The Ping Latency Problem and Motherboard Design

There is a common problem with latency in PC builds, particularly when it comes to connecting peripherals such as graphics cards. This issue arises from the physical distance between components, which can lead to delays in data transmission. In order to minimize this latency, motherboard manufacturers have designed their boards with specific layouts in mind. For example, RAM slots are often placed near the CPU socket to reduce latency, and primary PCIe slots are positioned directly below the CPU to achieve similar results.

This design decision is crucial when it comes to installing graphics cards. Typically, you would not connect a graphics card to the chipset, as this can increase latency and hinder performance. Instead, it's generally recommended to use a separate PCIe slot for the graphics card, which reduces the distance between the components and minimizes latency. However, adding additional peripherals such as an external cable can introduce latency.

Chips that process data transmission are another factor in the latency problem. The more components added to this pipeline, the worse the latency becomes. Laptops, in particular, have been criticized for not being designed with discrete GPUs in mind. Instead of incorporating a custom PCIe connector or other design improvements, laptops often rely on Thunderbolt technology, which can introduce additional latency.

However, some manufacturers have found ways to mitigate this issue. For example, Asus has developed the XG Mobile ecosystem, which includes a proprietary connector that enables fast data transfer and reduces latency. By using this connector, users can connect their graphics card directly to the laptop's CPU, achieving faster performance. Additionally, the XG Mobile design is compact enough to be used in tablet-style devices, making it an attractive option for those looking for a lightweight and powerful computing solution.

In conclusion, understanding the complexities of latency in PC builds is essential for anyone looking to upgrade their system or build a new one from scratch. By recognizing the importance of minimizing physical distance between components and using optimized designs, users can achieve faster performance and reduce lag.

Behind-the-Scenes: Jared's Studio Tour

Recently, I had the opportunity to visit Jared's studio and catch up with him about his work and interests. It was a pleasure to meet him in person and explore his workspace. As we chatted, he shared some insights into his content creation process and offered a behind-the-scenes look at how he produces his videos.

Jared's studio is equipped with top-of-the-line hardware and software, allowing him to create high-quality content with ease. He showed me his PC build, which he had been working on for several weeks, and shared some of the challenges he faced during the process. From selecting components to troubleshooting issues, Jared was happy to share his expertise and provide tips for other builders.

As we toured the studio, Jared pointed out various pieces of equipment and explained their functions. He also discussed his approach to content creation, including how he plans his videos, conducts research, and interviews guests. Throughout the tour, I was impressed by Jared's knowledge and enthusiasm, which shone through in every conversation we had.

The tour concluded with a preview of upcoming content, including a behind-the-scenes look at our studio visit. I'm excited to share this footage with my audience and provide a unique glimpse into the world of PC building and content creation. If you're interested in learning more about Jared's work or would like to explore the studio, be sure to check out his Patreon page for exclusive content and updates.

In the coming days, I'll be working on a video that showcases my PC build and provides an in-depth look at the design process. Stay tuned for this upcoming video, which will include a tour of my own workspace and a detailed explanation of how I chose each component. As always, I appreciate your support and look forward to sharing more content with you in the future.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome back to Hardware unboxed I mean Jared stack but I'm with Hardware unboxed and we've got some questions that you guys answered sir it's a hybrid video yeah let's let's get into the questions let's do it but first this video is brought to you by the new hyperx Cloud 3 gaming headset an evolution of the iconic Cloud 2. experience immersive high quality audio with the retuned angled 53 millimeter drivers that deliver accurate and detailed Sound by directing audio into the ears at a more optimal position a lifetime activation of DTS headphone X for accurate 3D audio spatialization and all-day Comfort thanks to thicker memory foam padding communicate clearly with your team with the detachable mic whether you're playing on a PC or console and quickly adjust volume or mute with controls ready at your fingertips find out more about the hyperx cloud 3 with the sponsored Link in the description alright first question does vram in gaming laptops matter as much as their desktop counterparts so I thought this was kind of interesting because obviously you've done a lot of content lately showing the limits of vram in modern graphics cards but then on the laptop side you know we've obviously got less vram generally speaking so like the best laptop GPU maxes out at 16 gigs okay so 16 gigs for the 4090 mobile then 12 gigs for the 4080 mobile such confusing name like what's going on this doesn't make sense yeah and then eight gigs for the 4070 mobile and 4060 mobile and six gigs on the 40 50. okay so with that in mind does vrm in gaming laptops matter as much as desktop counterparts well not being a laptop user myself at least for gaming I'm not an expert but we can we'll collaborate on this one as we're doing uh but the short answer shortly is yes it matters because you're playing the same games the same way you might be targeting slightly different performance but I mean what a resolution Solutions and stuff like that like 4K laptops are common now 1440p I mean you can use things like dlss or various types of upscaling but generally speaking you're playing stuff like Hogwarts Legacy uh the last of us all that sort of stuff on your laptop so it stands to reason that it's the same game same quality settings you're going to run into the same problems again you can dial back quality settings on low attacks and stuff like that to make it playable so vram is less of a concern there and that's the same stuff it's a difficult conversation to have because if you've bought something like a Radeon RX 6600 for 200 US you're probably okay with medium quality settings having said that if that card had 16 gigs of RAM you could play at medium and then Jack the textures right up and that would make the game look almost as good as Ultra in a lot of ways so having the extra VM is certainly a benefit in that sense you can go the to the point where you have just way too much of vram like 24 gigabytes and you just can't use that so it's of no benefit but yeah if you're paying a lot of money like and this is why we criticize the RTX 3072i 600 us and you know you can't play a lot of the games maxed out that that kind of sucks on that card you'd expect 600 us you get a premium experience so if you're paying I don't know three thousand dollars or something crazy like that for a high-end laptop and you're having a dial down texture quality settings which have I would say the biggest impact on visuals so having to really like tune and tweak those settings pretty disappointing I would have thought yeah it really depends on the price like when 470 laptops with eight gigs of vram I have noticed like texture popping in Hogwarts Legacy in particular yeah um even without maxing out the settings necessarily um but yeah it's just the problem like I said comes down a price so I think I've seen the cheapest 4070 laptop for like 1400 but then I've seen like one from MSI I recently reviewed the ge68 they're selling it for like 2500 which is like 1100 more money and you still like that's like that's high-end premium gaming laptop pricing but yeah if you're getting texture popping issues in current games that's right yeah it's not great no but at the same time like I don't know I also kind of think that like the actual gpus in the laptops themselves aren't necessarily as powerful because often they cut down versions of like what you can get on the desktop side and they definitely use far less power as well so there's that too um so that combination of things I kind of think that you know in order to do like say 1440p gaming on a laptop you're probably going to need to look at something like a higher tier in terms of name on the laptop side compared to the desktop which are often going to come with more vram anyway so I guess what I'm trying to say is with on on laptops I still think like eight gigs of vram is I still think it's decent uh obviously if you want like the best and you're paying like 2000 plus you probably want to look at something a bit better if you can because like you you can definitely get 4080 laptops for just over 2000 at the moment which have 12 gigs so that would be a bit nicer compared to paying more than that for eight gigs like I don't think that makes sense in that case plus you get the better more powerful uh GPU but uh yeah this person also asks uh do you think that 16 gigs of vram is okay for 4K and I mean on the laptop side it only goes up to 16. so if you want to play that's your only choice really um but yeah from the 16 gig options I've used um I think 4K actually does pretty well on um get like 4090 mobile which surprised me that's right well on the desktop side products like the RTX 4060 TI which will have a 16 gigabyte version I expect that card to be you know perfectly fine in terms of vrm capacity for they're foreseeable like probably certainly I would say the the realistic uh lifespan of that product let's say to the point where it's like you know it's so old and slow now like a GeForce 10 series type product that yeah vram is just not a concern um and again like there's an eight gigabyte version of that card and a 16 gigabyte version of that card now pricing aside because it's ridiculous paying a hundred dollars more to double the vram but I expect in like a year or two from now that the 16 gigabyte model will deliver the same amount of performance but significantly higher image quality by being able to take advantage of those higher texture settings so that's something to be aware of I suppose but again it all comes down to the price like some some price ranges you're willing to compromise and it's certainly a non-issue which in my opinion eight gigabytes is now entry level so if you're buying an entry level product without gigabytes it's like not worth making a fuss about because you're buying an entry level product but when you're spending 400 on a current generation GPU and you're only getting eight gigabytes that kind of stings yeah and I suppose from a laptop perspective as well you'd have to consider the fact that you can't upgrade the GPU like it's sold it into the the laptop so whatever you buy you're stuck with you can't just in a year or two be like all right I'll just pull out the the graphics card that's a good point yeah swap in whatever comes out next you kind of unless you sell the whole laptop which you know that's a bit of a pain yeah so for sure but yeah I think that said at the same time like eight gig on mid-range laptops it's still personally I think it's plenty for like 1080p 1440 that's true I think most 1440p games at least today still play well but yeah I think the point we're trying to make is if it's kind of starting to struggle in modern games that are just coming out now with higher settings then like what does that mean for the future so yeah but I'm not sitting here saying like mid-range laptops can't play games at 1440p today because I've shown that they can it's just that's right it also depends on the type of game or like if you're buying a laptop to play multiplayer games like Apex Legends for example then vram there's not really it's not a concern this is more for your single player games where you're really wanting that premium immersive experience and yeah which you could still go with laptops right because a lot of people would plug their laptop into I imagine like a TV type an OLED TV or a bigger display and they're really going for that you know premium gaming experience and if you're having if you're getting like severe texture popping or not even able to load the textures period or mad stuttering then that's less than ideal yeah so I guess in summary more vrm more battle pretty much yeah within reason like I said do they don't need 24 gigabytes 16 is pretty much where you want to be these days for at least 12. yeah at least 12. so this kind of makes me think about something I thought in a recent video I did I compared basically all the 40 mobile laptop gpus at different power levels and essentially there is quite a big jump in performance between 40 70 mobile and 4080 mobile to the point where it's kind of like it almost feels like they're pushing you to spend the extra money to go for the 4080. I mean it's got like the extra vram the performance is actually a nice jump compared to last gen everything before it is like kind of battles with last gen it's like a 4070 mobile it's like five percent or something faster than the 370 TI mobile it's really not much different and it's got the same eight gigs of vram and worst memory bus and it's cut down in some other ways compared to that so yeah it's almost feels like the kind of like going for the the upsell with the 4080. yeah I think tactics have changed there because pretty much prior to this generation it was always like just I don't care about you know I don't care that I'm going into the beyond the point of diminishing returns I just I've got the money I want the best of the best I don't care if it's 10 faster for double the price I'm just doing it so you know you only captured a smaller percentage of well people that were willing to spend that kind of money but now it's like well we want to expand that market where we get maximum dollar for the Silicon so I guess we've got to incentivize people and the way they've gone about doing that is not necessarily making the high end better it's just making the stuff under it worse so that is why people are so excited on the desktop side for stuff like RTX 49ers because you get insane performance vrm is just not a concern at all and so a lot of people are turning to that and the 4080 but then you get down the 40 70 tier it's like yeah same thing on the desktop there's really not much Point buying a 40 72i despite the fact that it's like what 400 or something more for the 4080 which is a huge upsell but a lot of you well a lot of our viewers are basically like extra vram extra performance might as well just do it all right so more vram questions there's quite a few of them oh surprised with the current state of 8 gig vram not being enough on the desktop side should I spend more money to get a 12 gig card for a laptop I guess we kind of already answered that one actually yeah um I get it the quick answer is depends on the games you play um whether the price range you're looking at uh warrants let's say a compromised type experience and just what it is that you're after but yeah if it's not a huge premium then yes it's smart to get the more vram because it will definitely provide you with a better game experience in the future and they're not too just a future I would have thought yeah so for a specific example with laptops kind of like what I said just before like MSI have that g68 that I just covered for 2 550 US Dollars and that's on sale for 40 70 mobile but then you can get a Lenovo uh what do they call it now Legion Pro 7. twenty three hundred dollars on sale so it's like 250 less money and it's the 4080 mobile and it's just significantly better than the 4070 with the extra four gigs of your own two so that seems like a no-brainer yeah I mean that's probably just a like might just be an MSI pricing thing maybe that'll go down but yeah in the case where the 4080 is cheaper it's better I mean obviously there's more to picking a laptop than just the GPU power but in this specific case like the Lenovo is still a decent machine so yeah wouldn't bother getting the MSI for a worse experience for more money how will RTX 3060 mobile fare with its six gig vram in the upcoming future so I can't remember how much 30 60 desktop has was it 12 or am I thinking it's 12. no the ti had eight okay um yeah 12 for the 30 60. okay it's on in laptop world it's only six gig so it's like a 2060 vram capacity yeah yeah six um again that's Hogwarts Legacy you're probably looking at the lowest possible quality settings there uh having said that though that's not entirely true it just means you've got to be a bit more conscious of that limitation so you can probably play Hogwarts at high or at the very least medium with the GPU performance you have but you'll have to then go manually dial down texture quality is an obvious one for reducing vram usage so yeah you're just gonna be mindful of that and optimize your settings and again textures unfortunately well having a phrase that they have a very uh big impact on graphic Fidelity how good the game's presentation is because those those watered down muddy textures let's say they look pretty awful so yeah low quality textures you really want to avoid for a great gaming experience because you can you can jack everything else up you can have Ray tracing turned on you can have everything dialed up but if you drop those textures down to their lower setting doesn't look good yeah in Hogwarts specifically I found it more annoying just with like you're walking along and like suddenly the ground is just like flat and then like two seconds later it's like oh there's tiles here now and it disappears again and you're like what's going on it just keeps taking you out of it yeah so they do that to avoid performance hits stuttering it can still occur because obviously it's doing a lot of memory swapping and it's trying to work out you know it's trying to remove textures that you won't necessarily notice but you know there's limits to how well they can do that so often it's the texture right in front of you just disappears and reappears and if you look over there then they'll shift from there to there and it's just not a great experience but thankfully in the case of the 3060 I imagine especially on the laptop side that was more of an entry level type product so the fact that two years later you're having to play things on like lowish to medium settings I don't think that's the worst thing in the world um personally it's more people who more recently might have bought you know as I said on the desktop side a 600 30 70 TI that's an expensive GPU to have to like have have any kind of performance related problems especially especially vram it's such a weird thing to be limited by because in the history of graphics cards and gaming from the mid-range up I it's never really been a concern has it it's just that you always had enough vram and and now it's it's becoming a feature almost to have enough vram which is something we want to avoid which is why we've been pushing back so heavily against it we don't want that just to be another thing that you have to worry about yeah give us enough yeah I would say um 360 mobile is probably more mid-range okay so some other interesting thing I noticed is so compared to what was before the 3060 was the 3050 TI mobile which was four gigs um on average the 3060 mobile was like 50 faster so now this generation we've got 40 50 and 40 60. uh I did a video on this I can't actually remember the percent increase but it was like 20 I want to say 20 or less than that yeah it's like the Gap is even small in this generation too so last last gen there was actually a decent Gap and now it's just like so they've expanded the percentage differences at the high end again pressed it at the low end yeah so and that's obviously a strategy to get you to pay more so I guess a question that is kind of related to that will an RTX 4060 laptop which is 8 gigs of vrm be usable for modern games three to four years from now oh um I guess it depends on how you Define usable so three to four years from now I think it's reasonable to accept that you would be heading towards sort of medium quality settings at a lower resolution uh but yeah uh three to four years whether eight gigabyte cards will still be that usable it's obviously impossible for me to say I'll have to get back to you on that one in about three to four years but it's going to be a heavily compromised experience that is for sure um and I think it'll age much more poorly than it would have otherwise I mean we've got plenty of evidence of this for example you know the Radeon RX 6800 that's a 16 gigabyte card and that was only I think seventy dollars more than the RTX uh 3070 something like that that's got eight gigabytes those two cards today chalk and cheese like you can every check you don't have to dial down any texture quality settings on an RX 6800 you can play any game on the market today and regardless of what you do with the other settings textures you can always just max them so no matter what if you choose a medium preset just max the textures on an RX 6800 RTX 3070 you can't do that and the Radeon GPU gives you a much better experience because of the extra vrm and vram's not expensive it's like 30 dollars to double the vram thereabouts but I I'd estimate that's basically what it costs Nvidia and we know for a fact it's under a hundred dollars yeah for this question I don't even know if I would say it's specific to the vram like four years in laptops is quite a significant amount of time so if I think of like what was mid-range four years ago and then if I tried to play that in modern games even vram aside I don't think it would be amazing no I think two years is probably more relevant yeah again you can obviously like turn down settings and definitely get by especially with features like dlss and FSR these days I guess frame generation with 40 series at least in supported games and probably help out to a degree but yeah it's uh ultimately difficult to predict the future yeah I suppose yeah I mean the point really is you just don't want to be hamstrung in any period of time like you don't want your your laptop or your grab what your graphics card whether it's a desktop or a laptop you don't want it to become obsolete let's say just because it didn't have enough erm like you want that not to be a thing you want it to just be that didn't have enough processing power rendering power to continue on you don't want it like we're saying with the RTX 3070 you don't want it artificially limited I'm not sure what the best term to use there is but if that again if that card had 16 gigabytes of vram and you guys had an RTX 3070 you'd be like I don't really need to upgrade at this point in time like you know if uh I'm basically getting a similar performance out of a 40 60 TI for similar money so you just wait another generation but now you're sitting there thinking well do I spend another 500 two and a half years later to get the same raster performance similar Ray tracing performance just to double my vram buffer it's kind of a crap situation to be in yeah not great no all right next question what are your two thoughts on PC versus gaming laptop debate should people invest in a better computer for the same amount of money as the best gaming laptops or investing in the best laptop be just as good in its lifespan as the desktop counterparts before planning the next to buy so I'm kind of talking about this a bit yesterday I feel like we need a fight it's a sound effect well there is actually a question here uh Jarred versus Steve wrestling match oh yeah so that's that one yeah let's let's do that um yeah I mean I don't really know how to tackle this one because I don't really believe the question is sort of I suppose the question you should be asking with that so we can I suppose we can get into this but I know this is something Tim has talked about a lot that's something I've bullied for a long time so I'm not anti-gaming laptop by any means like I think um there's a time and a place for them um probably more Niche depending on what it is you do and how you need it but there's not there's not one to rule all situations I suppose like if you and in some of these some of these scenarios you can argue that one might be better than the other like it might be better to just build two gaming PCs and have one at like I don't know an apartment in the city and then one at your house that you spend the weekend at or something rather than lugging the laptop but then there's cons and Pros to which like the cool thing about the laptop is you've got all your data in the one location so if you're working and gaming from that you don't have to worry about multiple different computers and where are my files all that sort of stuff so it's tough but basically some obvious scenarios if you're primarily gaming in one location desktop PC right like getting a laptop to put in a docking station and you might take your laptop like on a holidays a couple of times a year it's just not worth having the laptop for that scenario in my opinion uh and then yeah I mean laptop gaming like on a train or whatever is that really a thing no even though I cover a lot of laptops I basically say like actually gaming on laptops is honestly a bit of a joke like I showed in every laptop review like best case you might be getting like uh two hours of 30 FPS which isn't like that's not nothing but that's best case most of them are like an hour some uh less so yeah for the most part I say that actually gaming on battery power isn't really great at least ones with discrete graphics maybe it might start changing as like integrated Graphics start stepping up and hopefully that gets a bit more efficient especially like I suppose lighter weight games so when I do my battery test on gaming I test the Witcher 3 1080p medium settings yeah so yeah older games certainly make much more sense because they don't require anywhere near the rendering power yeah and if you can definitely get by with igpu then yeah that would be different but for the most part I think we're pretty well aligned like personally I have actually we've been using a laptop for the last like 10 months or so that's why I'm actually here so we can build me a desktop PC finally so the last one I had just kind of stopped working and I'd basically been forced to swap to the laptop so I've been using that full time and it's actually been doing quite well but ideally like I spend all my time at home so it doesn't make much sense I might as well just have something with more power and more performance that can do my work faster and then have the laptop for when I need to like go out and travel it's like when I came here it doesn't really make sense to me to dump the desktop in the car if I'm coming here for like a day yeah that's right so I just I just brought the laptop in case I need it plus it already had like you said before having the data on different machines I've been using the laptop for like 10 months so it's got everything I need on it I know everything's there and when I go to computex I'll be just bringing the laptop because I know it can do the job now I say that and I remember computex 2019 and you guys actually brought desktop PCS from Australia to Taiwan that's right yeah that was a lot better um again not anti-laptop definitely a time and a place but in most situations uh a desktop PC does make more sense um anyway as Jared was just saying I think it was 2018 Tim and I uh were sponsored by MSI we took two big work state well MSI provided two big workstation laptops and they were loud they were hot they were clunky and they were slow so you know they worked they were kind of a decent makeshift thing but going I suppose from like a threadripper encoding PC at home to then like I think it was maybe an eight core laptop that just screamed every time you did anything it was a bit annoying Tim and I were like there's got to be a better way of doing this so the following year we built two Mini ITX PCS which we just took in our carry on luggage that were very very compact they were I think they were ryzen 7 2700x CPUs uh from memory which slaughtered the laptops of the time and then we just put a 32 inch monitor in our in our luggage and put our clothes around it and it sounds absurd but it was extremely practical worked really well we set that up in the hotel room nice and quiet very fast worked a treat and I think Jared came in with his laptop to I think you edited a video with us and yeah you were sitting there sort of scratching head going hmm I think this is a better option than the laptop well sir I definitely appreciate the portability of the laptop like I don't personally want to like I'm not going to make that compromise of trying to take a monitor and a like a case and to be fair I took a laptop as well to use on the plane and stuff so that's that's definitely uh not the move for me I would say but yeah it definitely has a time and a play slacking to be fair since you use that laptop in 2018 they have gotten significantly better especially when you consider like has 4K video footage really become more demanding in the last five years yeah yeah that's fair so the specs are way better and at the same time it's still going to be very loud so yeah well they would be better than the mini ITX systems we took um so they're obviously very usable in that sense but whether you can build a mini ITX system that would then Slaughter the laptop is hard to say like yeah I guess ultimately different things for different people which is basically what I end up concluding my laptop versus desktop comparisons with do you need portability or not that's right that is the big one it's kind of like the whole console gaming versus PC gaming it's sort of two different audiences after two different things and at the end of the day like I'm not going to sit here and tell you you're wrong for doing a certain thing like if it works for you and you like that then awesome like I guess that's the great thing about having the variety right like I'm not sitting here going laptops shouldn't exist or what like I'm not anti-laptop it's like if you if you have one and it works great for you and and the way you operate then that's that's awesome it's really that simple uh and and again I I certainly recognize that there's cases where they make sense and they're more practical depending on what it is you do um kind of the worst person to get any kind of laptop advice from because I'm pretty ignorant on the subject because I've not really tried gaming laptops for a very long time and I sit on my backside over there every single day and barely leave the office so I work from home I'm not I'm not the the audience the the target market for uh laptop use and I do all my gaming over here so so no need yeah yeah all right so Matt and Discord relevant to what we're just talking about asked I'll ask me what laptop I brought here and what I'm taking to computex and then what you guys are taking to computex like so we just talked about laptops being better are you going to be taking laptops to compute absolutely laptops are better no uh we're cheating this year actually so again we're sponsored by MSI to go over there this year and I sort of said to Ms I'm like will you do computers don't you and they're like yeah actually we do do computers so uh we're taking our video editor bailin myself and Tim and so there's three of us and MSI is like well how about we just provided three of our high-end desktop systems with three 32 inch 144 Hertz monitors and I was like that sounds awesome so we're just going to take each going to take an SSD with uh you know installing our data that we need and we're going to pop that into the computer so they'll deliver those to the hotel we'll set them up yeah I mean that definitely sounds it's probably the most optimal option I think it's optimal when someone else will just handle it for you so you don't have to bring anything yeah you can turn up and you've just got good performance I was like why did I think of this sooner yeah it's probably a good idea but uh as for me like I said I'll just be taking the laptop I've been using it's the MSI uh z17 whatever said z z yeah I honestly forget which one it is in Australia I know I think it's zed zed yep I'm used to saying Z for these I've had Americans go you wouldn't say zebra though would you you'd say zebra like no we say that and they're like what mind blown yeah so that's what I'll be taking and it's got a 12th gen i7 12700h in that laptop but it I mean it from memory it beats my threadripper first gen desktop so yeah that's fine I think in terms of productivity on the CPU side laptops are significantly more competitive than they are on the gaming side as long as you're plugged in no none of this battery business yeah yeah because like um yeah like these days you can get a 13900 HX which is essentially a 13900k just with less power like same cores same threads same cash that's another one cash cash yeah we we've we've yielded to that one it's cash now so I always always go the same I think only Australia says cage confuses far too many people in the audience yeah anyway the point is it's essentially a desktop processor just with less power so yeah depending on the like thickness and how big the machine is when it's plugged in it can do very very well been generally not so great on battery we'll have a render off yeah you can come over to our hotel room and we'll we'll have our three desktops versus your laptop oh I I don't know I guess if it was actually a competition I'd consider bringing something better because like well what I have does the job but there's definitely much better hours left 13 900k is an RTX 49ers so we will just be using all the power that is available yeah I think if we use all three of them rendering at the same time the lights will start flickering all right next question will entry and mid-range gpus ever be affordable again I think well I think if AMD and Nvidia um have their way probably probably should have led within video because they shouldn't be well they're the market leaders most market share but yes if Nvidia and AMD have their way I think no is the answer um I mean if they can get more money why wouldn't they Yeah Tim and I have had this discussion for a while now in the Q a series because this comes up all the time and my opinion which I think Tim didn't didn't disagree with but he wasn't necessarily on board with but as time's gone by I think he's coming around to the idea that they're just trying to recondition the market they've seen the good times that can be had on fat margins during cryptocurrency and they're like well we don't necessarily need cryptocurrency to be a thing to milk Gamers we just you know we're the market leaders it's somewhat of a monopoly duopoly you know best or worst um so we're just we're just going jack up the prices and Gamers will have to pay it like you don't really have a choice you cannot pay it but at some point if you want to keep gaming you have to pay it right so I I see it as like Gamers and Nvidia AMD are in a bit of an armrest or right now they're setting these prices really high and then it's a bit of a standoff like how long can Gamers hold out for if they can hold out long enough they'll be forced to bring them back down but of course the next generation will try and bring them up so it's always like this sort of act where they're jacking them off and then we'll bring them down a bit and they'll be like well we'll go here and then we'll bring him down a bit and I see them just continue to go up and up because what's the alternative yeah I mean if people are buying them but it just made me think of a one of the top comments I saw on one of your videos recently something along the lines of like just everyone keep waiting hold out but then at the same time like how much power do you as the individual really have in controlling that I mean if you need something now it's yeah that's a worth waiting yeah that's right I mean I don't expect someone to if their favorite hobby is PC gaming and their RTX 2060 dies you know I mean there is I suppose a second hand Market which maybe is a wise investment but you know I don't expect them to sort of go well you know my GPU is dead I am wanting to get sort of a new thing I'll get an RTX 4070 or whatever it's like yeah well that's what you would do right you have much choice but it that just sucks so yeah I think those affordable entry level cards have gone the way of the dodo unfortunately I think um 300 is sort of the new entry level there'll be I'm sure there'll be a 200 GPU it's whether it's worth buying or not it's hard to say I mean it's questionable whether the 300 card's worth buying so yeah I I've got no no good news on that one yeah it's no good as for the laptop side well not great either I guess so last year for like a thousand US Dollars you'd probably be looking at like a decent RTX 3060 mobile laptop and when Nvidia launched the 40 series at CES uh in January this year um you know they show they're like starting from prices and the 4050 was starting from uh a thousand US Dollars now the 40 50 so I have compared the 40 50 and 30 60. oh man I can't actually remember the results but I believe the 3060 um was generally a little ahead unless you take into account like frame generation and you know that type of thing yeah but the point is is the point I wanted to make was that 40 50 laptops starting at a thousand dollars I kind of Wonder like I mean Nvidia has obviously specified that that's the price because they're the ones saying starting at a thousand dollars now with that said I bought the cheapest 4050 laptop I could a few months ago which was exactly a thousand USD uh now the laptop was honestly pretty crap it was the MSI gf63 another crap MSI laptop now since then a few months later um there was a Acer Nitro 5 which I reviewed and that was on sale for 950 US dollars so 50 cheaper same GPU but I should have also mentioned the MSI it's the 4050 was power limited to 45 watts and the Nitro 5 from ASA goes up to like well they say 140 but I've shown in a video that they maxed out about 100 in games yeah but either way still much more performance frame rate way better it's also just a much better laptop better build quality it's got better features like the option to disable integrated Graphics which will boost FPS and games point is is these types of like different options with the 4050 is starting to come out in lower prices below the thousand dollars so it kind of made me wonder like was MSI forced into selling their lowest tier 4050 laptop for a thousand dollars because maybe Nvidia has said so and now once some unknown period of time has passed perhaps then they'll be able to start actually lowering the price to something that would be more reasonable I'm not sure so that's kind of what it feels like yeah um yeah obviously I don't know for sure but if they're not selling them and MSI is sitting there going well we made all these laptops and they're not selling then you know they have to make a compromise they can be like well wait one more month and then we can we can discount them because they don't want to discount them straight away because that looks a bit silly um and it stings for anyone who just bought it but yeah it's it's again it's it's a situation where if people aren't buying the laptops and Nvidia wants to sell you laptops uh with well at least their GPU on the laptops then something has to give and they'll hold that as long as they can but at some point they've got to move that inventory but yeah I think the GeForce 40 series is going to be a massive success for them having said that though I haven't really seen all the sales figures apparently the GeForce 20 series sold quite well despite it being just a massive flop in terms of what it offered gamers but that seems to be sort of how they're doing that Tick Tock type generation release yeah so I guess it's not looking too great for the mid-range but hopefully over time things get cheaper yep yeah and I suspect to the next generation of gpus will be a lot more exciting sort of like what the 30 series was not that Gamers got to enjoy that because the cryptocurrency Boom but I think the next generation of gpus from Nvidia and AMD will offer a lot more than what we've got this generation this was sort of the features generation so you know dlss3 that sort of stuff yeah it kind of feels like that's how it's been going in the past because like you know there was Pascal 10 series Pascal was amazing that was quite good even in laptops like 1060 laptop versus 1060 desktop you know that was back when the performance was actually not too different and you were sitting here going oh we're actually getting to a point in time where there's going to be very little separation between them and you're like that's amazing and then it gets bigger and bigger next minute yeah yeah yeah but then like 20 series like that was obviously when they introduced Ray tracing and they made a big deal about that so that was the feature generation so cost per frame went nowhere there was you know same vram capacities all that sort of stuff and then yeah then we've got the 30 series which was the performance generation so um features were much the same am I forgetting something I mean nothing major because like yeah 20 series was Ray tracing CSS I guess dlss improved yeah so you got a bit more vram like 2080 eight gigabytes um 30 80 10 gigabytes so there was some change there and obviously the 390 got a heap of vram but so it was sort of upgrading vrm which is sort of like a performance related feature and then a huge cost per frame increase and then the 40 series has come along and moved the needle like that much whereas I expect the 50 Series to be more like the 30 series and the 10 Series yeah so I guess just based on the past if the past is anything to go by which it isn't always no but if it is then yeah maybe 50 Series might be better that'd be my guess my it's certainly My Hope yeah well we'll see what would you say is the best current GPU for 1440p gaming both on the desktop and laptop side also keeping money in mind so I guess you can do the desktop side and I'll try and do the laptop yeah don't get me into the laptop but barely not the options are it's tough because not everything's been released yet yeah so it's yeah it's tough and there's not like from from a video well we should we eventually will have like a 16 gigabyte uh 4060 TI for 500 which that's a no buy at that price and then you've got the 40 70 at 600 which is kind of like kind of like the best option there um especially because we don't have an AMD alternative yet at that price but then it's like well yeah the 4070 TI has more performance but the same vrm buffer not really you know worth going up to 800 for that but then you get the the 7900 XT up around that and you get 20 Gigabytes there more performance again doesn't have like frame generation yet not sure if it's going to get it so it's a tough one like I'd have to say the 4070 just because it's sort of the only option there um you can get like a previous generation GPU from uh from AMD but they use a lot more power they don't have av1 encoding they don't have frame generation so probably not worth buying a 6950xt for roughly the same price as an RTX 470 in my opinion but you do get more vram so there is that but 12 gigabytes is sort mostly okay so I'm gonna have to say RTX 4070 really though I would urge you to try and stretch the budget to a 7900 XT but then that's so much money for that product so I mean my hands are tied there's no good option here it's the best of limited Choice yeah I mean in previous generations you'd be like oh this is a great value product get that huge upgrade for people with this this and this you know I highly recommend it but now it's sort of like yeah what's the the lesser of the evils yeah so I guess on the laptop side it's a bit tough so I kind of want to say the 3070 TI mobile now hear me up because that does have eight gig of vram and we spent like a bunch of this start of this video so your hands are tied though yeah so like so on the laptop side if you want to go up from the 30 70 TI to a 3080 TI you do get double the vrm at 16 gig but it's often far more expensive and apart from the vram the GPU performance is like very small so it's sort of like 40 60 TI eight gigabyte versus 16 gigabyte it's in a way yeah I've seen the performance big upgrade in price yeah so like there's more like criticals and stuff but the power limit's the same you're ultimately paying for the vram and that is quite a premium so I it depends I guess if the 3080 TI laptops go down in price and you know that extra vrm is worth however much that extra money is that would definitely be a good option but the reason I'm saying 3070 TI mobile over something newer like 40 70 mobile is well I've done a whole video comparing uh the 4070 mobile and 3070 TI and like I said I think before in this one the 470 was only like five percent faster but the laptops often cost a lot more now if they're about the same price then yeah you might as well go for the 4070 version because well you get features like frame generation but yeah if the 370 TI model is like hundreds of dollars less probably I would lean towards that but then at the same time it depends how much like you personally value features like frame generation so I think I have used it in quite a few games and you know I think it adds more I think it I think it's overall a net positive if a game has it I will turn it on and play it and I've played a bunch of games with it and you know I I enjoy using it but would I pay more than like 100 bucks for it or something probably not especially given how limited it is in games today but I mean it also depends like if you're spending two thousand dollars on a laptop at that point a hundred dollars extra is like what like five percent more money it's a small small percentage and again stuff like frame generation also depends on the type of games you play and stuff like that as well so then like it's useless for multiplayer gaming for example yeah so I guess if you are interested in frame generation I think the 4070 otherwise um from last gen 30 70 TI is a decent option but if you really do want the extra vrm yeah see if you can get a cheap 3080 TI or maybe a 4080 on sale like I said earlier there was that 4080 that was less money than a 40 70 so that would be an easy choice in that case yeah with the vram thing we're saying basically we're not saying spend a lot more money to get more vram we're basically saying we want Nvidia to give you the vram they should give you rather than making it like a premium type feature like just give people enough vram to begin with so that's what I'm advocating for anyway I'm not saying that you guys are dumb for buying eight gigabytes of vrm I'm not saying that you made a mistake if you bought it nothing like that I'm I'm we're trying to educate Gamers into like pushing AMD and Nvidia to giving you more vrm like they should rather than yeah artificially limiting gimping products that that really can take advantage of the extra vram but not given it so you have to upgrade sooner or whatever it may be but yeah from The Limited options that we do have from them at the moment I guess that's yeah there's nothing there's nothing we can do about it right now but we're trying to improve it for the future so we stop seeing 400 US expensive eight gigabyte graphics cards as sort of the mainstream offering we don't want that anymore 12 gigabytes minimum ideally really 16 I mean it's not expensive guys they're making out that this is really expensive to add it's just not so and they can do it the density is there so it's not something that is unheard of and they've been doing it for a long time already anyway it's not new it's not groundbreaking technology speaking of vram get a gun nice to change the topic actually yeah I was just getting over talking about that uh I want to know if there's a difference in vrm buffer impact between gddr6 and gddr6x for example testing 3070 versus 3070 TI in games that exceed eight giga vram now I thought this was this is a very good question I thought it was also partially interesting because on the gaming laptop side we don't even get gdr gddr6x mouthful yeah well this this is a good one and it comes up a lot and the Assumption seems to be by a lot of people that the faster the memory the more bandwidth you have that somehow mitigates the capacity problem which it absolutely does not do so and Nvidia recently tried to uh sort of Muddy the waters on that discussion and confuse people by saying that they have more L2 cash which effectively increases the bandwidth which helps with vram which it absolutely doesn't do it can help with bandwidth but it doesn't actually make up for uh bandwidth relating to accessing the vram so if you have like a a 12 gig texture pack the larger L2 doesn't really help with that so there's a whole heap of confusing things going on there but essentially no amount of bandwidth can make up for not having enough capacity because the bandwidth and the latency to your local memory on the graphics card that's just for how fast you can access it that's how quick you can move things in and out of that memory But ultimately you need enough memory to move things in and out of and if you don't have enough it goes to the system memory which means going through the PCI Express Bus which is the greatest bottleneck there and into the system memory which is has more bandwidth but again you're limited by the pcie bus so that that's the problem there you just need the bandwidth oh sorry you need the capacity and the bandwidth can't make up for that so it yeah it doesn't matter what type of memory you have that'll that that more relates to the the performance the frame rate performance you can extract from that product but yeah you can have the world's you can have thousands and thousands of gigabytes worth of bandwidth between the local memory and the GPU but if you don't have enough uh storage to store it all then you just get those horrible frame starters performance tanks because you go from having in this hypothetical thousands upon thousands of gigabytes per second to like you know 50 something like that and then it all comes crashing down so basically 6X in laptops would not solve the problem wouldn't solve the problem it would allow for faster gpus so I believe it also uses more power there which I think is why they probably don't use it yeah it definitely does so yeah it's because it because it does improve performance it gets conflated with oh well it's improving performance it's somehow mitigating the capacity issue but no it's improving performance it's allowing the GPU to do its thing faster um providing you have a big enough buffer so they're two separate things so there's there's memory access which is like bandwidth and latency and then there's memory capacity um and you know a larger capacity doesn't increase bandwidth and a larger bandwidth doesn't help mitigate a smaller capacity yep all right final question would an e-gpu slash regular laptop setup be as viable or close to desktop rather than a traditional gaming laptop while having the benefit of battery life so I was interested to see what you would think about this so you were saying before like how you know the differences between laptops and desktops in theory you would think an egpu was like the solution you just have your dock at home with all your monitors set up keyboard and mouse you've got your powerful GPU inside all you have to do is come home put the laptop down stick in one cable you're good to go you've basically got the full desktop experience and then you can just unplug the cable walk away with the laptop so Best of Both Worlds so yeah I was curious what you thought about that well I have a limited experience and knowledge doing this kind of testing because a I've never done it before Tim takes care of that but my understanding is that it's very latency sensitive because well gpus are very latency sensitive if you use like a riser cable that can have especially if they're not shielded correctly but it's a separate issue but it can impact latency and more of an issue for like high frame rate competitive type gamers but basically depends on the interface you're using to connect to the laptop to the egpu as to how much latency that introduces and how much bandwidth It ultimately has as to what the experience is like um so I guess it's like what Thunderbolt they'd use probably USB type c stuff now uh I'd imagine some laptops probably even have some sort of proprietary type PCI Express interface to do it which is probably the most preferable option um but yeah it should certainly work it's just how much you can reduce the latency connection basically yeah and how well does it work so you're basically spot on with everything you said there so I think in terms of egpu the most common setup that's out there is Thunderbolt 4 but the problem with Thunderbolt 4 is it's limited to like 40 gigabit per second so yeah latency is a big killer um so if you compare like a I don't know 40 90 graphics card in an egb setup versus like just in a desktop PC the performance is like it's a massive difference I did a video on it like after the 49 came out I can't remember the actual differences but it's like three four five times faster in some cases and a lot of that is just because of the way Thunderbolt 4 currently works like I think I can't actually remember because it changes between CPU Generations from Intel but basically some generations have to have like a separate chip to handle the like Thunderbolt part of it yeah there's more overhead and more latency some of them have that part actually built into the processor which does improve things significantly but then it's still not ideal my main problem I have with it is it's just so hit or miss whether or not it'll actually work like some laptops will work flawlessly with an egpu setup no problem at all but then you'll have another one and you'll just have problem after problem after problem and it's just not worth it so based on it just being so like you don't know whether or not it's going to work I almost never recommend anyone actually buy a setup like that even though in theory it sounds like it sounds like the ultimate solution yeah it sounds like the solution to the laptop versus desktop problem yeah but it's just not implemented well so I don't know if that's going to change whenever Thunderbolt 5 comes out because in theory I think it goes up to like 120 gigabit which is 3x bandwidth yep so yeah it's it's kind of like the whole um you know cloud-based gaming you've got that the Ping the latency problem and it's that to a lesser degree so there's a there's a reason why motherboards are structured the way they are with the the ram the dim slots right next to the CPU socket to minimize latency there the primary pcie slots directly below the CPU to minimize latency there and then you know that's why you don't typically install your graphics card like connected to the chipset for example because that kills the latency in your performance there and that's much closer to where it needs to be opposed to having you know an external chord like that chord adds latency however long that is then obviously there's the the chips that you know do all the transmitting of data and the more things you add into that that pipeline just the worse the latency gets and then as Jared saying laptops aren't they're not designed with discrete gpus in mind it's sort of an afterthought or it should work based on the technology but the it's not something they've really put a lot of time into making sure there's compatibility and it works well yeah it's kind of just bolted on top of Thunderbolt but like you were saying before um some laptops do have like you know a custom pcie connector so Asus do that with the XG mobile so they basically have like a little box they only use Mobile gpus in it I think that might be an Nvidia limitation can't remember but the point is you get a little box with like I don't know say a 4090 mobile 175 Watt and then you connect to that with again the cable is actually quite short compared to Thunderbolt you can get much longer cables but with the XG mobile it's quite short because it's pcie and you get way more bandwidth direct to the CPU compared to Thunderbolt And there's just you don't get the overheads and I haven't tested that in about a year but the last time I used it it worked flawlessly it was the best egpu setup that I've ever attached sir yeah that'd be my expectation yeah so that's the only time I would say that egpu works is unfortunately with asus's I guess proprietary connector because with Thunderbolt obviously it's USB type-c so you know you can use that on multiple machines but if you buy into I guess the Asus ecosystem you're kind of stuck but at the same time I don't think it's that bad because this XG mobile thing has been around for like three years or so now so they've kept it going and you know when they originally launched it like three years ago or whatever I was kind of skeptical like are they actually gonna keep refreshing this with new gpus are we going to get new laptops that actually have this port and they have kept it around yeah so this is still going and you know it's mostly on there like tablet style devices so you get like 13 inch up to 16 inch I think it's basically kind of like a tablet okay that's cool and you know you can use it as a tablet I think some of them go up to like well this generation might be 40 70 mobile so you know it'll do all right I wouldn't suspect just on its own but yeah then you can connect in the the egpu and it should be much better I haven't actually tested this gen yet but yeah that's basically the best you can get in terms of egpu and I guess that would act as both a desktop and laptop setup although the XG mobile is so small like it's a brick like that you could realistically just put it in a bag and take it with you unlike it's like a big power brick yeah unlike a traditional like egpu enclosure which you know they have to be quite massive because they have to fit all sorts of different graphics card sizes like my one at home when I tested 40 series I can't actually put the like the lid on because I guess it wasn't designed with current gen graphics cards in mind at that point it might just be a mini ITX system yeah like that would probably be small so all right that's all the questions well I had fun yeah it was interesting do it for someone other than Tim not there's anything wrong with Tim but sorry Tim yeah sorry to be fine no we're joking um but that was great to catch up with Jared and have you come and check out the studio and and yeah do a video for your channel yeah um I will actually have a behind the scenes little tour of this studio if you're interested um that'll be over on patreon so I'll leave a link in the description otherwise the main reason I'm here is to do that PC build I mentioned so that'll probably be yeah that should be live before this video goes up yeah definitely a little bit yeah I'll uh I'll put a link to that on Steve's facewelcome back to Hardware unboxed I mean Jared stack but I'm with Hardware unboxed and we've got some questions that you guys answered sir it's a hybrid video yeah let's let's get into the questions let's do it but first this video is brought to you by the new hyperx Cloud 3 gaming headset an evolution of the iconic Cloud 2. experience immersive high quality audio with the retuned angled 53 millimeter drivers that deliver accurate and detailed Sound by directing audio into the ears at a more optimal position a lifetime activation of DTS headphone X for accurate 3D audio spatialization and all-day Comfort thanks to thicker memory foam padding communicate clearly with your team with the detachable mic whether you're playing on a PC or console and quickly adjust volume or mute with controls ready at your fingertips find out more about the hyperx cloud 3 with the sponsored Link in the description alright first question does vram in gaming laptops matter as much as their desktop counterparts so I thought this was kind of interesting because obviously you've done a lot of content lately showing the limits of vram in modern graphics cards but then on the laptop side you know we've obviously got less vram generally speaking so like the best laptop GPU maxes out at 16 gigs okay so 16 gigs for the 4090 mobile then 12 gigs for the 4080 mobile such confusing name like what's going on this doesn't make sense yeah and then eight gigs for the 4070 mobile and 4060 mobile and six gigs on the 40 50. okay so with that in mind does vrm in gaming laptops matter as much as desktop counterparts well not being a laptop user myself at least for gaming I'm not an expert but we can we'll collaborate on this one as we're doing uh but the short answer shortly is yes it matters because you're playing the same games the same way you might be targeting slightly different performance but I mean what a resolution Solutions and stuff like that like 4K laptops are common now 1440p I mean you can use things like dlss or various types of upscaling but generally speaking you're playing stuff like Hogwarts Legacy uh the last of us all that sort of stuff on your laptop so it stands to reason that it's the same game same quality settings you're going to run into the same problems again you can dial back quality settings on low attacks and stuff like that to make it playable so vram is less of a concern there and that's the same stuff it's a difficult conversation to have because if you've bought something like a Radeon RX 6600 for 200 US you're probably okay with medium quality settings having said that if that card had 16 gigs of RAM you could play at medium and then Jack the textures right up and that would make the game look almost as good as Ultra in a lot of ways so having the extra VM is certainly a benefit in that sense you can go the to the point where you have just way too much of vram like 24 gigabytes and you just can't use that so it's of no benefit but yeah if you're paying a lot of money like and this is why we criticize the RTX 3072i 600 us and you know you can't play a lot of the games maxed out that that kind of sucks on that card you'd expect 600 us you get a premium experience so if you're paying I don't know three thousand dollars or something crazy like that for a high-end laptop and you're having a dial down texture quality settings which have I would say the biggest impact on visuals so having to really like tune and tweak those settings pretty disappointing I would have thought yeah it really depends on the price like when 470 laptops with eight gigs of vram I have noticed like texture popping in Hogwarts Legacy in particular yeah um even without maxing out the settings necessarily um but yeah it's just the problem like I said comes down a price so I think I've seen the cheapest 4070 laptop for like 1400 but then I've seen like one from MSI I recently reviewed the ge68 they're selling it for like 2500 which is like 1100 more money and you still like that's like that's high-end premium gaming laptop pricing but yeah if you're getting texture popping issues in current games that's right yeah it's not great no but at the same time like I don't know I also kind of think that like the actual gpus in the laptops themselves aren't necessarily as powerful because often they cut down versions of like what you can get on the desktop side and they definitely use far less power as well so there's that too um so that combination of things I kind of think that you know in order to do like say 1440p gaming on a laptop you're probably going to need to look at something like a higher tier in terms of name on the laptop side compared to the desktop which are often going to come with more vram anyway so I guess what I'm trying to say is with on on laptops I still think like eight gigs of vram is I still think it's decent uh obviously if you want like the best and you're paying like 2000 plus you probably want to look at something a bit better if you can because like you you can definitely get 4080 laptops for just over 2000 at the moment which have 12 gigs so that would be a bit nicer compared to paying more than that for eight gigs like I don't think that makes sense in that case plus you get the better more powerful uh GPU but uh yeah this person also asks uh do you think that 16 gigs of vram is okay for 4K and I mean on the laptop side it only goes up to 16. so if you want to play that's your only choice really um but yeah from the 16 gig options I've used um I think 4K actually does pretty well on um get like 4090 mobile which surprised me that's right well on the desktop side products like the RTX 4060 TI which will have a 16 gigabyte version I expect that card to be you know perfectly fine in terms of vrm capacity for they're foreseeable like probably certainly I would say the the realistic uh lifespan of that product let's say to the point where it's like you know it's so old and slow now like a GeForce 10 series type product that yeah vram is just not a concern um and again like there's an eight gigabyte version of that card and a 16 gigabyte version of that card now pricing aside because it's ridiculous paying a hundred dollars more to double the vram but I expect in like a year or two from now that the 16 gigabyte model will deliver the same amount of performance but significantly higher image quality by being able to take advantage of those higher texture settings so that's something to be aware of I suppose but again it all comes down to the price like some some price ranges you're willing to compromise and it's certainly a non-issue which in my opinion eight gigabytes is now entry level so if you're buying an entry level product without gigabytes it's like not worth making a fuss about because you're buying an entry level product but when you're spending 400 on a current generation GPU and you're only getting eight gigabytes that kind of stings yeah and I suppose from a laptop perspective as well you'd have to consider the fact that you can't upgrade the GPU like it's sold it into the the laptop so whatever you buy you're stuck with you can't just in a year or two be like all right I'll just pull out the the graphics card that's a good point yeah swap in whatever comes out next you kind of unless you sell the whole laptop which you know that's a bit of a pain yeah so for sure but yeah I think that said at the same time like eight gig on mid-range laptops it's still personally I think it's plenty for like 1080p 1440 that's true I think most 1440p games at least today still play well but yeah I think the point we're trying to make is if it's kind of starting to struggle in modern games that are just coming out now with higher settings then like what does that mean for the future so yeah but I'm not sitting here saying like mid-range laptops can't play games at 1440p today because I've shown that they can it's just that's right it also depends on the type of game or like if you're buying a laptop to play multiplayer games like Apex Legends for example then vram there's not really it's not a concern this is more for your single player games where you're really wanting that premium immersive experience and yeah which you could still go with laptops right because a lot of people would plug their laptop into I imagine like a TV type an OLED TV or a bigger display and they're really going for that you know premium gaming experience and if you're having if you're getting like severe texture popping or not even able to load the textures period or mad stuttering then that's less than ideal yeah so I guess in summary more vrm more battle pretty much yeah within reason like I said do they don't need 24 gigabytes 16 is pretty much where you want to be these days for at least 12. yeah at least 12. so this kind of makes me think about something I thought in a recent video I did I compared basically all the 40 mobile laptop gpus at different power levels and essentially there is quite a big jump in performance between 40 70 mobile and 4080 mobile to the point where it's kind of like it almost feels like they're pushing you to spend the extra money to go for the 4080. I mean it's got like the extra vram the performance is actually a nice jump compared to last gen everything before it is like kind of battles with last gen it's like a 4070 mobile it's like five percent or something faster than the 370 TI mobile it's really not much different and it's got the same eight gigs of vram and worst memory bus and it's cut down in some other ways compared to that so yeah it's almost feels like the kind of like going for the the upsell with the 4080. yeah I think tactics have changed there because pretty much prior to this generation it was always like just I don't care about you know I don't care that I'm going into the beyond the point of diminishing returns I just I've got the money I want the best of the best I don't care if it's 10 faster for double the price I'm just doing it so you know you only captured a smaller percentage of well people that were willing to spend that kind of money but now it's like well we want to expand that market where we get maximum dollar for the Silicon so I guess we've got to incentivize people and the way they've gone about doing that is not necessarily making the high end better it's just making the stuff under it worse so that is why people are so excited on the desktop side for stuff like RTX 49ers because you get insane performance vrm is just not a concern at all and so a lot of people are turning to that and the 4080 but then you get down the 40 70 tier it's like yeah same thing on the desktop there's really not much Point buying a 40 72i despite the fact that it's like what 400 or something more for the 4080 which is a huge upsell but a lot of you well a lot of our viewers are basically like extra vram extra performance might as well just do it all right so more vram questions there's quite a few of them oh surprised with the current state of 8 gig vram not being enough on the desktop side should I spend more money to get a 12 gig card for a laptop I guess we kind of already answered that one actually yeah um I get it the quick answer is depends on the games you play um whether the price range you're looking at uh warrants let's say a compromised type experience and just what it is that you're after but yeah if it's not a huge premium then yes it's smart to get the more vram because it will definitely provide you with a better game experience in the future and they're not too just a future I would have thought yeah so for a specific example with laptops kind of like what I said just before like MSI have that g68 that I just covered for 2 550 US Dollars and that's on sale for 40 70 mobile but then you can get a Lenovo uh what do they call it now Legion Pro 7. twenty three hundred dollars on sale so it's like 250 less money and it's the 4080 mobile and it's just significantly better than the 4070 with the extra four gigs of your own two so that seems like a no-brainer yeah I mean that's probably just a like might just be an MSI pricing thing maybe that'll go down but yeah in the case where the 4080 is cheaper it's better I mean obviously there's more to picking a laptop than just the GPU power but in this specific case like the Lenovo is still a decent machine so yeah wouldn't bother getting the MSI for a worse experience for more money how will RTX 3060 mobile fare with its six gig vram in the upcoming future so I can't remember how much 30 60 desktop has was it 12 or am I thinking it's 12. no the ti had eight okay um yeah 12 for the 30 60. okay it's on in laptop world it's only six gig so it's like a 2060 vram capacity yeah yeah six um again that's Hogwarts Legacy you're probably looking at the lowest possible quality settings there uh having said that though that's not entirely true it just means you've got to be a bit more conscious of that limitation so you can probably play Hogwarts at high or at the very least medium with the GPU performance you have but you'll have to then go manually dial down texture quality is an obvious one for reducing vram usage so yeah you're just gonna be mindful of that and optimize your settings and again textures unfortunately well having a phrase that they have a very uh big impact on graphic Fidelity how good the game's presentation is because those those watered down muddy textures let's say they look pretty awful so yeah low quality textures you really want to avoid for a great gaming experience because you can you can jack everything else up you can have Ray tracing turned on you can have everything dialed up but if you drop those textures down to their lower setting doesn't look good yeah in Hogwarts specifically I found it more annoying just with like you're walking along and like suddenly the ground is just like flat and then like two seconds later it's like oh there's tiles here now and it disappears again and you're like what's going on it just keeps taking you out of it yeah so they do that to avoid performance hits stuttering it can still occur because obviously it's doing a lot of memory swapping and it's trying to work out you know it's trying to remove textures that you won't necessarily notice but you know there's limits to how well they can do that so often it's the texture right in front of you just disappears and reappears and if you look over there then they'll shift from there to there and it's just not a great experience but thankfully in the case of the 3060 I imagine especially on the laptop side that was more of an entry level type product so the fact that two years later you're having to play things on like lowish to medium settings I don't think that's the worst thing in the world um personally it's more people who more recently might have bought you know as I said on the desktop side a 600 30 70 TI that's an expensive GPU to have to like have have any kind of performance related problems especially especially vram it's such a weird thing to be limited by because in the history of graphics cards and gaming from the mid-range up I it's never really been a concern has it it's just that you always had enough vram and and now it's it's becoming a feature almost to have enough vram which is something we want to avoid which is why we've been pushing back so heavily against it we don't want that just to be another thing that you have to worry about yeah give us enough yeah I would say um 360 mobile is probably more mid-range okay so some other interesting thing I noticed is so compared to what was before the 3060 was the 3050 TI mobile which was four gigs um on average the 3060 mobile was like 50 faster so now this generation we've got 40 50 and 40 60. uh I did a video on this I can't actually remember the percent increase but it was like 20 I want to say 20 or less than that yeah it's like the Gap is even small in this generation too so last last gen there was actually a decent Gap and now it's just like so they've expanded the percentage differences at the high end again pressed it at the low end yeah so and that's obviously a strategy to get you to pay more so I guess a question that is kind of related to that will an RTX 4060 laptop which is 8 gigs of vrm be usable for modern games three to four years from now oh um I guess it depends on how you Define usable so three to four years from now I think it's reasonable to accept that you would be heading towards sort of medium quality settings at a lower resolution uh but yeah uh three to four years whether eight gigabyte cards will still be that usable it's obviously impossible for me to say I'll have to get back to you on that one in about three to four years but it's going to be a heavily compromised experience that is for sure um and I think it'll age much more poorly than it would have otherwise I mean we've got plenty of evidence of this for example you know the Radeon RX 6800 that's a 16 gigabyte card and that was only I think seventy dollars more than the RTX uh 3070 something like that that's got eight gigabytes those two cards today chalk and cheese like you can every check you don't have to dial down any texture quality settings on an RX 6800 you can play any game on the market today and regardless of what you do with the other settings textures you can always just max them so no matter what if you choose a medium preset just max the textures on an RX 6800 RTX 3070 you can't do that and the Radeon GPU gives you a much better experience because of the extra vrm and vram's not expensive it's like 30 dollars to double the vram thereabouts but I I'd estimate that's basically what it costs Nvidia and we know for a fact it's under a hundred dollars yeah for this question I don't even know if I would say it's specific to the vram like four years in laptops is quite a significant amount of time so if I think of like what was mid-range four years ago and then if I tried to play that in modern games even vram aside I don't think it would be amazing no I think two years is probably more relevant yeah again you can obviously like turn down settings and definitely get by especially with features like dlss and FSR these days I guess frame generation with 40 series at least in supported games and probably help out to a degree but yeah it's uh ultimately difficult to predict the future yeah I suppose yeah I mean the point really is you just don't want to be hamstrung in any period of time like you don't want your your laptop or your grab what your graphics card whether it's a desktop or a laptop you don't want it to become obsolete let's say just because it didn't have enough erm like you want that not to be a thing you want it to just be that didn't have enough processing power rendering power to continue on you don't want it like we're saying with the RTX 3070 you don't want it artificially limited I'm not sure what the best term to use there is but if that again if that card had 16 gigabytes of vram and you guys had an RTX 3070 you'd be like I don't really need to upgrade at this point in time like you know if uh I'm basically getting a similar performance out of a 40 60 TI for similar money so you just wait another generation but now you're sitting there thinking well do I spend another 500 two and a half years later to get the same raster performance similar Ray tracing performance just to double my vram buffer it's kind of a crap situation to be in yeah not great no all right next question what are your two thoughts on PC versus gaming laptop debate should people invest in a better computer for the same amount of money as the best gaming laptops or investing in the best laptop be just as good in its lifespan as the desktop counterparts before planning the next to buy so I'm kind of talking about this a bit yesterday I feel like we need a fight it's a sound effect well there is actually a question here uh Jarred versus Steve wrestling match oh yeah so that's that one yeah let's let's do that um yeah I mean I don't really know how to tackle this one because I don't really believe the question is sort of I suppose the question you should be asking with that so we can I suppose we can get into this but I know this is something Tim has talked about a lot that's something I've bullied for a long time so I'm not anti-gaming laptop by any means like I think um there's a time and a place for them um probably more Niche depending on what it is you do and how you need it but there's not there's not one to rule all situations I suppose like if you and in some of these some of these scenarios you can argue that one might be better than the other like it might be better to just build two gaming PCs and have one at like I don't know an apartment in the city and then one at your house that you spend the weekend at or something rather than lugging the laptop but then there's cons and Pros to which like the cool thing about the laptop is you've got all your data in the one location so if you're working and gaming from that you don't have to worry about multiple different computers and where are my files all that sort of stuff so it's tough but basically some obvious scenarios if you're primarily gaming in one location desktop PC right like getting a laptop to put in a docking station and you might take your laptop like on a holidays a couple of times a year it's just not worth having the laptop for that scenario in my opinion uh and then yeah I mean laptop gaming like on a train or whatever is that really a thing no even though I cover a lot of laptops I basically say like actually gaming on laptops is honestly a bit of a joke like I showed in every laptop review like best case you might be getting like uh two hours of 30 FPS which isn't like that's not nothing but that's best case most of them are like an hour some uh less so yeah for the most part I say that actually gaming on battery power isn't really great at least ones with discrete graphics maybe it might start changing as like integrated Graphics start stepping up and hopefully that gets a bit more efficient especially like I suppose lighter weight games so when I do my battery test on gaming I test the Witcher 3 1080p medium settings yeah so yeah older games certainly make much more sense because they don't require anywhere near the rendering power yeah and if you can definitely get by with igpu then yeah that would be different but for the most part I think we're pretty well aligned like personally I have actually we've been using a laptop for the last like 10 months or so that's why I'm actually here so we can build me a desktop PC finally so the last one I had just kind of stopped working and I'd basically been forced to swap to the laptop so I've been using that full time and it's actually been doing quite well but ideally like I spend all my time at home so it doesn't make much sense I might as well just have something with more power and more performance that can do my work faster and then have the laptop for when I need to like go out and travel it's like when I came here it doesn't really make sense to me to dump the desktop in the car if I'm coming here for like a day yeah that's right so I just I just brought the laptop in case I need it plus it already had like you said before having the data on different machines I've been using the laptop for like 10 months so it's got everything I need on it I know everything's there and when I go to computex I'll be just bringing the laptop because I know it can do the job now I say that and I remember computex 2019 and you guys actually brought desktop PCS from Australia to Taiwan that's right yeah that was a lot better um again not anti-laptop definitely a time and a place but in most situations uh a desktop PC does make more sense um anyway as Jared was just saying I think it was 2018 Tim and I uh were sponsored by MSI we took two big work state well MSI provided two big workstation laptops and they were loud they were hot they were clunky and they were slow so you know they worked they were kind of a decent makeshift thing but going I suppose from like a threadripper encoding PC at home to then like I think it was maybe an eight core laptop that just screamed every time you did anything it was a bit annoying Tim and I were like there's got to be a better way of doing this so the following year we built two Mini ITX PCS which we just took in our carry on luggage that were very very compact they were I think they were ryzen 7 2700x CPUs uh from memory which slaughtered the laptops of the time and then we just put a 32 inch monitor in our in our luggage and put our clothes around it and it sounds absurd but it was extremely practical worked really well we set that up in the hotel room nice and quiet very fast worked a treat and I think Jared came in with his laptop to I think you edited a video with us and yeah you were sitting there sort of scratching head going hmm I think this is a better option than the laptop well sir I definitely appreciate the portability of the laptop like I don't personally want to like I'm not going to make that compromise of trying to take a monitor and a like a case and to be fair I took a laptop as well to use on the plane and stuff so that's that's definitely uh not the move for me I would say but yeah it definitely has a time and a play slacking to be fair since you use that laptop in 2018 they have gotten significantly better especially when you consider like has 4K video footage really become more demanding in the last five years yeah yeah that's fair so the specs are way better and at the same time it's still going to be very loud so yeah well they would be better than the mini ITX systems we took um so they're obviously very usable in that sense but whether you can build a mini ITX system that would then Slaughter the laptop is hard to say like yeah I guess ultimately different things for different people which is basically what I end up concluding my laptop versus desktop comparisons with do you need portability or not that's right that is the big one it's kind of like the whole console gaming versus PC gaming it's sort of two different audiences after two different things and at the end of the day like I'm not going to sit here and tell you you're wrong for doing a certain thing like if it works for you and you like that then awesome like I guess that's the great thing about having the variety right like I'm not sitting here going laptops shouldn't exist or what like I'm not anti-laptop it's like if you if you have one and it works great for you and and the way you operate then that's that's awesome it's really that simple uh and and again I I certainly recognize that there's cases where they make sense and they're more practical depending on what it is you do um kind of the worst person to get any kind of laptop advice from because I'm pretty ignorant on the subject because I've not really tried gaming laptops for a very long time and I sit on my backside over there every single day and barely leave the office so I work from home I'm not I'm not the the audience the the target market for uh laptop use and I do all my gaming over here so so no need yeah yeah all right so Matt and Discord relevant to what we're just talking about asked I'll ask me what laptop I brought here and what I'm taking to computex and then what you guys are taking to computex like so we just talked about laptops being better are you going to be taking laptops to compute absolutely laptops are better no uh we're cheating this year actually so again we're sponsored by MSI to go over there this year and I sort of said to Ms I'm like will you do computers don't you and they're like yeah actually we do do computers so uh we're taking our video editor bailin myself and Tim and so there's three of us and MSI is like well how about we just provided three of our high-end desktop systems with three 32 inch 144 Hertz monitors and I was like that sounds awesome so we're just going to take each going to take an SSD with uh you know installing our data that we need and we're going to pop that into the computer so they'll deliver those to the hotel we'll set them up yeah I mean that definitely sounds it's probably the most optimal option I think it's optimal when someone else will just handle it for you so you don't have to bring anything yeah you can turn up and you've just got good performance I was like why did I think of this sooner yeah it's probably a good idea but uh as for me like I said I'll just be taking the laptop I've been using it's the MSI uh z17 whatever said z z yeah I honestly forget which one it is in Australia I know I think it's zed zed yep I'm used to saying Z for these I've had Americans go you wouldn't say zebra though would you you'd say zebra like no we say that and they're like what mind blown yeah so that's what I'll be taking and it's got a 12th gen i7 12700h in that laptop but it I mean it from memory it beats my threadripper first gen desktop so yeah that's fine I think in terms of productivity on the CPU side laptops are significantly more competitive than they are on the gaming side as long as you're plugged in no none of this battery business yeah yeah because like um yeah like these days you can get a 13900 HX which is essentially a 13900k just with less power like same cores same threads same cash that's another one cash cash yeah we we've we've yielded to that one it's cash now so I always always go the same I think only Australia says cage confuses far too many people in the audience yeah anyway the point is it's essentially a desktop processor just with less power so yeah depending on the like thickness and how big the machine is when it's plugged in it can do very very well been generally not so great on battery we'll have a render off yeah you can come over to our hotel room and we'll we'll have our three desktops versus your laptop oh I I don't know I guess if it was actually a competition I'd consider bringing something better because like well what I have does the job but there's definitely much better hours left 13 900k is an RTX 49ers so we will just be using all the power that is available yeah I think if we use all three of them rendering at the same time the lights will start flickering all right next question will entry and mid-range gpus ever be affordable again I think well I think if AMD and Nvidia um have their way probably probably should have led within video because they shouldn't be well they're the market leaders most market share but yes if Nvidia and AMD have their way I think no is the answer um I mean if they can get more money why wouldn't they Yeah Tim and I have had this discussion for a while now in the Q a series because this comes up all the time and my opinion which I think Tim didn't didn't disagree with but he wasn't necessarily on board with but as time's gone by I think he's coming around to the idea that they're just trying to recondition the market they've seen the good times that can be had on fat margins during cryptocurrency and they're like well we don't necessarily need cryptocurrency to be a thing to milk Gamers we just you know we're the market leaders it's somewhat of a monopoly duopoly you know best or worst um so we're just we're just going jack up the prices and Gamers will have to pay it like you don't really have a choice you cannot pay it but at some point if you want to keep gaming you have to pay it right so I I see it as like Gamers and Nvidia AMD are in a bit of an armrest or right now they're setting these prices really high and then it's a bit of a standoff like how long can Gamers hold out for if they can hold out long enough they'll be forced to bring them back down but of course the next generation will try and bring them up so it's always like this sort of act where they're jacking them off and then we'll bring them down a bit and they'll be like well we'll go here and then we'll bring him down a bit and I see them just continue to go up and up because what's the alternative yeah I mean if people are buying them but it just made me think of a one of the top comments I saw on one of your videos recently something along the lines of like just everyone keep waiting hold out but then at the same time like how much power do you as the individual really have in controlling that I mean if you need something now it's yeah that's a worth waiting yeah that's right I mean I don't expect someone to if their favorite hobby is PC gaming and their RTX 2060 dies you know I mean there is I suppose a second hand Market which maybe is a wise investment but you know I don't expect them to sort of go well you know my GPU is dead I am wanting to get sort of a new thing I'll get an RTX 4070 or whatever it's like yeah well that's what you would do right you have much choice but it that just sucks so yeah I think those affordable entry level cards have gone the way of the dodo unfortunately I think um 300 is sort of the new entry level there'll be I'm sure there'll be a 200 GPU it's whether it's worth buying or not it's hard to say I mean it's questionable whether the 300 card's worth buying so yeah I I've got no no good news on that one yeah it's no good as for the laptop side well not great either I guess so last year for like a thousand US Dollars you'd probably be looking at like a decent RTX 3060 mobile laptop and when Nvidia launched the 40 series at CES uh in January this year um you know they show they're like starting from prices and the 4050 was starting from uh a thousand US Dollars now the 40 50 so I have compared the 40 50 and 30 60. oh man I can't actually remember the results but I believe the 3060 um was generally a little ahead unless you take into account like frame generation and you know that type of thing yeah but the point is is the point I wanted to make was that 40 50 laptops starting at a thousand dollars I kind of Wonder like I mean Nvidia has obviously specified that that's the price because they're the ones saying starting at a thousand dollars now with that said I bought the cheapest 4050 laptop I could a few months ago which was exactly a thousand USD uh now the laptop was honestly pretty crap it was the MSI gf63 another crap MSI laptop now since then a few months later um there was a Acer Nitro 5 which I reviewed and that was on sale for 950 US dollars so 50 cheaper same GPU but I should have also mentioned the MSI it's the 4050 was power limited to 45 watts and the Nitro 5 from ASA goes up to like well they say 140 but I've shown in a video that they maxed out about 100 in games yeah but either way still much more performance frame rate way better it's also just a much better laptop better build quality it's got better features like the option to disable integrated Graphics which will boost FPS and games point is is these types of like different options with the 4050 is starting to come out in lower prices below the thousand dollars so it kind of made me wonder like was MSI forced into selling their lowest tier 4050 laptop for a thousand dollars because maybe Nvidia has said so and now once some unknown period of time has passed perhaps then they'll be able to start actually lowering the price to something that would be more reasonable I'm not sure so that's kind of what it feels like yeah um yeah obviously I don't know for sure but if they're not selling them and MSI is sitting there going well we made all these laptops and they're not selling then you know they have to make a compromise they can be like well wait one more month and then we can we can discount them because they don't want to discount them straight away because that looks a bit silly um and it stings for anyone who just bought it but yeah it's it's again it's it's a situation where if people aren't buying the laptops and Nvidia wants to sell you laptops uh with well at least their GPU on the laptops then something has to give and they'll hold that as long as they can but at some point they've got to move that inventory but yeah I think the GeForce 40 series is going to be a massive success for them having said that though I haven't really seen all the sales figures apparently the GeForce 20 series sold quite well despite it being just a massive flop in terms of what it offered gamers but that seems to be sort of how they're doing that Tick Tock type generation release yeah so I guess it's not looking too great for the mid-range but hopefully over time things get cheaper yep yeah and I suspect to the next generation of gpus will be a lot more exciting sort of like what the 30 series was not that Gamers got to enjoy that because the cryptocurrency Boom but I think the next generation of gpus from Nvidia and AMD will offer a lot more than what we've got this generation this was sort of the features generation so you know dlss3 that sort of stuff yeah it kind of feels like that's how it's been going in the past because like you know there was Pascal 10 series Pascal was amazing that was quite good even in laptops like 1060 laptop versus 1060 desktop you know that was back when the performance was actually not too different and you were sitting here going oh we're actually getting to a point in time where there's going to be very little separation between them and you're like that's amazing and then it gets bigger and bigger next minute yeah yeah yeah but then like 20 series like that was obviously when they introduced Ray tracing and they made a big deal about that so that was the feature generation so cost per frame went nowhere there was you know same vram capacities all that sort of stuff and then yeah then we've got the 30 series which was the performance generation so um features were much the same am I forgetting something I mean nothing major because like yeah 20 series was Ray tracing CSS I guess dlss improved yeah so you got a bit more vram like 2080 eight gigabytes um 30 80 10 gigabytes so there was some change there and obviously the 390 got a heap of vram but so it was sort of upgrading vrm which is sort of like a performance related feature and then a huge cost per frame increase and then the 40 series has come along and moved the needle like that much whereas I expect the 50 Series to be more like the 30 series and the 10 Series yeah so I guess just based on the past if the past is anything to go by which it isn't always no but if it is then yeah maybe 50 Series might be better that'd be my guess my it's certainly My Hope yeah well we'll see what would you say is the best current GPU for 1440p gaming both on the desktop and laptop side also keeping money in mind so I guess you can do the desktop side and I'll try and do the laptop yeah don't get me into the laptop but barely not the options are it's tough because not everything's been released yet yeah so it's yeah it's tough and there's not like from from a video well we should we eventually will have like a 16 gigabyte uh 4060 TI for 500 which that's a no buy at that price and then you've got the 40 70 at 600 which is kind of like kind of like the best option there um especially because we don't have an AMD alternative yet at that price but then it's like well yeah the 4070 TI has more performance but the same vrm buffer not really you know worth going up to 800 for that but then you get the the 7900 XT up around that and you get 20 Gigabytes there more performance again doesn't have like frame generation yet not sure if it's going to get it so it's a tough one like I'd have to say the 4070 just because it's sort of the only option there um you can get like a previous generation GPU from uh from AMD but they use a lot more power they don't have av1 encoding they don't have frame generation so probably not worth buying a 6950xt for roughly the same price as an RTX 470 in my opinion but you do get more vram so there is that but 12 gigabytes is sort mostly okay so I'm gonna have to say RTX 4070 really though I would urge you to try and stretch the budget to a 7900 XT but then that's so much money for that product so I mean my hands are tied there's no good option here it's the best of limited Choice yeah I mean in previous generations you'd be like oh this is a great value product get that huge upgrade for people with this this and this you know I highly recommend it but now it's sort of like yeah what's the the lesser of the evils yeah so I guess on the laptop side it's a bit tough so I kind of want to say the 3070 TI mobile now hear me up because that does have eight gig of vram and we spent like a bunch of this start of this video so your hands are tied though yeah so like so on the laptop side if you want to go up from the 30 70 TI to a 3080 TI you do get double the vrm at 16 gig but it's often far more expensive and apart from the vram the GPU performance is like very small so it's sort of like 40 60 TI eight gigabyte versus 16 gigabyte it's in a way yeah I've seen the performance big upgrade in price yeah so like there's more like criticals and stuff but the power limit's the same you're ultimately paying for the vram and that is quite a premium so I it depends I guess if the 3080 TI laptops go down in price and you know that extra vrm is worth however much that extra money is that would definitely be a good option but the reason I'm saying 3070 TI mobile over something newer like 40 70 mobile is well I've done a whole video comparing uh the 4070 mobile and 3070 TI and like I said I think before in this one the 470 was only like five percent faster but the laptops often cost a lot more now if they're about the same price then yeah you might as well go for the 4070 version because well you get features like frame generation but yeah if the 370 TI model is like hundreds of dollars less probably I would lean towards that but then at the same time it depends how much like you personally value features like frame generation so I think I have used it in quite a few games and you know I think it adds more I think it I think it's overall a net positive if a game has it I will turn it on and play it and I've played a bunch of games with it and you know I I enjoy using it but would I pay more than like 100 bucks for it or something probably not especially given how limited it is in games today but I mean it also depends like if you're spending two thousand dollars on a laptop at that point a hundred dollars extra is like what like five percent more money it's a small small percentage and again stuff like frame generation also depends on the type of games you play and stuff like that as well so then like it's useless for multiplayer gaming for example yeah so I guess if you are interested in frame generation I think the 4070 otherwise um from last gen 30 70 TI is a decent option but if you really do want the extra vrm yeah see if you can get a cheap 3080 TI or maybe a 4080 on sale like I said earlier there was that 4080 that was less money than a 40 70 so that would be an easy choice in that case yeah with the vram thing we're saying basically we're not saying spend a lot more money to get more vram we're basically saying we want Nvidia to give you the vram they should give you rather than making it like a premium type feature like just give people enough vram to begin with so that's what I'm advocating for anyway I'm not saying that you guys are dumb for buying eight gigabytes of vrm I'm not saying that you made a mistake if you bought it nothing like that I'm I'm we're trying to educate Gamers into like pushing AMD and Nvidia to giving you more vrm like they should rather than yeah artificially limiting gimping products that that really can take advantage of the extra vram but not given it so you have to upgrade sooner or whatever it may be but yeah from The Limited options that we do have from them at the moment I guess that's yeah there's nothing there's nothing we can do about it right now but we're trying to improve it for the future so we stop seeing 400 US expensive eight gigabyte graphics cards as sort of the mainstream offering we don't want that anymore 12 gigabytes minimum ideally really 16 I mean it's not expensive guys they're making out that this is really expensive to add it's just not so and they can do it the density is there so it's not something that is unheard of and they've been doing it for a long time already anyway it's not new it's not groundbreaking technology speaking of vram get a gun nice to change the topic actually yeah I was just getting over talking about that uh I want to know if there's a difference in vrm buffer impact between gddr6 and gddr6x for example testing 3070 versus 3070 TI in games that exceed eight giga vram now I thought this was this is a very good question I thought it was also partially interesting because on the gaming laptop side we don't even get gdr gddr6x mouthful yeah well this this is a good one and it comes up a lot and the Assumption seems to be by a lot of people that the faster the memory the more bandwidth you have that somehow mitigates the capacity problem which it absolutely does not do so and Nvidia recently tried to uh sort of Muddy the waters on that discussion and confuse people by saying that they have more L2 cash which effectively increases the bandwidth which helps with vram which it absolutely doesn't do it can help with bandwidth but it doesn't actually make up for uh bandwidth relating to accessing the vram so if you have like a a 12 gig texture pack the larger L2 doesn't really help with that so there's a whole heap of confusing things going on there but essentially no amount of bandwidth can make up for not having enough capacity because the bandwidth and the latency to your local memory on the graphics card that's just for how fast you can access it that's how quick you can move things in and out of that memory But ultimately you need enough memory to move things in and out of and if you don't have enough it goes to the system memory which means going through the PCI Express Bus which is the greatest bottleneck there and into the system memory which is has more bandwidth but again you're limited by the pcie bus so that that's the problem there you just need the bandwidth oh sorry you need the capacity and the bandwidth can't make up for that so it yeah it doesn't matter what type of memory you have that'll that that more relates to the the performance the frame rate performance you can extract from that product but yeah you can have the world's you can have thousands and thousands of gigabytes worth of bandwidth between the local memory and the GPU but if you don't have enough uh storage to store it all then you just get those horrible frame starters performance tanks because you go from having in this hypothetical thousands upon thousands of gigabytes per second to like you know 50 something like that and then it all comes crashing down so basically 6X in laptops would not solve the problem wouldn't solve the problem it would allow for faster gpus so I believe it also uses more power there which I think is why they probably don't use it yeah it definitely does so yeah it's because it because it does improve performance it gets conflated with oh well it's improving performance it's somehow mitigating the capacity issue but no it's improving performance it's allowing the GPU to do its thing faster um providing you have a big enough buffer so they're two separate things so there's there's memory access which is like bandwidth and latency and then there's memory capacity um and you know a larger capacity doesn't increase bandwidth and a larger bandwidth doesn't help mitigate a smaller capacity yep all right final question would an e-gpu slash regular laptop setup be as viable or close to desktop rather than a traditional gaming laptop while having the benefit of battery life so I was interested to see what you would think about this so you were saying before like how you know the differences between laptops and desktops in theory you would think an egpu was like the solution you just have your dock at home with all your monitors set up keyboard and mouse you've got your powerful GPU inside all you have to do is come home put the laptop down stick in one cable you're good to go you've basically got the full desktop experience and then you can just unplug the cable walk away with the laptop so Best of Both Worlds so yeah I was curious what you thought about that well I have a limited experience and knowledge doing this kind of testing because a I've never done it before Tim takes care of that but my understanding is that it's very latency sensitive because well gpus are very latency sensitive if you use like a riser cable that can have especially if they're not shielded correctly but it's a separate issue but it can impact latency and more of an issue for like high frame rate competitive type gamers but basically depends on the interface you're using to connect to the laptop to the egpu as to how much latency that introduces and how much bandwidth It ultimately has as to what the experience is like um so I guess it's like what Thunderbolt they'd use probably USB type c stuff now uh I'd imagine some laptops probably even have some sort of proprietary type PCI Express interface to do it which is probably the most preferable option um but yeah it should certainly work it's just how much you can reduce the latency connection basically yeah and how well does it work so you're basically spot on with everything you said there so I think in terms of egpu the most common setup that's out there is Thunderbolt 4 but the problem with Thunderbolt 4 is it's limited to like 40 gigabit per second so yeah latency is a big killer um so if you compare like a I don't know 40 90 graphics card in an egb setup versus like just in a desktop PC the performance is like it's a massive difference I did a video on it like after the 49 came out I can't remember the actual differences but it's like three four five times faster in some cases and a lot of that is just because of the way Thunderbolt 4 currently works like I think I can't actually remember because it changes between CPU Generations from Intel but basically some generations have to have like a separate chip to handle the like Thunderbolt part of it yeah there's more overhead and more latency some of them have that part actually built into the processor which does improve things significantly but then it's still not ideal my main problem I have with it is it's just so hit or miss whether or not it'll actually work like some laptops will work flawlessly with an egpu setup no problem at all but then you'll have another one and you'll just have problem after problem after problem and it's just not worth it so based on it just being so like you don't know whether or not it's going to work I almost never recommend anyone actually buy a setup like that even though in theory it sounds like it sounds like the ultimate solution yeah it sounds like the solution to the laptop versus desktop problem yeah but it's just not implemented well so I don't know if that's going to change whenever Thunderbolt 5 comes out because in theory I think it goes up to like 120 gigabit which is 3x bandwidth yep so yeah it's it's kind of like the whole um you know cloud-based gaming you've got that the Ping the latency problem and it's that to a lesser degree so there's a there's a reason why motherboards are structured the way they are with the the ram the dim slots right next to the CPU socket to minimize latency there the primary pcie slots directly below the CPU to minimize latency there and then you know that's why you don't typically install your graphics card like connected to the chipset for example because that kills the latency in your performance there and that's much closer to where it needs to be opposed to having you know an external chord like that chord adds latency however long that is then obviously there's the the chips that you know do all the transmitting of data and the more things you add into that that pipeline just the worse the latency gets and then as Jared saying laptops aren't they're not designed with discrete gpus in mind it's sort of an afterthought or it should work based on the technology but the it's not something they've really put a lot of time into making sure there's compatibility and it works well yeah it's kind of just bolted on top of Thunderbolt but like you were saying before um some laptops do have like you know a custom pcie connector so Asus do that with the XG mobile so they basically have like a little box they only use Mobile gpus in it I think that might be an Nvidia limitation can't remember but the point is you get a little box with like I don't know say a 4090 mobile 175 Watt and then you connect to that with again the cable is actually quite short compared to Thunderbolt you can get much longer cables but with the XG mobile it's quite short because it's pcie and you get way more bandwidth direct to the CPU compared to Thunderbolt And there's just you don't get the overheads and I haven't tested that in about a year but the last time I used it it worked flawlessly it was the best egpu setup that I've ever attached sir yeah that'd be my expectation yeah so that's the only time I would say that egpu works is unfortunately with asus's I guess proprietary connector because with Thunderbolt obviously it's USB type-c so you know you can use that on multiple machines but if you buy into I guess the Asus ecosystem you're kind of stuck but at the same time I don't think it's that bad because this XG mobile thing has been around for like three years or so now so they've kept it going and you know when they originally launched it like three years ago or whatever I was kind of skeptical like are they actually gonna keep refreshing this with new gpus are we going to get new laptops that actually have this port and they have kept it around yeah so this is still going and you know it's mostly on there like tablet style devices so you get like 13 inch up to 16 inch I think it's basically kind of like a tablet okay that's cool and you know you can use it as a tablet I think some of them go up to like well this generation might be 40 70 mobile so you know it'll do all right I wouldn't suspect just on its own but yeah then you can connect in the the egpu and it should be much better I haven't actually tested this gen yet but yeah that's basically the best you can get in terms of egpu and I guess that would act as both a desktop and laptop setup although the XG mobile is so small like it's a brick like that you could realistically just put it in a bag and take it with you unlike it's like a big power brick yeah unlike a traditional like egpu enclosure which you know they have to be quite massive because they have to fit all sorts of different graphics card sizes like my one at home when I tested 40 series I can't actually put the like the lid on because I guess it wasn't designed with current gen graphics cards in mind at that point it might just be a mini ITX system yeah like that would probably be small so all right that's all the questions well I had fun yeah it was interesting do it for someone other than Tim not there's anything wrong with Tim but sorry Tim yeah sorry to be fine no we're joking um but that was great to catch up with Jared and have you come and check out the studio and and yeah do a video for your channel yeah um I will actually have a behind the scenes little tour of this studio if you're interested um that'll be over on patreon so I'll leave a link in the description otherwise the main reason I'm here is to do that PC build I mentioned so that'll probably be yeah that should be live before this video goes up yeah definitely a little bit yeah I'll uh I'll put a link to that on Steve's face\n"