thread processor which really outperformed intel's cpus especially if you're looking at the price comparisons to them because intel's top cpu at the time i believe was still the two thousand dollar ten core and basically that first generation of threadripper and then followed up by a second generation and now they're in third generation threadripper kind of blew intel's offerings out of the water in the high-end desktop space so you had some really significant competition come in and i think amd was able to keep that secret enough that it kind of caught intel off guard at the same time intel has had well-documented issues with their 10 nanometer process and making upgrades there so that's been so slow coming so because of that all their stuff is still based on 14 nanometers so there really hasn't been much change in the cpus available for x299 or anything that would warrant a switch to a new platform finally x299 and the high-end desktop cpus that go along with it really got squeezed i'd say from both sides on the one hand by stuff like the 3175x which came out a little bit later but intel realized i think that they weren't going to be able to compete with amd with the lga 2066 socket so they had to go to something bigger that's what allowed them to get an actual 28 core sku launched but high in desktop in the past has always been like oh that's the top end that's the best so this is now the best so if people are like well what's the best intel can offer you don't talk about x299 anymore you talk about lga 3647. then at the bottom end for like the more kind of entry-level x299 stuff and remember on that platform they had like a quad-core cpu with the 70 whatever this stupid cpu was called it was a dumb cpu but then you had amd coming out with eight core and then 12 core and then 16 core processors so suddenly even those relatively higher core counts that you did still have available on x299 we're being supplanted by amd's offerings that cost a lot less that have motherboards that you could get for a lot less and these really high core and thread count cpus were just really competitive with x299 stuff and it sort of became an irrelevant platform i think it's kind of sad because i had a few really nice x299 systems over the year that have kind of lost a little bit of their luster but that's that's my assessment for why you don't really hear about x299 anymore just a few more questions this one from toonami 20. uh what motherboard and ryzen processor would you recommend for high-end streaming and video editing build there is no price listed here that would be an important third factor you put ryzen in here so i don't think you're going for a high-end desktop platform so my answer for you would be the 3900x which you can get for as little as 430 dollars right now and i would pair this with a nice x570 motherboard that said we are expecting new processors probably within the next month in fact within about a week of this video going live amd's making some announcements so i am telling you my answer for right now but i would absolutely wait at least for that week to go by so you can see what comes out and if these prices change and if you might be able to get more bang for your buck once the new stuff launches the rumor is that there is going to be a 50 900 x which will also be a 12 core so i would keep my eye on that one in particular also rumored is 10 core and 8 core varieties with the new zen 3 micro architecture so be patient for now but as far as a motherboard goes i would recommend an x570 motherboard and you can find solid options there for about 200 to 250 dollars i was going to bring up the like threadripper stuff and 303 stuff but honestly that gets really expensive really fast and since you specifically said ryzen then i then that's why i stuck with the desktop stuff that said the reason i'm recommending uh x570 is because you get full pci express gen4 support not only from all the pcie lanes going to your expansion slots but also through the chipset and if you're doing video editing or a lot of capture storage is going to be a concern for you you're probably going to want a lot of it you're probably going to want to have expansion capabilities so when it comes to m.2 slots and connection for high-speed nvme drives i think x570 is a little bit better suited for that again the only reason i might recommend looking at threadripper it's a it's a big step up in your initial cost but if you really want to do a crazy storage configuration threadripper is the way to go because you have 64 pci expression four lanes instead of 20 plus four so that's a lot more and you can connect a lot more drives to that zoza torovsky asks what software do the founders edition use i always bought msi products and use afterburner software so i sort of interpreted this as what software would you use to overclock an nvidia founder's edition i'm also assuming that you're talking about the 30 series but i guess this would technically apply to any of the nvidia founders edition cards the short answer is i typically use msi afterburner as you can see from this tech quote which i'm sure is very recent afterburner is the gold standard of overclocking utilities they probably said that in like 2009 or something like that but that's okay you can download it straight from the msi website it's pretty well maintained and one of the most is it also installs riva tuner and if you've ever watched one of those videos where they're playing a game and then up in the corner they have different colored statistics for like frame rate and cpu frequency and gpu frequency and all that that's usually typically done with riva tuner riva tuner can go in and hook stats from other software like hardware info and then it can display them on screen and it's got a pretty wide range of stuff you can do as far as changing the color and size and what's displayed and everything so it's pretty full featured the other thing about afterburner is since msi manufactures both amd and nvidia cards it will work to install and manage or overclock your graphics cards whether you're using an amd radeon or an nvidia card that said if you're not using an msi graphics card but you still have you know a geforce rtx 3080 like a founder's edition or whatever the basic functions in just about any overclocking utility should work for adjusting stuff like gpu clock speed and fan speed if you have a specific card from a specific manufacturer like evga for example then using evga's precision x overclocking software might be a better option for you because that might have plug-ins for stuff that's unique to that card like uh controlling the rgb lighting for example the overclocking software that i've used the most would be afterburner followed up i think by evga's precision x although precision precision x only works for nvidia cards and there are software utilities from gigabyte that i forget what it's called asus which is called gpu tweak which i never really fell in love with zotac has one and galax has one and stuff it's just it's just msi kind of early on established after burner and they do a really good job maintaining it and stuff so that's that's the one i go for so i guess you already had the answer to your question but i've talked about it further now so so there last question is not a question these are some comments from last month's video because in last month's probing paul the comment that i got the most was i had no idea that if i tell windows 10 to shut down it does not actually shut down it goes into a deep sleep or a hibernate mode which is part of the windows rapid start function you can go into the windows settings and disable that if you want to but for most people it's not really a big deal if you actually want to do like a full shutdown and restart of your computer like going from a cold boot you can just use the restart function and that works for stuff like if you've just run through a windows update or something like that but as pointed out by joshua chesney here as well as sigurd flatten you can hold the shift button down while you click shutdown in the windows 10 shutdown menu and then it will do the full shutdown so that's an option i will use this opportunity once again to plug my video called the best way to access your virus or uefi which i have previously lamented didn't get a whole lot of views but it's actually kind of blown up and i have recent comments on it so i feel like youtube picked this up at some point and was like hey this is a useful video and people like it and it got some more recommendations so thank you for any of you who did check that out i will link it in the description because it has some other useful tips besides holding shift while you select restart if you do that it pulls up this menu and then you can click troubleshoot and then that can let you do some stuff like accessing your uefi directly on a reboot or accessing like safe mode which is which is also really useful in a lot of situations like if you need to run ddu to do a full wipe of your display drivers nice additional tip though is that uh shift plus restart is one thing shift and shutdown is another and you can force your computer to do the actual full shutdown so thank you for those comments and follow-ups and that is going to wrap it up for this video if you want a next one to check out check out that tips video there's some other tips in there that i think people found useful thank you so much for watching this video though and if you want to leave me questions once again for next month or probably just a couple weeks from now uh leave those down in the comment section below while you're down there maybe hit the thumbs up button if you enjoyed this video subscribe to my channel if you're not already and of course check out my store at paulsharbar.net where you can buy shirts mugs pint glasses and other super awesome merchandise help and support my channel and get yourself cool stuff at the same time thank you guys so much once again for watching this video we'll see you in the next one youhey guys this is a probing paul video my monthly q a and i'm going to get to that in a second but i wanted to start with a quick note about some of the stuff that's gone on over the weekend with the rtx 3090 two-way sli overclocking excellent i buy power wanted to make an affordable custom liquid-cooled desktop pc with hardline tubing three things allowed them to do it in the now available element cl first a custom front distribution plate holds the pump and reservoirs for standardized tube routing second sliding mechanisms built into the front panel and cpu block allow the element cl to support different motherboard and gpu layouts and third specialized push to connect fittings save time during assembly if you want i buy power to build you a customized elementcl gaming pc click the sponsor link in the video description first off i wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone who's been watching and engaging with this little bit of friendly competition because it's been a lot of fun and then i wanted to say what an honor it is to accept uh the first place prize in the first round of this competition that being the air cooled competition jay posted his video with his air cooling results this morning and it seems like if you're looking at just the air cooled results i'm on top i'm going to credit my win with the structural support and all the engineering and design that went into my cardboard shroud here as well as of course the jankiness of the setup because as we all know a janky setup is going to produce better results even jay was forced to go with a bit of jank in his setup in order to get things going but i am really happy to say that uh jay i gave him a little bit of a hard time in this first round and he bounced around between a few different test beds and you can probably see jay eventually did go with some ac assisted cooling and the shroud which he also bedecked with rip gn and ripped paul appreciate that so my initial top score was 27 402 and as we can see jay ended his video with him beating me with a score of two seven four thirty one however that was not the end of the story you see the very night he posted this score of 27 431 beating me out i went and followed up and i posted a score of 27 453 a small margin of error perhaps but a win nonetheless and that got me back into second place i also want to point out that this is all air cooling here uh this tech lab result is with ln2 and kingpin of course he's using his crazy ln2 setup that he has as well but believe it or not i was not even finished uh i was actually sandbagging a bit i had a score of 27 595 that i did not upload and i was kind of hoping jay was going to come back and do a little bit more air cooling and maybe beat me by 50 or 100 points and then i can immediately have answered back with this however it seems that jay has switched over to water cooling so he is now in second place with a really really nice score of 28 773 and make no mistake uh he absolutely deserves this number two spot there however i do want to point out once again that these scores up here are ln2 and then jay is using a setup with water-cooled evga cards although i don't know the other details surrounding that because he hasn't posted a video on that and of course that's to be expected jay does a fair amount of water cooling for round one with air cooling with ac assistance though i do believe 27 595 would be the score to beat so i challenge anyone to beat that without removing the cooling solutions from your cards but i don't know if fourth place is going to cut it for me so i'm going to do a little bit more testing with these cards this week i will make a video on it i might succeed i might fail who knows i do not have water blocks for these so i'm gonna have to figure something out but my main goal really is just to have some fun with it so that's what i'm gonna try to do and i'll have more content on this coming up this following week uh whether i succeed or whether i fail for now though back to your regularly scheduled probing poll so if you're not familiar with the series it's a pretty standard q a answer tech questions for the most part but random stuff as well and all the questions from this month were taken from last month's probing paul in the comments section so leave me a comment down there if you want me to answer it next month here's a look back through past probing paul's and uh i'm kind of i feel like i want to zoom in enhance to get like all the way down that tunnel we'll see back to the first one but it's getting further and further away now sometimes i make other statements at this point in the video but uh don't have much to add for today so let's get right into the questions joselino junior serrano joselito i'm sorry i don't know how to pronounce that but anyway thank you for your question good day paul i'm just wondering does thermal paste still inside the container have an expiration date and if it does is there a huge temperature difference between before and after it expires just bought thermal paste but still haven't used them all sorry if this question's already been asked i don't think it has but i feel like thermal paste is one of those things a lot of people get concerned about because they're not sure about it especially for someone who hasn't gone through and like assembled the cpu cooler on the cpu or who's never like disassembled a graphics card if the thermal paste goes bad people get a little bit sketchy about doing that disassembly and re-application process that said once you sort of try it out it's really not too difficult but i think i'm getting ahead of myself because you asked about thermal paste that's still in the little container and i will admit i've got this baggie of thermal pastes that i've collected over time for quite some time i've got some pretty sketchy stuff in here too like this thermaltake tube that i feel like has been in here since i was still back at newegg so the manufacturer response that you will get if you ask them is that thermal paste has about a three to five year life span and that's a generic answer for a question that has lots of potential nuance to it because there's lots of different mixtures that go into thermal paste they're not all the same a lot of them have different materials that are used in them but most of them like this mx4 compound that arctic makes that i use pretty often will come in like a tube-like syringe like this so as long as you're using it properly you should get a fair amount of life out of it because they will pretty much always have some sort of cap so make sure to put the cap back on after you're done with it if you squeeze paste out of the tube don't like pull the plunger back out because that will introduce air to it you want to not expose it to air but once you've used what you need and recapped it it's best to store it kind of like you would a fine wine put it in a bag keep it out of sunlight you don't want light hitting it if you can avoid it and keep it in a cool dry place in particular for storage it's best to keep it from getting really really hot so this baggie that has been in my garage for a long time especially over the summer it has gotten very hot different times i wouldn't necessarily trust but there is a real world test you can do with thermal paste to see if it's still viable or not it should have a smooth consistency and if you squeeze some out of the tube it shouldn't look like it's gunked up or separated in particular if it is you should toss it and get some new thermal paste if it's still squeezing out normally and the consistency still seems appropriate to you then you should be okay to still use it if you're worried about thermal paste that's already installed on something like a graphics card for example there will pretty much always be pace between a cpu and the cooler or between the actual gpu itself on a graphics card and the cooler and that can dry out over time as well and that's the main thing that causes thermal paste to fail is it drying out so for that i would just monitor temperatures and if you notice temperatures increasing significantly over time and if you have a piece of hardware that's been in use for three to five years or more then it's worth considering that the thermal paste might have started to fail or might have started to dry out and in that case you pretty much don't have any choice but to disassemble the thing clean the thermal paste and replace it but if you like tinkering with pcs then that's kind of a fun task to do anyway but hopefully that answer helps you out and thank you very much for the question next question is from claymore who asks do the 3080 founders edition fans spin at idle i live in a dusty environment and this is very important to me i am happy to report that none of the rtx 3080s or the 1390 that i've tested so far have fans that spin at idle as long as the gpu temperature is low enough the fans do not spin and it's actually something that i intended to bring up in my review but it's just something that got kind of lost in the mix as i feel like the rtx 3080s in particular are kind of aggressive about keeping the frequencies down thus keeping the temperatures down when you're not doing 3d rendering so anytime that you're just showing 2d stuff on the screen and that includes a few alt tab out of a game so it's not doing the 3d rendering there anymore i saw the gpu frequency drop to 210 megahertz and it would just sit there wouldn't change at all no matter what you would do unless you would load up a game again in that states all of the gpus including the founders edition just don't spin their fans at all so they don't make any noise at all and a side benefit for you if you live in a dusty environment and you're concerned about dust buildup over time and minimizing that or if like me you have like a home theater pc that doesn't have a case or enclosure around it and you just want to minimize the dust build up over time going fanless is a good option and these are essentially fanless when the fans aren't running technically saying fanless is probably a bit of a stretch there but the point is the fans don't spin so uh answer to your question is no no they don't spin at idle next question is from chris macarthur hey paul love the channel thank you chris i was wondering if you have a tv with one hdmi variable refresh rate port so that would be freesync or g-sync can you use an xbox and a computer with an amd gpu in this case with it with an hdmi switch do the switches support variable refresh rate do you think nvidia will support variable refresh rate over hdmi that last question i can answer definitively yes they already do and in fact there's a fair amount of lg tvs that already support nvidia g-sync over hdmi and in particular if you're looking for hdmi 2.1 support i did a video on the lg c10 65-inch tv a month or two ago so check that out if you want a little bit more to answer the question though i did a little bit of searching and i was not able to find any hdmi switches that seem to indicate that they support variable refresh rate in particular if you're looking for higher refresh rate in general it's difficult to find an hdmi switch that specifically says it supports that wendell at level one tx has actually developed i believe a displayport 1.2 kvm switch that i believe does go up to 144hz but if you're specifically talking about gaming and you want to get a tv that's one of the newer tvs that supports variable refresh rate and you have a pc that you want to plug into it and you have an xbox or another console that you want to plug into it and both of those have variable refresh rate options that you want to take advantage of i would absolutely make sure that your tv has multiple inputs that support variable refresh rate because that's going to be the best solution for you is a direct cable going from your graphics card or your game console to the tv even if there was an hdmi switch that did support variable refresh rate which i'm almost positive that there is not right now it would introduce some sort of lag or latency and if you're gaming you really want to minimize and reduce that or get rid of it as much as possible so adding another device between your source and the tv would add some amount of additional latency and and you just don't want that so if you have multiple devices that need to connect to a single tv and they both need variable refresh rate support i would be absolutely sure that when you're buying that tv it has multiple inputs that support variable refresh rate and i believe speaking specifically about the tv i recently reviewed in the lg c10 that has multiple hdmi 2.1 inputs and i believe any of those will support g-sync here's sort of a follow-up question to that last one from delcio gorjev hey paul long therm fan and i love your work i'm also thermally in love with you friend i have no idea what i'm saying i don't know what a long-term fan is but uh i appreciate you nonetheless i want to ask you will with the new hdmi standard and new gpus sorry there's some funny typos in this but with the new hdmi standard and the new gpus do i need to buy a new hdmi cable or will the old one work just fine and i believe i've brought this up before but i'm going to mention it again for anyone who is managing to get their hands on an rtx 30 series graphics card and does want that full hdmi 2.1 experience with 4k 120 hertz and hdr you need an hdmi 2.1 cable uh one of the old hdmi 1.4 or 2.0 b cables or whatever will not work well it'll work but it won't work for the updated standard with the increased bandwidth to 48 gigabits per second fortunately those are already available on sites like amazon and i just did a search here i'm not vouching for these products by the way but it looks like you can find hdmi 2.1 cables for around 20 to 25 dollars not too bad i'd make sure that the product you're buying actually says hdmi 2.1 on it because there is a certification process by the hdmi triumvirate or whatever they're called and they should all uh list this support 48 gigabits per second which is the raw bandwidth for hdmi 2.1 uh and by default with those specs you should also get support for everything else like erc and vrr and everything but i will post a link to that in the description if you guys are interested next question from sylvia alcantara paul sylvia have you asked the question before your name sounds familiar anyway uh paul i have a question whatever happened to the x299 platform thank you for all your videos silvio a good question and uh you know for anyone who follows the high-end desktop space it might seem like the x299 has just sort of evaporated and gone away over the past few years and it kind of has but it is still around it is still intel's high-end desktop platform they haven't replaced it with anything except maybe uh the platform that you can run an intel xeon w175x processor on because this is sort of their top consumer slash prosumer processor with 28 cores and everything this is what they're putting up against threadripper but these don't work with x299 which is uh socket lga 2066 these are socked lga 3647 so there's a limited number of motherboards that work with these well first off in 2017 there was kind of an amd kill shot that came out of nowhere from it which is the launch of the original threadripper which was in august of 2017 about three years ago that one blew a lot of people away because ryzen was expected a lot of people saw ryzen coming in the refreshed desktop platform and everything and it took i'd say you know a good year before that really started to gain traction and then things improved with the 2000 series ryzen and everything but then suddenly as ryzen was coming out they're like oh and we also have this new high-end desktop platform how about that and that used the x399 chipset and the original threadripper socket and right out of the gate there they had the 1950x which was a 16 core 32 thread processor which really outperformed intel's cpus especially if you're looking at the price comparisons to them because intel's top cpu at the time i believe was still the two thousand dollar ten core and basically that first generation of threadripper and then followed up by a second generation and now they're in third generation threadripper kind of blew intel's offerings out of the water in the high-end desktop space so you had some really significant competition come in and i think amd was able to keep that secret enough that it kind of caught intel off guard at the same time intel has had well-documented issues with their 10 nanometer process and making upgrades there so that's been so slow coming so because of that all their stuff is still based on 14 nanometers so there really hasn't been much change in the cpus available for x299 or anything that would warrant a switch to a new platform finally x299 and the high-end desktop cpus that go along with it really got squeezed i'd say from both sides on the one hand by stuff like the 3175x which came out a little bit later but intel realized i think that they weren't going to be able to compete with amd with the lga 2066 socket so they had to go to something bigger that's what allowed them to get an actual 28 core sku launched but high in desktop in the past has always been like oh that's the top end that's the best so this is now the best so if people are like well what's the best intel can offer you don't talk about x299 anymore you talk about lga 3647. then at the bottom end for like the more kind of entry-level x299 stuff and remember on that platform they had like a quad-core cpu with the 70 whatever this stupid cpu was called it was a dumb cpu but then you had amd coming out with eight core and then 12 core and then 16 core processors so suddenly even those relatively higher core counts that you did still have available on x299 we're being supplanted by amd's offerings that cost a lot less that have motherboards that you could get for a lot less and these really high core and thread count cpus were just really competitive with x299 stuff and it sort of became an irrelevant platform i think it's kind of sad because i had a few really nice x299 systems over the year that have kind of lost a little bit of their luster but that's that's my assessment for why you don't really hear about x299 anymore just a few more questions this one from toonami 20. uh what motherboard and ryzen processor would you recommend for high-end streaming and video editing build there is no price listed here that would be an important third factor you put ryzen in here so i don't think you're going for a high-end desktop platform so my answer for you would be the 3900x which you can get for as little as 430 dollars right now and i would pair this with a nice x570 motherboard that said we are expecting new processors probably within the next month in fact within about a week of this video going live amd's making some announcements so i am telling you my answer for right now but i would absolutely wait at least for that week to go by so you can see what comes out and if these prices change and if you might be able to get more bang for your buck once the new stuff launches the rumor is that there is going to be a 50 900 x which will also be a 12 core so i would keep my eye on that one in particular also rumored is 10 core and 8 core varieties with the new zen 3 micro architecture so be patient for now but as far as a motherboard goes i would recommend an x570 motherboard and you can find solid options there for about 200 to 250 dollars i was going to bring up the like threadripper stuff and 303 stuff but honestly that gets really expensive really fast and since you specifically said ryzen then i then that's why i stuck with the desktop stuff that said the reason i'm recommending uh x570 is because you get full pci express gen4 support not only from all the pcie lanes going to your expansion slots but also through the chipset and if you're doing video editing or a lot of capture storage is going to be a concern for you you're probably going to want a lot of it you're probably going to want to have expansion capabilities so when it comes to m.2 slots and connection for high-speed nvme drives i think x570 is a little bit better suited for that again the only reason i might recommend looking at threadripper it's a it's a big step up in your initial cost but if you really want to do a crazy storage configuration threadripper is the way to go because you have 64 pci expression four lanes instead of 20 plus four so that's a lot more and you can connect a lot more drives to that zoza torovsky asks what software do the founders edition use i always bought msi products and use afterburner software so i sort of interpreted this as what software would you use to overclock an nvidia founder's edition i'm also assuming that you're talking about the 30 series but i guess this would technically apply to any of the nvidia founders edition cards the short answer is i typically use msi afterburner as you can see from this tech quote which i'm sure is very recent afterburner is the gold standard of overclocking utilities they probably said that in like 2009 or something like that but that's okay you can download it straight from the msi website it's pretty well maintained and one of the most is it also installs riva tuner and if you've ever watched one of those videos where they're playing a game and then up in the corner they have different colored statistics for like frame rate and cpu frequency and gpu frequency and all that that's usually typically done with riva tuner riva tuner can go in and hook stats from other software like hardware info and then it can display them on screen and it's got a pretty wide range of stuff you can do as far as changing the color and size and what's displayed and everything so it's pretty full featured the other thing about afterburner is since msi manufactures both amd and nvidia cards it will work to install and manage or overclock your graphics cards whether you're using an amd radeon or an nvidia card that said if you're not using an msi graphics card but you still have you know a geforce rtx 3080 like a founder's edition or whatever the basic functions in just about any overclocking utility should work for adjusting stuff like gpu clock speed and fan speed if you have a specific card from a specific manufacturer like evga for example then using evga's precision x overclocking software might be a better option for you because that might have plug-ins for stuff that's unique to that card like uh controlling the rgb lighting for example the overclocking software that i've used the most would be afterburner followed up i think by evga's precision x although precision precision x only works for nvidia cards and there are software utilities from gigabyte that i forget what it's called asus which is called gpu tweak which i never really fell in love with zotac has one and galax has one and stuff it's just it's just msi kind of early on established after burner and they do a really good job maintaining it and stuff so that's that's the one i go for so i guess you already had the answer to your question but i've talked about it further now so so there last question is not a question these are some comments from last month's video because in last month's probing paul the comment that i got the most was i had no idea that if i tell windows 10 to shut down it does not actually shut down it goes into a deep sleep or a hibernate mode which is part of the windows rapid start function you can go into the windows settings and disable that if you want to but for most people it's not really a big deal if you actually want to do like a full shutdown and restart of your computer like going from a cold boot you can just use the restart function and that works for stuff like if you've just run through a windows update or something like that but as pointed out by joshua chesney here as well as sigurd flatten you can hold the shift button down while you click shutdown in the windows 10 shutdown menu and then it will do the full shutdown so that's an option i will use this opportunity once again to plug my video called the best way to access your virus or uefi which i have previously lamented didn't get a whole lot of views but it's actually kind of blown up and i have recent comments on it so i feel like youtube picked this up at some point and was like hey this is a useful video and people like it and it got some more recommendations so thank you for any of you who did check that out i will link it in the description because it has some other useful tips besides holding shift while you select restart if you do that it pulls up this menu and then you can click troubleshoot and then that can let you do some stuff like accessing your uefi directly on a reboot or accessing like safe mode which is which is also really useful in a lot of situations like if you need to run ddu to do a full wipe of your display drivers nice additional tip though is that uh shift plus restart is one thing shift and shutdown is another and you can force your computer to do the actual full shutdown so thank you for those comments and follow-ups and that is going to wrap it up for this video if you want a next one to check out check out that tips video there's some other tips in there that i think people found useful thank you so much for watching this video though and if you want to leave me questions once again for next month or probably just a couple weeks from now uh leave those down in the comment section below while you're down there maybe hit the thumbs up button if you enjoyed this video subscribe to my channel if you're not already and of course check out my store at paulsharbar.net where you can buy shirts mugs pint glasses and other super awesome merchandise help and support my channel and get yourself cool stuff at the same time thank you guys so much once again for watching this video we'll see you in the next one you\n"