0:00

Okay, Adam, your family is from

0:02

places adjacent to where my family's from. And I

0:04

learned about something new when

0:06

I was on the phone with people over the holiday this

0:09

winter that I did not know existed. Are

0:12

you familiar with Bucky's? I

0:15

actually had my first Bucky's experience this

0:18

Christmas and wow, that's

0:20

all I gotta say. Have you been there

0:23

physically yourself? No, no, my

0:25

sister described it to me on the phone. I was

0:27

like, this doesn't seem like a real thing. I think

0:29

she's jerking me around. I kinda wanna hear how your

0:31

sister describes it because I've been debating

0:33

internally how I would describe it. Well,

0:36

so she said it was like a

0:38

convenience store with a bunch of food

0:40

and 100 gas pumps. And

0:44

also, and like basically, we went

0:46

through this whole long conversation process and I got to the

0:48

point where I was like, oh, it sounds like a truck

0:51

stop without any place to put trucks. And

0:53

she was like, yeah, that's exactly it. Yes, no,

0:56

I've been wrestling with it for a while because my wife

0:58

had actually been to one in the summer and she came

1:00

back and she was just like, I don't

1:02

know how to describe this to you. The closest thing

1:04

she could think of was, yeah, like a

1:06

Walmart mixed with a gas station mixed

1:09

with something else. And then when I

1:11

went there, I mean,

1:13

you have to experience it. You have to experience

1:15

Bucky's to truly understand it, I

1:17

think, which is magical,

1:19

I guess, in this day and age. Did you let

1:22

Bucky's into your heart, Adam? That's the question. I did

1:24

and I spent a lot of money there. And

1:27

yeah, no, over the course of a couple of days,

1:29

because I actually went there a couple of times, like

1:31

at first I was like, oh, you know, it is

1:33

kind of like a gas station. Because the way you

1:35

check out is kind of gas stationy and

1:38

it has the traditional gas station kind

1:40

of like drink wall and some

1:42

food and stuff like that. But it's- You

1:44

can buy cigarettes and lottery tickets. Exactly, but it's way

1:47

more than that. And I was like, okay, well, what

1:49

if it was like a truck stop, but

1:51

like a really good truck stop with like, you

1:53

can get brisket sandwiches. They were like chopping the brisket

1:56

right there in the middle and

1:58

the actual like area. where

2:00

you can do some shopping for goods

2:02

was like substantial, like a

2:05

mini target or something. I mean,

2:07

it's not just like

2:09

USB chargers and busted cables and

2:11

stuff like that. No, it was

2:13

everything from like outdoor gear to

2:16

apparel. I mean, a lot of apparel.

2:18

They had a whole wall with like

2:21

sniper scopes and target range practice dummies,

2:23

you know, but even like cooking utensils,

2:25

things like that. The only section they

2:27

didn't have, unfortunately, was electronics. I was

2:30

looking at like, I was like, okay,

2:32

you've got like every kind of quote

2:35

unquote traditional area to hang out in

2:37

except for electronics because I was

2:40

really looking for it and I wanted it because everything

2:43

there, almost everything there is

2:45

like Buckeys branded. This big old beaver

2:47

with the teeth and stuff like that.

2:49

And I was just like, man, if

2:51

I could have got like a Buckeys

2:53

branded USB charger or something, like I totally would

2:55

have done it. That's that's look, that's where you

2:57

buy your next computer case, man. You go to

2:59

Buckeys, you get the Buckeys from the North and

3:02

yeah. Oh no, we got to stop this because some

3:05

of these. Welcome

3:34

to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod. I'm Will. I

3:37

am Adam. Oh, we're joined

3:39

today by a special guest, Brad.

3:43

Our friend, Adam Patrick Murray from PC

3:45

World is here today. And

3:48

welcome to the show, Adam. Thank you so much for coming

3:50

in and subbing in for Brad while

3:52

he's still out on a family, some family

3:54

to help him with some family stuff. Glad

3:56

to be back. I don't think I'm a

3:58

viable substitute for Brad. Brad is

4:00

amazing. He's got an amazing voice, but

4:03

I'm gonna try my best to hang

4:05

out. Look, Kishore, Kishore last

4:07

week did like the Star-Lord thing and tried

4:09

to just bring it down to octaves and

4:12

then I had to bring him back up in post because it

4:14

was it sounded like he was

4:16

talking like this. No, he didn't really do that.

4:18

That would have been funny. We're

4:21

so glad to have you here. You're fresh

4:23

off of some holiday travels. So I appreciate

4:25

you coming in early on Saturday morning to

4:27

chat with me. Very fresh but always excited

4:29

to talk about technology. Yeah, so

4:32

for folks who don't know Adam is one

4:34

of our friends over at PC World. He

4:37

does well, you know, for

4:39

a long time did all the behind the scenes stuff and then this

4:42

year did some of the a lot more of the in front of

4:44

the scene stuff. But

4:46

we you are uniquely

4:48

positioned to have been aware of

4:50

a lot of the things that happened in the

4:52

in the year in technology this year. Yeah,

4:56

especially computer technology and

4:59

yeah, a lot of fun

5:01

things to talk about. We were working on the the list

5:03

of things that we could potentially talk about

5:05

and I was like, how much time we have?

5:08

Because oh boy, I could talk about a lot

5:10

of these things. Yeah, so so the idea here

5:12

is that we're going to go down the year.

5:14

We're going to we're going to do a do

5:16

a I want to say an in-depth overview

5:18

of the year. We're going to kind of hit the high points

5:20

at the low points, you know, maybe get into a little bit

5:22

of scene drama. Yeah, talk about talk

5:24

about the places, the things that went well

5:26

and the things that didn't. Harder

5:29

than your analogy. Yeah, hardware announcements,

5:31

hardware releases and a

5:34

lot of drama, I guess, as well. Yeah,

5:36

so I think I think for me,

5:39

it's funny for me this year

5:42

was the year that PC gaming

5:45

handhelds kind of got

5:47

big like like. Steam Deck's been rolling out gradually

5:49

over the last couple of years. It's

5:51

definitely had an impact, but this is the first year

5:53

that I like saw them on on Bart. I saw

5:55

them on you. Brad told me that he

5:57

saw one on the plane the other day. Like

6:00

a steam desk specifically? Specifically he

6:02

saw multiple steam decks on his

6:04

flight back East. Which

6:07

makes sense because like if you're traveling a lot and

6:09

you like PC games, a steam

6:11

deck is an easy no-brainer purchase,

6:13

right? You

6:16

get to play your full-ass

6:18

video games on a handheld when you're

6:20

traveling all over the place without any

6:22

weird like cross-platform syncing like a lot

6:24

of indie games did with the Switch

6:26

and Steam. But

6:28

then also this year we saw new

6:31

releases, you know, ASUS launched the Republic

6:33

of Gamer. Do they? When

6:35

you say ROG, it's not wrong. It's not

6:37

wrong. Okay, the ROG Ally,

6:40

Lenovo has the GO, Steam Deck has

6:42

the OLED. Even Sony released

6:44

their weird, well, Sony and Logitech

6:46

both released weird streaming only devices,

6:48

right? Was the Logitech

6:50

one this year? Wow. Logitech

6:52

might have been end of last year. But

6:55

streaming only. And I mean specifically, I

6:57

mean the Logitech one, well, I

7:00

actually never used that one. Like

7:02

the idea of it is like, okay, I can

7:04

kind of get behind. I think it's the pricing

7:06

that I wasn't necessarily fully behind. But then the

7:08

Sony one, like it's just a one-trick

7:10

pony, man. You're just like, hey, do you want to

7:12

connect to your PS5? That's

7:15

what this is. Yeah. And that's

7:17

all that this is. Well, and it turns

7:20

out it's a thing that you can do with

7:22

the Steam Deck or the Ally or the Lenovo,

7:24

any of the Linux-based or Windows-based ones will do

7:26

the same thing. Or your

7:28

phone. Yeah, or your phone or your tablet or

7:30

your laptop or anything that'll look like, look, there's

7:33

a lot of stuff that'll run Chiaki, it turns

7:35

out. Where

7:37

do you end up on this, Adam? You

7:39

guys do, you're kind of hardcore

7:41

PC people and these are pretty,

7:44

I don't want to say underpowered, but

7:46

they're modest PCs in these little handheld

7:48

cases. What's

7:50

your official take? I will

7:52

say that on the team, I am

7:56

the only one who loves handhelds. of

8:00

the show, friend of both you and

8:02

me, Gordon Mung. He is not much

8:04

of a handheld person, though I did get some

8:06

information over the break that might change

8:08

his mind. But he, yeah,

8:11

he's not, you know,

8:13

he likes the fastest, biggest thing ever,

8:15

right? And these handhelds like, well, I

8:18

guess in context, they're the fastest, biggest thing,

8:20

like compared to a 4090,

8:23

it is not. And so he's like, nah,

8:25

whatever, boring. Get back to me when there's a 4090.

8:28

And his kids are also, you know,

8:30

have an age where they're using their

8:32

own screens and art. There's no competition

8:34

for the TV in his house, I

8:37

would bet at this point. So yeah,

8:39

and he doesn't believe in

8:41

TVs for games anyway. So like, it's a, it's a

8:43

real, yeah, he likes to sit

8:45

down in his basement with the, with the, with

8:47

his comfortable chair and the dark room. Hey, you

8:49

know what respect. And then yeah,

8:51

so everyone else on the team

8:54

isn't like staunchly against it. They just like have

8:56

no use case for it kind of thing. And

8:59

so me, I, my very

9:01

first console was a Game Boy, like

9:03

the original Game Boy, like that was

9:05

my first personal console. I

9:07

of course played other consoles, but

9:09

this was mine. And like, so I've always

9:12

grown up with a soft spot for

9:14

handhelds. So these PC handhelds

9:16

have just like blown my mind.

9:19

And I mean, it's not just the big guys

9:21

we're talking about, you know, the steam deck OLED,

9:23

the ROG ally, Lenovo, Legion Go. There's

9:26

all these Chinese based companies

9:28

like Ayaneeo, GPD. I've been

9:30

sitting there waiting for my

9:33

Coon pre-order to Ayaneea

9:35

Coon to get shipped. That

9:38

one stuck. But yeah, like for me, like I'm

9:41

in it and I love it. And I, I

9:43

unfortunately have probably way too many of them

9:46

in my possession. But

9:48

I mean, it's easy to kind

9:50

of get it like the Ayaneeo one is especially

9:53

seems like they're releasing a new kind

9:55

of shape device every other week at some

9:58

point. Like at one point this summer. I

10:00

remember looking up and they announced

10:02

four different things and like

10:04

I don't know they have a clamshell yet, but

10:06

it's only a matter of time at this point.

10:09

They have one teased. It is not released yet,

10:11

but they have one teased. And

10:13

yeah, I mean, there's so much

10:15

good movement in the space and so

10:17

many different ways that people are kind

10:20

of like moving it forward. I mean, of

10:22

course there's the processing power. And

10:25

I mean, that's one of the big things

10:27

this year was the AMD

10:29

Z1 chip that's

10:31

used in at least the Ally and the

10:34

Legion Go. And

10:36

essentially it's just kind of a modified 7840U mobile part, just a little

10:38

bit tailor made

10:43

for handheld specifically. And I mean, when I

10:45

saw that, because the Steam Deck has a

10:48

custom chip that they worked with AMD,

10:50

but it's Valve, right? I could see

10:52

them working with Valve and getting some

10:54

custom, but like to say, hey, to

10:56

then for AMD to go out and

10:58

make a whole nother, I don't know,

11:00

quote unquote, spoke chip just for

11:02

handhelds, like signaled to me like,

11:04

oh, okay, wow, this is a

11:07

serious area of PC. And like,

11:09

even though the sales, I don't know,

11:11

you can see kind of

11:14

like the sales numbers on a lot

11:16

of these Chinese based companies because they're

11:18

Indiegogo campaigns essentially using as like pre-order.

11:21

You can kind of see how much are

11:23

sold over there. And

11:25

you can also see that the Steam Deck is always like within

11:28

the top 10 of like most sold

11:30

on Steam itself. So these

11:32

things are selling well, I don't know exactly

11:34

how much they're selling, but I mean, it

11:37

seems legit. Well, I mean,

11:39

it's interesting. You can kind of track a

11:41

little bit of how Linux in general is

11:43

doing. Like for all intents

11:45

and purposes, Linux and the Steam Deck are one

11:47

and the same when you look at the Steam

11:49

hardware survey results. And

11:51

the Linux share among

11:54

these active Steam users has gone

11:57

from like nothing to 7%, I think.

12:02

I did not check that number. That's good. Depends on

12:04

the game. So yeah,

12:06

like it's the thing that's

12:08

interesting to me is that this head held category has

12:10

been around for a really long time, but it's never

12:12

seen any kind of real traction in games. And

12:16

the work that Valve has done with the Steam Deck and

12:19

with Proton and all the supporting stuff that makes this team

12:21

deck work. It

12:23

turns out I think it's done the thing that they wanted, right? It

12:26

kind of knocked loose a lot of other activity in the

12:28

space. And

12:31

as a result, we're seeing all

12:33

sorts of new novel things

12:36

happening just

12:38

in general, which is I

12:40

think like that's the magic of

12:43

building this platform for everyone. Yeah,

12:45

and it really feels like there's a lot

12:48

of innovation still to be had. We

12:51

have another topic where we're talking about VR. We're

12:54

like, okay, that's been in it for

12:56

a while. It's variations on a theme

12:58

kind of thing. But

13:01

the handheld stuff, I feel like even

13:03

though the Steam Deck is awesome, I do feel

13:05

like when there's an eventual Steam Deck 2, that's

13:08

going to be even more awesome,

13:10

like and push things even more forward

13:12

kind of thing. Yeah.

13:15

So to clarify my earlier statement,

13:18

the 7% number was on

13:20

the game that I work on. 7%

13:23

of total players were playing on Linux. On

13:26

the overall hardware survey, it's about 2% are

13:28

Linux users now, which is up a half

13:30

a percent year over year on the

13:33

most recent version of the survey that they released. I

13:37

got to tell you, the diehard

13:39

Linux people in our Discord, they're

13:42

always telling us about Linux and how awesome it is. And

13:47

they're like, hell yeah, the Steam Deck has

13:49

been amazing for Linux. Yeah,

13:52

Proton and all the work around

13:54

that. It's funny,

13:56

there's places where Proton actually solves

13:58

rendering problems that exist. on Windows

14:00

and in the Windows DirectX

14:02

or Vulkan stacks because

14:04

of the way they make that. Anyway,

14:07

it's neat. Proton's really cool, Steam Deck's cool,

14:09

all of the supporting hardware is neat. It's

14:12

a good thing. Yeah. Let's talk, you mentioned

14:14

VR. Let's talk about VR. It's

14:16

dead, right? We're done. The whole thing's, Windows

14:19

Mixed Reality is shutting down. The

14:21

Oculus Quest 3 is the viable

14:24

headset on the market these days. Facebook

14:27

rolled out that Quest Pro that nobody really cared

14:29

about outside of people making games and having to

14:31

wear them all day, bring the headset all day.

14:36

What's happening in the world of VR? As

14:41

much as my coworker Gordon

14:43

once again would probably point to

14:45

VR being dead long ago. The

14:48

thing is with him, he bought a

14:50

Valve Index. Was it the Index? I

14:52

can't remember. His kids kept

14:54

bugging him to get one. He finally got

14:56

one and they used it for

14:59

a week and then he was just like, oh

15:01

no. Yeah, so he- I bet you heard about

15:03

that. Yeah. Oh, I still hear

15:05

about that. He was very much like, hey, you know

15:07

what? VR is dead to me. I'm

15:10

like everybody else who bought in and

15:13

now it's just sitting on a shelf somewhere and

15:15

it probably hounds him in the middle of the

15:17

night like, hey, you paid $1,000 for me and

15:20

nobody's using me. But

15:24

I mean, I also

15:26

personally, I had a Quest 2. I

15:29

upgraded the Quest 3. I

15:32

would use it occasionally, maybe a couple times a month,

15:35

but the Quest 3 is a nice

15:37

upgrade and I've actually been doing stuff

15:39

in the Quest 3 since it launched.

15:43

I've used it way more than the Quest 2 and who

15:46

knows how much that'll stick, but I actually

15:49

do like the upgrade to the Quest 3 personally.

15:52

I was kind of joking. Yeah, I think the Quest 3 is

15:54

a nice upgrade. I have Facebook-related

15:57

issues with the Oculus

15:59

hardware, unfortunately. And

16:02

of course, Apple announced the Vision Pro this

16:04

year, which is the other big AR, MR,

16:07

whatever blank R category you

16:09

want to talk about. Yeah,

16:12

which I mean is big. I mean,

16:14

you had the norm on, gave

16:17

a real good breakdown of like the

16:19

idea around it. And for me, listening to it

16:21

from afar, because I was not at the event

16:24

and I don't really cover VR. I

16:26

just kind of make sure I at least

16:28

know about it to a certain degree. And

16:30

like, I'm not an Apple fan at

16:32

all. But even I'm

16:34

like kind of cheering for them because like, hey,

16:36

listen, if somebody is going to help shake this

16:40

kind of market loose and further

16:42

move things forward, Apple stepping

16:44

into it, I mean, is a big sign

16:47

for me personally. Well, to me, the

16:49

interesting thing about the Apple thing is it looks like they're going to

16:51

build a Mac that you can wear on your head. If

16:56

there's a market for that, if that takes off, I'll be

16:58

interested to see. The

17:01

unfortunate thing is with the overall

17:05

VR market, and this is

17:07

something we talked about years and years ago, and this is only

17:09

a test, is that

17:11

they wouldn't Facebook subsidize a

17:13

bunch of AAA developers and

17:16

built the expectation that VR games look

17:18

like kind of console gamey,

17:22

big sprawling, expensive

17:24

to make platforming experiences and adventure games and

17:26

things that have a buttload of content that

17:29

are going to cost 20 or $30 million

17:31

to make in most cases.

17:36

Like, that was great, but

17:38

they were basically building these games that were

17:41

impossible to have a financial success outside

17:43

of the subsidy that Oculus

17:46

or Facebook was providing. And

17:49

that was fine until the moment Facebook decided they didn't want

17:51

to pay for those games to be developed anymore. But

17:54

then they had this giant audience

17:56

that they built, people who bought headsets

17:59

expecting know, these, these big,

18:01

uh, uh, uh, uh, sort of

18:03

wrath style experiences. Yeah. Kill

18:05

these, these, these huge things. And like, and valve's

18:07

a little bit guilty of this. They built Alex,

18:09

but valve has a different, has a, has a

18:11

weird, it's not like valve was going out and

18:13

funding 30 games. They just built one

18:16

then was like the thing they wanted to make to show

18:18

off their hardware. Um, it's

18:21

a, it's a weird situation that the market is

18:23

in now cause there's, uh, there's this pent up

18:25

demand for these big giant games and you'd have

18:27

to be a maniac to make one of those

18:29

big giant games. Cause you're going to spend $40

18:32

million you're going to make maybe five or 10.

18:35

And it's a, it's a, just cause there's

18:37

not enough, like, there's not enough

18:39

people that that's playing those kinds of games. So

18:42

it's, it's a weird, it's a weird

18:44

situation. Well, a question I have for

18:46

you cause obviously you were in that

18:48

space very heavily for a long time.

18:50

Uh, you know, you've talked about how,

18:52

how that went, but say,

18:54

say that you were still in that

18:56

space daily, uh, you know,

18:58

as your work, how much, how

19:01

much would you see the vision pro announcement,

19:03

like changing what you were

19:05

doing and working on? Oh, if I

19:07

was making VR games for

19:10

current gen headsets, 0.0%

19:14

probably really well, cause there's no

19:16

controllers. So they're going

19:18

to build a completely different thing. Apple's going

19:20

to build something that's completely different than what

19:22

we've seen before. Well, I mean, but something,

19:24

I feel like the, the, the food show

19:26

probably could work without dedicated controllers, right? Well,

19:28

yeah, but the food show wasn't a financial, it's

19:32

not like we were making money on the food show ever. Um,

19:34

uh, yeah, the

19:36

food show, the viewing would be

19:39

great without the dedicated headset. The recording

19:41

would be almost impossible, I think, without

19:43

the dedicated headset without the

19:45

dedicated controllers. Um, because, because

19:47

it's, it's the

19:50

way the, the way the kind of, the

19:53

way the data works to do the animation,

19:55

the, the worst your initial

19:57

signal is the janky or the animation.

20:00

gets and it's a real,

20:02

it's a real, the curve would be real

20:04

bad. At least,

20:06

I mean this was five years ago, I stopped working, four

20:09

years ago now that I stopped working on it. The

20:13

not directly tracked

20:16

data was much less reliable than

20:18

the controllers. That

20:21

may be different now, I don't know. I haven't

20:23

spent any time with a Vision Pro or even

20:26

really with the Quest 2 or 3 with

20:29

their hand tracking. Well, so it

20:31

sounds like, or the kind

20:33

of sentiment I'm getting or the tone I'm getting

20:35

is that like, like

20:38

you're not excited about this space and

20:40

quite much anymore or? I

20:43

mean I love this space, right? Like

20:45

I love VR, I love firing up

20:47

pistol whip or beat saber or at

20:50

some point I'll play a, I

20:52

can't remember the name of the game, a Shur's Wrath or

20:54

whatever. Shur's Wrath 2, yeah. Shur's Wrath 2. People

20:58

were doing, it got incredibly positive reviews

21:00

and it should be a transformative experience.

21:04

I don't know how that game ever makes

21:06

money, right? Like I look at that

21:08

and I'm like, as somebody who is

21:10

looking at what the next game is to

21:13

make, I'm like, I would love to do

21:15

a VR game but I don't see how

21:17

it's financially viable for anybody that isn't owned

21:19

by Oculus or

21:21

Gabe basically. And

21:25

then the other thing that kind of blows this year

21:27

is that Microsoft just real quietly at the end of

21:29

the year, like did a Friday night news drop that

21:31

was like, oh, by the way, we're, sometime

21:34

next two years we're gonna

21:36

remove support from mixed reality from

21:39

Windows entirely. I

21:43

assume that that's probably timed

21:45

to whenever the last bit

21:47

of mixed reality hardware was released but

21:50

I don't know for sure or sometime

21:52

around Windows 12, you know. They

21:56

said 2025 I think was the cutoff. Hopefully

22:00

that'll be the end of Steam VR support. Mixed

22:03

reality, the headsets will just be e-waste

22:05

at that point if

22:08

you upgrade your machine. So that's

22:10

a bad upgrade if you're still using a Lenovo or

22:12

HP. It's

22:16

not like those were bad headsets. HP and Samsung

22:18

both made really good headsets there. Which Brad had

22:20

one, right? Yeah, Brad had a

22:22

Lenovo. I

22:24

have a couple of them just laying around, so they

22:26

used them to test Steam VR support on.

22:31

So yeah, it's a little bit of a bummer. But

22:35

watch your, if you have a Windows Mixed

22:37

Reality headset and you intend to keep

22:39

using it, maybe watch your Windows updates. It might be worth

22:41

keeping the old PC around. Sorry, there we

22:43

go. Yeah, freeze a system in place to always

22:46

have one ready. Yeah, there you go. Just get

22:48

an image and then you can restore the image.

22:50

It'll be, yes. That's dedicated.

22:54

This year was also a big PC hardware. This

22:57

was the first year it felt like we were out

22:59

of the pandemic when it came to PC hardware. People

23:02

were announcing stuff. Some of it was good. Some

23:04

of it was messy. There's

23:06

everything but new high-end video

23:09

cards. The

23:13

Intel GPUs seem

23:15

generally okay. It's

23:17

a weird year. Yeah, yeah. Being

23:20

in this space daily, I definitely

23:22

feel like this year was

23:24

hot and heavy with a new announcements. Both

23:27

desktop and laptop related, of course. We

23:31

mostly focus on the desktop over

23:33

on my coverage zone. But

23:36

yeah, there was a lot to cover. There

23:38

was some interesting things going on for

23:40

sure. Where do you want to start? Where do

23:42

you think is the most interesting? I'm

23:44

curious. The

23:47

3D vCache Ryzen's, those

23:50

are the ones that are always the X3D and come

23:52

out later, right? That's their kind

23:54

of thing. It's

23:57

weird because... days

24:00

when you wanted to get the fastest computer, you just

24:02

bought the one with the biggest number and paid like

24:04

$500,000 and then it worked itself

24:06

out and you'd have to really understand

24:08

what was going on. Now, it's kind

24:10

of complicated and what is the best one for

24:12

you might change based on how you use your

24:14

computer. If you do a lot of spiking the

24:16

CPU, what's the best CPU

24:21

for you may be completely different than

24:24

if you just play

24:26

games and do an occasional 100% CPU spike, right?

24:30

Yeah, well, I mean, we've talked about this

24:32

a lot. A lot of people who come

24:34

to our podcast, the full nerd over on

24:37

PC world, definitely have a lot

24:39

of questions, people trying to figure

24:43

out best bang for buck and things like that. And

24:47

so yeah, like between the X3D

24:49

stuff, which was kind of revolutionary

24:52

and then Intel at some point moving

24:54

to a desegregated architecture on the desktop,

24:57

I do feel like we're getting more and

24:59

more in specialty lanes, right? Where instead of

25:02

just being like, hey, you know what, the

25:04

biggest, fastest CPU is going to be the

25:06

best at everything kind of thing. It's

25:09

more like, oh, hey, well, what do you want to do

25:11

with it? Is there something specific?

25:13

Which lane do you play in the most

25:15

that you really care about? I

25:18

will copy out by saying, I

25:21

did a bunch of testing and

25:24

I haven't done the video quite yet, but with

25:27

the, like all the CPUs that

25:29

are currently out there in video

25:32

production workloads, it'd be like, hey,

25:34

you know, like what's the best CPU out there?

25:36

And I mean, of course there are some clear

25:38

winners and the 3DV cache isn't always thought of

25:40

as the best in production

25:43

related workloads. They're

25:45

still damn good. I'll tell you

25:47

what, you know, it's just like

25:49

eight cores now are not what you got

25:51

eight cores, you know, a handful

25:54

of years ago, like, like, so even though like

25:56

a lot of times we're trying to sit there

25:58

and like be like, hmm, well, Well, if you

26:00

do this, you know, and if you do that, maybe it's better

26:02

to go this way or better to go that way. For

26:06

eight cores with that 3D V-cache on it, specifically

26:08

on the 7800X3D, it's just like, that's

26:12

a damn good CPU. And sure, it's not

26:14

16 cores, but you know what? Those are

26:16

eight damn good cores. Well,

26:19

I'm curious, when you do your

26:21

benchmarks for video

26:23

stuff, do you use the

26:25

GPU accelerated encodes or

26:27

do you use CPU encodes for

26:29

that? So a lot

26:32

of the CAN benchmarks, you know, it's kind

26:34

of a mixture of stuff, I should say.

26:36

So a lot of the CAN benchmarks that

26:38

we use are from a place, Puget Systems.

26:42

They have a Puget bench, really

26:44

good benchmarking tools. There's

26:46

others like Procyon has video editing stuff

26:49

and that takes into factor

26:51

the whole system. And when I

26:53

was doing the CPU testing, I

26:55

tried to keep the system as the

26:58

same except for the actual

27:00

CPU. So if a 4090 was used, the 4090 is

27:02

used across the way and

27:06

you're only gonna see the difference of the CPU

27:08

makes kind of thing. So

27:11

there's that. Some

27:13

people still prefer the CPU and code for

27:15

quality, I assume. I mean, that was the

27:17

case for a long time. Maybe it isn't

27:19

anymore. You know, it's funny, the quality, I

27:21

feel like, especially with the newer codecs, has

27:23

gotten to a point where I don't hear

27:26

that as much anymore. Like, I mean, it definitely

27:28

is a thing and I'm sure in large

27:31

production environments, you know, movies and TV

27:33

shows, it's still a thing. But at

27:35

the same time, like, you know, more

27:37

kind of mainstream people, like even me,

27:39

that's what I consider the video production

27:41

we do. Like, I'll take that quicker

27:44

rendering any day of the week over a

27:46

CPU and code. But I do, so the

27:48

way I do test the CPU and code

27:50

is with Handbrake. I do a

27:53

bunch of different codecs in Handbrake and that's

27:55

CPU only. And so, like,

27:57

I still do that testing to kind of

27:59

see. where it shakes out, but yeah,

28:02

I feel like and we kind of

28:04

saw this shift at least you know behind the

28:06

scenes with the new Cinebench moved

28:09

to what our 2024

28:11

and they kind of like changed

28:13

the the whole way they think about Benchmarking

28:16

to make it a little bit more practical and

28:19

they're like hey, you know what like just

28:21

pure CPU workloads It's not not

28:23

that much of a thing anymore Like if you have an

28:25

awesome GPU like why not use it? It

28:27

seemed like the NVENC to shift in with like

28:30

the I guess was since 2000 series Probably

28:32

was was the kind of was

28:35

the kind of moment that a lot

28:37

of that changed Yeah, an

28:39

AV1. I mean is obviously a big

28:41

thing h265 like, you know, I mean

28:43

it's yeah, but back

28:46

to the 3d v-catch stuff like I do

28:48

feel like There's still

28:50

even more in that space You know

28:52

a lot of times when we're

28:54

having these these talks with people at AMD

28:57

and Intel A

28:59

lot of it goes over my head But

29:01

you know, they're talking about new different

29:03

ways for computing to work right within

29:05

the space that keeps getting smaller and

29:07

smaller How do you get it to

29:10

work actual like? Stacking

29:12

on top is like one of the

29:14

newer ways to talk about it, but

29:16

then also a disaggregated architecture So that

29:18

that 7850x 3d had one two CCDs

29:20

one of them had the 3d v-cache

29:22

one of them didn't So, you

29:24

know the promise was kind of the best of both worlds. Do

29:26

you want high clocks or do you want the cache? Whatever

29:30

Intel can roll out. It makes games run

29:32

better, right is the idea or right? Yeah

29:36

Sorry, it's less multi threaded

29:38

applications run better with more cash. It

29:40

was the idea I think right? Yeah,

29:42

and while it's always hard to know

29:45

like I wish there was a way to look At

29:48

which games like oh, hey, you know what

29:50

it uses an unreal engine or it uses

29:52

a specific thing Then you know for sure

29:54

that that game is gonna benefit from the

29:57

cash Unless

29:59

somebody has done the work and I don't know

30:01

about it. I still feel like a lot of times

30:03

it's a crapshoot. People

30:06

are buying new hardware, thinking about games in

30:08

the future and being like, oh, well, whatever

30:10

game is coming up, will it benefit from

30:12

the 3DV cache? It doesn't seem like we

30:14

have a magic ball quite yet. But

30:17

for the most part, my

30:19

gaming machine has a 3DV cache

30:21

part in it because I'm like, you know what, when it

30:24

does benefit it, oh boy, that

30:26

benefit is huge. We

30:28

were debating on one of the recent episodes of

30:30

The Full Nerd about the best... At

30:33

the end of the year, we always kind of

30:35

debate live about the best CPU hardware

30:37

that came out this year. And

30:40

Gordon, I mean, Gordon

30:42

was pretty much always like... He

30:45

always just votes for the biggest, most expensive thing. So

30:47

he was pushing for the 7850X3D or even the 14900K

30:49

kind of thing. But

30:54

I brought up the benchmark charts. My pick was the 7800X3D.

30:58

And I was like, listen, the 7800X3D at half the

31:00

price of the 14900K, beat it. I

31:06

mean, not just matched it, but beat it

31:08

in specific games. And when it did, it

31:10

was like super beneficial. That's crazy

31:13

to think of. A CPU that's half the

31:15

price was matching or beating the 14900K.

31:18

Well, so I mean, I was just saying, this is part of

31:21

the overall theme of the year for me. And

31:23

this kind of applied to last year too, right? Because

31:25

we've reached a point where we're not

31:28

seeing advancements on process technology

31:30

driving performance forward. So that

31:32

means that the vendors can't

31:34

bin out 10 different... A

31:37

thousand different CPUs and pick the two fastest ones

31:39

and sell those as a thousand dollar part anymore.

31:41

I mean, they're trying still. I mean, they do.

31:43

Yeah, just to be clear. But

31:46

the impact of that isn't as much. And

31:48

so we're seeing them have to do much

31:50

more clever, complete design changes

31:53

or enhancements to

31:55

the actual CPUs in order to justify those

31:58

high end parts. And

32:00

it puts

32:02

the person who's the purchaser

32:05

in an interesting conundrum because

32:07

like you said, you're seeing these mid-range parts

32:09

that are performing almost as well as

32:12

the high end in all but the weird

32:14

edge cases that people benchmark. And

32:18

it's a real shift, especially on the CPU side. Now,

32:20

the GPU side is a little bit different. The GPU

32:22

side, Nvidia especially, is

32:24

just throwing enormous amounts of compute at

32:26

the high end GPU market. And

32:30

we've reached a point where we're building

32:33

computers around these enormous 800 watt video

32:38

cards. And

32:41

it's a little bit of a different situation. But

32:45

it's also the first year, like we're

32:48

in a weird spot. We were talking about this at

32:51

work in the context of like what minimum spec for

32:53

a video game should be in 2023. And

32:57

it's a weird time because everybody, there's a

32:59

bunch of people with 2000 series and

33:01

video cards out there who in their

33:03

head, because they weren't able to buy a

33:05

video card for the last three years, think,

33:07

oh yeah, my video cards really

33:10

new. When in reality,

33:12

they have a five-year-old video card, right?

33:17

And those

33:19

two thoughts can both be true in your head

33:21

and not be true in the real world. It's

33:27

a weird situation. Did you see

33:29

market? What's

33:31

going on with it? I guess. Here's my

33:33

question, Brad. And

33:35

by Brad, I mean Adam. Okay. I

33:37

was like, wait, hold on. What

33:41

the hell is going on with video cards this year? Oh,

33:44

God. I mean, not

33:46

as much as people wanted, right? So I

33:48

would say we listed out the GPUs

33:50

that actually got announced and launched this year.

33:52

And it's mostly in the quote

33:55

unquote mid range, but that's still

33:57

a lot of stuff. of

34:00

people bitching about, can we cuss here?

34:02

I'm sorry. Yeah, you can say all the words.

34:07

People really bitching about like, hey, what

34:10

used to be high end is

34:12

now mid range. What the hell?

34:14

In terms of price? In terms

34:17

of price, yeah. There's been a

34:19

lot of Nvidia kind of reshuffling

34:22

what certain things mean in

34:25

the space. Traditionally,

34:27

it used to be a 60 class is now

34:29

a 70 class kind of thing. Typically, I'd say before

34:31

the 2000 series, I was always solidly

34:38

a 70 class. So like a 40, 70, 90,

34:40

70, even a 40, 60 was my first GPU

34:42

kind of thing.

34:46

And I think that was only

34:48

a couple hundred bucks. But now,

34:50

to get into that class, you're

34:53

talking about twice the price now.

34:55

So there's still a lot of belly aching

34:57

about pricing and how everything's kind of

34:59

shifted upward. I mean, a lot of it

35:02

does come with awesome performance

35:04

and these new 40 series GPUs

35:07

from Nvidia are super efficient,

35:09

like crazily efficient. So

35:12

like, I mean, the NV Inc

35:15

performance, the ray tracing performance, you're getting

35:17

a lot with these GPUs for sure.

35:20

But also, it just comes with that feeling of like,

35:22

man, I used to be able to get this GPU

35:25

for half the price. Well,

35:27

and so part

35:30

of it is Nvidia has redone their

35:32

naming scheme for everything. Yeah. But

35:35

like also the 1080 launched at $600. Right.

35:37

Founders Edition. Yeah,

35:41

which was higher than the AIB models. Yeah.

35:45

Yeah. Now it's kind of the opposite. It's

35:48

funny you think about for me, there's these high

35:50

water parts that kind

35:52

of remind me of what things

35:54

used to cost. Right. Right. Right. Like the G4 three

35:57

was a $400 video card. If

35:59

we want to go all the way back. 2003.

36:01

Now look, some stuff has happened.

36:03

There's been a little bit of inflation. Things

36:05

are more expensive. Obviously it's a more expensive

36:08

to build part now than it was with the G4 3 in

36:12

2000, you know, 20 years ago. But

36:15

I think that the established price for that.

36:17

Now, the difference now

36:19

is that a 4060 is

36:22

a perfectly capable video card. It's

36:25

like more than capable video card for playing games at

36:27

1080p. Yeah, right. I mean,

36:29

a lot of people

36:32

would still argue that like the bus width

36:34

and the VRAM size, like you should be

36:36

getting more VRAM for that price,

36:38

which I get. But I mean, at the same

36:41

time, yes, if you're loading it up

36:43

and playing it in 1080p, the lane that it's intended

36:45

to, you can get some damn good performance out of

36:47

it. Yeah, so that's

36:49

interesting. The thing is

36:51

the wild card and all of this for me, and it

36:53

didn't really apply this year as much as it, I think

36:55

it will apply next year and the year after, assuming

36:58

Intel doesn't pull out of the graphics market

37:00

for the third or fourth time. Is

37:04

that it's going to be a three, it looks

37:06

like it's going to be a legit three-way race,

37:08

right? The Arc stuff launch and

37:10

it's okay. It's not like the first, for

37:12

first gen, their performance has

37:14

been good. It's been getting consistently better with

37:16

driver updates. And by better,

37:22

it's not even just like small shifts. I mean,

37:24

we have seen some small shifts, but we had

37:26

a series by one of our freelancers, Keith May.

37:29

Every month for six months, he

37:32

was looking at Arc driver updates

37:34

and we'd stopped it. We need to do,

37:36

I think we did like a year check-in as well,

37:38

or maybe we were supposed to and we didn't. But

37:41

like the improvements in some

37:43

of these games, mostly

37:46

with different APIs. So, DX12 was like,

37:48

for the most part, solid,

37:53

but the DX9 performance

37:55

was bad. So, they had

37:57

this big reveal of like, hey, you know what?

38:00

this new newest driver, Uplist

38:02

DX9 performance by 100% or whatever. And

38:04

so like, yeah, where it is now is

38:07

much better place. I'm sorry, I should say the,

38:10

the Arc 8, you know, 770, 750, they did

38:12

announce their launch the

38:16

A580. So

38:19

like their cards that are on the

38:21

market right now, like have seen substantial

38:23

improvements, but they still stumble every once

38:25

in a while. Like Starfield had

38:28

a problem out the gate where if you had an

38:30

Arc card, you just couldn't play it. So,

38:32

you know, they still have some stumbling blocks,

38:34

but I do feel like that team internally

38:36

is like learning a lot. And

38:39

it's not just applying to their, their discrete

38:41

cards with Meteor Lake. It

38:44

has new Arc graphics core and like

38:46

they're seeing some big improvements there. So

38:48

I, you know, it's,

38:51

we're in this weird spot as journalists where we just

38:53

want to work kind

38:55

of what's going on. But at the

38:57

same time, me personally as a person, I'm, I

39:00

am rooting for Intel to

39:02

continue and try to be a third

39:04

player in the space because more competition

39:06

is better for everyone. Right. Yeah.

39:09

But yeah, at the same time, it still is

39:11

just a little hard to recommend an Arc card

39:13

unless you know it. It's somebody who can tinker

39:16

a little bit. Right. Yeah.

39:19

I think it comes with that caveat. I think

39:21

that's the normal first gen, right? Like this is

39:24

like Intel has been making GPUs for a really

39:26

long time. They just jammed inside CPUs and it's

39:28

a little bit of a different market. Right.

39:32

But, but yeah, I think it's, it's an interesting place

39:34

for them to be. And

39:36

it's, I, I, I 100% agree

39:39

that it's good that there's other,

39:41

other vendors in that space now. Well,

39:43

and overall for GPUs, one

39:45

of the big things that we had talked about

39:47

was a Tom Pitt or I'm sorry, not Tom

39:50

Petty. John Petty. Two

39:52

different people. John Petty Research. He

39:55

does some really good, you know, he's

39:57

an analyst, does some really good. insights

40:00

into what's going

40:02

on, buying trends and things like that. Very

40:05

high level. He had a

40:07

report talking about GPU sales

40:09

figures being down for 10

40:11

years running. If

40:14

you look at the chart, I have a link in here,

40:16

if you look at the chart, it's just like sales for

40:18

10 years are just going down and down, down kind of

40:21

thing. It's starting

40:23

to slowly climb up. But

40:26

yeah, discrete GPU sales is

40:28

still not where it used to be.

40:31

It signals some things, I think

40:34

it is kind of a hard buying market. Once

40:36

again, the prices are up. People are, I think,

40:38

holding on to hardware a lot longer. We actually

40:40

have somebody in our Discord who has a 970

40:42

and is just holding on for dear life

40:46

to it. I

40:48

will tell you, we have

40:50

people playing the anti-crucist right now on 970s.

40:54

970 is a perfectly viable machine

40:56

for 1080p DX11 games for

40:59

a lot of them. I

41:05

think it's weird, but then

41:07

also even with all the bitching people are

41:09

doing about Nvidia, like

41:12

Nvidia's market share in the GPU space

41:15

is just massive. AMD

41:17

over the past couple

41:19

years have had some really good cards,

41:22

especially price to performance like

41:24

their new GPU out right now, the 7800 XT

41:28

is kind of like what everyone's turning to is

41:30

like, hey, that's kind of like the sweet spot

41:32

in terms of price and performance. It's not perfect,

41:35

but it's still a pretty good sweet spot if

41:37

you're buying new. And

41:39

yeah, even AMD with all

41:42

their wins that they pull off, like just can't

41:45

break that Nvidia market share. It's just crazy.

41:48

You know, here and here's the thing,

41:50

the unfortunate thing for AMD is

41:52

that Nvidia invests a lot

41:54

of money in developer relations and AMD

41:58

either can't or doesn't do the same. at

42:00

the same level. It's a much smaller team over

42:02

there. Yeah, it's

42:05

an unfortunate situation

42:07

for AMD because

42:09

it puts them in these weird situations where

42:12

if you like to play new games the

42:14

day it comes out, then

42:16

you're probably best bet is to buy an Nvidia

42:18

card because it's more likely to

42:20

run on that. Mainly at this

42:22

point, because like to bake

42:25

lights in Unreal, you have to

42:27

have an Nvidia card, right? So that means every developer

42:29

who does any kind of work

42:31

with lighting or any of that stuff is probably

42:33

running on an Nvidia card, which means that they

42:35

play their game on an Nvidia card, which means

42:37

they find the Nvidia bugs and then they find

42:39

the AMD bugs later. And you

42:43

know, it's an

42:46

unfortunate fact of life

42:48

in the game industry these days. So it's a

42:52

wild time. 14th Gen came

42:55

out this year, which seemed like a real

42:57

free spin of this is

42:59

Intel's 14th Gen, just so

43:01

we're full disclosure. Well,

43:03

it seems a lot like 13th Gen,

43:05

Adam. Yeah, 14th Gen desktop parts. So

43:08

while on the laptop, they're moving to

43:10

a completely different architecture, 14th Gen

43:13

on the desktop is kind of

43:15

a stopgap. I mean, yeah, they just took

43:17

it's a Raptor like refresh. That's

43:19

when I kind of stepped in

43:21

and did my first official old CPU reviews

43:23

for PC world, which was

43:26

amazing. And also probably

43:28

the best time to do it too,

43:30

because the stakes were really low. You just

43:32

copy and paste it and change all the 13s

43:34

to 14s and talk about the memory controller a

43:37

little bit. I did not do

43:39

that. I did not do that. But

43:41

yeah, so for the desktop, I mean,

43:43

like, yeah, whatever it's

43:45

fine. Intel needed a new car smell. They

43:47

have the new car smell on the market.

43:49

That's fine. But yeah,

43:51

for the laptop part, Meteor Lake was kind

43:53

of the big announcement in

43:56

the summer. And then it just

43:59

barely launched. in the middle of December, which

44:01

is traditionally not a great time

44:03

to launch a major CPU architecture. What

44:05

if you're not super confident in that?

44:07

Is it a good time for that?

44:10

Uh, you know, I don't know. You

44:13

want like just a little bit of sales, not

44:15

a lot of sales. You just want to ease

44:17

them out there, kind of take the temperature of

44:20

the market, see how people like it. Is it

44:22

a good time in that situation? Well, you know,

44:24

I mean, there's people always throw around the term

44:26

paper launch, right? Like, oh, hey, you have a

44:28

launch on paper, but you don't actually have product.

44:30

It product is out. I do. I was

44:32

able to buy a laptop on Newegg. There's

44:35

okay. You know, the, there are, there were

44:37

some companies that had hardware out there for

44:39

sure. So it didn't feel like to

44:42

me at least quote unquote, a traditional

44:44

paper launch kind of thing. Uh, but

44:46

yeah, the timing is real weird. And

44:48

honestly, I like, I don't know the

44:50

behind the scenes of the timing of

44:52

launching mid December, but it

44:54

feels like, Hey, we were going to do it at CES, but

44:57

we needed it to do, to do it in

44:59

this calendar year. So, uh, let's push

45:01

it up a little bit, but really like as,

45:03

as we're kind of looking at what's coming up

45:06

in CES, which I will be at in a

45:08

week from this time. Sorry.

45:10

Yeah. Right. Uh, that

45:12

like, I think that's going to be the

45:14

real unveiling, uh, of meteor Lake and well,

45:18

I'm sorry, it's Intel core ultra

45:20

processors. Meteor Lake is

45:22

the code name for their first chiplet design,

45:24

right? Yeah. The architecture. We're kind

45:27

of in a weird spot where now then

45:29

the numbering scheme, now we've actually seen it

45:31

and we still haven't seen the full stack.

45:33

So it's kind of hard to compare apples

45:35

to apples, but like right now

45:37

we're kind of resetting back to one. The

45:40

numbering is like they're not calling it first

45:42

gen. They're not, they're not

45:44

calling it series one or these

45:47

other things we've heard about, but essentially this

45:49

is we're resetting the counter

45:51

back to first gen, uh, which the Intel,

45:54

right? Yeah. So right

45:57

now everything's just called the Intel core ultra

45:59

processor. but

46:01

yeah, anyway. So I haven't

46:04

had enough... So we had a

46:06

freelancer at PC World who did a review

46:09

article for the website. I

46:11

personally haven't had enough time, even

46:14

though I have hardware and I haven't had enough time to look

46:16

at it. Gordon is still

46:18

out on medical leave so he hasn't had time.

46:20

But I mean, he has been following the news

46:23

closely and like we've been chatting all

46:25

the time and he's like, man, I wish I

46:27

could test this or that or why does this

46:29

launch feel so weird? And you know, like... Yeah.

46:34

It's an interesting...

46:37

So the reason these Chipplet designs are... One of the

46:39

reasons these Chipplet designs are interesting is because they require

46:41

a lot of work on the Windows side, I think,

46:43

in order to get the most out of the hardware.

46:45

The other thing about launching a laptop first to me

46:48

is like, I don't know about

46:50

you, but my use case for a laptop is dramatically

46:52

different than my use case for a desktop. A

46:54

desktop, I want as much performance as possible

46:56

all the time until the cable is hot coming

46:58

from the power table is warm coming out

47:00

of the wall. You might want to check that.

47:03

Maybe get a thicker one. But on a

47:05

laptop, really all I care

47:09

about is that when I open the lid that it turns

47:11

on and that it doesn't feel slow. Which

47:14

is a different mark. Ah,

47:16

you know, that's the hard thing with

47:18

laptops and why personally I have a

47:20

hard time like covering them is because

47:23

everyone has different needs

47:25

out of a laptop. Some people just really

47:27

care about battery life. Some people do care

47:29

about performance and use it as like a

47:31

desktop replacement and want the most

47:33

powerful thing. And there are just

47:36

so many variations in between like, you know,

47:38

it is hard to like, for

47:40

me at least to make a definitive advice and

47:42

be like, hey, you know what? This is the

47:44

laptop you should get or that's the laptop you

47:46

should get. So yeah, it's nuts. Yeah.

47:50

The nice thing about buying desktops and building desktops

47:52

is that you assume if somebody is going to

47:54

go to the trouble of having a three foot

47:57

tall box in their office, they probably

47:59

care about performance. So, you

48:01

know, though I gotta say, I'm not gonna put

48:04

any family members on blast, but I had a

48:06

family member who was recently talking about having

48:08

some performance problems. And

48:11

when they went to go finally

48:13

do some troubleshooting, they

48:16

realized that they have never installed

48:18

drivers or updated drivers since

48:21

they originally built the box.

48:24

And then when they did, they were like, oh

48:26

my God, I got like double the performance. This

48:28

is amazing. And then they were like, oh my

48:30

God. So, not

48:32

everyone building boxes, you know, is...

48:35

Hey, no shame. You

48:37

know, there are people out there, right? Yeah,

48:40

we all learn, but there are a lot of people out

48:42

there who just build a box, you know, and then just

48:44

don't think about it and just try to play on it.

48:46

Were they just running Windows Update drivers and it

48:48

was doing okay? That's kind of amazing,

48:50

actually. Well, so honestly, it

48:53

became... It didn't become

48:55

a thing until they got a new

48:57

monitor. So they had a 1080p60 monitor and

48:59

the hardware was fine for that. And

49:02

then when they got a new monitor, they realized it

49:04

was like a 1440p, 144 hertz. That's

49:08

when they were like, wait, weird. I

49:10

am not getting what I should be getting here

49:12

or what they thought they should be getting. So...

49:17

Wow, that's amazing. So, okay,

49:19

last CPU kind of integrated

49:21

thing. Apple rolled out M3s

49:23

this year. And M2s.

49:25

M2s were earlier this year. Well,

49:28

M2 launched late last year. Yeah, specific

49:30

M2. M2 Pro, I think, came out

49:32

this year, right? Ultra.

49:34

Yeah. Like, they remain

49:36

interesting, but they're kind of... As

49:39

with most Apple stuff, it ends up on an island

49:41

by itself, right? Because

49:44

it's not like you can get

49:46

your Intel, your Windows running Mac

49:48

anymore. It's just... Yeah,

49:51

you're over in OS X Land no matter what, I guess. Yeah.

49:56

We don't officially cover Apple stuff.

49:58

Gordon definitely does. look at Apple stuff and

50:01

we use it to compare to Windows

50:03

stuff. But also, I don't know, me

50:05

personally, I'm of the mindset of like,

50:08

hey, if you're going to get a Mac, you

50:10

don't really care to compare it against Windows. And

50:12

if you're getting a Windows one, you don't really

50:14

care to compare it against Mac. Like,

50:16

it's good theoretically to kind of see how all

50:18

this stuff is shaking out. But like from a

50:21

buying decision, like how many people are actually

50:23

out there being like, hmm, should I get a Mac or should I

50:25

get a PC? So

50:27

I think the place that that hits

50:29

is in the kind of the high-end

50:32

laptop, like not like the pro laptop,

50:34

but the high-end consumer laptop range, where

50:36

I think Apple drives a lot of

50:39

the market based on, hey, I want

50:41

a thin, like thin light. Ultrabooks

50:44

existed because of the MacBook

50:47

Air, right? Like

50:49

they've done a lot of, hey, you can buy

50:51

a cheap, good enough computer to do all of

50:54

the stuff that a normal person uses a computer

50:56

for for $900,000 and it will look cool

50:58

and have

51:00

like three days of battery life and all sorts of other stuff

51:02

too. I mean, I

51:04

remain, I still think that the

51:06

stuff that Apple's doing with the M2, M3 is maybe the

51:10

most interesting work

51:12

that's happening in CPUs right

51:14

now because they're getting this incredible

51:16

perf out of these really small,

51:18

light, you know,

51:20

SOCs. I

51:24

do have some issues with the way that

51:26

they market the M2 Ultras against

51:29

like 4090s and I'm like, man,

51:31

that's not exactly how that works. You're comparing

51:33

it, you've got a really,

51:36

really nice mobile GPU and you're comparing it

51:38

to this monster and you're

51:40

like, yeah, ours is better and like

51:42

some really specific tests. So pro res,

51:45

guess what? Pro res works really well

51:47

on Apple hardware. Press

51:50

press. Okay, so a

51:52

couple more quick hits, we're running up

51:54

on time here. But

51:56

the machine learning stuff, really

51:59

popular. There was, you

52:01

hear popular AI, certain values are

52:04

popular. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if

52:06

you would think about like the, the ratio of

52:08

people talking about AI to, you know, actually how

52:11

much it's being used, I still

52:13

don't fully know, but yeah, AI, everybody is

52:15

talking about AI. Well, so, so this is

52:17

the year Chad GPT and Dolly

52:19

and stable diffusion and all the image

52:22

generators became much

52:24

more accessible this year. You

52:27

people have been doing image

52:29

generation and deep fakes and stuff like that for

52:31

a while, but now you can just open up

52:33

a webpage and types of stuff in and 20 seconds later you

52:35

get an image. And it's

52:38

interesting cause like wildly

52:41

different experiences in different communities, like my tech,

52:43

the tech communities I live in, people

52:46

are strongly enthusiastic about this

52:48

because you can, people who

52:50

can't draw can make drawings that look like something an

52:53

artist would make now oddly,

52:55

not surprisingly at all, I guess, in the

52:57

art communities, they're like, Hey, this is just

53:00

copyright infringement at a different scale. And,

53:03

and Hey, maybe don't use your AI

53:05

image generators because they're bad, which is

53:07

also a completely fair situation to be

53:10

in. Now

53:13

I don't think we're, I think at some point

53:15

Brad and I are going to dig into the

53:17

kind of ethical and social ramifications of copyright

53:20

infringement at mass scale. You got

53:22

that. The, the, the thing

53:24

I'll say is maybe don't use

53:26

text generators for your legal cases and places where

53:28

people are going to like go to jail or

53:30

die if you, if

53:33

you make mistakes, you know, cause

53:35

they're basically like computerized lying machines.

53:39

But there are a handful of really good

53:41

places where machine learning is, is having an

53:43

impact in and is actually doing something useful.

53:45

Yeah. I think we can all look at

53:47

our, at our newer phones and see that

53:49

the voice recognition stuff is

53:51

dramatically better now than it was even

53:53

two years ago. And that's,

53:55

that's a result of those improvements. DLSS 3.5 trained.

54:00

video users on a high end four series

54:02

cards. Like the game, the

54:04

video card can just make up frames in

54:06

between the, to fill

54:08

in, fill in gaps in your frame rate.

54:10

Yeah. I still feel weird about that, but

54:12

you know, it's, I'm glad it's there. It

54:14

is, it is a viable option. It's,

54:17

um, I've spent a fair amount of

54:19

time experimenting with that in cyberpunk mostly.

54:22

And it's a, it's a, it's like, it's

54:24

one of those ones that I'm like, wow, this is going

54:26

to be really cool next generation when they kind of work

54:28

out the kinks in that. Sometimes it feels a little hinky.

54:31

Sometimes it feels really good and I wouldn't even know that

54:33

it's turned on. It is

54:35

firmly a feature that I probably don't turn

54:37

on right now for the most part. Unless,

54:39

unless you, you really need it. I mean, there

54:42

are definitely people who, you know, don't

54:44

care that much about latency and things like

54:46

that. And they're just like, Oh, I get

54:48

extra frames. Awesome. Then cool. I mean, if

54:51

you, if you don't notice it, then you

54:53

know, reap the benefits, more power to you.

54:55

The number is bigger when it's on Adam.

54:57

Yeah. Uh, the

55:00

same thing for ray tracing. Like we're seeing the, you're

55:03

getting the equivalent of more rays cast

55:05

in your, in your ray tracing games

55:07

so that your, your lighting looks a

55:09

little bit better. And better quality too.

55:11

If the ray reconstruction technique can deal

55:13

with this 3.5. So yeah.

55:16

Um, but then the place that I'm most

55:18

excited, we talked about this a little bit

55:20

with Kishore last week is with science stuff.

55:22

Like there's, there's now for places

55:24

where there's established data sets, for

55:27

example, like radio radiology screenings,

55:29

radiological screenings, there are

55:31

first pass breast cancer, uh, scanners

55:34

that can, that can read a,

55:36

an X-ray, you know, mammogram and

55:39

detect tumors or at least flag something that

55:41

a human needs to look at so

55:44

that, so that you can get a faster

55:46

look, better, better results, less

55:48

likely, you know, it's, it's like a second line

55:50

of defense for a human that might've missed something

55:52

or, or whatever, or at

55:54

least take out like the busy work, right? Like,

55:57

Hey, you know what? The somebody's a doctor's way

55:59

too busy. look over the fine details.

56:01

So let machine learning kind of grape it over and

56:03

let you know if you need to. Yeah,

56:05

that and the, hey, here's something that's

56:07

a little questionable that the machine noticed

56:09

that the human maybe doesn't, right? Like

56:11

every, the problem with people is we

56:14

all have bad days, right? So if

56:16

you're, if you, if you have something on your eye

56:18

that day and you have a little bit of a

56:20

headache, you miss something that's, that's a bad outcome for

56:22

the person who's screening, you saw. I

56:26

think this is the year that phones were boring. Is

56:30

that fair? Unfortunately, I

56:32

would say for the most part phones have been

56:34

boring for a while. As somebody

56:36

who used to cover phones, like, and I

56:39

always love bleeding edge,

56:41

new technology. A lot of

56:43

the companies that used to do that, like

56:45

LG, like our HTC, they're just not around

56:47

anymore. And at this point, you know,

56:50

it's such a massive market that

56:52

it's, it's better to iterate than

56:54

try to do anything super revolutionary

56:56

except for folding phones. I

56:58

love folding phones. I have always wanted the

57:00

biggest phone I can get in my pocket.

57:03

For the past couple of years, I've been using a Samsung

57:07

fold, but this year I just barely got

57:09

the OnePlus open, which

57:12

is like, yeah, why

57:14

like it is, it is an awesome phone

57:16

in a lot of ways. And specifically they

57:18

figured out the camera finally on folding phones

57:20

because that was always kind of like a

57:23

weak point of it. So I

57:25

don't know. Google had their pixel fold, which

57:28

you know, I'm not a, not

57:30

a big pixel fan to begin with. And you know,

57:32

it's not, I don't think it's the

57:34

best folding phone out there, but like my

57:37

wife, she, she's on the

57:39

opposite end. She wants the smallest phone

57:41

ever. And she recently

57:44

switched to the, the Samsung

57:48

flip. No, no. Yeah. I'm a

57:50

folder. She's a flipper. That's the

57:52

whole style. Yeah.

57:54

And she absolutely loves it.

57:56

Cause when it's, when it's in that flipped

57:59

mode, actually fit it in

58:01

her pockets and she's just like, this is

58:03

awesome. So like I do

58:05

feel like folding, flipping, bending,

58:08

all that kind of stuff like

58:10

is getting better and better. Do

58:12

you feel like the screen is getting to

58:14

a better like, like when we

58:16

had Wes was on, we talked about this because

58:19

he's a Wes Fenland, a PC gamer, is a

58:21

long time flip phone, folding phone

58:23

aficionado. He

58:25

was still, he described

58:28

a degree of anxiety that I think I'm

58:30

probably not comfortable with on my phones, which

58:32

is a funny thing to say given that a phone usually

58:34

lasts between one and two years for me before I switch

58:36

to the next one. But

58:40

yeah, do you think about it when

58:42

you're unfolding your phone, do you think, oh, I

58:44

just used one of the 1500 folds I have

58:46

for this thing or whatever it is? So I

58:48

had that same feeling going into it and I

58:50

got the Galaxy Z Fold 3 two years ago

58:52

and I intentionally

58:55

wanted to kind of like not

58:57

baby it to say, hey, you know what?

58:59

So I didn't put a case on it when

59:01

the screen protector, the built-in screen

59:03

protector for the inside screen

59:06

started to kind of like show some cracks

59:08

and peels and dirt coming up. I intentionally

59:10

ripped off the screen protector and was like,

59:12

okay, let's just see how it works. And

59:15

I'll say I did this because I was

59:17

talking to somebody in my

59:19

company who had a fold, a

59:22

flipping phone. Yeah, the half size one. And I showed

59:24

him, I was like, man, I'm starting to get like

59:26

dust and bubbles underneath the screen protector. And he's like,

59:28

oh yeah, mine did that too. And I was like,

59:31

oh, did you send it in? He's like, nah, I

59:33

just ripped the thing off. And I was like, oh,

59:35

you're not supposed to do that, but huh, okay, I

59:37

guess people are doing that out in the wild. This

59:39

is a screen protector that reviewers famously ripped off

59:42

because they thought it was like the manufacturing film,

59:44

right? Yeah. You're not supposed to. And I think

59:46

people have kind of learned that, but I intentionally

59:48

ripped it off and use it. Was it

59:51

fine? So I used it for about a year

59:53

with the screen protector off. And

59:55

I mean, it started to get like little

59:58

grooves in it. Like I wasn't intentionally. hammering

1:00:00

on it, but it started to get little grooves in

1:00:02

it where I would mostly use my thumb, right? But

1:00:04

you'd have to kind of look at it at a

1:00:06

certain angle, but the actual

1:00:08

where the fold actually happens, the

1:00:10

crease definitely was starting to get

1:00:12

like cracks in the middle. So

1:00:14

like, but that was two years

1:00:16

of use. And once

1:00:19

again, like I dropped it a ton and

1:00:21

like that thing was like built like a

1:00:23

tank. So I didn't worry about that. The

1:00:25

actual folding mechanism, I didn't

1:00:27

worry about it at all. Like I never had any

1:00:30

problems with that. It was a screen that was kind

1:00:32

of, you know, but even then it

1:00:34

was not that big of a deal. It's funny because

1:00:37

like the little micro scratches that you get on

1:00:39

your phone just by putting it in and out

1:00:41

of your pocket make me so crazy that I

1:00:43

put screen protectors on my phones like the moment

1:00:45

I unwrap them so that I can just,

1:00:47

when I start getting to any of the micro scratches, I just pop

1:00:49

one off and put a new one on. You're

1:00:51

giving me hives over here, Adam. I will

1:00:53

say it's on the inside, right? Yeah. So

1:00:55

like this was just a normal use. And

1:00:57

once again, if you use the

1:00:59

screen protector, so it is under

1:01:02

warranty. Like I think I started to get some

1:01:04

bubbles and dirt underneath that screen protector like

1:01:06

about nine months in. And that's

1:01:09

when I was like, I'm just going to

1:01:11

rip the whole thing off, but you can

1:01:13

get it replaced under warranty by Samsung for

1:01:15

free. So like, you know, most people I

1:01:17

think would just take it in and kind

1:01:19

of get that screen protector replaced and not

1:01:21

have a problem. That makes more sense. Yeah.

1:01:25

Okay. We're to our favorite part of the

1:01:27

episode, I think. Ooh,

1:01:30

drama. Time for the scene drama. You

1:01:33

just put a bullet point on here that

1:01:35

says ASUS and I don't know what this

1:01:37

one is. Sorry, JJ. Yeah. Well,

1:01:39

it was a couple of things.

1:01:41

Yeah. You know, being

1:01:44

a company that makes a lot of

1:01:46

stuff like ASUS makes

1:01:49

a lot of stuff. And

1:01:51

some of it, you know, hits and some

1:01:53

of it is something I would, you know,

1:01:57

I have no problem using ASUS stuff, but

1:01:59

some of it is just like, ooh boy,

1:02:01

you kind of screwed up on that

1:02:03

for one reason or another. One of

1:02:05

them was the ROG Ally. They started

1:02:07

having problems with the SD card reader

1:02:09

because they ended up putting the SD

1:02:12

card reader right by where the heat vents

1:02:14

from the system. So, you

1:02:16

know, SD card readers were failing. Whoops,

1:02:18

okay. Was that a solder situation or

1:02:21

is that a, or do they say?

1:02:24

I, no, they didn't really, they kind

1:02:27

of like said, hey, listen to your, if you're having these

1:02:29

problems, like we will cover that and you know, that

1:02:32

kind of stuff. But I don't think they

1:02:34

said specifically what was, what was going on.

1:02:36

So yeah, I mean, there's that.

1:02:38

But then I would say kind of the biggest

1:02:41

one is, is the motherboard stuff. And

1:02:43

this wasn't just an ASUS thing. Brad

1:02:46

had a lot of anxiety around his 7950X3D, you

1:02:49

know, but yeah, there was

1:02:53

these voltage issues with motherboards. ASUS

1:02:56

was kind of leading the pack

1:02:58

out there as some of them that were

1:03:00

burning up CPUs and

1:03:02

had some really bad messaging

1:03:05

around what was going

1:03:07

on kind of thing. So yeah, I

1:03:10

don't know. Like, you know, Well, then, yeah,

1:03:12

well, and then we also had this problem with

1:03:14

the AMD was a

1:03:16

large, fairly large number of Ryzen

1:03:19

motherboards this year where

1:03:21

they just started kind of failing sporadically over

1:03:23

time, right? Or is that like, yeah, that

1:03:25

was a different voltage issue. That's the voltage

1:03:27

thing. Okay. Yeah. So the

1:03:30

upshot is it created an

1:03:32

inconsistent, but inevitable

1:03:34

failure for these

1:03:37

what are essentially pretty high end motherboards,

1:03:39

it seemed like. Well, not even just

1:03:41

high end. I mean, I think the

1:03:43

thing is that over the course of

1:03:45

the past number of years, motherboard manufacturers

1:03:47

have always wanted the biggest number on

1:03:49

the box, right? And so like they've

1:03:51

been playing with pushing that bleeding edge

1:03:53

and just going right up to it.

1:03:56

And I think they finally found where that edge

1:03:58

is. And it

1:04:01

wasn't just, I will say, it wasn't just the

1:04:03

motherboard manufacturers. Some of it was on AMD and

1:04:05

how they, you know, deal with voltage and things

1:04:07

like that. So it, you know,

1:04:09

kind of made everyone be like, okay, well, we

1:04:11

need to stop and look at how much voltage

1:04:13

is going in, how much voltage, you know, should

1:04:16

be supported, like what's, you know, all that kind

1:04:18

of stuff. So I think it ended up being

1:04:20

kind of a good thing to stop and kind

1:04:22

of reevaluate like, hey, you know what, don't always

1:04:24

push the bleeding edge on some of this stuff.

1:04:28

But yeah, I mean, but once again, like Brad had

1:04:30

a lot of times where

1:04:32

I was messaging with him and he's like,

1:04:34

I'm scared, man. Like I was like, hey, listen,

1:04:37

like your voltage, if you're checking it, you

1:04:39

know, your voltage is saying where it's at. I

1:04:41

wouldn't worry about it too much, but it

1:04:43

caused him a lot of heartache. If

1:04:47

we, like if the positive

1:04:49

outcome of this whole thing is

1:04:52

that everybody has a, yo, here's

1:04:54

the, just how to run this motherboard at

1:04:56

complete stock button, that

1:05:00

would be a good addition. Like I think,

1:05:02

I think we're in a place where that would be nice

1:05:04

because the, the, the biases are really complicated now. There's

1:05:07

a bazillion options, especially in, in,

1:05:10

in the higher

1:05:12

end boards. And it's hard

1:05:14

to know. Oh, yeah, we

1:05:17

talked about this on the full nerd last time I was on, I think

1:05:20

when, when we were, when I was there with Steve and

1:05:23

like most people, Steve from

1:05:25

Cambridge Nexus, most people don't

1:05:27

realize that running

1:05:30

memory at the XMP settings

1:05:33

is overclocking. At this point.

1:05:35

It's overclocking. Yeah. So like,

1:05:37

it's a, it's a weird, like we've

1:05:39

gotten to this weird situation where everybody's

1:05:41

just overclocking everything all the time and

1:05:43

now nobody's overclocking because it's just the

1:05:45

way everybody runs their computers. And

1:05:48

it's a cool thing now. Yeah, exactly. We

1:05:50

should, we should do more undervolting. That's the,

1:05:52

that's the, I love it. That's the hottest

1:05:54

take of all. Yeah. A

1:05:56

couple more quick hits. You have bad

1:05:59

PC ports here. I would say some of

1:06:01

these are just bad games, Adam, but go right down

1:06:03

the list. You know, yeah, well, I mean,

1:06:05

it was it was something we. Yeah. It

1:06:07

and it depends on the game. But yeah, the The

1:06:09

Last of Us that came

1:06:11

out on PC, Jedi Survivor, Redfall,

1:06:14

Hogwarts, Legacy, Diablo 4, Starfield.

1:06:17

I mean, there were so many games that

1:06:19

came out that had issues.

1:06:24

Whether it was, I mean, a

1:06:26

lot of people point to the developers

1:06:28

being lazy. They didn't optimize for XYZ

1:06:30

games. That's not how it works, guys.

1:06:32

Yeah, right. Yeah. And

1:06:34

we had a lot of discussion. I feel like people

1:06:37

got sick of us talking about it on our

1:06:39

podcast a little bit because we were like, I

1:06:41

was bringing in multiple different people to be like,

1:06:43

Hey, how do you know what's going

1:06:46

on with this with these developers and

1:06:48

quote, unquote, lazy ports and things like that. So

1:06:50

some of it's that some of it is. Was

1:06:52

it all performance stuff or was there like control

1:06:54

and UI stuff as well? Do

1:06:56

you feel like I mean, I

1:06:59

think I think

1:07:01

the the idea of hey,

1:07:04

it's not optimized to run the way that I

1:07:06

think it should on my hardware is one part

1:07:08

of it. I think one of one of it

1:07:10

is, Hey, I want to

1:07:12

use the most bleeding edge tech and

1:07:14

guess what? It's not there. And I'm

1:07:16

talking specifically about Starfield. Oh, why didn't

1:07:18

that deal assess? Oh, because AMD gave

1:07:20

them money to not implement it or

1:07:22

whatnot. I think some of it is

1:07:25

like, like

1:07:27

being able to put options in there. Like, I

1:07:29

think of like Redfall where it's just like the

1:07:31

settings menu in there was just like junk. It

1:07:34

was hard to know if anything was actually

1:07:36

making a change performance wise at all. And

1:07:38

no matter what, you would always have these

1:07:40

huge stutter drops in these specific places. So

1:07:42

I honestly like it's just

1:07:44

it runs the gamut of

1:07:46

everything. Yeah, it's

1:07:50

it's funny. The Redfall, the

1:07:53

Redfall, the Starfield thing is interesting because, you

1:07:55

know, it's a Microsoft studio now and

1:07:58

they're building primarily presumably for Xbox. consoles.

1:08:00

That purchase happened midway through

1:08:02

the development cycle for that

1:08:04

game, but it

1:08:08

makes sense that they'd run the native version

1:08:10

of FSR, AMD's FSR

1:08:12

rather than DLSS. Look,

1:08:14

no will. AMD gave them money. I mean,

1:08:18

look, all of this is

1:08:20

complicated. Rami Ismail says that every

1:08:22

game that ever ships is a miracle, which

1:08:25

is I think accurate

1:08:27

given my experience. I

1:08:29

will also tell you that I have had people

1:08:31

yell at me on the message boards and we

1:08:34

have a very small game that literally, compared

1:08:36

to Diablo 4 and Starfield, literally no one

1:08:39

plays. But I've

1:08:41

had somebody tell me that with the straight face that a 1070

1:08:43

with 16 gigs

1:08:45

of RAM on a, I think

1:08:48

a 9600 and Intel 9600 CPU should be able to run, not running, they

1:08:55

were like, hey, the game runs at 60 frames a second.

1:08:57

I should be getting 90 to 120

1:08:59

frames a second on this. I'm like, I

1:09:02

love that you think that it's very sweet. I,

1:09:05

people have weird expectations

1:09:07

about performance on, but

1:09:10

back to the GPU thing, right? When a

1:09:12

GPU, you know, is costing twice the amount

1:09:14

of money that it used to, like I

1:09:16

totally get where somebody's like, Hey, you know

1:09:18

what? Like I paid for this, you know,

1:09:21

very expensive graphics card and usually, usually on

1:09:23

the PC, you can power through problems, but

1:09:25

we're seeing, you know, a lot of these

1:09:27

things where it's just like, no matter even

1:09:29

if you have the highest hardware, you cannot

1:09:31

power through some of these problems. Well,

1:09:34

it's, it's funny you say that because I literally

1:09:36

had a support, a support ticket

1:09:38

the other day where I helped somebody out

1:09:40

with a problem and they were like, I have a 40 90, I

1:09:42

have a 3900 K here's, I'm only

1:09:44

getting this frame rate. I was like, I have

1:09:46

the exact same computer you have. And I'm seeing

1:09:49

literally a 50% increase in

1:09:51

performance that you're seeing. And we went, I, and I

1:09:54

took the time and I troubleshooted with the guy and

1:09:56

was like, Hey, by the way, guess what your problem

1:09:58

is? Your memory clocks. are

1:10:00

at JEDEC defaults and not the

1:10:02

XMP settings. So you're underclocking your

1:10:04

memory and as a result, you're

1:10:06

on your UE4 engine games. He

1:10:08

was running the RAM at stock.

1:10:11

Yeah. Yeah, but

1:10:13

I mean, but like UE4

1:10:16

is really memory speed dependent.

1:10:18

So yeah, anyway, it's

1:10:20

a weird situation to be in. It's

1:10:23

always a weird situation. Let's see. Let's

1:10:26

see. Apple stopped selling the Apple Watch.

1:10:28

That seems like a whoops. I'm glad I might talk

1:10:30

about this in a full episode at some point because

1:10:32

it's quite an interesting story. But didn't it come back?

1:10:34

Isn't that, I thought the latest news is that, oh,

1:10:36

actually we're allowing it again. I

1:10:38

don't know. Once again, I

1:10:40

don't follow Apple too closely. She's Adam. Let's

1:10:43

see. It looks

1:10:45

like if I, I'm going to go hit buy on this Apple

1:10:47

Watch Ultra 2. Do it. Let's

1:10:50

see. I think I'll get a, a Braille loop. You get

1:10:52

a buy for science. Yeah, it's for science. I'll

1:10:54

tell my wife that and we'll see how it goes. Oh,

1:10:57

why'd you buy a, why'd you buy a knife? $900 watch. No

1:11:00

trade in. No, of course not. Buy now. Let's

1:11:03

see. This is the most exciting segment we've ever

1:11:05

done. You gotta go buy an Apple Watch. Might

1:11:08

as well get an Apple card number. With my

1:11:10

active lifestyle leaving the house all the time. Yeah.

1:11:12

Um, you don't want to break it. I

1:11:16

can pick it up in store today at Apple

1:11:18

Valley Fair. Yeah. So yeah,

1:11:20

there you go. It's back on the market. Joe

1:11:22

Biden must have needed an Apple Watch for Christmas

1:11:24

for somebody. Yeah. I went immediately

1:11:27

to Joe Biden and said, Hey, listen, come on, we

1:11:29

got to figure this out. That's

1:11:31

Joe America. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. Uh,

1:11:34

but, but no, so they, they had a,

1:11:36

the patent, a patent, uh, judgment

1:11:38

go against them on like

1:11:41

the way this works is interesting. Like I said, I think Brad

1:11:43

and I are going to probably do a whole episode about it

1:11:45

or we have plenty of that episode. That would be interesting. Interesting

1:11:47

story. Uh, Apple also skipped a year

1:11:49

on the iPad pro. They rolled out the M

1:11:51

two ones last like November. I think I feel

1:11:53

like I bought one right after they came out,

1:11:55

but maybe it was a couple of weeks. Uh,

1:11:58

and then just kind of didn't do it. other one this year,

1:12:00

which is, you know, as a person

1:12:02

who purchased the last one, kind of okay with

1:12:04

that. On the other hand, M3

1:12:07

seems like a nice upgrade. So, you know,

1:12:09

maybe, maybe, uh, more iPad next year. Uh,

1:12:13

and then the 12 volt two by two by six.

1:12:16

Yeah. So obviously one of the big things

1:12:18

last year with the launch of the 40

1:12:20

series was, Oh my God, my 12 volt

1:12:22

high power cables are melting my system. Uh,

1:12:25

I mean, well, only a smallish

1:12:28

number. What had it happening to them,

1:12:30

but because of that, uh, the, the,

1:12:32

uh, all the powers

1:12:34

that PCI SIG got together to say,

1:12:36

Hey, you know what? We're going to do a slight revision. And, uh,

1:12:39

I have actually seen personally in the

1:12:41

wild my first, uh, power supplies

1:12:44

that have the 12 volt two by six power

1:12:46

connector, which, you know, it's, it's not the revision

1:12:48

that I think people were screaming for. Uh, but

1:12:51

specifically, uh, you know, it does,

1:12:53

it deal with some of the, uh, seating

1:12:56

issues to make sure, Hey, it's fully seated.

1:12:58

Um, specifically for

1:13:00

the power supply to GPU supplemental

1:13:02

power cables. Yeah. The,

1:13:05

you know, the, the, the big change of

1:13:07

like, Hey, you don't have three eight pin

1:13:09

PCI power plugs. Uh, now

1:13:11

you just have one, uh, you

1:13:13

know, 12 volt high power cable. Um, and

1:13:16

yeah, like I, I still like the

1:13:18

cable as long as it's seated properly. Like

1:13:21

I would much rather use a smaller cable

1:13:23

than, than a much larger cable. Uh, and

1:13:26

also the benefits that you get from the ATX

1:13:28

3.0 spec, uh, is, is

1:13:30

really nice. So the, you

1:13:33

know, this is just a slight iteration, but

1:13:35

I think at this point, a lot of that

1:13:37

is behind us now for the most part. Um,

1:13:40

people are on their outreach ponies about something

1:13:42

else. The, the, um,

1:13:44

the interesting thing to me is so is

1:13:46

the new cable going to be backwards compatible

1:13:49

with the old cards or is this a

1:13:51

third new table in the last

1:13:53

three generations? Right. I did have that question.

1:13:55

Uh, at least according to Gordon, he says

1:13:57

it is backwards compatible. So, uh, Yeah,

1:14:00

yeah, yeah. So like the, the,

1:14:03

the, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Cause

1:14:05

I was, we were building a PC that

1:14:07

had the new cable in the new power

1:14:10

supply that we were using, but we also

1:14:12

wanted to use a sleeved cable and we

1:14:14

only had the older 12 volt high power

1:14:16

cable. Uh, and it's

1:14:19

the works. So it works. It works. It

1:14:21

just, you get the benefits from using the

1:14:23

12 volts two by six. Got

1:14:26

it. Okay. That sounds good. And what's going

1:14:28

on? There's a, there's a slot standard coming

1:14:30

to write a power powered slot standard to

1:14:33

deliver the power through the motherboard theoretically at

1:14:35

some point. Yeah. I mean, this

1:14:37

kind of goes into my, my favorite tech of the year a little

1:14:39

bit, but the, uh, at Computex, uh,

1:14:41

Asus was showing off a GPU that

1:14:43

didn't have a dedicated, uh,

1:14:46

cable running to it. And instead they,

1:14:49

they added a, had probably

1:14:51

like an inch, uh, after

1:14:53

the, uh, PCIe, uh, by

1:14:56

16 slot, uh, you know, just kind

1:14:58

of like further down the card, uh, and

1:15:00

then a subsequent slot on the motherboard

1:15:02

to deliver power. Um, we

1:15:05

don't know a ton about it. We know what kind

1:15:07

of like comes from a server standard that's out there.

1:15:10

We don't know the theoretical limits of like how

1:15:12

much power it can feed through there, but essentially

1:15:14

the idea is you actually 12 plug

1:15:16

in a 12 volt high power cable

1:15:18

to the motherboard and it just delivers

1:15:21

the power through into that slot. Asus

1:15:24

is the only one so far that has

1:15:26

talked about having that standard, you

1:15:28

know, uh, running that much

1:15:30

power through the motherboard. It seems like it could

1:15:32

be brought to, right? You know, yeah, it's

1:15:35

not something that I would feel excited

1:15:37

about right now unless it's, you know,

1:15:39

proven to be okay. So I'm not,

1:15:41

you know, like chomping at the

1:15:43

bit to get it. And I, I, you know, but

1:15:45

I see, I see the benefit there and you know,

1:15:48

it would be nice if it becomes a thing, but

1:15:50

also at the same time, then

1:15:52

if you buy this GPU, you're

1:15:55

kind of stuck with it because it literally does not have a,

1:15:57

you know, any other slot to deliver power. So you. you

1:16:00

can't take that GPU and use it in a traditional

1:16:02

system. So. It

1:16:04

seems like a better solution would be to build

1:16:06

a bridge that goes, like

1:16:09

to build a thing that goes in and

1:16:11

loops around and then hooks into the, into

1:16:13

the top of the video card. What

1:16:16

do I know? Oh, Adam's digging around. Sorry.

1:16:18

I'm, I'm grabbing a GPU. I know this is

1:16:20

not a video podcast, but I, uh, so

1:16:22

one of the other things that we saw, uh,

1:16:24

was putting the 12 volt high power connector,

1:16:26

uh, by the bottom. Yeah.

1:16:28

Like kind of on the same side

1:16:31

as where the PCIe slot is. So, uh, when

1:16:33

you're feeding the cable through from the back of

1:16:35

your case, you're just going straight into the video

1:16:38

card rather than trying to like loop it around

1:16:40

to the, to the side or even to the

1:16:42

back. Uh, so yeah, I, I

1:16:44

like that, but also it really depends on

1:16:46

the case. So it's not an

1:16:48

open spec or not anything, but yeah, that's,

1:16:50

that's, that's interesting. Okay. So, uh,

1:16:52

last, last little bit here, what's,

1:16:55

what's some of your favorite stuff this year, Adam? What's, what's the

1:16:57

stuff that got you excited? Maybe the small stuff, maybe the big

1:16:59

stuff doesn't matter. You know, like

1:17:01

I, I will say this is something

1:17:03

we've talked about since CES 2023, uh,

1:17:05

and ended up being kind of a

1:17:07

big deal for the industry, but Hey,

1:17:10

will, uh, did you know that fan technology

1:17:12

has kind of been the same for a

1:17:14

long time? Uh, well, yeah, you hook

1:17:17

a motor on a thing and you put the blades

1:17:19

aim to specific way and then the, then

1:17:21

the air moves and it makes a whooshing sound,

1:17:24

you know, and that's how it's worked for a while.

1:17:27

And I guess, I mean, it still works in a

1:17:29

lot of cases, but at CES 2023, Gordon

1:17:31

and I saw a company called, uh,

1:17:34

four systems and they had this technology

1:17:36

called the air jet. Uh, they had two

1:17:38

different variations, the air jet mini and the air jet pro,

1:17:40

I think was the bigger one. Uh, and

1:17:43

what this is aiming to do is

1:17:45

to revolutionize cooling

1:17:47

technology, especially in small,

1:17:50

uh, hardware. So

1:17:52

like they had some demos at CES,

1:17:55

uh, so far, they actually did release a piece

1:17:57

of hardware. Actually have it back here, a ZOTAC

1:17:59

mini. PC, it's like

1:18:01

a point of sale kind of system,

1:18:03

like a real small. It's

1:18:06

like a solid state cooler though, right? Yeah, yeah,

1:18:08

yeah. So, yeah, long story short, I actually have

1:18:10

one here because last time I was here, they

1:18:12

gave it to me, but it's like the size

1:18:14

of... Like it's like a battery. Yeah,

1:18:17

yeah. And so it's solid

1:18:19

state cooling. A

1:18:22

lot of people were kind of debating on

1:18:25

if it is actually solid state, but the

1:18:27

idea is that it has no motors. It

1:18:29

is... And all the

1:18:31

efficiency of the cooling technology, just go

1:18:33

look up PC World AirJet. You'll

1:18:36

see some deeper explanations about it, but the

1:18:38

idea is that with this thin and light

1:18:40

device, it has immense back pressure to

1:18:43

be able to break the boundary

1:18:45

layer of heat. So I guess there's a

1:18:47

thing where like there's a boundary layer over

1:18:50

anything that gets really hot and

1:18:52

traditional cooling fans has a hard time

1:18:54

breaking through that and like getting the

1:18:57

cool air over it. And

1:19:00

this is aimed at really

1:19:02

using the back pressure to break that boundary

1:19:04

layer and exhaust it out of the system.

1:19:07

The benefits are is that it's really

1:19:09

small. I mean, and they had...

1:19:11

I don't have it here, but they... At their

1:19:13

demos, they compared it to the fan that

1:19:17

is traditionally in a laptop

1:19:19

and they're saying that this thing is way much

1:19:21

more efficient and also

1:19:24

silent because it doesn't have spinning

1:19:26

blades. You

1:19:28

can hear when it's at full load, you

1:19:30

can hear the air coming out, but the

1:19:32

actual system itself doesn't have moving

1:19:34

parts to make a sound. That's

1:19:37

interesting. Yeah. So I mean, they've showed

1:19:39

us a ton of demos. There's

1:19:42

only one actual piece of hardware that has it

1:19:44

that has hit the

1:19:47

market, but they continue... I

1:19:50

love going and meeting with the people over there because they're always

1:19:52

looking at new things and just

1:19:56

trying new variations of... of

1:20:00

tech that's out there. So, you know,

1:20:02

they have laptops. They even had our

1:20:04

latest video was about a MacBook Air

1:20:07

that replaced this, but worked the

1:20:09

same performance as a Pro. SSDs,

1:20:14

you know, one of the big things that we've always

1:20:16

yelled about since the beginning is like, hey, it would

1:20:18

be awesome to have this in a steam deck. And

1:20:21

they're like, yeah, we know, we know, it

1:20:24

would be awesome. So like,

1:20:26

yeah, long story short, like this

1:20:29

AirJET I truly believe

1:20:31

could revolutionize how we

1:20:33

cool small electronic devices. So

1:20:35

this is the Thor AirJET is

1:20:38

what this is called. Yeah, F-R-O-R-E

1:20:40

AirJET. I know. Intercat.

1:20:43

So I like, like, I've seen a lot of

1:20:45

things in the years. You know, I mean, I

1:20:47

haven't been here as long as you or Gordon

1:20:50

in tech, but like, of all the things I've

1:20:52

seen, this has like been one of the things

1:20:54

that has like gotten me truly excited. Well,

1:20:57

I joke about not being excited to

1:20:59

not go to CES, but walking around

1:21:01

the back alleys of the, of like

1:21:03

the, the, the disused halls where it's

1:21:05

just a bazillion small booths missing

1:21:07

this stuff. Like I remember we saw a hydrophobic

1:21:11

nanocoding back in one

1:21:13

of those areas three years before anybody

1:21:15

shipped anything that was actually in a,

1:21:18

you know, that made your phone waterproof. The

1:21:21

eye tracking and all the different weird, like

1:21:23

you, you, you walk around the, you walk

1:21:25

around the back end of the, of the,

1:21:28

I can't recall it is stacked on

1:21:30

top of each other, but it's like

1:21:32

this enormous, like 10 football fields of

1:21:34

conventional. Yeah. And you see five years,

1:21:36

if you have the right kind of eyes, you can see

1:21:38

five years into the future back there, which is fun as

1:21:41

well. Shall I do another one or

1:21:43

do you want to do another one? Well, I was going to

1:21:45

say I'm actually wearing one of mine. I bought a pair of

1:21:49

SteelSeries wireless headphones last year. Nice.

1:21:52

So I've always been a studio headphone guy for

1:21:55

fairly obvious reasons, but it turns out

1:21:57

when you sit in the same desk for 10 or 12 hours. day

1:22:00

and you walk, it's nice to not have to take your headphones off

1:22:02

to walk into the kitchen and get a drink. Yeah.

1:22:05

Um, and, and, or to dig around into the

1:22:07

desk or whatever. And you haven't had any latency

1:22:09

issues or? So I

1:22:11

did a fair amount of research when I

1:22:14

got these. They're really expensive. It's

1:22:16

the SteelSeries Arctis Nova

1:22:18

Pro Wireless. And

1:22:21

they have, they're basically, it's the only

1:22:23

low latency headset I could find that

1:22:25

had a line in. And

1:22:27

I'm not sure if it's an analog line end because most

1:22:29

of them are USB devices. Yeah. Yeah.

1:22:32

So, uh, it has a tiny bit of

1:22:34

latency. It's like 110 milliseconds if I had

1:22:36

to guess, like having, having done

1:22:38

a fair amount of latency analysis on food stuff.

1:22:41

That seems about right. Uh, it's

1:22:44

less than 200 more than more. It's

1:22:46

detectable, but not, not annoying.

1:22:48

Okay. Um, and it

1:22:50

has a little, uh, like, um, a

1:22:53

desktop control unit. How, how does that?

1:22:56

Yeah, it has a little breakout box that actually

1:22:58

also charges the second battery. So you have two

1:23:00

batteries, you can swap back and forth.

1:23:02

Oh, that's cool. So when you're, when your battery conks

1:23:04

out, you just pop the side off and switch a

1:23:06

new battery in. And as long as you like do

1:23:08

it within, I think eight or nine seconds,

1:23:10

you don't even have to like hit the power button again.

1:23:12

It just turns back on. Thanks.

1:23:15

Um, I don't actually use any of the USB stuff. I

1:23:17

just have it. I'm literally running

1:23:19

off of USB power and

1:23:21

then pipe in an audio signal from

1:23:23

my analog mixer and

1:23:26

I do so for

1:23:28

the audio nerds, I, my,

1:23:30

I, my ears

1:23:32

are a little bit lower than they are traditionally,

1:23:34

uh, on, on

1:23:36

a wired set of headphones, but

1:23:39

it's, it's, it's nice. And I can do Bluetooth. I can

1:23:41

hook it up for my phone. So if I need to

1:23:43

take a call or something like that, I can pop out

1:23:45

the little side mic, hook up to the

1:23:47

Bluetooth, listen to music or a podcast or whatever, and

1:23:49

have that all mix in on the same, the same

1:23:52

headphones without a bunch of weird software on

1:23:54

my computer, which I quite like. That's

1:23:57

awesome. Yeah. options

1:24:00

on low latency wireless are basically

1:24:02

DJ headphones that are crazy

1:24:05

expensive and all had weird sound profiles

1:24:07

that didn't seem good for the stuff

1:24:09

that I do. Both

1:24:11

the sound mixing on the game and playing games and

1:24:13

listening to music. So here we are. Another

1:24:18

one that I was excited about this year is we talked

1:24:22

a lot about a PC world, the

1:24:25

ATX 3.0 spec. I'm sorry,

1:24:27

the ATX case

1:24:29

system spec. Of course. Yeah.

1:24:32

I think everybody does that, honestly, Adam. Just

1:24:35

the other day I was eating a bowl

1:24:37

of Captain Crunch's Christmas Crunch. It's a fabulous

1:24:40

seasonal cereal with my daughter and we were

1:24:42

talking about ATX 3.0. You too.

1:24:44

I had no idea. But

1:24:46

yeah, so the ATX spec on systems

1:24:48

have been around for decades, right? And

1:24:50

the way we

1:24:53

build a tower PC has pretty much stayed the

1:24:55

same for a long

1:24:57

time. And what's happening now is that

1:25:00

companies are starting to kind of think outside

1:25:03

the box. And one of them is this

1:25:05

whole... There's

1:25:07

not a quick and easy way to

1:25:09

kind of say it, but the idea

1:25:11

of putting the motherboard headers on the

1:25:13

backside. So you get a

1:25:16

couple of benefits from this. Oh!

1:25:19

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So instead of

1:25:21

having all those ugly wires visible through

1:25:23

your nice glass side panel,

1:25:26

now you have the wires on the back.

1:25:29

They say it helps with maybe airflow, but I'm

1:25:31

like, eh, I don't know about that. That seems

1:25:33

like bunk to me. But it seems

1:25:35

like all the benefits of putting a

1:25:37

hole behind your CPU bracket on

1:25:40

the motherboard tray, but just

1:25:42

for everything. So that it's also like all

1:25:45

of the stuff that's a pain in the ass

1:25:47

access around your cooler or your RAM or whatever

1:25:50

is suddenly on the backside. So

1:25:52

you just take the back case off to adjust

1:25:54

your wire. That sounds fabulous. So imagine building system,

1:25:56

right? I

1:26:00

typically like to build outside the motherboard stuff outside

1:26:02

of the case. So I put the CPU in

1:26:04

the RAM, the SSD, all that kind of stuff,

1:26:06

you know, prep it, put it in the case.

1:26:08

And then when you plug in the power supply

1:26:10

stuff, you have to do that dance where you

1:26:12

get the cable, you route it through the hole

1:26:14

that you think it needs to go in. Then

1:26:16

you go to the other side of the case

1:26:18

and oh man, it's the wrong hole. I need

1:26:20

to take it back out, put it back in, right?

1:26:22

So that whole dance of going side to side.

1:26:24

This is, once you put the motherboard in, everything

1:26:27

is right there. Like, so you

1:26:29

plug in the power supply and

1:26:31

then you route your cables literally

1:26:33

just, you know, okay, it goes

1:26:35

there, it goes there, it goes there. I mean, there's,

1:26:38

you know, a couple of ways that it

1:26:41

doesn't work. Obviously for the GPU, um, I

1:26:43

mean, Asus is taking it to the next

1:26:45

extreme by having that power slot so that

1:26:47

you just plug 12 volt high power in

1:26:49

your motherboard in the back and then that

1:26:51

works. So in some cases you'll still need

1:26:53

to route a PCI power to your GPU

1:26:55

in the traditional way. You

1:26:58

just put a hole though. Yeah, right.

1:27:01

Yeah. Hole in the middle of the motherboard ran

1:27:03

the, run the cable through there. Exactly. So the,

1:27:05

I don't know, like the, we

1:27:08

saw a lot this at CompuTecs, a lot

1:27:11

of companies getting into this space. And right

1:27:13

now like it's still, it's still early days.

1:27:15

Companies need to work together to make this

1:27:17

kind of like a viable system. Cause

1:27:20

you want the motherboard and the case to have

1:27:22

the same kind of cutouts and put in the

1:27:24

same places. Um, there

1:27:26

are companies working, working

1:27:28

together to make this a reality,

1:27:30

but this is kind of for

1:27:32

traditional tower systems. This is like the,

1:27:35

the, like the next evolution. And

1:27:37

some people aren't super excited about it, but I

1:27:40

was excited about it already when we saw the

1:27:42

CompuTecs and then I got more excited about it

1:27:45

once I actually built my first system in it.

1:27:47

And I can't talk about that system cause it's

1:27:49

under embargo for a little bit. Um, just subscribe

1:27:51

over on PC world and go watch the video,

1:27:54

but building my first system in it, like

1:27:56

I've built many systems. I'm sure you've built many systems.

1:27:58

So this wasn't like, revolutionary, but

1:28:01

it was just like so easy. And

1:28:04

I can imagine for you first time builders,

1:28:07

like not having to do that snake cable

1:28:09

dance and making sure you're plugging into the

1:28:11

right spot, like it just

1:28:14

feels like this is gonna be like

1:28:16

groundbreaking for like just building in a

1:28:18

system. Well, I mean, yeah, like I

1:28:20

think about plugging in the 12 volt

1:28:23

CPU power, right? And how, especially if

1:28:25

you're in a small mid tower, getting

1:28:29

those big fat power cables around and getting

1:28:31

them to turn the corner and getting them

1:28:33

in a place that doesn't look janky is

1:28:37

always a pain in the ass. And

1:28:39

it's like to me, it really

1:28:41

brings me back to like when we first started

1:28:43

having CPUs that had backplane mounts and

1:28:46

CPU coolers that had backplane mounts. And

1:28:49

suddenly Cooler Master was like, hey, you know what, we just

1:28:51

cut a hole in the board where the

1:28:53

CPU goes so that you can unscrew it

1:28:55

without having to dismantle the entire PC and

1:28:58

change the CPU cooler, you're welcome. And

1:29:00

like it really

1:29:02

makes a difference. Now, like

1:29:05

you said, the place that we could really mess this up

1:29:07

is if we have a hardware compatibility list for your motherboard

1:29:09

in cases now, where like the

1:29:11

case holes only line up with certain cases

1:29:13

on certain motherboards. I would

1:29:15

hope that we would not create that problem

1:29:18

for ourselves. And once again,

1:29:20

I do know of a handful of

1:29:23

companies that are actually working together to

1:29:25

make sure that, hey, you know what,

1:29:27

you have a different system, I have a different

1:29:30

system, but at least at the end of the

1:29:32

day, the cutout zones for the case are

1:29:34

in similar places that you're not gonna get

1:29:36

screwed. So I

1:29:39

mean, Gordon always likes to point out, like if you

1:29:41

look at the actual ATX spec, it's

1:29:43

actually pretty damn loose. It just all the

1:29:45

companies kind of like, were able to come

1:29:47

together and just agree to something and it's

1:29:49

been that way for decades. So like,

1:29:52

I do believe that we can get

1:29:54

there to a similar spot. And

1:29:58

trust the community, man. Yeah,

1:30:00

yeah, and it's not groundbreaking

1:30:02

like a BTX or an actual

1:30:04

complete change to the ATX spec,

1:30:06

but it is the next

1:30:09

step along the way in my mind. So

1:30:13

my next thing, we've talked about this

1:30:15

a lot on the podcast, so I won't belabor it,

1:30:17

but there's two pieces of open source software that have

1:30:19

completely changed the way I use, not the

1:30:22

way I use, but the way I manipulate my

1:30:24

computer. Fan control, which I

1:30:26

think you introduced me to, is

1:30:29

an open source fan curve editor. Oh, it's

1:30:31

so good. You can do,

1:30:33

it does stuff that you can do

1:30:35

in other applications, but it

1:30:37

bundles them all in one place and

1:30:39

lets you make detailed

1:30:42

and well-defined fan

1:30:45

curves and behaviors for your fans. So for

1:30:47

example, you can set it so

1:30:49

that it runs one curve when the CPU temperature

1:30:51

is below this point and a different curve when

1:30:53

the CPU temperature goes up to the

1:30:56

under load temperature and it just

1:30:58

switches automatically between the two and it means that

1:31:00

you don't have

1:31:02

to hear your PC when you're not doing something

1:31:04

and you do, but you

1:31:08

can still turn it up so you can get max performance if you

1:31:10

want when you're under high load. And it

1:31:12

literally puts every single fan in

1:31:14

your system in one

1:31:17

easy to handle place, right? For

1:31:19

me, assuming your hardware is all supported, it's all

1:31:22

across. Exactly, yeah. So for me,

1:31:24

it's like I

1:31:26

used to have a different application

1:31:28

that ran the fans for the

1:31:30

AIO. I had a different application

1:31:32

that would run the case fans. If

1:31:35

I wanted to control any sort of

1:31:37

the fan curves on the GPU, that

1:31:39

would be another application. This literally puts

1:31:41

everything into one and adds those features

1:31:43

that you're talking about. I

1:31:45

know you talked with Brad recently about it too,

1:31:47

but when I was telling him about

1:31:49

the history kind of stuff because he was

1:31:51

like, man, my system does get

1:31:54

loud really quick. And I'm like, oh, well,

1:31:56

it's ramping up based off of CPU package

1:31:58

temperature. You can tell it not to. ramp up

1:32:00

so quick, you know, under those spiky loads

1:32:02

kind of thing. And you're just like,

1:32:04

really? And I'm like, yeah, that's. And

1:32:08

for me, having it all in one place is nice.

1:32:10

Not having to go into the bios to make adjustments

1:32:12

is really, really convenient because that's what I used to

1:32:14

do. And then the other thing

1:32:16

is my, my

1:32:19

water cooler is supported. So

1:32:21

I can base my fan speed on the

1:32:23

water temperature rather than the CPU temperature, which

1:32:25

is kind of automatically does the hysteresis for

1:32:28

you. Huge. But yeah, it means that I

1:32:30

actually am spinning up

1:32:32

the fans based on the amount of energy in

1:32:34

the water rather than the amount of energy, then

1:32:37

the instantaneous measurement of the heat coming off the CPU,

1:32:39

which is nice. And I don't

1:32:41

know about you, but I definitely kicked some

1:32:43

money to, to the person who developed this.

1:32:45

Cause I'm just like, it's free, but I

1:32:47

want you to keep going. And, and honestly,

1:32:49

like the past, whatever months I've been using

1:32:51

it, I mean, updates are coming out hot

1:32:53

and heavy. Yeah. He,

1:32:55

I had a problem with a piece of hardware.

1:32:57

He helped me out. I, I chucked some money

1:33:00

over there after that. I

1:33:02

need to add them on my, on my

1:33:04

GitHub monthly, monthly subs, I think. But

1:33:07

it's just one guy and he's using open

1:33:09

source libraries that connect to all

1:33:11

the hardware on the same front. Open RGB

1:33:14

is the same idea, but for all everything

1:33:16

that has lights in your computer. And

1:33:19

it is broadly supported using a series of

1:33:21

all open source, other

1:33:23

open source projects. It

1:33:26

also provides an API that

1:33:28

other things can connect to. So if

1:33:30

you want to use like

1:33:32

Aurora or I can't remember

1:33:34

the overall replacement is called

1:33:37

Artemis to, to

1:33:39

interface to get like fancy game lighting

1:33:41

onto your RGB lights. You can do

1:33:43

that. How many, I'm sorry, real quick.

1:33:45

How many people use the game specific

1:33:47

lighting? I know anybody.

1:33:49

I, you, I did. So when I played a

1:33:51

lot of Overwatch and I had a logic keyboard

1:33:53

that was supported, I did because it would change

1:33:56

colors when you change characters. But

1:33:58

then they introduced a bunch of skins that didn't. match

1:34:00

the colors of the like once

1:34:02

the Diva skin once you had a blue

1:34:04

Diva skin the pink Diva keyboard didn't make

1:34:06

as much sense and like you know whatever.

1:34:08

Okay. Like I'm

1:34:11

a tasteful northern lights on all of

1:34:13

my lights Adam but

1:34:16

the benefit for open RGB is that you can

1:34:18

set up all of your lighting all of your

1:34:20

things with lights in one place and

1:34:22

apply the same changes to all of them at the same time.

1:34:25

You can do maps like mine mine goes from top

1:34:27

to bottom throughout the case the RAM you know it's

1:34:29

all synchronized nicely. I spent a fair I don't want

1:34:32

to say an embarrassing amount of time but I spent

1:34:34

a fair amount of time figuring out how to do

1:34:36

that. I'm really happy with it. I'm

1:34:38

never going to touch it again probably. Awesome. But

1:34:41

it just kind of quietly runs and

1:34:43

if you have a QMK compatible keyboard

1:34:45

you can even hook that

1:34:47

in to open RGB now so you can

1:34:49

get real time lighting on a real real

1:34:51

ass keyboard which was the thing I didn't

1:34:54

think was possible because of the low power

1:34:56

CPUs that they put in those keyboards. Wow.

1:34:59

But some enterprising people figured it out

1:35:01

for a lot of the most popular

1:35:04

you know like like

1:35:07

RGB mechanical keyboards out there.

1:35:09

So yeah it's a it's a cool thing.

1:35:12

Nice. Well my last cool thing

1:35:14

that I was excited about this year I saw

1:35:17

I'm in I originally went to school

1:35:19

for audio engineering back in 2008. And

1:35:22

even then we were talking about

1:35:24

how the frequency spectrum that wireless

1:35:26

devices worked on was

1:35:28

you know the audio professionals you

1:35:32

know we're getting the short end of the stick and

1:35:34

just over time we're going to get less and less

1:35:36

of that spectrum right. So a

1:35:38

couple of years ago we did switch to

1:35:40

Wi-Fi direct based systems and I had I

1:35:42

had some problems

1:35:44

especially when we go to trade shows

1:35:47

like where everybody's using Wi-Fi like we

1:35:49

had some series of dips. Our

1:35:52

strategy is CES and E3 was

1:35:54

just to carry a 25 foot

1:35:56

long XLR cable. I

1:36:00

actually carried a loop of XLR cable everywhere I went

1:36:02

with the stick mic on it and I'd chuck it

1:36:04

to Joey when it was time to record a bit.

1:36:06

Right? Because it worked every time. Yeah,

1:36:08

right. So this

1:36:11

year, and believe me, we

1:36:15

bought way too many wireless audio systems over

1:36:18

the past couple of years to try to find one that

1:36:20

works well for our

1:36:23

workflow. But this year, Rode

1:36:25

introduced, actually just bought a second one,

1:36:27

the Rode Wireless Pro. So

1:36:30

this isn't too much different from

1:36:33

some of the other wireless systems like the

1:36:35

DJI mic is actually pretty awesome. The

1:36:37

original Rode wireless systems are awesome.

1:36:40

But what the Pro introduces is

1:36:42

onboard recording of 32-bit float. Which

1:36:46

32-bit float, if people who don't know,

1:36:48

is a good way to think

1:36:51

of it as like high dynamic range for audio

1:36:53

or like... I'm

1:36:58

trying to think of... Well, so you think about... If

1:37:02

you're looking at audio recording, you're taking

1:37:04

a number of samples per second

1:37:06

and the size of

1:37:08

each of those samples

1:37:10

determines how much audio gets captured

1:37:12

basically, right? So if you're recording

1:37:14

at 48 kilohertz, you're recording 48,000

1:37:16

slices every second and each of

1:37:21

those slices is either 16-bit integer, 24-bit

1:37:23

integer, I think you can do 24-bit float

1:37:27

now too or 32-bit float, right? Yeah,

1:37:30

and so 32-bit float, so 32-bits gives

1:37:32

you the most like

1:37:36

range of whatever the frequency is

1:37:38

going to be, but 32-bit float

1:37:41

essentially captures it in more

1:37:44

space fidelity. Yeah,

1:37:46

highest fidelity and also... Sorry,

1:37:49

I'm explaining the

1:37:51

math bad here. The idea is that

1:37:53

no matter how hot that you have

1:37:55

the gain or how quiet, you

1:37:57

can bring it back in post. in

1:38:00

camera. Oh, wow. I didn't

1:38:02

know that. Yeah. So the idea is

1:38:04

that like, you know, when you shoot

1:38:06

JPEGs versus raw on cameras, raw

1:38:09

is always has the most information and you just

1:38:11

kind of can kind of bring things back if,

1:38:13

oh man, I overexposed, but it's okay. I shot

1:38:15

it in raw. I can kind of bring it

1:38:17

down. Well, cause we're all you're capturing what the

1:38:19

what the sensor like you're capturing the state

1:38:22

of the sensor rather than an image.

1:38:24

Yeah. Yeah. So non 32 bit

1:38:27

float is a way to think of like, that's

1:38:29

a JPEG. You're, you're, you're baked in. If you

1:38:31

know you had some sort of distortion, maybe

1:38:33

you had the mic gains clipping too much.

1:38:35

You can't really get the, it's a square

1:38:37

wave. You literally can't get that data back,

1:38:39

but 32 bit float, uh, you're

1:38:41

like, Oh man, I was clipping. That's okay. I can bring

1:38:43

it down. It re retains

1:38:45

all of that information, uh, at

1:38:48

a much wider, you know, variations and

1:38:51

non float. How do you

1:38:53

sync that back in though? Uh, well,

1:38:55

so yeah. So is that just like a

1:38:58

fail safe or is that? Yeah. So the,

1:39:00

the, the connection to, to the

1:39:02

camera, right? Cause it's a wireless system from the

1:39:04

receiver to the, I'm sorry, from the transmitter to

1:39:06

the receiver, the receiver plugs

1:39:09

into the camera and you don't get 32

1:39:11

bit float. You're just getting the system. Uh,

1:39:13

but if you record it internally, then you

1:39:15

just plug it into your system, grab the

1:39:18

32 bit float file, put it in your

1:39:20

editing software, sync it up and you

1:39:22

know, and then you've got the highest fidelity. So

1:39:24

honestly, like, like we,

1:39:27

we were fine without the 32 bit float.

1:39:30

Um, you know, because we

1:39:32

were trying to solve the, the issues of

1:39:34

dropout between transmitter and receiver. Uh, but

1:39:37

this at least gives me that, that, uh, I

1:39:40

dunno, just that backup and that, that feeling of

1:39:42

like, Hey, if something really goes wrong, I have

1:39:45

it recorded internally and I have it recorded

1:39:47

in a way that like, you

1:39:49

know, something has to go real wrong

1:39:52

to not be able to get it back. So then

1:39:54

you just clap or something in mind. Do you just

1:39:56

clap at the start of every, every piece? You know,

1:39:59

the funny thing is Like I've been doing audio since

1:40:01

2008. I don't

1:40:03

really clap anymore. Like I can, I can

1:40:05

just sync up waveforms like, like that. Waveforms.

1:40:08

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like I don't

1:40:11

really clap or do any, any sort of sync

1:40:13

at the beginning of stuff. I can just do

1:40:15

it visually, like no problem. Yeah.

1:40:17

It's, it's, it's awesome. Like, like, I

1:40:19

definitely feel like we're, we're in a

1:40:21

really good spot with wireless transmitters

1:40:25

and yeah, I I'm, I'm excited

1:40:27

to use these at CES because

1:40:29

we have two, two systems now.

1:40:31

And CES is going to be the

1:40:33

first time where we get to like really, you

1:40:36

know, test it out and put it through

1:40:38

paces. Are you still carrying the 20 foot

1:40:40

XLR table just in case? Actually

1:40:44

funny. So we do a live

1:40:46

recording of our podcast from CES, and

1:40:49

we're going the other way where we were

1:40:52

using our, our wireless devices usually for the

1:40:54

show. But now like we have, we've run

1:40:56

into so many problems and not all of

1:40:58

its wireless transmission related. And

1:41:00

I was like, you know what, let's just

1:41:02

dumb down that whole system and just plug

1:41:04

everything wired because let's just

1:41:06

do that. So sometimes it's just easier, right?

1:41:08

Yeah. Yeah. So, it's,

1:41:11