today's video is a masochist guide on how to bring the most powerful
graphics card in the world to its Knights using something as simple as a pcie slot
now the reason I'm doing this very useful guide is because when tearing down this ridiculous
MSI system in a previous video I noticed something interesting let's have a look
the 4090 is plugged into a pcie slot that's only wired for attacks now first off I'm not
entirely sure why MSI would do that but to be fair it is pcie Gen 4 and despite
there being a 4090 involved I don't think it's going to make a huge difference to the
performance but we'll test that in today's video and don't worry even if it doesn't
matter we'll find a way to make it matter later in the video foreign anyway on that
note let's get a quick Baseline reading before we swap out the motherboard now I'm going to
be running these tests at 4K Ultra settings and here with Battlefield 5 you can see this
MSI system performs like a student on Adderall and frankly inappropriate amount of frame rate
Happening Here performance frame rate power all of the things in Spain so with all that
good stuff let's transplant all of our parts into a new motherboard and see what happens
oh they also have the GPU screw down the front of the case I'm assuming that
this is to help with like GPU sag and wobble and shipping and stuff
oh it's a big block
only the highest quality plastic used in the construction of this very expensive PC and
here's a better look at the motherboard in this system which looks a bit like it was dug out of
a discount bin in a Toys R Us but at least we don't only get atex pcie slots there's also a
4X one I mean MSI is a motherboard manufacturer you'd expect them to use something a bit less bare
minimum looking than this but whatever let's tear it down further some snazzy looking Ram
that is a surprisingly arid thermal paste
application under which we have our powerful 3900 KF
next I had to remove the CPU mounting bracket for
the AIO that came with the system which led to a bit of a whoopsie oh
the glue holding this back plate on is like the most well made part
of the system there we go there we go what glue do they use to hold this on
and why is the whole PC not made out of it but my celebration was short-lived ah oh no
I got a boo-boo motherboard wise I'm using this NZXT N7 z790 because it's the only z790
motherboard I have available and this way we've got the same chipset as the MSI board
there is our borderline erotic EP in Ram nice
and now that we have proof of our full endowment of pcie Lanes let's see if it's made a difference
no it it hasn't has it which like I said at the beginning of the video is not really surprising
it's a relatively well documented thing there's clearly just enough bandwidth to
go around out of Interest I also clocked the ram to its rated speed which was a very small
increase in frequency that also had no impact on the performance so with that out the way how
do we go about kicking this system in the balls now the simplest way to reduce pcie bandwidth is
by incrementally turning the pcie slot into an octogenarian so first things first we're
gonna drop it to gen 3 which effectively halves the bandwidth which shouldn't make a difference
because it's basically the same as having an atex Gen 4 slot but let's see what happens
and just to be sure yes according to gpu-z we are getting 16x gen 3. wow some more margin of error
results very surprising luckily there's still a lot more ass kicking left in this foot drop
upping down to pcie Gen 2 that was introduced back in 2007 is
the first step down that begins to look like we may lose some performance at
some point but side by side they're the same thing but what about gen 1
now we've dropped all the way down to pcie Genesis this has to make a difference right
oh yes there we go it's finally starting to impact the performance we're still hitting
about 190 frames per second but you can see it's starting to dip down into almost the 120s at 4K
Ultra settings what a complete outrage honestly still like what the hell it's running on pcie gen
1 and we're still getting well over 120 frames per second at 4K that's kind of crazy but this
but that's what Carnage looks like no my foot needs more
now unfortunately we've kind of run into our pcie gen rock bottom but luckily this
NZXT motherboard does have a variety of pcie slots available so next we're going
to drop it into this Forex slot at gen 1 and see what that does to the performance
I think we may be approaching our Cliff because in the menus we are just getting about a hundred
frames per second which is half we were getting before yes it briefly hit 40 there so something's
finally happening oh this is this is running very weirdly oh no it it feels a lot like I'm
gaming on two 300 ping it's kind of giving me motion sickness it has a similar physiological
effect and it's like really bad VR because there's this very clear disconnect between between where
you move your mouse and what happens on screen is running well bad now but it can always run worse
now the cool thing about the 1X pcie slots on this NZXT motherboard is that they're
not closed off at the end which means you can plug a full-sized connector into them which is
very useful now there's a bunch of components under here so I am going to put some electrical
tape across just so that the connector doesn't short out on anything there foreign
ly reasonable Okay so we've effectively managed to get the most powerful graphics
card in the world gaming wise to barely be able to manage 20 frames per second
oh we just hit 10 there oh no this kind of feels like the rest of my system is
trying to communicate with my graphics card in Turkmenistan over a dialogue connection like it it
a power Battlefield 5 was so unplayable that I couldn't finish this standard Benchmark run I do
so the figures I'm showing you here are just from like a quarter of it which made me want to try one
last thing I have to see if it can run Half-Life too because that would be the complete cherry on
top if Half-Life 2 is unplayable on the 4090 oh no Half-Life 2 still runs on the 40 90. that's a
bit disappointing although it does feel a little bit weird I can't quite put my finger on it but
every time I feel like I'm noticing input lag it goes away it feels a bit like trying to observe
whether light is a particle or a beam here in the Riverboat section it briefly dropped to 120 frames
per second so it's not running very well but it is running but there really is this ethereal sense of
desync however PC gaslighting aside Half-Life 2 was still very much playable which I think
means we need to do a follow-up video where we use even more archaic connectors to see if
we can [ __ ] the 4090 to the point where even a Half-Life 2 is unplayable subscribe to the channel
if you don't want to miss that and yeah thank you for watching until the next video bye-bye
foreign