We Downgraded our Computers – Switching to Intel Arc Pt. 1
I got you a new GPU yay yay it's an arc it's easy to say we want competition what's not easy is spending your hard-earned money with an underdog company and your precious time fighting with an inferior product Fall For What so your buddy can just go out and buy the actually good one and get it for a reasonable price I mean we all complain about nvidia's pricing and we say that we want their Stranglehold on the discrete GPU Market to end but if the steam Hardware survey is anything to go by nobody actually wants to be the one to buy something else especially in Intel Arc and if the rumors are anything to go by Intel's discrete GPU division was already in a precarious position before these things were so difficult to sell so we've been challenged the 30-day Arc challenge 30-day Arc challenge okay but only if Luke has to do it too I'm down so here it is it's the 30-day Arc challenge part one baby where we are both gonna rip our Superior gpus out of our gaming Rigs and for the first time ever on this channel perform a downgrade I really hope this goes smoothly like this message from our sponsor Boost Mobile Boost Mobile provides you with unlimited data talk and text for only 25 a month all on one of America's largest 5G networks click the link below for a limited time offer foreign [Music] to ensure I couldn't cheat you know oh well you know I didn't change out my VR rig and I'm not going to drag my main machine out here which I did do during the Linux challenge when show viewers demanded that I change out not only my daily driver gaming rig but also my VR machine so Alex is here to help me perform one of the two surgeries the choice is yours sir and this is a bit of a trick question which would you rather the small form factor machine or the Hardline water cooled one water cool oh crap that might actually be the easier one should be a bit more fun too I thought you were going to take this one I can take this one if you want no no no no no no by all means you can have the harder one remember when I stole our first 3080 and I was like don't worry I'll bring it back and then you didn't I still have it what a dick now I'm a little torn right now on the one hand the upstairs machine I'm running a 4k monitor which frankly neither of these GPS Decay enough it's only 30 days I'll make it but on the other hand this machine is used for VR where consistent frame times are extremely important you're gonna need a bucket down here which one should I go a770 and which one a750 we didn't have enough a770s to go around I think a750 in this one okay all right I'll take this then I'm curious which one you got oh well if it says limited edition on it it's the 16 gig I think right I'm pretty sure they're both limited edition they're like the same and I don't know yeah well we'll find out later memes aside when it comes to DirectX 12 or Vulcan titles so that is to say newer games at anywhere from 1080p to 1440p Arc actually performs pretty darn well for the price the issue is that Intel is up against literally Decades of experience on both Nvidia and amd's side when it comes to developing drivers for older apis like DirectX 9 and 10. the other big issue is that their Hardware doesn't actually have native support for some of those older apis which means that they have to run them through a translation layer that results in a big performance hit so if all Luke and I wanted to do was play Anno 1800 do maternal you know in a handful of other newer titles we'd probably be fine the problem is that many popular games even today were built for older apis Counter-Strike League Legends well and even DirectX games don't necessarily play very well okay all right all right he was pretty bullish on Arc until he actually sat down and tried to Game On It Master Chief collections what did it for me it was so bad getting my machine out is a little bit of a chore because the USB fiber boxes that go to some of the other computers in the house uh rest on it um and also we put a big radiator behind it yeah so getting at the i o is a little bit more challenging than it used to be bigger radiator is not great what I'm thinking then is you're gonna pull from the front and then I'm gonna kind of Juggle all of that stuff in the back and make sure that nothing comes crashing down okay cool what could go wrong one potential speed bump that I hadn't thought of before accepting this challenge I have two full sets of peripherals monitor keyboard mouse and speakers upstairs and in the basement so that I can sit and game with my kids when they don't have a friend over who's using that station or whatever else I have no idea how Arc is going to handle that cloning to two 4K 120hz displays should be fine sure should I mean it should have had a great price to Performance ratio if intel was to be believed I'm going to tape all these together so that I don't lose track of which ones go into my PC because I'm a smart boy like that and Alex I think you're ready to start pulling uh okay does this just like Fallout or does it no no it'll stop they're Stoppers okay yeah you should be good do you have it yeah I got another Edge okay okay all right it's a little heavy and end oh goodbye there's a story behind that screw my PC is kind of a ship of Theseus it has no clear beginning and end it's kind of fun for me to keep little bits and Bobs from previous iterations of the machine and these thumb screws from my antec p160w case are the oldest pieces of this current iteration however I lost one of them but then I finally found it when we moved so I put it somewhere safe with the intention of restoring it to its rightful place I'm regretting saying that I'd upgrade this one yeah yeah you screwed up yeah I uh doesn't seem too difficult but it seems like a whole lot of potentially filling your boss's computer with water yeah hey do you like my cooling fan for my Nick oh that is nice yeah yeah I just kind of screwed a thing into like kind of a thing and it's like kind of on there I can't believe I'm replacing a 30 90 with an arc to be clear we are not Hardline water cooling this thing and if we did I mean it took me forever to get around to changing it out does anyone even have blocks for this I don't think so the plan is just to bypass the existing card take it out tubes and all and then flunk it back in when we're done what do you have here exactly my bypass idea cool all right yeah sure I've actually done this before so don't freak out it's a werewolf Thing Once I bite them they start dropping things here's what we're gonna do gravity works right gravity is great so theoretically it's the bucket is under the computer the water cannot reach the computer so we'll go car oil change yeah easy uh yeah either you know what let's do both okay here we go and one two three oh hey come on okay uh this one man oh there we go a bit of a gusher oh I was gonna yeah not that way oh okay flip it this way it should be fine can I help you oh he's got this he's got this uh-oh what we also have to get these off I got those or like oh or like a towel or something no I got it I got it I got it yes for those of you who are just tuning in the computer is vertical because the loop is full of water but we need to remove a water cooled GPU from it and we don't want the water to fall all over everything whoa the RGB cable see you later buddy you've been good to me some of you probably think that we're Hamming this up a little bit and that's fair you know we're making a video here but if you feel that way you probably didn't watch the video where we tried like a couple dozen games on Ark and had problems almost across the board at least you have a buddy though yeah it's very nice that Luke is doing this with you yeah misery does love company Brandon just asked if we could run it at like 720 but the problem is that the frame times are the biggest issue and there seems to be Hardware problems where whatever you're getting at 1080p is probably what you're getting at 720p because it doesn't necessarily scale it's like a problem with the scheduler and that's why you can't get more fps's what are the odds Alex that since the last time we looked at it it's gotten way better and I'm gonna have no trouble this month crap are these both eight pins too oh balls I've gone Arc and you know what they say once you go Ark you've gone Arc two Intel's credit if you don't have an exotic cooling solution to work around they've done a great job of making Arc a drop in replacement for pretty much any system with a discrete GPU compared to the RTX 3080 you can see it's shorter the same height and it uses standard eight plus six pin power connectors which means I can actually take out nvidia's single generation only 12 pin power adapter and go ahead and throw this blade I think we have a problem uh-oh what's these are eight pins oh these are not six plus twos no the good news is wherever those cables are could be where these cables are that at the office I don't know no that's the bad news I don't know where either of them are I thought we might have another sacrificial six pin we don't on that doorstop power supply no dice but there's other good news I have an ATX pin removal tool here the plan for this one is pretty straightforward in my emergency Tech Supplies bag I found an old Molex to six pin adapter what we're going to do is we're going to pull these pins out of here and put them in here it's going to take a little bit of time but I happen to have an old ATX removal tool which is good for pcie and theoretically they should all be about that quick yeah this is a really good quality one I got it from Charles from murder box not what I was expecting to be difficult we're already done the part that was supposed to be hard PCI Express EPs and 24 pin connectors all have the same little square pins in them and what you'll find is that they go into here and then there's two little flanges on the edges that hold them into place so I have a pin removal tool from way back in the day when modding your power supply was a thing that people did it goes down into the connector and basically pushes those sponges down so you can extract the pin without damaging either the connector or the PIN what we're going to do then is we're going to take our connectors here extract all the pins we need put them into our sacrificial connector and we take our eight pin and turn it into a six pin pcie because the other two pins are just extra grounds anyway okay so you have these all numbered in a way that makes sense to you and I can go ahead and remove them yep I will only remove the six that you need that way we can just leave this connector in here and it could be reassembled in the future no no that's a good thing you're clear you officially have something to do I'm gonna go look for another six pin in the meantime but this card can go in this system can fire up Wicked there oh there was one other thing I wanted to do while we were at it my multi-controller USB card here appears to have died so I would like to replace it the sonnet one is even better this thing is super cool it's got eight USBC ports on it oh damn and four controllers is that sick or what look that's an m.2 that's PCA by four so it's a by 16 card that has a buy four little Riser here for half of the things so uh what that means is you can do I think it's full 10 gigabit per second USB 3 times four on this card so wait how expensive is one of those oh it's very expensive the reason that you might want multiple USB controllers is that for VR applications sometimes whether it's with cameras or sensors having too many of them plugged into a single controller can cause problems so I was using this old one from sonnet but it's it's having some issues now because USB is shared right which means that if you want to get the full bandwidth or if you want to have no interference from other USB devices that are connected they actually do need their own controller any luck this just goes in connect the power and it turns on or it goes boom those are the two options right now here we go I'm gonna feel like such an idiot when I figure out where my cables are that's the thing about being in a new place is everything's perfectly organized which means there's no hope when you don't immediately find something like that thumb screw fortunately over the years I've gotten pretty good with this tool I'm proud to be Linus when we run over time people start to get pretty snarky since I'm doing both sides on this one I'm not going to bother labeling anything all right this one's all good to go back in really yeah okay we got this wait why am I excited surgery number two complete it's not like Yvonne needs a six pin for her computer she's not getting downgraded okay this one's done too you know how you went from type A to type c no that's fine I'll be back hi C cables in the context of how much VR costs overall with the full body tracking setup it's a lot of money but sunk cost fallacy baby let's go if this is what it takes to reduce the Jitter on my limbs then yeah you'll be having dinner other places now yeah super cool case though it's the Cerberus from sliger to my knowledge it is still the smallest matx case here we go it's Arc time how exciting I'm excited cool that's fine [Music] um oh no that is not fine oh crap that is extra not fine that is inside the computer there's a cable in a fan [Music] where is it oh come on are you in there yep right ah yes there's your problem uh okay so is that seems fine cook yay okay and no extracting it from the cabinet black brilliant now I just need to put more water in this Linus what what you have most acceleration on this is the first time a mouse has been connected to this computer still no no it doesn't matter no no no I won't take it wait do you have over scan on as well what overscan well yeah but you just put a new GPU in no no I do not have overscan I blame Intel well he does that I'm going to properly set up this when you're swapping between different GPU vendors it's really important to go and do display driver uninstaller or ddu that gets rid of the old stuff so in this case we ran it on Nvidia now it restarts and we should be able to put on the Intel drivers now and it all works out fine you should do it in safe mode I never have but you should one fun thing about Intel Arc is that they have like a 1.3 gigabyte download for their drivers so that's very big and videos are like 500 megabytes now and that's like stupid large one thing that's super important about Intel Arc and it also just reminded me of it is that we need to enable resizable bar if you don't you have a really bad time on Arc how to enable a resizable bar oh you have to have CSM enabled Advanced PCI configuration is there even PCI configuration there no uh oh oh no you can't use CSM with resizable bar and this is an ancient boot drive that I just kept carrying forward with me it's not a UEFI boot Drive to reformat my little computer for this oh we should bios update first maybe it'll just work I don't think so I don't know if you have to disable CSN I am so unhappy right now and I don't even know if the other machine is working yet oh look at that it just is well that's good it's funny this video started out as will upgrading to Arc be a challenge and ended up just being hey upgrading your computer can be sort of a pain in the butt none of the things I was expecting to be a problem like the dual monitor setup have been a problem things I wasn't expecting to be a problem like oh I gotta find my power supply cables and oh does my motherboard support this new thing how totally been a problem okay it looks like resizable bar is already enabled on this system so we shouldn't have any issues another issue I hadn't foreseen is I'm in the middle of working on my review of the gcloud which I have no idea if Intel's encoders will work well for a network gaming device but I guess I'm gonna find out yeah yeah I see you got resizable bar enabled yeah so that works but well I had to disable CSM okay and now it doesn't boot well I don't know I don't think it's going to boot I think it's going to boot into my boot Drive probably oh you put a boot Drive in there well I have a boot drive on my keys your USB IC so that doesn't help me well it helps you if we need to reinstall Windows oh no I don't want that right now all my like stupid beat saber mods and everything are all set up exactly how I like it and like it's pain in the butt to like back up a custom songs and like it's obvious all solvable I just like I could find a directory and then I gotta copy everything over do you want to explain to the people what having to disable CSM does why that's a problem sure disabling CSM is a problem on this system because I originally installed Windows on an older motherboard using an MBR partition well newer motherboards UEFI motherboards want a GPT partition you can convert an MBR to a GPT partition but the process is a bit of a pain in the butt um and you can lose data I found a thread though should we do that first before we try for our fresh windows so we enabled CSM and it should boot and then there's a link here how to convert Legacy BIOS to UEFI in Windows there's a tool whoa whoa whoa apparently this has gotten easier there's a tool called mbr2gpt introduced in Windows 10 that lets you convert Legacy files to ue5 with just two commands what make Tech easier.com shout out apparently this tool is in the advanced startup screen so we need to restart while holding shift okay let's see here mbr2 GPT validate meanwhile upstairs it's been 20 minutes and these drivers are still installing that's a good sign even ignoring my missing cables we're off to a pretty bad start here we've got the one machine that has an older install of Windows that's not compatible with resizable bar which is going to hurt performance even more and then a second machine that is completely compatible and just is crapping the bed just trying to install the driver you think it worked Maybe okay about to find out enabled enabled if this boots that would be incredible because it means we all get to go home I mean I'm home but I get to enjoy my home oh you might have done it that's pretty good yeah that's pretty good what we're seeing right there we like this oh come on bad magic come on get it together uh all the fans quieted down hold on hold on maybe it's just a little confused and it's going to the VR headset I've seen that before it's here we did it holy crap we're in we hacked the Mainframe uh now I just got to put that display port back in come on baby oh yes good good oh uh it was there briefly that TV just turned off I think so yeah oh there we go we did it hey okay let's go this is not good at all the only reference I can find to someone trying to run an arc GPU in a valve index is asking if anyone else is having problems because they can't get it to launch yeah I had a little bit of searching and the only thing I could find was someone that tried to use a rift s with an a750 and could not they would just get a display board and unknown USB device error an OVR for a month oh I feel like this can only go uphill from here but maybe Intel find a way to prove me wrong this sucks unlike our sponsor uh no Luke and I are still gonna game tonight this is extremely choppy for me whoa my FPS is at uh nine right now what the heck this is not good my GPU encoding just outright crashed so I'm back with CPU encoding I mean it like Works um it seems to be kind of cut off though vessi Vesti Footwear is known for being lightweight easy to pack and comfortable and vessey boasts that with their dimetex technology their shoes are even waterproof simplifying your morning by allowing you to just ignore the uncertainty of weather patterns will it be warm cool hot dry doesn't matter to you because your feet will be comfortable and putting them on and taking them off is easy their shoes are made from cruelty free products right down to the glue and they're currently giving away 100 free pairs of socks to the first people to use code socks Linus Tech tips at the link down below so check out their early Black Friday sale at bessie.com Linus Tech tips I am
extremely pissed off right now on the plus side you won't have to get a new rug from throwing up on it playing VR cool thank you that's really helpful Alex well good night good night have a fun stream yeah I will
2022-11-29 13:36