For SSDs, remember that independent reviews are not trustworthy if the manufacturer decides to change the internal components without telling anyone or rebranding the SSD.
Poor choice of words when saying "trustworthy" because you're implying those reviewers have something to do with the fraudulent advertisements from the manufacturers. A better word would be "accurate" due to the review being tied to *when* they got the product.
@@PashaGamingYT corsair does this kind of thing too, just recently they removed the secondary timings from their website for some ram kits, and they when caught they put them back in. Remember no company is your friend, they just want to maximize profits
one time i was with a teacher working on someone else's laptop for a project and the laptop had 8th gen i5 i think, or something like that and it was pretty funny hearing her say "this is a fast computer, wow *looks at sticker* it has Intel core too, wow" annoying, but funny
Intel should just use model years alongside their CPUs I can confidently say that I own a MacBook Pro with a Core i7, and that sounds impressive to the normies until you find out it's from 2011
@61 Cygni especially if you intend to upgrade it. Was glad to find my laptop was single channel 8 and still had an empty slot to stick in an additional 8. Didn’t need it to be fast or whatever, I just needed the extra space and kept the slow one that was already in there.
Especially when they do a 4into1 quad Bayer. My phone takes 16mp pictures but they can claim 64mp even though the pics it takes aren't that good and definately not better than the 3x zoom lens
Monitors... nearly everything about them. They claim "1.000.000 : 1 Contrast", yet actually only reach around 1000:1 static and even that only with local-dimming which leaves HORRIBLE artefacts when you got any high-contrast images. Advertising 144Hz but with pixel response times >8ms and 20% or higher overshoot. I friend once had a large plasma TV. It was a "nice" room-heater in the winter, in summer that was a real problem, but at least it did exactly what it said it would do - near perferct black-levels and very good color gamut as well as viewing angle. Not good for a bright living-room, but perfect when you can darken the room.
I was working at office max. A manager said "this one is the terabyte, so it's going to be way faster than the 32 gig." I got in trouble for correcting him.
Me one time: "Excuse me, sir? Do you know if this laptop's SSD is NVMe or SATA?" Best Buy worker: "...um, uh...yeah it does. But you should get this one (points at different laptop) because this one has uh...(trying to remember) 4K."
And probably that 4K laptop had a 5400rpm HDD, which will make the laptop very slow. I bought a cheap HP laptop 3 years ago, and despite having specs that were decent (at least decent for my needs), it had a slow 5400rpm HDD. Thankfully I upgraded it to an SSD, and put the HDD in the Optical Drive bay to use it for extra storage.
@@Dac_DT_MKD In laptops is really a hassle, those 5400's don't perform apropiatelly at all, but for my desktop I only use high speed spinnies (Toshiba P300 storage, Toshiba X300 performance), and I cannot see any measurable performance degradation in comparison to others SSDs, only problem would be fragmentation but with Diskeeper that's also a thing of the past.
I have a hard time checking if the “SSD” on a laptop is eMMC, NVME or just SATA. There are some budget laptops that can come with 256GB “SSD” storage, but hell if I know if I can swap out the drive or no without opening it up and voiding warranty.
@@Mageman17 If it's not soldered memory (cough Apple cough), of course, and upgrades don't void the warranty, it should only be void if the brand can prove that you broke the machine intentionally or by mishandling it. As for how to know the kind of memory, sometimes the manufacturers website has the info, if not, you could try and find a review with some sort of teardown and if that also doesn't work, you could try and search for replacement part numbers and watch there the kind of storage that it uses, this last method is the least ideal as this lists are not always perfect, to say the least, but as a last resort...
@@Mageman17 SATA is a connector (or communication protocol), while emmc and nvme are actual storage technologies. If you want to compare SATA with something else, compare it with m.2, or pcie
I find the battery life on laptops pretty misleading. They're obvious best case scenarios - when my laptop is bright enough to be usable it often only lasts 50% of the listed time.
I rarely see HDPS (Hot Dogs Per Second) listed when rating LTT staff's eating capabilities, maybe we could get a rating like that and finally find out what Brandon is really hiding...
I really hate this. Gamemax is a really common brand in my country and their power supplies are noisy and unreliable, but you can find them with bronze certification for much cheaper than a white EVGA PSU, for example.
80+ ratings are only a indicator of how efficient a psu is at certain amounts of load, while a 80+ certification is not a indicator that the psu is reliable, a psu without 80+ certification almost always is unriliable
i'm most frustrated with how portable speakers are marketed. Usually they have a power rating and a frequency span. But. A tiny thing that has no bass is often spec'ed as 20 hz to 20 khz, while an actual good speaker says 60 to 14k... and the power rating, which is usually just an electrical power its amplifier may be able to deliver into a resistive load... pfff, that has no relation to how loud and how clean the sound will be, and it's the sound that eventually matters.
Why you have to check the frequency response graph, will give you a very accurate idea of what it actually sounds like, though not all manufacturers provide them, and you also need to know how to read them
Over the years there had been many attempts to certify speakers to represent how good they are (remember how THX was important?) , in the end most of them do not mean much since different people listening from the same speaker would tell you different things. Especially the higher end it goes. Truth is there's no 1 unit alone that gives the 20-20k range nicely, there is a reason why tweeters and woofers exist, and where they crossover and how the frequency is distributed create different sound that appeal to different people. Easiest example is Bose, some love it , some avoid it like a plague. And yes , do try the speakers to see if you like it instead of someone telling you "its good" , audio equipment review is almost like fine wine review , its a matter of taste.
With the "electrical power its amplifier may be able to deliver into a resistive load... pfff, that has no relation to how loud and how clean the sound will be" do you mean that that suggests that a lot of power is lost on heat or?
@@syralessthanthree with any oscillating system (in this case, the speaker diaphragm moving to vibrate air) power delivery is complicated. You will always have some portion of the power that gets reflected back to the power source, instead of transferred to your load (in this case, converted into sound). The frequencies at which very little power is reflected are called 'resonances' and these are affected mostly by the size of the speaker cavity. Larger speakers (woofers) resonate better with larger wavelength (lower frequency) oscillations, so they couple better with deep sounds. However, the heavy diaphragms are difficult to oscillate quickly, so trying to generate high pitch sound from these devices is inefficient. On the other hand, a smaller speaker with a stiffer diaphragm will give you much more efficient coupling with high pitch sounds. I think OP is referring to the fact that, just because the amp can deliver a certain amount of power, not all of it couples into sound gen effectively. As you correctly suggested, if the power does not couple well, it gets wasted as heat and sound quality deteriorates.
I know Linus goes over ranks for RAM, but maybe even a Turbo Nerd edition on why RAM timings are more important than the frequency? I know Linus says it all the time but never really did a deep dive the way he explained ranks.
Why is an SSD faster than a HDD if both run at the same MB/s theoretical Its because of seek time (get this > is this right > its corrupt > here it is again) 4x 16 = 64 like wise 4x 18 = 72 And so with a different amount of operations that can be done inside a set frequency means you get different performance Truck has infinite space and no loading or unloading time, but takes X time for House A to B before it can do C to D before it can do E to F I want 1000 things that total 1GB vs 1 thing that is 1GB Explained it as best i can
ram timing are not more important than frequency. frequency is also not more important than timings. its more a matter of you need to know both to get an accurate idea of performance.
both are directly linked. neither of them is more important. higher frequency usually means higher timings. that's what you saw when we went from ddr3 to ddr4. essentially both frequency and latency doubled which means the performance is same. ddr3 1333 cl9 vs ddr4 2666 cl18 for example. ofc now with ddr4 being around for so long the tech evolved and we see higher frequencies at not so shitty timings which means something like ddr4 3200 mhz cl 14 is now quite faster than ddr3 but in the beginning that wasn't necessarily the case. however saying one of them is more important is just wrong. you have to look at both to get an understanding of the actual performance. cas latency stands for column access strobe latency and the number means how many clock cycles are passing when your cpu requests data from a memory modules particular column and the time in which it responds to it with the available data. so with that in mind you can understand why neither of them matter more than the other. higher frequency ram means that the clock cycles are faster or that you have more cycles in the same time than with lower frequency ram however higher latency means that it will take more cycles before the ram delivers the requested data. this is why ddr3 1333 cl9 and ddr4 2666 cl18 will perform really the same. the ddr4 will perform 2x the cycles in the same time however the requested data will also take 2 times as long to come back so you won literally nothing. ofc ddr4 had other improvements over ddr3 that aren't related to speed but that aside the two examples here would perform like one another.
RAM timings are always given in clock ticks so yes, both matter. I.e. you divide the CAS latency by the clock speed to give the true latency. The point is rather that an increase in clock speed is unlikely to be worth much if it's accompanied by a similar increase in the timings, and that faster RAM with really bad timings may end up being slower in practice.
@@Matt__B agreed buddy. Both memory frequency and timings matter but today it doesn't seem like they matter nearly as much as they did with DDR1. The lower the latency the faster the memory can be accessed at any given time which is very useful for benchmarking apps as well as games. This laptop (i7 10750h hexacore, 2 x 8GB DDR4 - 3200 runs at 1463MHz CL20-20-20-47-67 @ 1.2v) but I have not even been into the BIOS as I doubt a Medion laptop will allow me to change the memory timings.
Battery life. I guess it's cool to know that if I let my computer idle with no software opened it'll take it 10h to drain the battery completely, but I'd rather know how long it lasts when using the hardware at its maximum.
This would be both useful and pointless. As you would then think a netbook is more useful than a mobile workstation. But it all depends on what you want to do. This should be on the spec sheet, but not in the main marketing in stores.
welcome to apple, where we will never tell you the capacity of our batteries, but only tell you how many hours you will get using the apple communist party approved apps in the acp approved manner.
@@iris657 to be fair though, as a Dev machine (could stay with wheezing Dell quad core or move to Mac M1) it's actually pretty good. I've done 2 full days without charging.
macbook pro m1 and ipad pro 2020 11”, both of them i’ve used a fair amount since getting them and the battery life is deadass enough to last two days each on a single charge, even with a lot of use
x/1.024^(n-1) (where n is an order of magnitude, e.g. 1 for kilo, 2 for mega, 3 for giga, and x is the stated capacity for that magnitude, e.g. 1000 for 1000GB)
Every time a marketing team gets into tech something is going to crash. Back in 90s there was no thing like mebi or gibi. Everyone knew that when you are talking about bytes kilo is 1024, not 1000. But some marketer had to get into it and decide that smaller drive is cheaper to make and its still technically 80GB, just using a different then standard definition, and the war started.
I feel like this could've been at least a 10 minute video! But yay thanks for making this! I'm sure I'll share this one day with someone making a big purchase.
And top speed isn't a good indicator of performance either; it doesn't really showcase how long it takes to get there. But I see where you're coming from; sure, Honda's S2000 can do like 9000 RPM, but that actually resulted in it being less drivable for non-enthusiasts.
Interesting video. Great to learn about these things as a building novice. It's taking a longer time than I anticipated to build my PC due to learning more about components and not jumping in head first with no frame of reference.
Strange how things change. Once upon a long a go, a CPU's clock speed was the most significant measure of the speed of a processor and resulting system...then came multi-cores and as better manufacturing techniques as mentioned in the video and its significance became arbitrary (not strictly true, but useless as a direct measure of comparison).
Well, the freq was found to be an absolute dead-end loooong before Pentium 4 could overclock to 5GHz+, and with all the cool shit you could do with a computer, stopping at freq and a single core per package would leave it all a dream. Like, try building a massive supercomputer with max-clocked Pentium 4's (a clock which doesn't require liquid nitrogen as the cooler). Google's or Facebook's cooling systems wouldn't be remotely enough, and astronomically unreasonable money would be wasted just to run the CPU's at 100% for 1d.
@@morosis82 to be fair though, IPC was pushed so much to the limit that increasing it even further at the time was deemed to be straight up impossible for a single core cpu. Research focused on two paths, dual core cpus and increasing the clock to extreme levels but both had huge issues: Increasing clock inherently required to leave a bit of the IPC on the table (as it needed very long pipelines) and compensating for that while dealing with the increased power and thermal requirements would be extremely difficult. Dual core cpus on the other hand had huge issues with resource sharing and interlock, some of which were deemed basically impossible to solve. Resource sharing between cores also translated into an inherent penality on performance and thus, even if they worked, it wasn't that obvious that increasing the number of cores would lead to an increase in overall performance. They quite looked like dead ends. Therefore, although the clock increase path was hard and had many disadvantages, at least it was the more feasible and it was also the (financially) safer option any way you look at it, so it was the path taken with the pentium 4. Of course, with time, we found out that not only dual-cores are really feasible but, because the performance penalities can be worked around for the most part, they are way way better than single core cpus. Therefore we can easily say that, in hindsight, the path taken with the pentium 4 was the wrong one and, indeed, the real dead end between the 2 but, at the time, things didn't quite look this way.
I have a SLIGHT disagreement with the CPU argument. yes, it's true that not all CPUs are made the same anymore, but hard numbers are STILL relevant within 2-3 generations. (for example, a 1st gen Ryzen (1XXX) can still go toe to toe with a 3rd gen Ryzen (3XXX) ) Is it perfect? No, but it certainly has some merit still
@@Truth_Demon Su~re, but the Ryzen 3 1000 tech is hardly even comparable to anything before year 2010. Hell, CPU's and by extension GPU's are reaching their copper limits, so they've been looking into other materials for at least 6y by now.
Suggestion. A whole video on mega, giga, terabytes vs. mebi, gibi, tebibytes, where you see commonly each, and how to interpret what you're seeing. Wholly crap are those two mixed up all over the place, both intentionally and unintentionally, and it causes a huge amount of confusion. Edit: Adding on to abbreviation confusions, an explanation of the difference between MBps and Mbps. Most people don't know that 8 small b's = 1 big B. I've always thought that ISPs and other industries marketing data transfer technology take advantage of consumers knowing everything in Bytes to confuse the issue and make their _bit_ per second speeds sound 8x faster than they are. This is further confused when you add mebi and mega prefixes into the mix.
8 bits to 1 byte 8 gigabit = 1 gigabyte When talking about windows they use MB, GB, TB and so on but they are mibi by law cus of legal BS decades ago But that is because they are using true size before the legal BS that had the size changed So for windows 1GB is 1024MB Same on linux would be 1GB is 1000MB because of the legal BS Its really not hard Bit = 8 Byte = 1 Mibi = +24 to it (gibibyte 1024 megabytes) Then to internet MB/s is megabyte’s per second mbps is megabits per second 80 mbps = 10MB/s (so some would say its MBps and assume people are smart enough to look at the capitals vs lower case) GB/s = 8 gbps Gigabit internet = 125MB/s All of it is bit vs byte with 8 bits being 1 byte and mibi is +24 seeing as that is how computers count 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024 and legal BS spawned the mibi into existence
@@InfernosReaper this! this to me is the worst part about it. Like, by now i'm used to the MB vs Mb thing, the worst part for me is how IEC redefined Kilo-, Mega- etc to refer to decimal instead of binary...it's ALWAYS been binary in computers, now all of a sudden the correct term is MiB?
Me at a store : Which budget laptop do you recommend? The salesman (trying to clear older stock) : This one, it has a ryzen 3 processor (doesn't even mention the generation), it is going better than intel you can see the news. Me : 🤦🏿♂️
Honestly a bit surprised that they didn't talk about RAM in this video, especially for laptops, as they have another video on LTT talking about how not all "16gb 3200MHz modules" are made the same.
I think better car related parallel would be the rpm of the engine: one engine can reach to 13k rpm while other can only do 6500 rpm, but first one is I4 one liter motorcycle engine and latter is 6.3L V8
I4 litre motorcycles Aka superbikes are actually way more faster than almost all but some hypercars or modded cars. A 200 bhp I4 litre motorcycle will outperform a 600 to 700 bhp V8 car, because the motorcycle weighs very less compared to the car.
@@MrDsheel My comparison was with rpm and what happens with every rotation, translated from Clockspeed and IPC. Otherwise you're absolutely correct. ^^
Thanks, I needed to know the Random IOPS rather than the sequential speed, but I'm sure when you're transferring files to another NVME, that matters until it hits the buffer limit on the cache
IOPS is sure one of the critical SSD performance aspects, but it's useless if you don't know the other factors such as latency (how much time does it take to reach a block), block size (the smallest space unit that can be edited/deleted), RAID configuration, Read/Write percentage and Sequential/Random percentage. Unfortunately, vendors rarely if ever reveal the rest of their benchmark values and results. So IOPS is not that reliable in this case. more on this here: th-cam.com/video/cEb270L5Q1Y/w-d-xo.html
Lol apples to oranges, good one guys XD Edit: So yeah, you covered the stuff I hate seeing already on products, but one thing i hate that usually isn't included, more with laptops than anything else are specs that AREN'T included, you buy a new laptop, thinking about future upgradability, but you usually have to go to the manufacturers website and read through a bunch of fine print just to find out if it has a second RAM slot, or an extra M.2 slot or if everything's just soldered onto the board, and even then sometimes that information isn't included so you have to go somewhere like LTT or another reviewer so you can find a teardown of a laptop, all so you can find out if its what you're actually looking for.
also annoying when there are so many different variants of a type of laptop (eg nitro 5) and a bunch of them are different enough where some have different compatible parts than others or don’t have certain upgradability slots
About monitors, another thing people don't tell is AV Lag, which is the syncronization between the image and audio(specially if you are running audio through a Realtek(realteks boast at minimum 45ms of audio lag)). You can try and run a Realtek or similar audio device(USB headphones, etc) at 512 samples(20ms), but you need to run it in ASIO or WDM mode, as MME(which supports all audio card effects) doesn't run so fast. High AV Lag makes it hard to play music games.
Recently noticed the SD Association recommends their "SD Memory Card Formatter" Tool for formatting SD and SDXC Cards because the formatting of the operating system is "not optimized for sd cards" and the performance could be lower. The difference betweet the formatting tool and the windows bultin would be interesting.
A good analogy for how cpu power works is a car: GHZ = engine rotation speed Usage percentage = How much of it's horse power is demanded Cores = Count if pistons in the engine Hyperthreading = Doubling of pistons Cache size = How many Litres does the engine hold Boost clock = turbocharger IPC = gearing that the car can use Eventual speed is mostly determined by ipc+ghz if it is not at its limit because of to few cores (not enough horse power)
Speed is nowadays determined mostly by how bad the application is written = how much car weights thanks to the all unnecessary crap incorporated in its shitty design...
Riley keeps giving me the technobabble my computer illiterate friend likes as background noise to sleep where I rant to them. *I love the tech news and I love Riley
I just wanna add it here, common traps nowadays in Laptop Entry Market is putting the words "Fast Intel Quad Core" in ads only to find out it's just a Celeron if you dig deeper in research... Which is a trap for those who are new and with tight budget... In short, Google and TH-cam is your friend...
Don't forget video card memory. I have some fun memories from my childhood with my friends claiming their GeForce 4 MX being "faster" than my GeForce 3 Ti because both cards had 128 MB on board and 4 is a bigger number than 3 :P
I don't know about specs that are unimportant, but one spec that's pretty important that's almost never listed is whether the RAM is configured in single or dual channel. Single channel RAM, especially for integrated graphics, absolutely destroys performance.
@@marius0448 You always want dual channel memory. It's like tying one arm behind your back without it. You _can_ do the same things but it'll be slower. That's just a general way to look at it. And unfortunately you can't just add a second stick of ram. So ask someone who knows to find the right memory for you and make sure it's set up correctly.
@@marius0448 Running RAM in single channel essentially halves the speed of your RAM. So one 3200Mhz 8gb module in single channel mode will have half the speed as two 3200Mhz 4gb modules in dual channel mode. They’re still technically running at the same clock speed, but the bandwidth between the RAM and CPU is doubled in dual channel mode, so twice as much data can be pushed through in the same time interval. When you use integrated graphics, your CPU and GPU both share system memory, so a dual channel RAM configuration will dramatically increase performance in games.
@@HPerrin Thanks man,u explained very well!! So with dual channel the cpu and gpu can get from 2 sources at the same time,when in single they can get only from one source at one time :)
A Tech quickie on different color gamuts would be nice. I have no clue what DCPI-3, Adobe, or SRGB color spaces mean or how they differ. What would a typical consumer be looking for?
4:12 Monitor Response Time!!! All those monitors sporting a "1ms response time", but that measurement doesn't mean anything anymore, it could be 1ms at a ridiculous overdrive setting with 80% overshoot or something
This video is gold! On the subject of audio, people should ignore the frequency range of a speaker or headphone. It doesn't have a standard measurement scheme and it says nothing about sound quality.
A big thing about computer specifications is that so many of them are context dependent. A useful "sequel" to this video would be to propose spec minimums for different usage scenarios. Kind of like the the gaming video LTT did headlining "El Cheapo," show us recommended specc'd PCs including "office PC" and "gaming" "video editing" "software development" "3d modeling" "CAD" and "photo editing"
That's pretty easy. For casual users single thread performance is what matters and then just throw in the minimum of 8gb of ram. For power users you want 16gb of ram. Then core count/multi thread performance would be the numbers you want to be bigger. For pro's it depends on your job, so you wouldn't ask for generic advice. And there's tons of videos already on gpu performance. But yeah. A few recommendations for builds/premades would be handy for newbies.
The most frustrating is compare smartphone camera specs. I basically hope to have a TH-cam video of some one comparing the two devices that I'm interested to
who cares? unless your price range is $100-$200 any phone camera is adequate to take photos of food that will have filters applied to them and uploaded in 640x480 to instagram. if youre actually interested in taking proper photos, you already have a camera.
Specs you should ignore: the i3, i5 and i7 naming. "oH mY LaPtOp haS a i5!!1!!" yeah, from the 4th generation, released in 2013.... That shit has 2 cores bro
For me now that a monitor no longer needs to have the G-Sync module to be certified can be annoying especially when premium high priced units can now claim this
Hard drive specs piss me off. They say it's 4TB but after you format it, you are left with less space due to the partition table. They need to make hard drives slightly bigger so your new 4TB hard drive it actually 4TB after you format it.
Linus always banging on about how bright monitors can get, bruh I can't make my monitors DIM enough; I'm not trying to edit photos, I'm trying not to go blind
@@flameshana9 Not really, it's a simple concept. Being in a dark room with a screen is bad for your eye health, it strains them and gives you a headache. Get some ambient light going, like a led strip on the back / underside of the desk and it'll be more gentle on your eyes.
For M.2 SSDs, I use the rated read/write speeds to make sure that the SSDs is NVME vs. SATA (as for some prebuilts/laptops and even some M.2 SSD listings, they don't always make it clear).
@@AltonV are there SATA M.2 SSDs that aren't using AHCI? In any case, the max speeds possible are around 550 to 600 MB/s. So, faster than that and you are dealing with NVME.
Power consumption gets me worked up something chronic. Most PCs use less power per year than your fridge does in one day and thats with 24/7 usage maxing out your psu
From what I know a fridge uses about 1,000 watts a day. A computer uses about 100-200 an hour. A laptop uses 10-20 watts an hour. I've measured everything myself aside from my fridge.
Frustrated about not even being shown the exact models of those components by the PC/laptop/whatever manufacturer. Only some do, so in essence they don't even give us something to be frustrated with. Frustrating.
most offensive to me is 'core i7' because that literally means nothing. there was wven a 7w i7 at one point, the Y series, and most common is the U series, what you want in a performance laptop is the H, and thats just the mobile side
Battery size on gaming laptops. It doesn't matter how big or small that battery is, it will be depleted in no time gaming. Even if you aren't gaming and the dedicated nvidia or amd GPU kicks in
1ms response times in monitors are usually a lie, because even though it can support 1 ms response times, it's usually garbage with a crap ton of overshoot in it.
It's frustrating when companies (company?) say their newest product is arbitrary % faster, or bigger. Faster than what? Bigger than what??? WHAT ARE YOU COMPARING??
I own a hosting service and for our clients the clock speed is sometimes important, if it's a VPS. As some of them run a FiveM Server and it depends on a high clock speed
my pet peev (or however it is spelled) is when a brand tries at 2021 to advertise their laptop/pc/phone specs and somehow confuze memory and space. Well, they are either lying or they are just stupid, or this new 400$ smartphone phone from X brand HAS 256GB OF RAM to keep your favorite moments, songs etc
yeah its a phone for gen z. ditches the storage and has a large amount of ram instead. means everything gets flushed on reboot just like the empty heads of zoomers.
@@iris657 I wish, that would make sense. I talked to one of these idiots and they were like oooopppsss we totally made a mistake... they still haven't fixed it 😂 and years later they still do the same shit
@@hubertnnn Only if they're the same HDMI version. In the current age you should _never_ buy an HDMI cable below version 2.0 or you'll end up with 30 fps and no HDR support.
As I said, cable is cable. Cables don't support features, all they do is transfer data, and the only things a cable might differ form one to the other is: - how much current it can transfer (mostly irrelevant for data transferring cables) - how different length of each wire is (and thus how synchronized signals on each wire are) - how well its shielded (an thus, how much noise it will catch from outside) - what is its resistance A high quality cable will be able to handle many generations of standard in the future. (unless new standard added extra pins and wires). But the truth is that most cables are not high quality and barely even fit requirements of current standards. Cut a modern cable and you will be amazed how its possible that its even working (if you have any experience in electronics).
@@hubertnnn Google the differences between HDMI 1.4 and 2.1 and then edit your comment. There's no such thing as "a high quality variant can support many future versions" for a hardware standard.
@@Fiyaaaahh He's right tho, I have a cable from 2012 that can handle an HDMI 2.1 signal with no problems but a cable bought in 2020 marked as "2.0 compatible" can't manage a 2.1 signal reliably. It's mostly about the quality of the cable and the insulation, the physical standard for the cable has not changed since the original HDMI, only the signal rates have gone up and crappy cables can't keep up.
Monitor response time is the worst. I barely even understand it myself but when they advertise 1ms response times that's only in certain scenarios, they'll usually be closer to 5-10ms
I think the clock speed info about CPU's also now applies to GPUs. Like how current Ampere GPU's might clock slower than previous generations but still preform as good or better.
@@commanderoof4578 I admit I did not know if that was the case with the older generations. Good to know though and even more of a thing to know when buying a part.
@@JKirkInTexas it can be the same in the same generation as well so a 1030 vs a 1080 ti both at 2GHz using the same amount of Cuda Cores will give different results despite being the same because of transistor counts per core for different DIE designs and such IPC is a turd 4GHz is not 4GHz CPU to CPU or GPU to GPU unless its the same model or same die with more or less of its cores enabled or disabled
OK wait so now I'm confused... when I buy laptops I check the speed because of software says it requires such speed. Soooo.... how do I choose laptops now if I should ignore the speed?
I have to basically have a law degree to decipher every single line of advertised text for a new monitor. It's the one real piece of tech that seems to be monopolized by HSN writers.
@@amystery5238 My town doesn't even have any competent headphones stores... All the headphones on display are basically from tech stores and they only sell those sony, bose, beats, b&o etc overpriced crap...
Long before that. Of course CPU makers are testing shit out before they start producing cuz if your product is dead or pretty much, you'll have returns the instant you sold it, totally wasting all the money in production and what else. So, the freq was a dead-end long before multi-core happened.
most websites i've looked at don't mention peak nits, even manufacturer websites frequently will not post any actual brightness specs (just contrast, nothing else). And given how much monitors cost, it's kind of BS how they like to leave out some of the most important info. I can't even remember how many if any i've seen while shopping around listed how much of the gamut is covered. Or ones that have conflicting information, just pulled one up from phillips that the product title says 124% sRGB, but then in product description/details it says 101% sRGB. When they have a ton of very similar models, you can get fraudulent information because they accidentally copy/paste info from one to another that doesn't match
i remember when i was going to buy a new pc and the store listed the specifications like: hd: 7200rpm (no info about storage capacity) processor: i5 (no generation info) (no info about ram) monitor: HD graphics card: yes
also don't trust the RAM speed, recently bought a lenovo with 3600mhz memory just in case i wanna play some games on the vega 8 integrated graphics.. welp turns out the bios has no XMP capabilities and im stuck on 2666 :/
RE: PSU's - wondering if the "qtec" 550w 'gold' PSU was actually 80+ rated as "back in the day" I heard many stories of those PSU's failing in a catastrophic way, taking out most of the components with it. "You get what you pay for" with PSU's - or at least you used to. I did have a qtec 550 but I asked very little from it as the system it was powering was only an early PIII, 192MB RAM, 3dfx voodoo 2000 (I think) and a 20GB Fujitsu HDD + Liteon optical drive; I was extremely fortunate and the Qtec I had didn't cause my house to burn down!!
one tip that i thing is relevant do a cpu performance test vs your cpu to see how much of an improvement it is i usually just search up (cpu1) vs (cpu2)
I've never met a person who was able to do even those simple things. Heck, nobody would even know where to look to find the name of their cpu. Helpless consumers make a wealthy capitalist society.
The other misleading thing is RAM. Sure it may say "16GB RAM" but it doesn't say anything else, it doesn't say if it's in dual channel, and it definitely doesn't say the speeds. This is most common in laptops, much more on the budget side of laptops, so better to ask the seller or do your own research before buying the product.
Explaining CPU clock speed - shows Kia and Aston Martin... Me: "Oh, good. He's going to refer to both redlining at the same revs, which is the most comparable explanation to a CPU's clock speed." Says something about them both doing 100mph... Me (disappointed): "Swing and a miss!"
That was the same thing I would have thought bro. :) Lots of things in life are missed opportunities, which is a shame. That is why guys like you exist, to make a comment about said missed opportunity and allow people like me to say, "I agree, that was a total missed opportunity". The cylinders could represent cores, the RPM would be the GHz, while the engine HP could represent gigaFLOPS (calculations per second).
@@theMoporter I am not a huge car junkie, but I knew what RPM and cylinder counts (3, 4, 8, 12) were long before I watched the television series Top Gear & The Grand Tour. Those shows got me into cars, but I am still not a car enthusiast in the sense of Jay Leno or some random 25 year old guy who fixes classic cars in the garage. Lol...
For example power bank shopping is a torture. They write things like very quick charging but it doesn't support any quick charge protocol. They write (if at all) PD 65W but they support pd at 18w over 2 port simulatenously or so.
My 9750H could be listed as either 2.6gHz, 4.0gHz, 4.2gHz, or 4.5gHz depending on which spec you want to use. None of these are a good metric, as 4.5 and 4.2 are temporary turbo states for a single thread (different time and thermal limits), 4.0 is only for all 6 cores when under a high load and thermally safe, and 2.6 is roughly the base clock it hovers around when totally idle.
@@1IGG Anyone who buy a full specs Thinkpad and then realize the included overkill CPU is useless (aka me 🤪) Sweet i5, if only I had choose you instead of your hot sister ...
There's one that really bothers me, but it's mostly with the used market. When people list a cpu as just i5 or i7 and don't actually say what cpu it is. I've seen so many people trying to sell a SUPER HIGH END GAMING VR ULTRA PC I7 GEFORCE for $1500+ when it has a 2600 non k and a 670 in it. My younger cousin used to send me these ads all the time asking if it was a better deal than the 10400f and 1660 super pc we were going to build, because "that one has an i7 though." He knows better now.
Many people I work with are getting into buying PCs since the next gen consoles are impossible to buy and the one of the biggest issues I've had is teaching them that stuff like i3, i5, i7, and i9 aren't the generations but the tiers within a generation.
I'm still angry at the MiB/GIB garbage that hard drive manufacturers invented in the 90s to lie about drive capacity. Now they even lie about SSD capacity too. The marketing guy who thought it up should be hunted down, locked in a small closet, and forced to watch Lawnmower Man on a loop for an entire week.
Next to useless buttons on a laptop and gimmicky keyboards/keyboard software as well as fancy RBG. All of these things cost next to nothing to include in a laptop, but it can double the price of a laptop, and most these things either don’t function properly or will just completely break after a while. Usually they sacrifice overall build quality to try to stuff as much useless add one into a laptop. Also, laptop cooling advertisements where they try to show how cool the laptop will run with no actual metrics, but ironically those laptops usually run the hottest. I just want a fast gaming laptop with no extra BS that drives the price up, and one that actually has good cooling and thermal paste.
My number one spec that annoys me the most about an item I'm looking to buy is usually the price.
You'll have a bad time at the cash desk if you choose to ignore that one. :-D
Boomer
bruuuhh
lol
True
For SSDs, remember that independent reviews are not trustworthy if the manufacturer decides to change the internal components without telling anyone or rebranding the SSD.
At that point all you can really do is buy from trustworthy brands like Samsung & Corsair
@@PashaGamingYT Samsung did the same
Samsung EVO PLUS says hello
Poor choice of words when saying "trustworthy" because you're implying those reviewers have something to do with the fraudulent advertisements from the manufacturers. A better word would be "accurate" due to the review being tied to *when* they got the product.
@@PashaGamingYT corsair does this kind of thing too, just recently they removed the secondary timings from their website for some ram kits, and they when caught they put them back in.
Remember no company is your friend, they just want to maximize profits
This was good.
1 thing you missed: when people just say “it is an i5” instead of the model or generation.
one time i was with a teacher working on someone else's laptop for a project and the laptop had 8th gen i5 i think, or something like that and it was pretty funny hearing her say "this is a fast computer, wow *looks at sticker* it has Intel core too, wow"
annoying, but funny
@@gregottorry2994 Insert meme about “Intel go brrr!”
Intel should just use model years alongside their CPUs
I can confidently say that I own a MacBook Pro with a Core i7, and that sounds impressive to the normies until you find out it's from 2011
@@ohnoitschris Exactly.
@@gregottorry2994 teacher seeing and sticker: WHATS IS THIS LOW END CPU
RAM is one of the biggest scams. Companies boast 16gb,32gb ram on their pcs when you can just download it for free.
eh
Lmfao
lol
@61 Cygni especially if you intend to upgrade it.
Was glad to find my laptop was single channel 8 and still had an empty slot to stick in an additional 8.
Didn’t need it to be fast or whatever, I just needed the extra space and kept the slow one that was already in there.
yes mega pixels in cameras, are sooo irrelevant to the actual camera quality
This. I'm still amazed that people still fall for this today.
Everything above 8 is ok
@@SumriseHD you mean 12
Especially when they do a 4into1 quad Bayer. My phone takes 16mp pictures but they can claim 64mp even though the pics it takes aren't that good and definately not better than the 3x zoom lens
@@Khovh the bigger the sensor, the better
Monitors... nearly everything about them.
They claim "1.000.000 : 1 Contrast", yet actually only reach around 1000:1 static and even that only with local-dimming which leaves HORRIBLE artefacts when you got any high-contrast images. Advertising 144Hz but with pixel response times >8ms and 20% or higher overshoot.
I friend once had a large plasma TV. It was a "nice" room-heater in the winter, in summer that was a real problem, but at least it did exactly what it said it would do - near perferct black-levels and very good color gamut as well as viewing angle. Not good for a bright living-room, but perfect when you can darken the room.
My father has a 65" Plasma-TV from Samsung. Only problem? The switched off pixels aren't black. They're fucking grey.
@@bentm563 yeah cause it ain't oled
Yet they hide the actual bit depth and FRC
@@bentm563 lol how did you expected perfect blacks
correct me if i’m wrong, but aren’t plasma TVs backlit?
edit: they are not. oops!
I was working at office max. A manager said "this one is the terabyte, so it's going to be way faster than the 32 gig."
I got in trouble for correcting him.
We need to teach more people about pc specs
Change my mind
@@dyna6448 Godzilla had a stroke reading your comment and died
Edit: he edited it
Me one time: "Excuse me, sir? Do you know if this laptop's SSD is NVMe or SATA?"
Best Buy worker: "...um, uh...yeah it does. But you should get this one (points at different laptop) because this one has uh...(trying to remember) 4K."
And probably that 4K laptop had a 5400rpm HDD, which will make the laptop very slow. I bought a cheap HP laptop 3 years ago, and despite having specs that were decent (at least decent for my needs), it had a slow 5400rpm HDD. Thankfully I upgraded it to an SSD, and put the HDD in the Optical Drive bay to use it for extra storage.
@@Dac_DT_MKD In laptops is really a hassle, those 5400's don't perform apropiatelly at all, but for my desktop I only use high speed spinnies (Toshiba P300 storage, Toshiba X300 performance), and I cannot see any measurable performance degradation in comparison to others SSDs, only problem would be fragmentation but with Diskeeper that's also a thing of the past.
I have a hard time checking if the “SSD” on a laptop is eMMC, NVME or just SATA.
There are some budget laptops that can come with 256GB “SSD” storage, but hell if I know if I can swap out the drive or no without opening it up and voiding warranty.
@@Mageman17 If it's not soldered memory (cough Apple cough), of course, and upgrades don't void the warranty, it should only be void if the brand can prove that you broke the machine intentionally or by mishandling it.
As for how to know the kind of memory, sometimes the manufacturers website has the info, if not, you could try and find a review with some sort of teardown and if that also doesn't work, you could try and search for replacement part numbers and watch there the kind of storage that it uses, this last method is the least ideal as this lists are not always perfect, to say the least, but as a last resort...
@@Mageman17 SATA is a connector (or communication protocol), while emmc and nvme are actual storage technologies.
If you want to compare SATA with something else, compare it with m.2, or pcie
I find the battery life on laptops pretty misleading. They're obvious best case scenarios - when my laptop is bright enough to be usable it often only lasts 50% of the listed time.
That's like a turbo nerd episode on batteries
Yea, whos gonna sit on Calculator for 69 hours?
@@skygrove8423 I sit on it for 10 hours.
@@frozenturbo8623 that’s still a lot😮
I rarely see HDPS (Hot Dogs Per Second) listed when rating LTT staff's eating capabilities, maybe we could get a rating like that and finally find out what Brandon is really hiding...
I agree. The company needs far greater transparency in this field.
TIP: Just because a psu is rated 80+ bronze/gold/yada yada, it doesnt mean its good only because of that. Best metric is cybenetics
what is it
I really hate this. Gamemax is a really common brand in my country and their power supplies are noisy and unreliable, but you can find them with bronze certification for much cheaper than a white EVGA PSU, for example.
80+ ratings are only a indicator of how efficient a psu is at certain amounts of load, while a 80+ certification is not a indicator that the psu is reliable, a psu without 80+ certification almost always is unriliable
legit question, what is cybenetics, and do brands put it on the specsheet? i never seen that
It's good if it's not a gigabyte bomb
i'm most frustrated with how portable speakers are marketed. Usually they have a power rating and a frequency span. But. A tiny thing that has no bass is often spec'ed as 20 hz to 20 khz, while an actual good speaker says 60 to 14k... and the power rating, which is usually just an electrical power its amplifier may be able to deliver into a resistive load... pfff, that has no relation to how loud and how clean the sound will be, and it's the sound that eventually matters.
Why you have to check the frequency response graph, will give you a very accurate idea of what it actually sounds like, though not all manufacturers provide them, and you also need to know how to read them
Over the years there had been many attempts to certify speakers to represent how good they are (remember how THX was important?) , in the end most of them do not mean much since different people listening from the same speaker would tell you different things. Especially the higher end it goes. Truth is there's no 1 unit alone that gives the 20-20k range nicely, there is a reason why tweeters and woofers exist, and where they crossover and how the frequency is distributed create different sound that appeal to different people.
Easiest example is Bose, some love it , some avoid it like a plague.
And yes , do try the speakers to see if you like it instead of someone telling you "its good" , audio equipment review is almost like fine wine review , its a matter of taste.
With the "electrical power its amplifier may be able to deliver into a resistive load... pfff, that has no relation to how loud and how clean the sound will be" do you mean that that suggests that a lot of power is lost on heat or?
@@syralessthanthree with any oscillating system (in this case, the speaker diaphragm moving to vibrate air) power delivery is complicated. You will always have some portion of the power that gets reflected back to the power source, instead of transferred to your load (in this case, converted into sound).
The frequencies at which very little power is reflected are called 'resonances' and these are affected mostly by the size of the speaker cavity. Larger speakers (woofers) resonate better with larger wavelength (lower frequency) oscillations, so they couple better with deep sounds. However, the heavy diaphragms are difficult to oscillate quickly, so trying to generate high pitch sound from these devices is inefficient.
On the other hand, a smaller speaker with a stiffer diaphragm will give you much more efficient coupling with high pitch sounds.
I think OP is referring to the fact that, just because the amp can deliver a certain amount of power, not all of it couples into sound gen effectively. As you correctly suggested, if the power does not couple well, it gets wasted as heat and sound quality deteriorates.
@@desmondlau4632 looking how covid is going, i don't think the saying "avoid it like a plague" really means anything now a days.
I know Linus goes over ranks for RAM, but maybe even a Turbo Nerd edition on why RAM timings are more important than the frequency? I know Linus says it all the time but never really did a deep dive the way he explained ranks.
Why is an SSD faster than a HDD if both run at the same MB/s theoretical
Its because of seek time (get this > is this right > its corrupt > here it is again) 4x 16 = 64 like wise 4x 18 = 72
And so with a different amount of operations that can be done inside a set frequency means you get different performance
Truck has infinite space and no loading or unloading time, but takes X time for House A to B before it can do C to D before it can do E to F
I want 1000 things that total 1GB vs 1 thing that is 1GB
Explained it as best i can
ram timing are not more important than frequency. frequency is also not more important than timings. its more a matter of you need to know both to get an accurate idea of performance.
both are directly linked. neither of them is more important. higher frequency usually means higher timings. that's what you saw when we went from ddr3 to ddr4. essentially both frequency and latency doubled which means the performance is same. ddr3 1333 cl9 vs ddr4 2666 cl18 for example. ofc now with ddr4 being around for so long the tech evolved and we see higher frequencies at not so shitty timings which means something like ddr4 3200 mhz cl 14 is now quite faster than ddr3 but in the beginning that wasn't necessarily the case. however saying one of them is more important is just wrong. you have to look at both to get an understanding of the actual performance.
cas latency stands for column access strobe latency and the number means how many clock cycles are passing when your cpu requests data from a memory modules particular column and the time in which it responds to it with the available data.
so with that in mind you can understand why neither of them matter more than the other. higher frequency ram means that the clock cycles are faster or that you have more cycles in the same time than with lower frequency ram however higher latency means that it will take more cycles before the ram delivers the requested data. this is why ddr3 1333 cl9 and ddr4 2666 cl18 will perform really the same. the ddr4 will perform 2x the cycles in the same time however the requested data will also take 2 times as long to come back so you won literally nothing. ofc ddr4 had other improvements over ddr3 that aren't related to speed but that aside the two examples here would perform like one another.
RAM timings are always given in clock ticks so yes, both matter. I.e. you divide the CAS latency by the clock speed to give the true latency.
The point is rather that an increase in clock speed is unlikely to be worth much if it's accompanied by a similar increase in the timings, and that faster RAM with really bad timings may end up being slower in practice.
@@Matt__B agreed buddy. Both memory frequency and timings matter but today it doesn't seem like they matter nearly as much as they did with DDR1.
The lower the latency the faster the memory can be accessed at any given time which is very useful for benchmarking apps as well as games.
This laptop (i7 10750h hexacore, 2 x 8GB DDR4 - 3200 runs at 1463MHz CL20-20-20-47-67 @ 1.2v) but I have not even been into the BIOS as I doubt a Medion laptop will allow me to change the memory timings.
Battery life. I guess it's cool to know that if I let my computer idle with no software opened it'll take it 10h to drain the battery completely, but I'd rather know how long it lasts when using the hardware at its maximum.
Asus ZenBook Pro Duo: Best I can do is 30 min.
This would be both useful and pointless. As you would then think a netbook is more useful than a mobile workstation. But it all depends on what you want to do. This should be on the spec sheet, but not in the main marketing in stores.
welcome to apple, where we will never tell you the capacity of our batteries, but only tell you how many hours you will get using the apple communist party approved apps in the acp approved manner.
@@iris657 to be fair though, as a Dev machine (could stay with wheezing Dell quad core or move to Mac M1) it's actually pretty good. I've done 2 full days without charging.
macbook pro m1 and ipad pro 2020 11”, both of them i’ve used a fair amount since getting them and the battery life is deadass enough to last two days each on a single charge, even with a lot of use
i want someone to talk about gibibytes vs gigabytes so people can understand why their harddrive has less space than advertised
x/1.024^(n-1) (where n is an order of magnitude, e.g. 1 for kilo, 2 for mega, 3 for giga, and x is the stated capacity for that magnitude, e.g. 1000 for 1000GB)
How Much Space Do You REALLY Have? - Techquickie
th-cam.com/video/ZBzIeJFdN-8/w-d-xo.html
here thank me later :)
yess , about internet speeds, in megabits and megabites ...
@@darkmtbg also th-cam.com/video/i3_JnetivIQ/w-d-xo.html
Every time a marketing team gets into tech something is going to crash.
Back in 90s there was no thing like mebi or gibi.
Everyone knew that when you are talking about bytes kilo is 1024, not 1000.
But some marketer had to get into it and decide that smaller drive is cheaper to make and its still technically 80GB,
just using a different then standard definition, and the war started.
Can you do sequel videos to this?
There are probably more specs that aren't important
I second that
I third that
I fourth that
I 5th this notion.
like laptop gpu specs
"Not everything is what it seems"
SunTzu, The art of observation.
"Everything is what it seems."
- Moon Tzu, "The Art of Oblivion"
wise words
"The Red pill or the Blue pill"
Sun Tzu, The art of quoting on the interwebs
"My kok is bigger than your ex"
- xue piao piao tzu sun
@@WTFBOOMDOOM
"WTF are you guys talking about?"
- Earth Tzu, The Art between E and H
Manufacturers of gaming mice mice seem to to be pushing the whole "higher DPI = better performance" thing, although that typically isn't the case...
well while higher dpi does mean lower response time, it really comes down to preference
Nah. Best to spend more time improving skill than Shopping for "pro" gear
@@microwave6097 dpi let’s you move the cursor further while moving the mouse less. Anything above 4,000 actual dpi for me is flat out unusable.
Yeah like why do I need 32k dpi when anything beyond a few thousand is unusable
I feel like this could've been at least a 10 minute video! But yay thanks for making this! I'm sure I'll share this one day with someone making a big purchase.
Taking your car analogy for processor clock speeds, it's more like choosing the car based on the engine RPM, rather than top speed
And top speed isn't a good indicator of performance either; it doesn't really showcase how long it takes to get there.
But I see where you're coming from; sure, Honda's S2000 can do like 9000 RPM, but that actually resulted in it being less drivable for non-enthusiasts.
Interesting video. Great to learn about these things as a building novice. It's taking a longer time than I anticipated to build my PC due to learning more about components and not jumping in head first with no frame of reference.
When a website says i5 or Ryzen 5 without specifying an actual processor or even an actual generation.
Strange how things change. Once upon a long a go, a CPU's clock speed was the most significant measure of the speed of a processor and resulting system...then came multi-cores and as better manufacturing techniques as mentioned in the video and its significance became arbitrary (not strictly true, but useless as a direct measure of comparison).
Well, the freq was found to be an absolute dead-end loooong before Pentium 4 could overclock to 5GHz+, and with all the cool shit you could do with a computer, stopping at freq and a single core per package would leave it all a dream.
Like, try building a massive supercomputer with max-clocked Pentium 4's (a clock which doesn't require liquid nitrogen as the cooler). Google's or Facebook's cooling systems wouldn't be remotely enough, and astronomically unreasonable money would be wasted just to run the CPU's at 100% for 1d.
It was probably easier to increase clock speed than increase IPC. When they couldn't push it any further they had nowhere else to go.
@@morosis82 to be fair though, IPC was pushed so much to the limit that increasing it even further at the time was deemed to be straight up impossible for a single core cpu.
Research focused on two paths, dual core cpus and increasing the clock to extreme levels but both had huge issues:
Increasing clock inherently required to leave a bit of the IPC on the table (as it needed very long pipelines) and compensating for that while dealing with the increased power and thermal requirements would be extremely difficult.
Dual core cpus on the other hand had huge issues with resource sharing and interlock, some of which were deemed basically impossible to solve.
Resource sharing between cores also translated into an inherent penality on performance and thus, even if they worked, it wasn't that obvious that increasing the number of cores would lead to an increase in overall performance.
They quite looked like dead ends.
Therefore, although the clock increase path was hard and had many disadvantages, at least it was the more feasible and it was also the (financially) safer option any way you look at it, so it was the path taken with the pentium 4.
Of course, with time, we found out that not only dual-cores are really feasible but, because the performance penalities can be worked around for the most part, they are way way better than single core cpus.
Therefore we can easily say that, in hindsight, the path taken with the pentium 4 was the wrong one and, indeed, the real dead end between the 2 but, at the time, things didn't quite look this way.
I have a SLIGHT disagreement with the CPU argument. yes, it's true that not all CPUs are made the same anymore, but hard numbers are STILL relevant within 2-3 generations. (for example, a 1st gen Ryzen (1XXX) can still go toe to toe with a 3rd gen Ryzen (3XXX) ) Is it perfect? No, but it certainly has some merit still
@@Truth_Demon Su~re, but the Ryzen 3 1000 tech is hardly even comparable to anything before year 2010.
Hell, CPU's and by extension GPU's are reaching their copper limits, so they've been looking into other materials for at least 6y by now.
Suggestion. A whole video on mega, giga, terabytes vs. mebi, gibi, tebibytes, where you see commonly each, and how to interpret what you're seeing. Wholly crap are those two mixed up all over the place, both intentionally and unintentionally, and it causes a huge amount of confusion.
Edit: Adding on to abbreviation confusions, an explanation of the difference between MBps and Mbps. Most people don't know that 8 small b's = 1 big B. I've always thought that ISPs and other industries marketing data transfer technology take advantage of consumers knowing everything in Bytes to confuse the issue and make their _bit_ per second speeds sound 8x faster than they are. This is further confused when you add mebi and mega prefixes into the mix.
They already did a TQ on this a while while back
th-cam.com/video/i3_JnetivIQ/w-d-xo.html
It's it's definitely a sham, because they basically redefined terms to make it work.
...I hate that I'm just learning about this in 2021.
8 bits to 1 byte
8 gigabit = 1 gigabyte
When talking about windows they use MB, GB, TB and so on but they are mibi by law cus of legal BS decades ago
But that is because they are using true size before the legal BS that had the size changed
So for windows 1GB is 1024MB
Same on linux would be 1GB is 1000MB because of the legal BS
Its really not hard
Bit = 8
Byte = 1
Mibi = +24 to it (gibibyte 1024 megabytes)
Then to internet MB/s is megabyte’s per second
mbps is megabits per second
80 mbps = 10MB/s (so some would say its MBps and assume people are smart enough to look at the capitals vs lower case)
GB/s = 8 gbps
Gigabit internet = 125MB/s
All of it is bit vs byte with 8 bits being 1 byte and mibi is +24 seeing as that is how computers count 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024 and legal BS spawned the mibi into existence
@@InfernosReaper this! this to me is the worst part about it. Like, by now i'm used to the MB vs Mb thing, the worst part for me is how IEC redefined Kilo-, Mega- etc to refer to decimal instead of binary...it's ALWAYS been binary in computers, now all of a sudden the correct term is MiB?
Electronic store I know keeps on advertising Tv's and monitors like this :
Picture quality - 50Hz
Sounds like a good deal, as long as the refresh rate is at least 1440p ;)
@@JustSomeCanuck it should also have a response time less or equal to 50 watts
You know what's frustrating?
When they don't mention the RAM and SSD speed
Because we can not ingore ram and SSD speed.
@Project X even if they say the generation. So let's say i5 10th gen
THERE ARE ATLEAST 5 MODELS OF i5 10TH GEN
Me at a store : Which budget laptop do you recommend?
The salesman (trying to clear older stock) : This one, it has a ryzen 3 processor (doesn't even mention the generation), it is going better than intel you can see the news.
Me : 🤦🏿♂️
Honestly a bit surprised that they didn't talk about RAM in this video, especially for laptops, as they have another video on LTT talking about how not all "16gb 3200MHz modules" are made the same.
x8 x16 might be misleading, but they're important though.
I think better car related parallel would be the rpm of the engine: one engine can reach to 13k rpm while other can only do 6500 rpm, but first one is I4 one liter motorcycle engine and latter is 6.3L V8
I4 litre motorcycles Aka superbikes are actually way more faster than almost all but some hypercars or modded cars. A 200 bhp I4 litre motorcycle will outperform a 600 to 700 bhp V8 car, because the motorcycle weighs very less compared to the car.
@@MrDsheel My comparison was with rpm and what happens with every rotation, translated from Clockspeed and IPC.
Otherwise you're absolutely correct. ^^
Thanks, I needed to know the Random IOPS rather than the sequential speed, but I'm sure when you're transferring files to another NVME, that matters until it hits the buffer limit on the cache
IOPS is sure one of the critical SSD performance aspects, but it's useless if you don't know the other factors such as latency (how much time does it take to reach a block), block size (the smallest space unit that can be edited/deleted), RAID configuration, Read/Write percentage and Sequential/Random percentage.
Unfortunately, vendors rarely if ever reveal the rest of their benchmark values and results. So IOPS is not that reliable in this case.
more on this here:
th-cam.com/video/cEb270L5Q1Y/w-d-xo.html
Lol apples to oranges, good one guys XD
Edit: So yeah, you covered the stuff I hate seeing already on products, but one thing i hate that usually isn't included, more with laptops than anything else are specs that AREN'T included, you buy a new laptop, thinking about future upgradability, but you usually have to go to the manufacturers website and read through a bunch of fine print just to find out if it has a second RAM slot, or an extra M.2 slot or if everything's just soldered onto the board, and even then sometimes that information isn't included so you have to go somewhere like LTT or another reviewer so you can find a teardown of a laptop, all so you can find out if its what you're actually looking for.
also annoying when there are so many different variants of a type of laptop (eg nitro 5) and a bunch of them are different enough where some have different compatible parts than others or don’t have certain upgradability slots
I prefer oranges
About monitors, another thing people don't tell is AV Lag, which is the syncronization between the image and audio(specially if you are running audio through a Realtek(realteks boast at minimum 45ms of audio lag)). You can try and run a Realtek or similar audio device(USB headphones, etc) at 512 samples(20ms), but you need to run it in ASIO or WDM mode, as MME(which supports all audio card effects) doesn't run so fast.
High AV Lag makes it hard to play music games.
Recently noticed the SD Association recommends their "SD Memory Card Formatter" Tool for formatting SD and SDXC Cards because the formatting of the operating system is "not optimized for sd cards" and the performance could be lower.
The difference betweet the formatting tool and the windows bultin would be interesting.
This needs a part 2 with comments as suggestions.
Ngl, this might be one of the most important videos you've released
A good analogy for how cpu power works is a car:
GHZ = engine rotation speed
Usage percentage = How much of it's horse power is demanded
Cores = Count if pistons in the engine
Hyperthreading = Doubling of pistons
Cache size = How many Litres does the engine hold
Boost clock = turbocharger
IPC = gearing that the car can use
Eventual speed is mostly determined by ipc+ghz if it is not at its limit because of to few cores (not enough horse power)
Speed is nowadays determined mostly by how bad the application is written = how much car weights thanks to the all unnecessary crap incorporated in its shitty design...
Riley keeps giving me the technobabble my computer illiterate friend likes as background noise to sleep where I rant to them.
*I love the tech news and I love Riley
I just wanna add it here, common traps nowadays in Laptop Entry Market is putting the words "Fast Intel Quad Core" in ads only to find out it's just a Celeron if you dig deeper in research... Which is a trap for those who are new and with tight budget... In short, Google and TH-cam is your friend...
Don't forget video card memory. I have some fun memories from my childhood with my friends claiming their GeForce 4 MX being "faster" than my GeForce 3 Ti because both cards had 128 MB on board and 4 is a bigger number than 3 :P
I don't know about specs that are unimportant, but one spec that's pretty important that's almost never listed is whether the RAM is configured in single or dual channel. Single channel RAM, especially for integrated graphics, absolutely destroys performance.
Why does it destroys the performance? I would like to know if I should add another ram stick :)
@@marius0448 You always want dual channel memory. It's like tying one arm behind your back without it. You _can_ do the same things but it'll be slower.
That's just a general way to look at it. And unfortunately you can't just add a second stick of ram. So ask someone who knows to find the right memory for you and make sure it's set up correctly.
@@flameshana9 yeah,but i was curios why is it faster? I ve seen this many times that dual is faster.
@@marius0448 Running RAM in single channel essentially halves the speed of your RAM. So one 3200Mhz 8gb module in single channel mode will have half the speed as two 3200Mhz 4gb modules in dual channel mode. They’re still technically running at the same clock speed, but the bandwidth between the RAM and CPU is doubled in dual channel mode, so twice as much data can be pushed through in the same time interval. When you use integrated graphics, your CPU and GPU both share system memory, so a dual channel RAM configuration will dramatically increase performance in games.
@@HPerrin Thanks man,u explained very well!! So with dual channel the cpu and gpu can get from 2 sources at the same time,when in single they can get only from one source at one time :)
A Tech quickie on different color gamuts would be nice. I have no clue what DCPI-3, Adobe, or SRGB color spaces mean or how they differ. What would a typical consumer be looking for?
We need this comment to be a video, seriously
1:08 I thought he was going to make the engine RPM comparison. Probably would have been the better metaphor.
4:12 Monitor Response Time!!! All those monitors sporting a "1ms response time", but that measurement doesn't mean anything anymore, it could be 1ms at a ridiculous overdrive setting with 80% overshoot or something
This video is gold! On the subject of audio, people should ignore the frequency range of a speaker or headphone. It doesn't have a standard measurement scheme and it says nothing about sound quality.
Riley: "Speaking of things that are frustrating..."
Me, thinking: 'is he really gonna rip his sponsor a new one?'
A big thing about computer specifications is that so many of them are context dependent. A useful "sequel" to this video would be to propose spec minimums for different usage scenarios. Kind of like the the gaming video LTT did headlining "El Cheapo," show us recommended specc'd PCs including "office PC" and "gaming" "video editing" "software development" "3d modeling" "CAD" and "photo editing"
That's pretty easy. For casual users single thread performance is what matters and then just throw in the minimum of 8gb of ram. For power users you want 16gb of ram. Then core count/multi thread performance would be the numbers you want to be bigger. For pro's it depends on your job, so you wouldn't ask for generic advice. And there's tons of videos already on gpu performance.
But yeah. A few recommendations for builds/premades would be handy for newbies.
It's not the size of your clock that matters, but how you utilise it?
This is a joke, right?
@@shlok975 Nah man. Clock size is super important.
@@flameshana9 clock size, not speed?
Anyone this video applies to should really leave it to the experts and just ask for help picking out a computer.
And by experts they'll think "Like the salesman in the store, right?" Or even better, a random google search.
The most frustrating is compare smartphone camera specs. I basically hope to have a TH-cam video of some one comparing the two devices that I'm interested to
who cares? unless your price range is $100-$200 any phone camera is adequate to take photos of food that will have filters applied to them and uploaded in 640x480 to instagram. if youre actually interested in taking proper photos, you already have a camera.
1:56 I never thought I'd see a Skip Bayless reference in a LMG video. But here we are...
Specs you should ignore: the i3, i5 and i7 naming. "oH mY LaPtOp haS a i5!!1!!" yeah, from the 4th generation, released in 2013.... That shit has 2 cores bro
This is my fave to see at Costco, bestbuy, frys, ect. A pc that just says "i5, nvidia graphics". It gives me a chuckle
Yeah lmao, mobile i5 4th generation was garbo
ah those "gaming" prebuilts with an i5 and an nvidia gpu which is slower than the i5's integrated gpu
*”oh my pc has a i9”.*
*Cricket noise*
@@Nobody-vr5nl If you're seeing things at Fry's, can you also see dead people?
0:38 satisfying clap
For most of these, it feels like it's a matter of "all else being equal, a higher number here is better - but in actuality all else is rarely equal"
For me now that a monitor no longer needs to have the G-Sync module to be certified can be annoying especially when premium high priced units can now claim this
"all day battery life"
Hard drive specs piss me off. They say it's 4TB but after you format it, you are left with less space due to the partition table. They need to make hard drives slightly bigger so your new 4TB hard drive it actually 4TB after you format it.
Linus always banging on about how bright monitors can get, bruh I can't make my monitors DIM enough; I'm not trying to edit photos, I'm trying not to go blind
Use Windows display calibration wizard.
raise ambient light dpn't lower the screen.
Exactly, I have my Dell S2716DG set to 35% brightness, otherwise I get headaches.
We need a video on this subject.
@@flameshana9 Not really, it's a simple concept. Being in a dark room with a screen is bad for your eye health, it strains them and gives you a headache.
Get some ambient light going, like a led strip on the back / underside of the desk and it'll be more gentle on your eyes.
More videos like this please. Computer newbies need to know these things.
For M.2 SSDs, I use the rated read/write speeds to make sure that the SSDs is NVME vs. SATA (as for some prebuilts/laptops and even some M.2 SSD listings, they don't always make it clear).
Just because its faster than regular sata doesn't mean its nvme. It could be ahci
That's actually a really good tip.
@@AltonV are there SATA M.2 SSDs that aren't using AHCI? In any case, the max speeds possible are around 550 to 600 MB/s. So, faster than that and you are dealing with NVME.
@@penguinguyx I have an m.2 ssd that is NOT nvme and are rated for 2,150MB/s read and 1,200MB/s write
@@AltonV if it's faster than 600mb/s then it's not a SATA drive
Power consumption gets me worked up something chronic. Most PCs use less power per year than your fridge does in one day and thats with 24/7 usage maxing out your psu
From what I know a fridge uses about 1,000 watts a day. A computer uses about 100-200 an hour. A laptop uses 10-20 watts an hour. I've measured everything myself aside from my fridge.
Yeah this is totally inaccurate.
When I moved in with my family their electric bill went up almost $80 just from my pc being plugged in.
Whoever told you that lied to you to get out of paying their share of the electric bill…
The only important spec is price
Oh man. That iMac at 0:37 is a nostalgia trip.
Frustrated about not even being shown the exact models of those components by the PC/laptop/whatever manufacturer. Only some do, so in essence they don't even give us something to be frustrated with. Frustrating.
most offensive to me is 'core i7' because that literally means nothing. there was wven a 7w i7 at one point, the Y series, and most common is the U series, what you want in a performance laptop is the H, and thats just the mobile side
@@bradhaines3142 True, my i7 8565U is just 20% faster per core than my desktop i3 540 (1st gen), at least when reencoding video on FFMPEG.
Thanks for the HDR part of the video. I was going to buy a "HDR" monitor. Now I'll research again for better monitor.
I remember the megahertz myth. Wintel chumps from back in the day were all about intel being better than PowerPC because of higher megahertz.
Battery size on gaming laptops. It doesn't matter how big or small that battery is, it will be depleted in no time gaming. Even if you aren't gaming and the dedicated nvidia or amd GPU kicks in
1ms response times in monitors are usually a lie, because even though it can support 1 ms response times, it's usually garbage with a crap ton of overshoot in it.
Nobody can tell that fast of a difference anyways
@@rpgfeatures793 some people actually can, like esports gamers.
@@aqeelaadam8557 false. They even stated they can’t. Shroud said he couldn’t tell between 11ms and 1ms. Anything higher he could
It’s a marketing strategy
@@rpgfeatures793 11ms is very high, usually people can't tell apart monitors when it's 4ms not 11ms
It's frustrating when companies (company?) say their newest product is arbitrary % faster, or bigger. Faster than what? Bigger than what??? WHAT ARE YOU COMPARING??
When they say a laptop screen supports 1080p like bitch every other laptop screen does
Well unless it's 1440p or 4K
believe it or not some still sell 768p screens
_cries in 1366x768_
A lot of office oriented laptops arent 1080
@@nicoper Bro that's the same as my laptop too lmao
I own a hosting service and for our clients the clock speed is sometimes important, if it's a VPS. As some of them run a FiveM Server and it depends on a high clock speed
my pet peev (or however it is spelled) is when a brand tries at 2021 to advertise their laptop/pc/phone specs and somehow confuze memory and space.
Well, they are either lying or they are just stupid, or this new 400$ smartphone phone from X brand HAS 256GB OF RAM to keep your favorite moments, songs etc
yeah its a phone for gen z. ditches the storage and has a large amount of ram instead. means everything gets flushed on reboot just like the empty heads of zoomers.
@@iris657 I wish, that would make sense. I talked to one of these idiots and they were like oooopppsss we totally made a mistake... they still haven't fixed it 😂 and years later they still do the same shit
@@iris657 lol I'm 17 and hardly use my phone, pc master race all the way
Speaker wattage usually doesn’t compare well either across different brands/models.
HDMI cables which only go up to 30 fps at 4k. The version matters a lot.
Cable is cable.
@@hubertnnn Only if they're the same HDMI version. In the current age you should _never_ buy an HDMI cable below version 2.0 or you'll end up with 30 fps and no HDR support.
As I said, cable is cable.
Cables don't support features, all they do is transfer data, and the only things a cable might differ form one to the other is:
- how much current it can transfer (mostly irrelevant for data transferring cables)
- how different length of each wire is (and thus how synchronized signals on each wire are)
- how well its shielded (an thus, how much noise it will catch from outside)
- what is its resistance
A high quality cable will be able to handle many generations of standard in the future. (unless new standard added extra pins and wires).
But the truth is that most cables are not high quality and barely even fit requirements of current standards.
Cut a modern cable and you will be amazed how its possible that its even working (if you have any experience in electronics).
@@hubertnnn Google the differences between HDMI 1.4 and 2.1 and then edit your comment. There's no such thing as "a high quality variant can support many future versions" for a hardware standard.
@@Fiyaaaahh He's right tho, I have a cable from 2012 that can handle an HDMI 2.1 signal with no problems but a cable bought in 2020 marked as "2.0 compatible" can't manage a 2.1 signal reliably.
It's mostly about the quality of the cable and the insulation, the physical standard for the cable has not changed since the original HDMI, only the signal rates have gone up and crappy cables can't keep up.
Monitor response time is the worst. I barely even understand it myself but when they advertise 1ms response times that's only in certain scenarios, they'll usually be closer to 5-10ms
I think the clock speed info about CPU's also now applies to GPUs. Like how current Ampere GPU's might clock slower than previous generations but still preform as good or better.
Now? It always has to my knowledge
@@commanderoof4578 I admit I did not know if that was the case with the older generations. Good to know though and even more of a thing to know when buying a part.
@@JKirkInTexas it can be the same in the same generation as well so a 1030 vs a 1080 ti both at 2GHz using the same amount of Cuda Cores will give different results despite being the same because of transistor counts per core for different DIE designs and such
IPC is a turd 4GHz is not 4GHz CPU to CPU or GPU to GPU unless its the same model or same die with more or less of its cores enabled or disabled
OK wait so now I'm confused... when I buy laptops I check the speed because of software says it requires such speed. Soooo.... how do I choose laptops now if I should ignore the speed?
I have to basically have a law degree to decipher every single line of advertised text for a new monitor. It's the one real piece of tech that seems to be monopolized by HSN writers.
Or just go into a physical store and try it 😉
@@amystery5238 My town doesn't even have any competent headphones stores... All the headphones on display are basically from tech stores and they only sell those sony, bose, beats, b&o etc overpriced crap...
This is where Tech discords come in helpfull
I am very upset when a site I visit often calls 60 Hz Lenovo office monitors and I quote "LED GAMING"
Comparing clock speeds was a valid point at least to the point dual core CPUs entered the market.
Long before that. Of course CPU makers are testing shit out before they start producing cuz if your product is dead or pretty much, you'll have returns the instant you sold it, totally wasting all the money in production and what else.
So, the freq was a dead-end long before multi-core happened.
most websites i've looked at don't mention peak nits, even manufacturer websites frequently will not post any actual brightness specs (just contrast, nothing else). And given how much monitors cost, it's kind of BS how they like to leave out some of the most important info. I can't even remember how many if any i've seen while shopping around listed how much of the gamut is covered. Or ones that have conflicting information, just pulled one up from phillips that the product title says 124% sRGB, but then in product description/details it says 101% sRGB. When they have a ton of very similar models, you can get fraudulent information because they accidentally copy/paste info from one to another that doesn't match
Thumbs up for "discombobulate", Merphy Napier's favourite word. Go on and tell her!
I thought her fave was undulate 🙂
@@biblioholic7139 oh crap, you're right. I misremembered
i remember when i was going to buy a new pc and the store listed the specifications like:
hd: 7200rpm (no info about storage capacity)
processor: i5 (no generation info)
(no info about ram)
monitor: HD
graphics card: yes
I recently shoped for a new laptop, and it was so frustrating to find some of the details, like the ram speed, the network card model, etc.
also don't trust the RAM speed, recently bought a lenovo with 3600mhz memory just in case i wanna play some games on the vega 8 integrated graphics.. welp turns out the bios has no XMP capabilities and im stuck on 2666 :/
@@nuxter6210 Lmaoo
RE: PSU's - wondering if the "qtec" 550w 'gold' PSU was actually 80+ rated as "back in the day" I heard many stories of those PSU's failing in a catastrophic way, taking out most of the components with it. "You get what you pay for" with PSU's - or at least you used to. I did have a qtec 550 but I asked very little from it as the system it was powering was only an early PIII, 192MB RAM, 3dfx voodoo 2000 (I think) and a 20GB Fujitsu HDD + Liteon optical drive; I was extremely fortunate and the Qtec I had didn't cause my house to burn down!!
Price is THE spec I am frustrated by the most.
One thing I've learned buying notebooks for our company: The CPU doesn't matter too much, is the SSD that makes the miracle.
An ssd gives new life to any pc
Video suggestion: how to shop for secondhand hardware without getting junk.
one tip that i thing is relevant
do a cpu performance test vs your cpu to see how much of an improvement it is i usually just search up (cpu1) vs (cpu2)
I've never met a person who was able to do even those simple things. Heck, nobody would even know where to look to find the name of their cpu. Helpless consumers make a wealthy capitalist society.
Could you guys make a video on,
“Are Stock Android better then other Android UI?”
The other misleading thing is RAM. Sure it may say "16GB RAM" but it doesn't say anything else, it doesn't say if it's in dual channel, and it definitely doesn't say the speeds. This is most common in laptops, much more on the budget side of laptops, so better to ask the seller or do your own research before buying the product.
Explaining CPU clock speed - shows Kia and Aston Martin...
Me: "Oh, good. He's going to refer to both redlining at the same revs, which is the most comparable explanation to a CPU's clock speed."
Says something about them both doing 100mph...
Me (disappointed): "Swing and a miss!"
That was the same thing I would have thought bro. :) Lots of things in life are missed opportunities, which is a shame.
That is why guys like you exist, to make a comment about said missed opportunity and allow people like me to say, "I agree, that was a total missed opportunity". The cylinders could represent cores, the RPM would be the GHz, while the engine HP could represent gigaFLOPS (calculations per second).
No offence, but that's pretty useless to anyone who isn't into cars. They chose their metaphor to be understandable, not most technically comparable.
@@theMoporter I am not a huge car junkie, but I knew what RPM and cylinder counts (3, 4, 8, 12) were long before I watched the television series Top Gear & The Grand Tour. Those shows got me into cars, but I am still not a car enthusiast in the sense of Jay Leno or some random 25 year old guy who fixes classic cars in the garage. Lol...
For example power bank shopping is a torture. They write things like very quick charging but it doesn't support any quick charge protocol. They write (if at all) PD 65W but they support pd at 18w over 2 port simulatenously or so.
CPU ghz is right. I have g3460 which is 3.5 ghz the ryzen 5 2600 will be faster despite having 3.4 ghz.
My 9750H could be listed as either 2.6gHz, 4.0gHz, 4.2gHz, or 4.5gHz depending on which spec you want to use. None of these are a good metric, as 4.5 and 4.2 are temporary turbo states for a single thread (different time and thermal limits), 4.0 is only for all 6 cores when under a high load and thermally safe, and 2.6 is roughly the base clock it hovers around when totally idle.
Ignore any spec that has the words "up to" next to it.
High-end CPU's are worthless if they're hampered by inadequate cooling
wait, who doesn't install a dedicated cooler and throws away the stock cooler?
@@1IGG dell
@@1IGG anyone who owns a laptop…
@@1IGG Anyone who buy a full specs Thinkpad and then realize the included overkill CPU is useless (aka me 🤪)
Sweet i5, if only I had choose you instead of your hot sister ...
@@LordNementon I'll take the hot sister off your hands.
There's one that really bothers me, but it's mostly with the used market. When people list a cpu as just i5 or i7 and don't actually say what cpu it is. I've seen so many people trying to sell a SUPER HIGH END GAMING VR ULTRA PC I7 GEFORCE for $1500+ when it has a 2600 non k and a 670 in it. My younger cousin used to send me these ads all the time asking if it was a better deal than the 10400f and 1660 super pc we were going to build, because "that one has an i7 though." He knows better now.
Me: does it have rtx 3060 90watts or 130watts?
worker: It's the latest version.
Me: Understandable....
Agreed. Laptop GPU wattage is a mess.
Many people I work with are getting into buying PCs since the next gen consoles are impossible to buy and the one of the biggest issues I've had is teaching them that stuff like i3, i5, i7, and i9 aren't the generations but the tiers within a generation.
I'm still angry at the MiB/GIB garbage that hard drive manufacturers invented in the 90s to lie about drive capacity. Now they even lie about SSD capacity too. The marketing guy who thought it up should be hunted down, locked in a small closet, and forced to watch Lawnmower Man on a loop for an entire week.
Next to useless buttons on a laptop and gimmicky keyboards/keyboard software as well as fancy RBG. All of these things cost next to nothing to include in a laptop, but it can double the price of a laptop, and most these things either don’t function properly or will just completely break after a while. Usually they sacrifice overall build quality to try to stuff as much useless add one into a laptop. Also, laptop cooling advertisements where they try to show how cool the laptop will run with no actual metrics, but ironically those laptops usually run the hottest.
I just want a fast gaming laptop with no extra BS that drives the price up, and one that actually has good cooling and thermal paste.