AMD’s X570 chipset marks the arrival of some technology that was first deployed on Epyc, although that was done through the CPU as there isn’t a traditional chipset. With the shift to PCIe 4, X570 motherboards have grown more complex than X370 and X470, furthered by difficulties cooling the higher power consumption of X570. All of these changes mean that it’s time to compare the differences between X370, X470, and X570 motherboard chipsets, hopefully helping newcomers to Ryzen understand the changes.

The persistence of AMD’s AM4 socket, still slated for life through 2020, means that new CPUs are compatible with older chipsets (provided the motherboard makers update BIOS for detection). It also means that older CPUs (like the reduced price R5 2600X) are compatible with new motherboards, if you for some reason ended up with that combination. The only real downside, aside from potential cost of the latter option, is that new CPUs on old motherboards will mean no PCIe Gen4 support. AMD is disabling it in AGESA at launch, and unless a motherboard manufacturers finds the binary switch to flip in AGESA, it’ll be off for good. Realistically, this isn’t all that relevant: Most users will never touch the bandwidth of Gen4 for this round of products (in the future, maybe), and so the loss of running a new CPU on an old motherboard may be outweighed by the cost savings of keeping an already known-good board, provided the VRM is sufficient.

Our viewers have long requested that we add standardized case fan placement testing in our PC case reviews. We’ve previously talked about why this is difficult – largely logistically, as it’s neither free in cost nor free in time – but we are finally in a good position to add the testing. The tests, we think, clearly must offer some value, because it is one of our most-requested test items over the past two years. We ultimately want to act on community interests and explore what the audience is curious about, and so we’ve added tests for standardized case fan benchmarking and for noise normalized thermal testing.

Normalizing for noise and running thermal tests has been our main, go-to benchmark for PC cooler testing for about 2-3 years now, and we’ve grown to really appreciate the approach to benchmarking. Coolers are simpler than cases, as there’s not really much in the way of “fan placement,” and normalizing for a 40dBA level has allowed us to determine which coolers have the most efficient means of cooling when under identical noise conditions. As we’ve shown in our cooler reviews, this bypasses the issue where a cooler with significantly higher RPM always chart-tops. It’s not exactly fair if a cooler at 60dBA “wins” the thermal charts versus a bunch of coolers at, say, 35-40dBA, and so normalizing the noise level allows us to see if any proper differences emerge when the user is subjected to the same “volume” from their PC cooling products. We have also long used these for GPU cooler reviews. It’s time to introduce it to case reviews, we think, and we’ll be doing that by sticking with the stock case fan configuration and reducing case fan RPMs equally to meet the target noise level (CPU and GPU cooler fans remain unchanged, as these most heavily dictate CPU and GPU coolers; they are fixed speeds constantly).

One of our most popular videos of yore talks about the GTX 960 4GB vs. GTX 960 2GB cards and the value of choosing one over the other. The discussion continues today, but is more focused on 3GB vs. 6GB comparisons, or 4GB vs. 8GB comparisons. Now, looking back at 2015’s GTX 960, we’re revisiting with locked frequencies to compare memory capacities. The goal is to look at both framerate and image quality to determine how well the 2GB card has aged versus how well the 4GB card has aged.

A lot of things have changed for us since our 2015 GTX 960 comparison, so these results will obviously not be directly comparable to the time. We’re using different graphics settings, different test methods, a different OS, and much different test hardware. We’ve also improved our testing accuracy significantly, and so it’s time to take all of this new hardware and knowledge and re-apply it to the GTX 960 2GB vs. 4GB debate, looking into whether there was really a “longevity” argument to be made.

ASUS grew impatient waiting for Samsung to reach volume production on its 32GB DDR4 UDIMMs, and so the company instead designed a new double capacity DIMM standard. This isn’t a JEDEC standard, but is a standard that has gotten some attention from ZADAK and GSkill, both of whom have made some of the tallest memory modules the world has seen. These DIMMs are 32GB per stick, so two of them give us 64GB at 3200MHz and, after overclocking effort, some pretty good timings. Two of these sticks would cost you about $1000, with the 3600MHz options at $1300. Today, we’ll be looking into when they can be used and how well they overclock.

These are double-capacity DIMMs, achieved by making the PCB significantly taller than ordinary RAM. More memory fits on a single stick, making it theoretically possible to approach the max of the CPU’s memory controller. This is difficult to do, as signal integrity starts to become threatened as the PCB grows larger and more complex.

This is an exciting milestone for us: We’ve completely overhauled our CPU testing methodology for 2019, something we first detailed in our GamersNexus 2019 Roadmap video. New testing includes more games than before, tested at two resolutions, alongside workstation benchmarks. These are new for us, but we’ve added program compile workloads, Adobe Premiere, Photoshop, compression and decompression, V-Ray, and more. Today is the unveiling of half of our new testing methodology, with the games getting unveiled separately. We’re starting with a small list of popular CPUs and will add as we go.

We don’t yet have a “full” list of CPUs, naturally, as this is a pilot of our new testing procedures for workstation benchmarks. As new CPUs launch, we’ll continue adding their most immediate competitors (and the new CPUs themselves) to our list of tested devices. We’ve had a lot of requests to add some specific testing to our CPU suite, like program compile testing, and today marks our delivery of those requests. We understand that many of you have other requests still awaiting fulfillment, and want you to know that, as long as you tweet them at us or post them on YouTube, there is a good chance we see them. It takes us about 6 months to a year to change our testing methodology, as we try to stick with a very trustworthy set of tests before introducing potential new variables. This test suite has gone through a few months of validation, so it’s time to try it out in the real world.