(keyboard thumping)
Perfect.
Completely unresponsive, hard-locked system.
This is great.
I finally finish the Intel Arc challenge,
I go back to my RTX 3090,
I'm like, "Yeah, I'm gonna have a stable system again."
And actually, I've had nothing but problems with it.
But I told myself, between Nvidia's price hikes
and their attitude, I am skipping the 40-series.
Which leaves me with what for options?
I mean, once upon a time, 15 years ago,
I daily drove the Radeon 3870,
but I haven't touched an AMD GPU,
at least not in my daily driver system,
for 15 years.
Have they reached the point where they're usable?
They've certainly reached the point
where they're my only feasible option for an upgrade,
so this is it.
That's right, folks.
It's time for the AMD challenge.
Sponsored by Seasonic,
I will be running AMD for the next 30 days,
and I will be bringing along with me
two of my very picky tech enthusiast friends, Jake and Luke
to share with you our experience.
So come along for the ride,
and I hope you've got a great power supply.
Did I mention this is brought to you by Seasonic?
Because whether you're team green or team red these days,
Oho, you're gonna need something pretty powerful.
(upbeat music)
In all seriousness, I am not really expecting
this to be as much of a gong show
as the Intel version was.
AMD, unlike Intel, has been doing dedicated graphics
for, well, ever since they acquired ATI,
which is, I guess, over 15 years now.
But in that time, their software team
has made enormous strides
in terms of both compatibility and performance.
That is, at least, if the community's reviews
of Radeon graphics cards are anything to go by.
They've certainly ran into some challenges
with the 7000-series.
They had some issues with defective vapor chambers
causing unusually high temperatures,
but that shouldn't affect me
because I'm not using an AMD reference card.
So, with confidence, I am going ahead to...
Why is this still on?
You guys watched me turn it off.
What can I say, I'm just a lot better
at turning things on than turning them off.
All three of us went with the R9 7900 XTX,
so the more premium version.
And you know, normally you don't look at the top tier card
and go, "Hmm, yeah, that one's probably the better value."
But somehow, AMD managed to pull it off.
The 7900 XT is cut down so much,
that for the $100 you're saving compared to the XTX,
it really doesn't look like a very compelling option.
The XTX on the other hand,
as long as a major focus for you isn't ray traced titles,
its performance in traditional games
is extremely compelling.
You can get more details about it in our full review
of the 7900-series that we uploaded a little while back.
Now of course, the card that we were covering
was the reference card from AMD.
This one, uh, is quite a bit beefier
to the point where - [Jake] Oh god.
- [Linus] we might actually have a clearance issue here.
- [Jake] Oh god.
- Jake, can I help you?
- [Jake] I'm just oh-goding
for the same reason you're oh-goding.
We've come up with a solution.
Massive thanks to Gigabyte
for sending over this Aorus card.
But I guess I get to use a reference card.
Now, the last thing we want is for any of this coolant
to get into our high quality Seasonic power supply.
Did I mention they sponsored this video?
So I'm just gonna put this high quality ShortCircuit Hoodie,
very absorbent,
in the way.
And make sure that we don't get any water in it.
Oh, this is gonna be so easy,
because AMD's drivers are not gonna be a problem.
At least, that's my hope, because in my review of this card
I kind of committed to switching to team red,
so I've really...
Regardless of whether it's an Aorus card
or a reference card,
I really need this thing to be good.
It uses AMD's RDNA 3 architecture,
which is all new for the 7000-series.
It brings with it a huge uplift in clock speed,
CUs or compute units, AI accelerators,
and, perhaps for me most importantly,
their video encoding engine has gotten a complete overhaul,
including support for AV1,
which isn't supported on streaming platforms
like Twitch yet,
but will hopefully be coming very, very soon.
One of the other things that's really cool
about AMD's RDNA 3 cards,
is, I mean, not necessarily gonna excite you
from a performance standpoint,
but could excite you from a cost standpoint.
Instead of building these cards using a monolithic,
or a single large die,
they used a chiplet approach,
similar to what they've done with their Ryzen CPUs.
So instead of using the latest manufacturing process
for the entire die,
they actually used TSMC's 6nm for their memory and cache die
since they found that there wasn't really
a benefit to shrinking it down,
and then they used their 5nm process for their compute die.
So that's where you're actually still getting good scaling
in terms of power consumption and performance.
I mean, they're still really expensive,
but like, guess we'll take the little "w"s
when we can get them.
Another thing we can do while we wait
is refill the loop.
Because the parts aren't actually here for my...
(metal clanging)
7950X upgrade,
I'm just gonna be running a bypass,
so the GPU will not be water cooled during this experiment.
This also allows me to, like, just go back to the 3090
if I decide ah, you know what,
it's really not worth the extra performance.
Jake, we cheated a little bit.
He's actually already done his upgrade,
we're shooting out of order.
He says it's pretty good, though.
- [Jake] Right off the bat I'm running into
a bit of an issue
because my current graphics card,
this RTX 3080 from EVGA, rest in peace,
just barely fits.
Fortunately, it's close.
This guy,
not even close.
So I think what I'm gonna do,
there's a little bit of extra space on this bracket.
I think I'm gonna take the pump out and this bracket
and drill new holes just about that much higher
so that the GPU in this slot can clear it.
Hold on, wait.
No.
Oh, is that the one Linus stripped?
Dammit.
(drill whirring)
Eh!
Who knew it could be this much work
just to swap an air cooled graphics card.
Originally, the pump circle bracket thing
was using those two holes.
But what I found out is there's an extra set of holes
in the middle.
So if I put the bottom holes of the ring thing
in the middle hole,
then I probably don't even need to drill anything,
I think I'm going to anyways,
but I could just put those two screws in
and that would probably be enough.
(drill whirring)
Look at that.
A hole.
Which hopefully fits this screw.
It looks mint.
I mean, the holes were a little too close together.
But it will work, and that's what matters.
Hi Arlo.
And there it is, the top of the res hits these tubes.
It's only screwed in with the top two holes here,
which don't line up with anything on the bottom
because all of the holes are stripped out.
And now, theoretically, this fits.
(Jake laughing)
Eh!
It works.
I don't know why the lights are in, like,
seizure mode right now.
But we can get that sorted.
- [Luke] This is less of an installation video
and more of an aftermath explanation video.
I decided that either the GPU or the reservoir
was gonna have to go.
And as the GPU going was less work,
that was kinda where I landed.
So I got this really long PCI Express riser cable
and decided to mount the GPU on top of the computer.
So the graphics card just sits there.
Except that it was overloading my power supply all the time,
so there is another power supply in the back
powering just the graphics card,
and it's all mounted on the top.
- Would Seasonic trust someone irresponsible enough
to pour water over a powered-on computer?
- [David] Oh, no, stop!
- It's fine. - Stop it!
- They make high quality power supplies.
Great efficiency, long warranties, super quiet.
- [David] IP68 rated? - Can't go wrong.
Well, no, not that thing.
No matter what your computer is,
Seasonic's got you covered.
Even if you've got a big power hog like this thing.
No, that's a very bad idea. - This is the only
reference one we have.
- That's a very bad idea. - I hope you catch it.
- Oh my gosh.
It would have come right out.
Like, it just opens, Jake.
(Jake laughing)
These people set me up for failure, you know.
- [Jake] Doesn't take much.
- Holy crap, is this still too long?
Jake?
- [Jake] It's too long?
- Hold on, okay, no, it fits, it fits.
- [Jake] Is it too tall, though?
- Oh, no, it's not two slots.
It's two and change.
- Oh no, we have to use the riser all along. (laughing)
- Wait, what, no.
Oh, no.
No, no. - [Jake] Yes.
- No, we're not using a riser.
I'm not catching that.
- Okay, it's just gonna hit you then.
I've got another one, here, you ready?
(box thumps)
- Oh, no.
Fine.
Fine. - [Jake] Oh my god,
that's the only one we have.
- That way I get to use the cool Aorus one too.
Dual BIOS, so you've got the silent and the OC version.
- [Jake] Triple fans.
- Yeah, triple fan.
I mean, they're both triple fans,
but this one's triple fans on a big, fat heat sink.
- [David] Are you gonna secure that GPU down with anything?
- How am I gonna secure the GPU, David?
- Double sided tape? I dunno. - Did you ever think of that?
Double sided tape...
Honestly, what I was planning to do
was put it right here.
- [Jake] Really?
On top of the water tube?
- Well, why not?
It's a hard line water cooling tube.
- Yeah, until you put too much pressure on it.
I was thinking just kind of like that.
And just put it on there.
That is significantly better than what you had before.
- All right. I'll allow it.
- What is POST code F3?
- I'm looking it up.
F3, blah blah blah blah.
- I'm gonna turn it on, like, while it's...
- Q-Flash something something, F3.
We got it, what did you change?
- [Jake] I did nothing, I plugged in a keyboard.
- I didn't change anything either.
- [Jake] Maybe F3 means plug in a keyboard.
- Does F3 just mean keyboard not found?
Why would the system not POST over that?
- [Jake] Well, hold on.
It's probably just because you turned it off
a bunch of times.
Oh. - Uh-oh.
Oh no.
I bet the BIOS reset
and I'm using, like, stupid AMD's stupid NVMe stupid RAID.
I better not have just lost my boot OS.
- I vote we go to BIOS for a moment.
- Okay.
- And we look at the PCI-E devices,
and maybe one of your NVMes just happened to die
in this process.
Like, did you RAID 0 them?
- Yeah.
- Why?
- For speed.
- It's like single threaded anyways.
AMD RAID is garbage.
So it's not even like, the card doesn't even have RAID,
it's just one of those four- - No.
- Oh my god.
Oh, Linus, I know what the problem is.
You turned the power off, like, multiple times
while it was trying to do Windows updates.
- No I didn't.
- Yes you did.
- No I didn't.
- Because it was trying to do Windows updates.
- I turned the power off one time.
Oh, thanks Windows, good timing Windows update.
- Yeah, but then remember
when you were doing the maintenance,
you turned it on and off, and on and off
like a bunch of times?
- I guess this shouldn't be on right now.
Okay.
- [Jake] Just power it off, eh.
- Why is this still on?
- I think you corrupted your own Windows install.
(Linus sighing) Got a Windows install disc?
- It's just, it's one of those things
where, like, honestly,
I don't know, 95 times out of 100,
you interrupt a Windows update,
it'll, like, figure it out.
- It's fine, yeah.
Except when you're trying to film a video
and you have a GPU on a riser outside your computer
and you've got water potentially dripping.
- There's no water dripping. - It's after the end
of the day and it's overtime now.
(Linus sighing and swearing)
- Here's the update.
We have a completely different GPU
with a completely different drive.
We have removed the drive
that we think has the corrupted Windows on it,
and we are still getting that same error.
You know what it reminds me of?
It's behaving like the boot loader
is on one storage device,
but then the actual operating system files are on another.
- On two drives?
- Yeah. Which I've seen. - On both of them?
- Yeah, which I've seen a lot of times.
But the problem is that I don't have
two storage devices in here.
- No.
- So what is happening?
- Don't know.
- I'm at a loss, man.
Total loss.
- Especially since we put the 3090 back in,
like in the slot, and it still didn't go.
(sighing) It's, like, an hour and a half later, I think.
And the computer's working now.
So what ended up being the problem, I'm pretty sure,
is there was some weird configuration in the BIOS
because of the RAID setup.
So I ended up taking the CMOS battery out,
putting it back in, and the system booted right up.
Installing the drivers went totally fine.
We had to install chipset drivers,
since this is from an Intel system.
That also went fine.
So it seems like everything's working great.
- It looks like there were two contributing factors.
One, I think Jake was right,
there must have been some kind of BIOS corruption.
And two, he might have been also right about this,
it looks like there was a PCI-E resource allocation problem.
So in order to get it to boot up reliably,
I not only had to enable above 4G decoding,
but I also had to remove both my network card
and my Thunderbolt card.
So I only have that carrier card
for the four M.2 SSDs and my GPU in here.
I'm using these optical USB things from Icron
to handle USB,
and then I'm just running an optical Display Port cable
straight up here.
Thunderbolt is not working at all.
After a couple small issues
with the optical Display Port cable
that's running downstairs to the gaming room,
I've got it running here,
so that seems to suggest there's no incompatibility
with optical cables.
But I'm running into something entirely new.
Let's see if I can get my mouse here.
Here we go.
USB is just cutting out
for three to five seconds at a time periodically.
And I'm moving my mouse continuously.
There it goes, yeah, see.
Hello?
Nothing.
There it is.
And it's not just the mouse,
it's the keyboard as well.
Just USB connectivity cuts out,
devices don't (imitating Windows dinging).
They don't disconnect and come back, they're just gone.
So I'm gonna try a chipset driver update.
Okay.
Mouse working fine.
Chipset drivers were what did the trick.
There it is.
Wait, what?
No.
Okay.
I mean...
I'm pretty sure this is running higher than I had it before
with the 3090.
Oh, I haven't played in a while, that's for sure.
Got 'em.
Got 'em, got 'em.
Let's go.
(Linus laughing)
No performance issues.
No hitching, no nothing.
Let's go, come on.
Ah!
Okay, that was three ball kills, though.
I'm feeling pretty good about that.
Where's the ball?
Does someone have it?
What the hell are you guys doing?
Bloody hell.
Stop putting it down.
He threw it at me.
It's a bloody objective map, you don't just go for kills.
What sucks is my teammates aren't even that bad
from just, like, a playing FPS standpoint.
They're just not playing the objective.
Do these idiots not understand how the mode works?
Hold the ball!
Where are you going?
Can't blame my GPU, game ran great.
Just like this great segue to our sponsor.
- All right, well, regardless, the computer works.
But there's no segue to a sponsor
because it's sponsored by Seasonic.
So thanks to Seasonic,
check them out in the link in the description.
If you liked this video,
maybe go watch the Intel Arc one,
because that was just as much chaos.
I don't actually know if it...
No, it wasn't as much.
This is awful.
- [David] This isn't AMD's fault, this is-
- No, none of this has been AMD's fault.
So far, the actual AMD experience has been totally fine.