Transcription
Okay, since there's not a whole lot of exciting things to talk about, I think I'm going to do a roundup of software today. And so many people now are trying to make older systems last longer because it's just becoming such an expensive hobby now to get into to computer gaming or PC in general or even to try to update your system. And over the years, we've done a lot of tutorials covering some of the best utilities that are free that just help you take better control of your system. So today, I'm kind of giving you a super cut of all of those utilities. Well, actually like our top five plus an honorable mention that I feel every system should have whether you think you're going to need it or not because chances are it'll be useful for you at some point. And the best part is they are all absolutely free forever. They're not like trial periods or any of that. [snorts] You download it once and you get to keep it.
Okay, so the first one that we think even if you install nothing else on this list, install Revo uninstaller. Such sounds like such an oxymoron in the name. The best part about Revo uninstaller is it gets all the traces of the programs that the uninstallers leave behind. Developers never really put a whole lot of effort into removing their off your system. They just put all their effort into embedding it in every place, you know, all levels of the registry and all of these profiles left everywhere in your system. And over the over the years and years of using your system, you can have just tons of these files and traces not only taking up potential space, but also just cluttering the registry. If you ever booted up Windows and you're getting some random error popping up and you're like, I don't even have this program installed anymore. Why am I getting this blah blah blah could not be accessed? yada yada. Like you get some of the weirdest stuff because uninstallers just never ever clean out all of the files that are left behind.
So I'm going to show you an example right now. So, this is Revo Uninstaller right here. It will automatically show you everything that's installed on your system. It'll show you when it was installed. It'll show you what company it's from, even the website where it's from, and including Windows apps. Now, this is what makes Revo an uninstaller, in my opinion, just that important is the fact that you can use it to get rid of not only bloatware that may have come, say if you're on your laptop or you've got a pre-built system. We know that these brands get subsidies and kickbacks from brand like Norton. You download MSI Afterburner and you get Norton 360 for Gamer with it. And it's like, why the hell would you want that? Well, that's because MSI After Burner is making money through Norton because Norton's bundling it with them and paying [music] them a kickback for that. So, you can start to remove a lot of the Windows bloatware that's built into it, too. So, let's just use this as an example here. I'm going to I'm going to uninstall what's something I can get rid of here? Sticky notes. I never use sticky notes. Now, here's the down part or the downside is a lot of the updates will put this back. It'll be like, "Oh, this isn't installed on your system. We should reinstall it. That was probably a mistake, not by design. Anyway, you can uh right click on sticky notes and click uninstall. Now, it says restore from back or make a restore point. You can do that if you want to. We never do around here. Um, hit continue after unchecking that. What it will do first is if you're if you're uninstalling an actual program, and I'll demonstrate this in a second. And by the way, I need to also point this out. every single one of these video these these programs we're about to talk about. We've done a fulllength full deep dive into how to use those softwares. So, you'll find links to each one of those videos in the description of this one. So, if there's one you want to know more about, um then just click on that link and you'll find a whole video about it, not just this quick highle demonstration I'm showing you. But anyway, because I'm uninstalling a Windows um function, if you will, a built-in Windows app, you can see right here, it's already left all of these locations and these files uh for, you know, remnants, if you will, of of what's left over of that piece of software or that app. So, you can collect, you can click select all, and then click delete. Are you sure? Say yes. And that's it for that one.
If we were doing software, let me go over here to the uninstaller, which is software. Let's say we want to uninstall. Let me see. I'm going to uninstall fan control. I haven't been using that in quite a while on this system. Click uninstall. The first thing it's going to do is try to use whatever built-in uninstaller that the app has already. So, it's not going to go in and just nuke the files. It wants the uninstaller to to take care of itself and then it will basically sweep what's left behind. So, fan control uninstall is saying, "Are you sure you want to completely remove fan control?" Say yes. Fan control was successfully removed from your computer. Now, it's an indie app. Let's see whether or not they've actually removed everything, shall we? So, we're [music] going to click advanced scan. Oh, we got all kinds of stuff left behind. So, we're going to select all. Click delete. Say yes. And there's even more leftover files and folders found after we got out of the registry. Click click select all. Delete. Say yes. Now, it is fully gone. Fun fact, there has only been one company that I have ever uninstalled using Revo uninstaller or and then had it Revo uninstaller tell me nothing was left behind and that was EVGA's own apps. More rip for the for the goat, if you will. Anyway, what I just showed you is pretty much all you need to know for all of the software. If there's nothing left behind, it'll tell you. So, Revo Uninstaller is an absolute must as [music] far as I'm concerned. Now, there is a pay version that does even more things. I don't think it's necessary. [music] So, the uninstaller is all you need for the apps and then even to go a step further and re to remove some of the built-in Windows apps. Uh anyway, okay, moving on.
Let's talk about monitoring of your system. More often than not, I get people that will message me and say, "Jay, I think my system's overheating, but I'm not entirely sure." Having just any sort of sensor monitoring utility is very important. And the most powerful one out there, which has amazing logging capabilities as well that allows you to to export those logs into a CSV and then chart and graph this stuff so you can see it over time if you want, is hardware info 64. Hardware Info 64 is a free utility that will build or that will basically tap into [music] every sensor in your system and not just like temperature sensors, but I mean it will actually show you what the upstream and downstream is of your network card. It'll show you the smart um statuses of your drives. It'll show you all of the sensors when obviously when it comes to temperatures from your drives, from your graphics card, your CPU, your CCDs if you're running AMD. I mean, everything is visible to it.
Now, there's a couple of different ways you can use this. We tend to run sensors only here because that's all we need. But if you want to go a step further, they have full mode. And if you hit start on that, it's not going to just show you the sensors like we have right here because I'm running this test. This is one of the cards I repaired. And I've been doing lots of constant tests to make sure it's truly good to go. And I've got it running just sensors mode on the on this machine. But over here, you can see this has more of a guey builtin with it that shows you some visual aspects to it as well. So you can see over here, this is the CPU active clocks. So, let's say if you were running an AMD system and you wanted to check for core parking or something like that, like is my X3D CPU or my core parking CPU parking cores like it's supposed to, you could see that actively right here. You can see the ratios for whatever the CPU's uh multiplier ratio is. You can see like this is obviously a 14900K system. We can see the stepping. We can see the code name. We can see everything we want to know about this system. We can see our memory timings, our drive speeds. This is one of the ways you can verify whether or not maybe you're bifurcating a drive down to a slower speed or a GPU down to a slower speed. It shows you all of this right here.
Now, we, like I said, tend to run sensors only on this, which for me shows me just about everything that I need. And on sensors only, it can be a little overwhelming at first. So, what you're going to see here on the left is what the current value is, the minimum value, the maximum value, and the average. So maximum is probably going to be the one you care about the most. That's if you're running a long test like this. Like I can see that my Astral over here's max temperature that the GPU ever reached was 70.4. The RAM hit 76. It's currently at 64.6 on the core and 70.0 on the RAM cuz I I sped up the fans a little bit. I wanted to know if I added a few more percent of fan curve, what was the effect? And I can see the temps have trended downward. So you can see all that over here. Same thing with voltages and such. Um, but it can be very overwhelming because there's a lot of sensors and things that may not even be all that important to you. So, let's say there's something you didn't want to see. Let's say I don't care about my network speed right here, right? Like, I just don't care about any of that. So, you can shiftclick and grab a bunch of stuff at once. Let's just say, you know, I'm not going to take Windows uh way errors out of there because it's nice to know if you're starting if your system is slightly unstable, you might get some corrected errors that will show there on a on an error counter, but it won't blue screen your system. them. So, it's just a nice thing to see. So, but I'm going to grab all the network stuff cuz I just don't care about any of that. Shiftclick, right click, and hide, and then it will be gone. And the reason why I do this is if I'm doing logging, every single one of these is going to be a column. Like, you get into the triple letters worth of columns. That is a lot of columns. And it's going to automatically do um its polling rate at 2,000 milliseconds or 2 seconds. If we hit the gear down here, you can change this to 1,000 milliseconds or every 1 second. Basically, take a picture, add it to the CSV, and by picture, I mean just all of these values are going to be just shoved into the CSV every second and separated by a comma. Hit set. If you don't hit set, it doesn't save that number. And then hit okay. And now you can see we're updating even faster. But, uh, I don't want to have a bunch of clutter in there. So, you can just shiftclick and remove all the stuff that like animation error average. I I don't know what that means. Apparently, we have 16,521.12 milliseconds worth of animation error. I don't know what that is. Not useful to me. So, anyway, this is a very important utility when it comes to just keeping an eye on your system. If you know how to use Excel or Google Sheets, you can record on this and you can spit that out. And this is how we get a lot of our charts and stuff. And it's just allows you to take these numbers and turn them into a visual reference. Um, watch the full guide on this if you want to know how to do that. I'm not going to show you that today, but that's that's a pretty important one in my opinion to have this on your system cuz you'll never wonder again whether or not you're overheating or what are my voltages running at? Like currently my vid is at 1.443. It dropped to 1.3 1.43. It's Intel.
Now, let's say you want to talk about monitoring or modifying or adjusting your graphics card. The specific utility that we use for that, which is still the goat as far as I'm concerned, even though all the GPU manufacturers have their own built-in utilities, is MSI Afterburner. Fortunately, there's been an update. It's on 4.6.6 as of making this video. That's that came out in October of 2025. Prior to that, it had been more than almost three years since we had seen a full version uh update because of the whole Russia Ukraine thing and the developer actually being in Russia because of the um embargo and all that stuff. He couldn't MSI couldn't pay him, etc., etc. It was a very sucky thing, but it's all back to apparently it's been worked out now where there's been an update. Now, whether or not it's by the same developer, I don't know. All I know is it's on 4.6.6 six and there's been some changes to it that I've been asking for and wanting for a long time, which is nice to see.
So, MSI After Burner will allow you to not only monitor your graphics card, but it will show you other things in your system. If you double click on the graph, it'll pop it out and then you can actually expand this if you want. So, you can see it's monitoring GPU 1 and 2. GPU 1 in this system is the 4090 that's on here. And then GPU 2 is the UHD 770, which is the iGPU built into the 14900 K. Um, but you don't have to monitor all that. You can rightclick this and then you can say just go properties and then in this drop down right here, wherever there's a check mark on the left, that's what's going to be shown in the graph. So, as you can see, clearly there is a lot more stuff being graphed that will even fit on the screen. So, obviously, we don't need all that. Um, this is a nice way though outside of hardware info. Although, in hardware info, you can do this as well. In fact, let me go back real quick. I apologize. This this is important, too, because MSI has a nice graphing feature, but so does hardware info 64 that doesn't require you to have to spit it out into Excel. Let's just say you want to look at it, and you don't need to present it later. You just want to know over time. If you were to say, okay, I want to graph my GPU core temperature right now. If you doubleclick this, it pops it out into a graph right there. And then you can expand this and you could just look over time. Like you could leave a firm mark or something running like this and you can see what your temperature is doing over time. So I just wanted to point that out. I forgot to mention that any of these values if you double click them will pop it out into a graph. And you can do more than one at a time. They just keep stacking. So there you go.
But back to MSI After Burner. Uh if you are running after burner and you don't want to graph like vid usage, bus usage and all that stuff, just remove the check mark from the left. That's it. Uh after burner is also what we use to get those numbers that show up on the screen. And you guys have asked us like when I'm seeing when I'm doing a live demo and it shows the CPU usage and GPU usage, GPU temperature, uh frames per second and all that. That's all MSI Afterburner also using the RTSS server which is is a down is downloaded with MSI After Burner. and MSI After Burner works in conjunction with. So if you want to show that, click the gear, scroll over to oncreen display and then right now nothing is selected. So you see how the more button right here, which is what we'd want to click, is actually grayed out. That's because we haven't told Afterburner to monitor anything yet. So you see right here, let's say we want to take a look at GPU1 temperature. You have to check on show an onscreen display. So as soon as I check that, it shows right there. Hit apply. Now, if we go back to on screen display, the more button shows up. This brings up the RTSS uh control panel and then we can change the size of our on screen and all of that. I like to set my application detection to high. Some games simply won't hook though. It has to hook into the API to be able to get that information. And some games, anti-che actually won't allow that to happen. So, just know if you're having a hard time getting games to show the live FPS and such, that might be by design. the game might be intentionally blocking hooking of the API because a lot of cheats take place at an API level as well. So that's one of the reasons why RTSS doesn't work in some titles.
After burner is not just a monitoring tool, it's also an overclocking and an undervolting tool. So for instance, if we wanted to let's say undervolt or maybe reduce the power limit to a 5090, 5080, 4090, whatever, you can just go to the power limit slider here. It's always going to be 100% by default, but you can reduce that. Let's say we only want to allow 90% power. And a lot of the times, you'll find that even at 90% power, you can still get full clocks out of your high-end graphics cards without all the heat to go along with it. But more importantly, you can also adjust your fan curves and your fan profiles. GPU fan profiles are going to be subject to whatever the designer of the cooler and the manufacturer felt is the happy medium between performance and acoustics. And we all know that the fans can get pretty loud on modern GPUs. But if you're like me, I personally always lean onto the side of performance over acoustic. So, I'm okay with having my fans be very loud and blast because I'm a loud gamer. I either have headphones on or a very loud sound system going. I don't care if the the fans are making noise. I'd much rather have my graphics card just run as cool as possible for peace of mind. And the idea that it's making my graphics card last longer, although that's kind of a placebo effect, doesn't really affect the lifespan of your system. They are rated to last their full life expectancy at max temperatures. But that's a whole another debate about modern electronics and whether or not that's true or not. But if you want to make your fan, see, right now they're clearly zero RPM fans. You can see right now the fan percent is at zero. If I click enable userdefined or defined software, this is now the fan curve that's userdefined. So you can see it stays at zero RPM all the way to 50° and then at 50° it'll jump on at 50%. I don't think that's like necessary to let it sit there idling like that. So what I would do is I would probably just pull this up to like 30% and then I would leave a bit of a slope on there rather than having it be an abrupt turn on of the fans. So, if you just click on the line, you can add as many points as you want to make that as soft and smooth of a line as you want. But now, if I hit apply, the fans are now turning and they just turned on at 52%. That's because it was at 52C. So, you see how like 0 dB is nice because it means less dust. It means less noise, but it also means your graphics card is sitting there being passively cooled. Now, you can get away with zero dB in certain cases. This is an open air chassis, so clearly it was getting no air flow. But if you're in a standard uh horizontal orientation and you have an updraft PC with fans blowing up from the bottom, you'd be surprised how much those bottom fans can keep that graphics card cool without the fans ever having to turn on. So obviously your mileage is going to vary depending on what your circumstances are. But it's already dropped down 11° since I turned it on. Still can't hear them. And uh that's that's a nice thing that you can come in here and and take advantage of custom fan curves and monitoring at the same time.
Now, let's say you don't want to have Afterburner running all the time because if I was to shut down Afterburner now and hit the X, the fans immediately turn off. You can't really see them on camera now, but the fans turn off because they're only active while MSI After Burner is running. Unless you open this back up. As soon as I open it back up, the fans will start turning again. See, they went from zero back up to 43. If I hit the save button and I save it to a profile and I click this button that says startup, it will apply this to the driver at startup. Even if if MSI After Burner isn't running. Now, here's the downside. If you accidentally say, I want to do a 1,000 megahertz overclock, the system will immediately hang. And what's going to happen is if you save that to that profile and it's set to start that profile on Windows startup, your driver will load. MSI Afterburner will load that profile and you will go into a crash loop. And the only way to get yourself out of that is to boot into safe mode and go into Afterburner and fix your profile. Just want to put that out there. Ask me how I know. There have been plenty of times I've accidentally done that and then I get myself into the into the crash loop of hell because I can't get it to stop loading unless you go into safe mode.
One last mention, you'll probably notice if you downloaded it for the first time right now, it does not look like mine. That's because the in my opinion the new interface is terrible. It I'm not even sure where it's at to be honest. Is it Oh, see look at that's terrible. That's just that's so ugly. Look at this. Anyway, if you just go all the way to the right to user interface and you click the drop down here in the middle, these are all the different designs, right? This is the one it looks like actually when you first load it. Now, this is okay, but I prefer the old school one. My brain just [music] knows that layout and it makes sense to me even though this is all exactly the same thing.
Let's also do some honorable mentions here on how you might use MSA After Burner. As you can see right here on this system, I have Firmark that's running. It's basically nothing but a fuzzy donut. You'd be surprised how hard rendering all those fibers of hair while moving is on a GPU. So if you was if you were to run firmark while having after burner open or in this instance here actually after burner is open over here. Let me show you if you don't believe me. There it is. So having afterburner open I can change my fan profile change the overclock profile if I want and see how the card is reacting to it while hardware info 64 is open and logging. Um you don't need to go that far with it though. You can literally just have uh you know firm or yeah firm mark running over here. Choose your resolution and then say run test. Running the test will be an infinite loop like that. If you do a benchmark then it will spit out a score obviously. Um but that's one way you can use after burner in validating like whether or not your GPU maybe needs a repaste if it's old. If you find if it's overheating and throttling by just using utilities like that. And then of course, Heaven is an absolute must for anyone that just wants to give Steve the middle finger.
Now, while we're on the subject of graphics cards, AMD and Nvidia, just like every other developer, wants to make the installation process as fast as possible. And one of the ways that they do that is by reusing components of previous driver installs when installing a new driver. if the version of it hasn't changed. Not everything in the driver is new. For instance, your driver for the most part just contains profiles that tells your graphics card not only how to communicate with the API and Windows and and theuler and all that such, but it also tells the the graphics card what game it's running and what settings to apply. and not just settings by like you know anti-aliasing and all that sort of stuff but just knowing how the card should behave with that title and that engine etc. That's why every time there's a new title that comes out there's always a new uh driver from either Nvidia or AMD. That way you can get the most efficient and best crashfree usually experience. Although that hasn't been the case in the last several years. AI written drivers. Need [clears throat] I say more? Anyway, but I digress. What I was trying to say was there's the drivers are getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger approaching a gigabyte at this point but to make the installation faster is it will kind of identify like okay all of these files are being untouched leave those files and let's just overwrite the new ones that we need to overwrite. If you do that enough times or you start getting enough crashing or potential corruption in the driver profile even if you install a new driver and it hangs on to those old files that are having problems the problem can persist. The best way to make sure that you are getting brand new fresh files every time is to use a program called DDU or display driver uninstaller.
Now display driver uninstaller will go in kind of like Revo uninstaller does but at a driver level and make sure every single instance of that driver and every single file left behind is completely swept away. There's a couple things you need to know here. First of all, one, it's best to do it without an internet connection. disconnect from your wireless or turn off the wireless adapter or unplug your network adapter or your network uh cable to make sure that Windows doesn't go in and automatically fetch a driver from the internet. Now, the Windows drivers that are fetched are usually they could be up to a dozen drivers behind. Okay, which is only going to mean now that you potentially have the same problem now of of if you're driving if you're installing a driver on top of an old driver. It's just what's the point of DDUing if you're going to do that anyway? Even if you click perform clean install in the driver, it still does not truly perform a fully clean install. So, DDU is the only way to truly do that. Now, DDU also works best in um safe mode. Safe mode is is where it can go because if you disconnect the driver while you're in a standard Windows environment, weird things can potentially happen. So, DDU has detected that you were not in safe mode. For a better cleanup without issues, it's recommended that you reboot into safe mode. Now, you don't have to. It's just saying it's recommended. I we always go to safe mode around here, but obviously because we're screen capping in OBS, we can't do that in safe mode and get the restart and stuff. So, anyway, I'm going to say okay.
Now, here's the thing. By default, it doesn't bring up the boot into safe mode menu. To do that, you have to click options. And then you can see all the way down here in the bottom at advanced options, there's enable safe mode dialogue. not recommended until you've tested safe mode manually. That's just making sure your system can go into safe mode without a problem. I've yet to come across a system that will run in normal mode but not safe mode, but they put it there for a reason. They're the developer and not me. Also, you would want to check prevent downloads of drivers. Windows update and Windows search for drivers for device. So, as I said, if you don't want to disconnect the internet from your system, so that'll stop Windows from going and fetching the drivers for the graphics card when it sees like, hey, this is a basic VGA device, but I'm sure we have a driver for it. Let's go find it. Now, keep in mind it will also turn off automatic driver install for all devices. Whether you install a new network card, if you install a new, I don't know, PCIe device or PCI device, whatever, it'll stop all autofetching for that. So, my recommendation would be turn this on while you're doing DDU and then getting a new driver in and then when you're done, go back into the menu and uncheck that. That way, Windows can automatically install drivers as needed for new devices when you plug in USBs and all that sort of stuff. So, if you leave this checked and you start noticing you plug something into your system and then your keyboard's not working right or whatever cuz it's not going to go and fetch the latest USB driver for whatever peripheral you plug in or whatever. It's probably this setting. But with that said, here's what we're going to do now.
So, I'm not going to actually uninstall my driver. I can't because of OBS, but I'll show you how to do it. If you click select drive device type, you can see we can do this with audio and GPU. We're going to click GPU. This is an Nvidia graphics card. If it was an AMD card, you'd click AMD. If it was Intel, you'd click Intel. If you just wanted to wipe everything because it could potentially have a bunch of these drivers installed. If you've ever had AMD in the past and then you switched, we're on an Intel system. So, obviously, it's going to have an Intel video driver because of the iGPU, the 770 that's in there. You could say all GPUs if you want, but in this instance, we would just be doing this with Nvidia. And then we would do clean and restart. So, basically what it does, as soon as you hit clean, it's going to disable the driver. Your screen will probably turn off for a second and come back on. Your FPS will be crap. You'll see a whole bunch of stuff happening down here in the log. And then when it's done, it will automatically initiate a restart of your system. Once you've done the restart, that is when you'll install the new driver. Now, ideally, you would have already gone online and downloaded the new driver, whether it be from AMD's website or Nvidia's website. Then you would just install that driver as normal. And what I do is I never say express. I still always hit like advanced and then clean install and all that. It's just it's I'm a creature of habit and I do it no matter what. And then once you're done, that is when you can rule out driver issues or any weirdness of your driver potentially causing any of your GPU stuff that's initiated this process anyway if you still have problems that persist beyond that. The problem is more than likely not your display driver, but this is the only way to do it and have it be perfectly clean.
All right, the last one here is definitely an advanced tool. This is Win Arrow Tweaker. We do have a long video on this where we barely scratched the surface. But basically, Win Arrow tweaker is an advanced tool that I'm going to put hopefully Phil editing Phil will put a bunch of flashing disclaimers on the screen. You can absolutely bork the crap out of your system by using this. Win Arrow Tweaker is nothing more than a guey that gives you basically all the knobs and switches that are built into Windows at your disposal, including ones you should not be touching. Now, the only reason I personally ever use Win Arrow Tweaker, and I know Phil has used this for a lot of other things, is to disable Windows updates. For me, especially when it comes to like our test rigs and stuff, we need them to be as locked down and unchanged as possible. We want full control over when those systems do their updates. Therefore, disabling Windows update and wind arrow tweaker is the only way to truly turn off updates. I cannot tell you how many people during the whole s Windows updates uh causing SSD issues, how many people were telling me I went in and told window and paused Windows updates for the 5 weeks or whatever it allowed me to do and I came home the next day and it still did the update without me telling it to because Windows will still decide regardless of what you said what you do and don't want. It will decide for you. we will tell you what you need regardless of what you select is kind of how Microsoft works, right? So, by disabling Windows updates here and then clicking disable Windows updates and notifications, that's it. We've now enabled like we've now toggled that. But if you want to use it for more things than just Windows updates, I mean, you can change like the Windows border type, the padding, and all this stuff. So, let's say you gone in here and started messing with things and now everything just kind of looks weird. If you go over here to actions and click reset all tweaks, it will show you everything you've done and then you can individually say, "No, no, I want to keep that one and undo the rest." So, you can quickly revert and undo your your tweaks. But this this allows you to go in here and just in one spot have full control over all of your all of the Windows functions, all of them. I mean, literally every single one of them, even developer tools. But anyway, it's all here. We have a full video on this. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it here. We've already got a long video going for this guy here, but this is just definitely more advanced. Win Arero Tweaker is a very nice one. It's very powerful. It's also very capable of breaking your system. So, use with caution and it's I would say it's very important to also save your tweaks because Windows has a habit of during updates if you've left them on going and reverting things that you've made the way you want them because again, Microsoft wants it to be the way they want it. So, win arrows weaker is about one of the only ways you can take control of that back.
All right, honorable mention time. Those are our five top uh I just said five. These are our five top I haven't been to Hawaii in a while. I don't know why I'm doing this. Anyway, >> three glasses. >> Yeah, I'll take three glasses, please. Three glasses. Anyway, now my brain is officially fried. Uh those are the five absolute mustaves as far as we're concerned. Revo uninstaller, hardware info 64, MSI Afterburner, DDU, and Win Arero tweaker.
But back to GPU stuff. Tech PowerUp GPUZ is a very nice utility to have. It will tell you even more information about your graphics card. For instance, let's say you wanted to start playing around with custom BIOS. You need to kind of know what BIOS you currently have, right? If you want to do it safest, you're going to want to make sure that the BIOS that you're currently using is all the same except for maybe the last two numbers or the the hexadimals on the back end of the the BIOS version. And so for instance right here, this BIOS version is 95.02.3C.0.f4. So if we find a driver that was or not driver but a vios that was 95.02.3C. CEO or E0 whatever then you know it's going to more than likely work just fine on that card. You would probably have to do an ND flash like 6 override because of the sub ID mismatch. But I digress. That's getting into a little bit more advanced stuff. You can see here right what are you currently running at uh PCI 4? at 16. No, we're not. We're running at 4x8, but that's because we have full drives utilized on this board for when we did the bifurcation video. We never took them off, so we're bifrocating that down. But you wouldn't know that. Maybe in hardware info 64 if you went digging for it inside of the full control panel. But here, it's like right here in your face. But this is also the way that we that reviewers figured out that there were missing rocks from the 5090s. Otherwise, how would you how would you have known? It's just people are going to look at this and go, "Wait a minute. I I forget what the number was, but why is there only 176 rocks, not 192 or whatever it was supposed to be? And that's how the rocks issues was figured out in the beginning. Um, but the cool thing here is you can also see, for instance, the where is it? You can also see what your boost clocks and more importantly whether or not resizable bar is enabled in your system. So, honorable mention GPUZ is something everyone should have. It's it's free. It allows you to save your BIOS and all that [music] stuff, too. Don't think we have a video on that one, but it's pretty self-explanatory. Go and look around. It even has a sensors tab where you can see all the sensors on your graphics card um right here in real time as well. And then it will even tell you, you know, why your graphics card might be throttling, whether it's voltage related, uh power related, or temperature related or just you hit your max clocks that are in that P [music] BIOS.
All right, guys. There we go. Those are our top five. What's yours? Are you using these? And do you think there's a better alternative? If so, put it down in the comments below so that you can let other people figure it out and as a community we can take control of our systems again before they take control of us in the future.