Hardware stub

Ask GN: Multi-Pass Testing, What Bottlenecks the 1080, & Price Hikes

Posted on May 22, 2016

This episode of Ask GN precedes our imminent trip to Taipei, Taiwan for a two-week trip around Asia. We're likely already in the air – a total of 24 hours through airports and planes – and are prepping for factory tours, HQ meetings, and Computex (comparable in size to CES). It'll be a big week, but before getting to that, we took to the home-base studio one more time for an Ask GN episode.

Questions this week included a focus on our testing methodology (“how much variance is there?”), the point at which a GTX 1080 is bottlenecked by the CPU, price hikes, and more.

Questions & Timestamps

0:24 – Leo DS: “Hey Steve, you said many times how you're doing 3 tests for each card to get more accurate results. […] Do you average these three tests? […] How large is the discrepancy between tests?”

2:50 – Mark Rushow: “Dude, To benefit from the new GTX 1080 am I going to need a new CPU and MoBo? My current CPU is an i5-4670 and my MoBo is a GIGABYTE GA-Z87N-Wi-Fi rev2.0 . I've been saving up for a new GPU in hopes of getting into VR. I recently tried the Rift at a BestBuy and loved it. I don't want to throw money away on a GPU that my machine can't fully utilize. My current GPU is an EVGA GTX780 SC w/ACX Cooler. It has been a beauty for a couple years now; and pretty much all the games I play look and play well enough still. However I know it is underpowered for VR. And I know I'm going to want decent looking graphics that are smooth. Do I need to save up for a whole new machine if I want to see the benefits from the 1080?”

4:25 & 6:08 – Zero Sami: “hi recently I switched to a mini atx low end mother board but the former over clock I sustained on my r9 290 gpu couldn't be achieved on the this new board what could really cause this I only switched my motherboard and case nothing else so I know for sure it is the mother board but why? also I crossfired my r9 290 with an r9 390 in my friends high end gaming desktop just for fun to see what performance scaling can be gained but when everything was done properly I noticed in the gpu panel that the second card ran at a 4x pcie noting that my friends rig has a devil's canyon i7 and many other high end components”

7:20 – Homer Thompson: “Steve man, what do you make of the price inflation we have seen in gpus the last five years? In 2011 the full mid-sized die GF114 chip was sold in the GTX 560 Ti for $250. In 2012 that doubled for $500 for the full mid-sized die GK104 in the GTX 680. Then a $50 increase to $550 for the equivalent uncut mid-sized GM204 die in the GTX 980. Now we're at $700 for the equivalent uncut mid-sized GP104 die in the GTX 1080. I mean how long until we're paying $350 for the small die GM206 GTX 960 equivalent? How long can PC gaming survive these continued steep price hikes? How did we get from $250 to $700 in five years??”

Editorial: Steve “Lelldorianx” Burke
Video: Andrew “ColossalCake” Coleman