00:00SPEAKEROkay, Adam or your family is from places adjacent to where my family's from and I learned about something new
00:06SPEAKERWhen I was on the phone with people over the holiday this this winter that I did not know existed
00:12SPEAKERAre you familiar with Bucky's?
00:14SPEAKERI actually had my first Bucky's experience this Christmas and
00:19SPEAKERWow, it's all I gotta say. Have you been there physically yourself? No
00:24SPEAKERNo, my sister described it to me on the phone. I was like this doesn't seem like a real thing
00:27SPEAKERI think she's jerking me around. Well, I kind of want to hear how your sister describes it because I've been
00:33SPEAKERDebating internally how I would describe it. Well, so she said it was like a
00:38SPEAKERconvenience store with a bunch of food and a hundred gas pumps and
00:44SPEAKERAlso and like basically we went through this whole long conversation process and I got to the point where I was like
00:49SPEAKEROh, it sounds like a truck stop without any place to put trucks and she was like, yeah, that's exactly it. Yes
00:54SPEAKERNo, it I've been wrestling with it for a while because my wife had actually been to one in the summer and she came back
01:00SPEAKERAnd she was just like I I don't know how to describe this to you
01:03SPEAKERthe closest thing she could think of was yeah, like a
01:06SPEAKERLike a Walmart mixed with a gas station mixed with something else and then when I went there
01:12SPEAKERI mean you have to experience it. You have to experience Bucky's to truly understand it I think
01:18SPEAKERWhich is magical I guess in this day and age. Did you have Bucky's into your heart Adam? That's the question
01:23SPEAKERI did and I spent a lot of money there
01:26SPEAKERand yeah, no over the course of a couple days because I actually went there a couple times like at first I was like
01:32SPEAKEROh, you know what?
01:32SPEAKERIt's kind of like a gas station because the the way you check out is kind of gas station II and it has you know
01:38SPEAKERthe traditional gas station kind of like drink wall and some food and stuff like that, but if you buy cigarettes and lottery tickets
01:45SPEAKERExactly, but it's way more than that and I was like, okay
01:48SPEAKERWell, what if it was like a truck stop but like a really good truck stop with like you can get brisket sandwiches
01:54SPEAKERThey were like chopping the brisket right there in the middle
01:57SPEAKERand the the actual like area where you can do some shopping for for goods was like
02:04SPEAKERSubstantial like a like a mini target or something. I mean it's not just like USB chargers and
02:10SPEAKERBusted cables and stuff like that. No, it was everything from like outdoor gear to
02:16SPEAKERApparel, I mean a lot of apparel they had a whole wall with like sniper scopes and target range practice
02:24SPEAKERDummies, you know, but even like cooking utensils things like that. The only section they didn't have unfortunately was electronics
02:31SPEAKERI was looking like I was like, okay
02:33SPEAKERyou've got like every kind of quote unquote traditional area to hang out in except for electronics because and I was really looking for
02:41SPEAKERit and I wanted it because
02:42SPEAKEREverything there almost everything there is like Bucky's branded this big old beaver with the the teeth and stuff like that
02:49SPEAKERAnd I was just like man if I could have got like a Bucky's branded
02:53SPEAKERUSB charger or something like I totally would have done it. That's that's look that's where you buy your next computer case, man
02:59SPEAKERyou go to Bucky's you get the Bucky's Freckle North and
03:03SPEAKERYeah. Oh, no, we got to stop this because somebody's gonna steal the idea
03:12SPEAKERI
03:33SPEAKERWelcome to Brad and will made a tech pod. I'm will I am Adam. Oh
03:39SPEAKERWe're joined today by a special guest Brad
03:42SPEAKERour friend Adam Patrick Murray from PC world is here today and
03:47SPEAKERWelcome to the show Adam. Thank you so much for coming in and subbing in for Brad
03:51SPEAKERWhile he's still out on a family on some family to help him with some family stuff. Glad to be back
03:56SPEAKERI I don't think I'm a viable substitute for Brad Brad is
04:01SPEAKERAmazing. He's got an amazing voice, but I'm gonna try my best to hang out
04:05SPEAKERLook Kishore Kishore last week did like the Star-Lord thing and tried to just bring it down two octaves
04:11SPEAKERAnd then I had to bring him back up in post cuz it was it sounded like he was talking like this
04:17SPEAKERThey didn't know he didn't really do that, but that would have been funny
04:20SPEAKERWe're so glad to have you you're fresh off of some holiday travels
04:24SPEAKERSo I appreciate you coming in early on Saturday morning to the chat with me very fresh, but always excited to talk about technology
04:30SPEAKERYeah, so for folks who don't know Adam is is our is one of our friends over at PC world. He
04:37SPEAKERDoes well, you know and for a long time did all the behind-the-scenes stuff and then this year did some of the been a lot
04:43SPEAKERmore of the in front of the scene stuff
04:45SPEAKERBut but we you are uniquely positioned
04:49SPEAKERTo have been aware of a lot of the things that happened in the in the year in technology this year
04:55SPEAKERYeah, especially computer technology
04:58SPEAKERAnd yeah, I thought a lot of fun things to talk about we were working on the the list of things that we could
05:05SPEAKERPotentially talk about and I was like how much time we have because oh boy I could talk about a lot of these things
05:10SPEAKERYeah, so so the idea here is that we're gonna go down the year
05:14SPEAKERWe're gonna we're gonna do it do a I want to say a D an in-depth overview of the year
05:19SPEAKERWe're gonna kind of hit the high points at the low points, you know, maybe get into a little bit of scene drama
05:23SPEAKERYeah, talk about talk about the the places the things that went well and the things that didn't
05:30SPEAKERYeah hardware announcements hardware releases and a lot of drama I guess as well
05:36SPEAKERYeah, so I think I think let's for me. It's funny for me this year
05:41SPEAKERWas the year that PC gaming?
05:45SPEAKERhandhelds
05:46SPEAKERKind of got big like like steam decks been rolling out gradually over the last couple of years
05:50SPEAKERIt's definitely had an impact but this is the first year that I like saw them on on Bart
05:54SPEAKERI saw saw them on you Brad told me that he saw one on the plane the other day
06:00SPEAKERLike like a steam desk specifically it specifically he saw multiple steam decks on his flight back east. So
06:06SPEAKERWhich makes sense because like if you're traveling a lot and you like PC games a steam deck isn't is an easy
06:12SPEAKERno-brainer purchase right you're you're you get to you get to play the you're you're
06:18SPEAKERfull ass video games on a handheld when you're traveling or all over the place without any weird like
06:23SPEAKERCross-platform syncing like a lot of indie games did with the switch and steam
06:28SPEAKERBut then also this year we saw new releases, you know asus relaunched the Republic of gamer today
06:34SPEAKERDo they suppose we see ROG? It's not wrong. It's not wrong. Okay, the ROG Ally
06:40SPEAKERLenovo has the go steam deck has the OLED even Sony released their weird
06:44SPEAKERWell, so Sony and Logitech both released weird streaming only devices, right?
06:49SPEAKERWas the logic tech won this year Wow logic logic check might have been end of last year like but yeah
06:55SPEAKERStreaming only and I mean specifically I mean the logitech one wall
06:59SPEAKERI actually never used that one like the idea of it is like, okay, I can kind of get behind
07:04SPEAKERI think it's the pricing that that I wasn't necessarily fully behind but then the Sony one like it's just a one-trick pony man
07:11SPEAKERYou're just like hey, do you want to connect to your ps5?
07:15SPEAKERThat's what this is
07:17SPEAKERThat's all that this is
07:18SPEAKERWell, and it turns out it's a thing that you can do with the steam deck or the Ally or the Lenovo and any of the
07:24SPEAKERLinux based or windows based ones will do the same thing
07:28SPEAKERYeah, or your phone or your tablet or your laptop or anything? That'll like look there's a lot of stuff that will run Chiaki
07:34SPEAKERIt turns out
07:36SPEAKERWhere do you end up on this on this Adam, you know, you you guys do you're kind of hardcore PC people
07:41SPEAKERAnd these are pretty
07:43SPEAKERYou know that I don't want to say underpowered but they're they're modest PCs in these little handheld cases
07:48SPEAKERWhere what's what's the your what's your official take? You know, I will say that on the team
07:54SPEAKERI am the only one who loves handhelds
07:59SPEAKERYou know friend of the show friend of both you and me Gordon mong
08:03SPEAKERHe is not much of handheld person though. I did get some information over the break that might change his mind
08:09SPEAKERBut oh, yeah, yeah, he's not, you know, he likes the the fastest biggest thing ever
08:15SPEAKERRight and these handhelds like well, I guess in context
08:19SPEAKERThey're the fastest biggest thing like compared to a 40 90 it is not and so he's like meh, whatever boring
08:26SPEAKERGet back to me when there's a 40 90 his kids are also
08:29SPEAKERYou know of an age where they're using their own screens and art compete. There's no competition for the TV in his house
08:35SPEAKERI would bet at this point so
08:38SPEAKERYeah, and he doesn't believe in TVs for games anyway, so like it's a it's a real
08:44SPEAKERHe likes to sit down in his basement with the with his comfortable chair in the dark room
08:49SPEAKERHey, you know what respect and then yeah, so everyone else on on the the team isn't like staunchly against it
08:55SPEAKERThey just like have no use case for it kind of thing and so
08:59SPEAKERMe I my very first console was a Game Boy like the original Game Boy like that was my first
09:06SPEAKERPersonal console I'd of course played other consoles
09:09SPEAKERBut this was mine and like so I've always grown up with a soft spot for handhelds
09:14SPEAKERSo these PC handhelds have just like blown my mind
09:18SPEAKERAnd I mean it's not just the big guys. We're talking about you know the Steam Deco LED, the ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go
09:25SPEAKERThere's all these Chinese based companies like Ioneo
09:29SPEAKERGPD
09:30SPEAKERI've been sitting there waiting for my Coon
09:34SPEAKERPre-order to Ionea Coon to to get shipped that one stuck
09:38SPEAKERbut yeah like for me like I'm in it, and I love it and I
09:43SPEAKERUnfortunately have probably way too many of them in my possession
09:48SPEAKERBut I mean it's easy to kind of get it like the Ioneo one is
09:53SPEAKEREspecially seems like they're releasing a new kind of shape device every other week at some point like at one point this summer
10:00SPEAKERI remember looking up and they announced four different things and like I don't know they have a clamshell yet
10:06SPEAKERBut it's only a matter of time at this point. They have one teased
10:09SPEAKERIt's not not released yet, but they have one teased and yeah
10:13SPEAKERI mean, there's there's so much good movement in the space and so many different ways that people are
10:19SPEAKERKind of like moving it forward. I mean of course. There's the processing power and
10:24SPEAKERI mean that's one of the big things this year was the the the AMD Z1
10:30SPEAKERChip that's used in at least the Ally and the the Legion Go
10:35SPEAKERAnd essentially it's just kind of a modified 7840U like mobile part. You know just a little bit tailor-made
10:42SPEAKERFor handheld specifically, and I mean when I saw that because the Steam Deck has a custom chip that they work with AMD
10:50SPEAKERBut it's valve right I could see them working with valve and you know getting some custom
10:54SPEAKERBut like to say hey to then for AMD to go out and make a whole nother
10:59SPEAKERYou know I don't know quote unquote bespoke chip just for handhelds like signaled to me like okay, wow
11:06SPEAKERThis is a serious area of PC and like even though the sales
11:10SPEAKERI don't know you know you can you can see kind of like the sales numbers on a lot of these
11:15SPEAKERChinese based companies because they're IndieGoGo campaigns essentially using is like pre-order so you can kind of see
11:22SPEAKERyou know how much are sold over there and but you and you can also see that the Steam Deck is always like
11:27SPEAKERWithin the top 10 of like most sold on on Steam itself, so these things are selling well
11:33SPEAKERI don't know exactly how much they're selling, but I mean it seems legit
11:38SPEAKERWell, I mean it's it's interesting you can kind of track a little bit of how Linux in general is doing
11:44SPEAKERLike for all intents and purposes Linux and the Steam Deck are one in the same when you look at the steam hardware survey results
11:50SPEAKERMmm, and the the Linux share on
11:53SPEAKERAmong these active steam users
11:56SPEAKERHas gone from like nothing to 7% I think
12:00SPEAKERI
12:02SPEAKERDidn't check that number. That's good. It depends on the game
12:05SPEAKERSo yeah, like it's it's the thing that's interesting to me
12:09SPEAKERIs that this handheld category has been around for a really long time?
12:11SPEAKERBut it's never seen any kind of real traction in in in games
12:15SPEAKERAnd the work that valve is done with the Steam Deck and with proton and all the supporting stuff that makes the Steam Deck work
12:22SPEAKERIt turns out. I think it's done the thing that they wanted right
12:25SPEAKERIt's it's kind of knocked loose a lot of other a lot of other activity in the space and as a result. We're seeing
12:32SPEAKERall sorts of new
12:34SPEAKERnovel things happening
12:37SPEAKERJust just in general which which is which is I think like that's the magic of building this platform for everyone
12:44SPEAKERSo yeah, and it really feels like there's a lot of innovation still to be had like
12:51SPEAKERYou know we have another topic where we're talking about VR. You know we're like okay. That's been in it for a while
12:56SPEAKERIt's variations on a on a theme kind of thing
13:00SPEAKERbut the the handheld stuff I feel like
13:03SPEAKEREven though the Steam Deck is awesome
13:04SPEAKERI do feel like when there's an eventual Steam Deck 2 that's gonna be even more awesome like and push things even more forward
13:12SPEAKERand I think
13:14SPEAKERYeah, so to clarify my earlier statement the 7% number was on the game that I work on
13:22SPEAKER7% of total players were playing on Linux on the overall hardware survey
13:27SPEAKERIt's about 2% are Linux users now, which is up a half a percent year-over-year
13:32SPEAKERon the most recent version of the survey that they released so yeah, I gotta tell you the the
13:39SPEAKERdiehard Linux people in our discord
13:42SPEAKERYou know they're always telling us about Linux, and how awesome it is and and and they're like hell
13:47SPEAKERYeah, like the Steam Deck has been like amazing or for Linux
13:51SPEAKERYeah, proton proton and all the work around that like this. It's funny
13:55SPEAKERThere's places where proton actually solves rendering problems that exist on Windows and in the windows
14:02SPEAKERDirectX or Vulkan stacks
14:04SPEAKERBecause of the way they they they make that anyway
14:07SPEAKERIt's neat protons really cool Steam Deck school all of the supporting hardware is neat. It's a good thing
14:12SPEAKERYeah, let's tell you you mentioned VR. Let's talk about VR
14:16SPEAKERIt's dead right. We're done the whole things my windows mixed reality is shutting down
14:21SPEAKERThe oculus quest 3 is the viable headset on the market these days
14:26SPEAKERFacebook rolled out that quest pro that nobody really cared about outside of people making games and having to wear them all day
14:32SPEAKERBring the headset all day
14:34SPEAKERWhat's what's what's happening in the world of VR?
14:38SPEAKERYou know I'd like as much as my coworker Gordon once again
14:43SPEAKERWould probably point to VR being dead long ago, so the thing is with him
14:48SPEAKERHe he bought a valve index was at the index
14:52SPEAKERI can't remember he his kids kept bugging him to get one he finally got one and they used it for a week
14:58SPEAKERAnd then you know oh, yeah, you know so he heard about that. Yeah
15:03SPEAKEROh, I still hear about that, and he he's very much like hey, you know what?
15:08SPEAKERVR is dead to me like I'm like everybody else who bought in and
15:13SPEAKERNow it's just you know sitting on a shelf somewhere
15:15SPEAKERAnd it probably like hounds him in the middle of the night like hey you paid a thousand dollars for me, and nobody's using me
15:22SPEAKERso yeah, but I mean like I
15:25SPEAKERit's all say personally I had a quest to I upgraded the quest 3 like I
15:32SPEAKERWould use it occasionally maybe a couple times a month
15:34SPEAKERBut the the quest 3 is a nice upgrade and like I've actually been doing stuff in the quest 3 since it launched
15:42SPEAKERI've used it way more than the the quest 2
15:45SPEAKERAnd you know and who knows how much that'll stick, but like I actually do like the upgrade to the quest 3 personally
15:51SPEAKERI was kind of joking yeah, I think the quest 3 is a nice upgrade. I I'm I have Facebook related issues with with the with the oculus
15:59SPEAKERhardware unfortunately
16:01SPEAKERAnd and of course Apple announced the vision pro this year, which is the other big AR MR
16:07SPEAKERwhatever
16:08SPEAKERBlank our category you want to talk about
16:11SPEAKERYeah, which I mean is big. I mean you had a norm on
16:16SPEAKERGave a real good breakdown of like the idea around it and for me listening to it from afar because I was not at the
16:23SPEAKEREvent and I don't really cover VR. You know I just kind of make sure I at least know about it to a certain degree and
16:30SPEAKERLike I'm not an Apple fan at all
16:33SPEAKERBut even I'm like kind of cheering for them because like hey listen if somebody's gonna help shake this
16:39SPEAKERYou know kind of mark it loose and and further move things forward Apple stepping into it
16:45SPEAKERI mean it's a big sign for me personally
16:47SPEAKERWell to me the interesting thing about the Apple thing is it looks like they're gonna build a Mac that you can wear on your head
16:55SPEAKERAnd if there's a market for that if that takes off I'll be interested to see the the the unfortunate thing is
17:03SPEAKERwith the overall VR market
17:06SPEAKERThis is something we talked about years and years ago, and this is only a test is that they?
17:11SPEAKERWouldn't Facebook subsidized a bunch of triple-a developers and built the expectation that VR games look like
17:19SPEAKERYou know kind of console console game II big sprawling
17:23SPEAKERYou know expensive to make
17:25SPEAKERPlatforming experiences and adventure games and things that have a buttload of content that are that are gonna cost
17:32SPEAKERYou know 20 or 30 million dollars to make in most cases
17:36SPEAKERLike that was great
17:38SPEAKERBut they were basically building these games that were impossible to have a financial success
17:43SPEAKERoutside of substitute outside of the subsidy that an oculus or Facebook was providing and
17:48SPEAKERAnd that was fine until the moment Facebook decided they didn't want to pay for those games to be developed anymore
17:53SPEAKERBut then they had this giant audience that they built of people who bought headsets expecting you know these these big
18:02SPEAKERstores wrath style
18:04SPEAKERexperiences yeah kill these these these huge things and like it valves a little bit guilty of this they built Alex but valve has a
18:11SPEAKERDifferent as a weird. It's not like valve was going out and funding 30 games
18:15SPEAKERThey just built one then was like the thing they wanted to make to show off their hardware
18:20SPEAKERIt's a it's a weird situation that the market is in now because there's there's this pent-up demand for these big giant games and
18:28SPEAKERYou'd have to be a maniac to make one of those big giant games because you're gonna spend 40 million dollars
18:32SPEAKERYou're gonna make maybe five or ten and it's a it's a just because there's not enough
18:38SPEAKERLike there's not enough people you with the headsets playing those kinds of games, so it's it's a weird
18:43SPEAKERIt's a weird situation well a question I have for you because obviously you were in that space very heavily for a long time
18:51SPEAKERYou know you've talked about how that went, but say say that you were still in that space daily
18:58SPEAKERYou know as your work. How much how much would you see the vision Pro announcement like changing?
19:04SPEAKERWhat you were doing and working on oh if I was making?
19:08SPEAKERVR games for current gen headsets
19:12SPEAKER0.0 percent probably really well because there's no controllers, so
19:17SPEAKERThey're gonna build a completely different thing Apple's gonna build something that's completely different than what we've seen before
19:22SPEAKERWell, I mean, but something I feel like the the the foo show probably could work without dedicated controllers, right well
19:28SPEAKERYeah, but the foo show wasn't a financial success
19:32SPEAKERIt's not like we were making money on the foo show ever
19:36SPEAKERYeah the foo show the viewing would be great without the dedicated headset the recording would be almost impossible
19:42SPEAKERI think without the dedicated headset without the dedicated controllers
19:46SPEAKERbecause because it's it's
19:49SPEAKERThe way the the way the kind of the way the data works to do the animation
19:55SPEAKERthe the worse your initial signal is the jankier the animation gets and it's a it's a real it's a real
20:04SPEAKERThe curve would be real bad was at least I mean this was five years ago
20:08SPEAKERI stopped working for four years ago now that I stopped working on it
20:12SPEAKERthe
20:13SPEAKERthe not directly tracked it data was much less reliable than than the than the hand than the
20:20SPEAKERControllers that may be different now. I don't know
20:22SPEAKERI haven't spent any time with a with a with a vision Pro or even really with the quest two or three with their
20:28SPEAKERWith their hand tracking. Well, so it sounds like or the the the kind of sentiment I'm getting or the tone
20:35SPEAKERI'm getting is that like?
20:37SPEAKERLike you're not excited about this space any quite quite much anymore or I mean
20:43SPEAKERI love the space right like I love VR. I love I love firing up pistol whip or or beat saber or at some point
20:50SPEAKERI'll play a
20:52SPEAKERCamera name is a game of sure is wrath or whatever
20:54SPEAKERYeah sure as wrath to
20:57SPEAKERPeople seem to really like like like people were doing it got incredibly positive reviews and seem to be a transformative experience. I
21:03SPEAKERDon't know how that game ever makes money, right?
21:06SPEAKERYeah, like I look at that and I'm like as somebody who who is looking at what the next game is
21:12SPEAKERTo make I'm like I would love to do a VR game
21:15SPEAKERbut I don't I don't see how it's financially viable for anybody that isn't owned by Oculus or or Gabe basically, so
21:24SPEAKERAnd then the other the other thing that kind of blows this year is that Microsoft
21:28SPEAKERJust real quietly at the end of the year like did a Friday night news drop that was like, oh by the way
21:32SPEAKERWe're we're sometime next two years. We're gonna remove support from mixed reality from Windows entirely
21:42SPEAKERI assume it's I assume that that's probably timed to whenever the last bit of mixed reality hardware was released
21:49SPEAKERBut I don't know for sure or some time around Windows 12, you know
21:55SPEAKERThey said 2025 I think was the was the cutoff but presumably that'll be the end of steam VR support
22:03SPEAKERMixed reality the headsets will just be e-waste at that point
22:07SPEAKERIf you if you upgrade your machine, so that's a bad upgrade if you're if you're still using a Lenovo
22:12SPEAKERor
22:13SPEAKERHP one of you know HP like it's not like those were bad headsets HP and Samsung both made really good headsets there
22:19SPEAKERSo it's a bummer right? Yeah, Brad had a Lenovo. I have I like I have a couple of them
22:25SPEAKERJust laying around till they used them to test
22:27SPEAKERYou know steam VR support on you know, so yeah, it's a it's a little bit of a bummer
22:34SPEAKERDon't up but watch your if you have a if you have a Windows mixed reality headset and you intend to keep using it
22:39SPEAKERMaybe watch your windows updates. It might be worth keeping the old PC around. Sorry. There we go
22:43SPEAKERYeah, free freeze a system in place to always have one ready. Yeah, there you go
22:48SPEAKERJust get an image and then you can restore the image. It'll be
22:52SPEAKERYes
22:53SPEAKERThis year was also a big PC hardware like this. This was this was the first year
22:58SPEAKERIt felt like we were out of the pandemic when it came to PC hardware people were announcing stuff
23:02SPEAKERSome of it was good. Some was messy like there's there's everything but new high-end video cards
23:09SPEAKERum
23:11SPEAKERLike that the Intel GPUs seem kind of generally, okay. It's it's a weird year
23:18SPEAKERYeah, yeah, I mean being in this space daily. Like I definitely feel like
23:23SPEAKERThis year was hot and heavy with announcements both desktop and laptop related. Of course
23:30SPEAKERWell, we mostly focus on the desktop over on my my coverage zone
23:34SPEAKERBut yeah, I mean there was there was a lot to cover there was some interesting things going on
23:40SPEAKERFor sure, like what? Where do you want to start? Where do you think's the most interesting?
23:43SPEAKERI I'm curious like the like the the 3d vcash
23:47SPEAKERrisons are
23:49SPEAKERThose are the ones that are always the X 3d and come out later, right?
23:53SPEAKERthat's that's they're kind of that's their kind of thing like
23:56SPEAKERit's weird because
23:59SPEAKERWell in the old days when you wanted to get the fastest computer you spot the bone with the biggest number and paid like five
24:03SPEAKERHundred or a thousand dollars and then it worked itself out and you'd have to really understand what was going on now
24:09SPEAKERLike it's kind of complicated and what is the best one for you might change based on how you use your computer
24:15SPEAKERlike if you do a lot of like if you do a lot of like spiking the CPU your
24:20SPEAKERyour what's the best CPU for you may be completely different than if you just
24:25SPEAKERYou know play games and do an occasional hundred percent CPU spike, right? Yeah
24:30SPEAKERWell, I mean we've we've we talked about this a lot
24:33SPEAKERUh, you know a lot of people who come to our podcast the full nerd over on PC world definitely. Yeah. There you go
24:39SPEAKERThank you
24:40SPEAKERHave a lot of questions, you know people trying to figure out best bang for buck and things like that
24:46SPEAKERAnd so yeah like between the X 3d stuff, which was kind of revolutionary
24:52SPEAKERAnd then Intel at some point moving to a desegregated architecture on the desktop
24:57SPEAKERLike I do feel like we're getting more and more in specialty lanes
25:01SPEAKERRight where instead of just being like hey, you know what the biggest fastest CPU is gonna be the best at everything kind of thing
25:09SPEAKERThat's more like oh, hey, what do you want to do with it?
25:11SPEAKERYou know, is there something specific which which which lane do you play in the most that you really care about?
25:16SPEAKERI will copy out by saying
25:19SPEAKERlike I did a bunch of I did a bunch of testing and I haven't done the video quite yet, but
25:26SPEAKERWith the the like all the CPUs that are currently out there in video production
25:32SPEAKERWorkloads it'd be like hey, you know, like what what's the best CPU out there?
25:36SPEAKERAnd I mean, of course
25:36SPEAKERThere are some clear winners and the 3d V cache isn't always thought of as the best in production related workloads
25:44SPEAKERThey're still damn good. I'll tell you what, you know, it's just like
25:49SPEAKERLike eight cores now or not what you got a course, you know a handful of years ago
25:54SPEAKERLike like so even though like a lot of times we're trying to sit there and like be like mmm
25:59SPEAKERWell, if you do this, you know, and if you do that, maybe it's better to go this way or better to go that way
26:05SPEAKERFor eight cores with that 3d V cache on specifically on the 7800 X 3d
26:10SPEAKERIt's just like that's a damn good CPU and sure it's not 16 cores, but you know what? Those are eight damn good course
26:18SPEAKERwell, I'm curious when you do your when you do your benchmarks for
26:23SPEAKERVideo stuff. Do you use the GPU accelerated?
26:27SPEAKEREncodes or do you use CPU encodes for that?
26:30SPEAKERSo a lot of the canned benchmarks, you know, it's kind of a mixture of stuff
26:34SPEAKERI should say so a lot of the canned benchmarks that we use are from a place
26:40SPEAKERPuget systems, they have a Puget bench really good benchmarking tools
26:46SPEAKERThere's others like Procyon has video editing stuff and and that that takes into factor the whole system
26:52SPEAKERAnd when I was doing the CPU testing
26:54SPEAKERI try to keep the system as as the same except for the the actual CPU
27:00SPEAKERSo, you know if a 40 90 was used the 40 90 is used across the way
27:05SPEAKERAnd you're only gonna see the difference of the CPU makes kind of thing. So
27:10SPEAKERSo there's that
27:12SPEAKERPeople still prefer the CPU and code for for quality. I assume I mean that was the case for a long time
27:17SPEAKERI don't maybe it isn't anymore, you know, it's funny like the quality I feel like especially with the newer codecs
27:23SPEAKERLike has gotten to a point where I don't I don't hear that as much anymore
27:27SPEAKERLike I mean, it definitely is a thing and and I'm sure in large production environments, you know movies and TV shows
27:34SPEAKERIt's still a thing but at the same time like, you know more kind of mainstream people like even me
27:39SPEAKERThat's what I consider the video production
27:41SPEAKERWe do like I'll take that that quicker rendering any day of the week over a CPU and code, but I do
27:48SPEAKERSo the way I do test the CPU and code is with handbrake
27:51SPEAKERI do a bunch of different codecs and handbrake and that CPU only
27:56SPEAKERAnd so like I still do that testing to kind of see where it shakes out
28:01SPEAKERBut yeah, I feel like and we kind of saw this shift at least, you know behind the scenes with the new cinebench
28:08SPEAKERmoved to what our
28:10SPEAKERv24 and they kind of like change the the whole way they think about
28:16SPEAKERBenchmarking to make it a little bit more practical and they're like, hey, you know what like just pure CPU workloads
28:21SPEAKERIt's just not not that much of a thing anymore. Like if you have an awesome GPU, like why not use it?
28:27SPEAKERIt seemed like the NV ink to shift in with like the I guess was since 2000 series
28:32SPEAKERProbably was was the kind of was the kind of moment that that a lot of that changed
28:38SPEAKERYeah, an AV one. I mean, it's obviously a big thing h.265. I like, you know, I mean, it's
28:44SPEAKERYeah, but back to the 3d V catch stuff. Like I do feel like
28:49SPEAKERThere's still even more in that space, you know
28:53SPEAKERA lot of times when we're having these these talks with people at AMD and Intel
28:58SPEAKERA lot of it goes over my head
29:00SPEAKERBut you know, they're talking about new different ways for computing to work right within the space that keeps getting smaller and smaller
29:08SPEAKERHow do you get it to work actual like?
29:11SPEAKERStacking on top is like one of the newer ways to talk about it, but then also a disaggregated architecture
29:17SPEAKERSo that that 7850 X 3d had one to CCDs one of them had the 3d V cache one of them didn't though
29:24SPEAKERYou know, the promise was kind of the best of both worlds. Do you want high clocks or do you want the cache?
29:29SPEAKERWhatever Intel presumably makes games run better right is the idea or right?
29:35SPEAKERSorry, it less multi-threaded applications run better with more cash. It was the idea I think right?
29:41SPEAKERYeah, and while it's always hard to know like I wish there was a way to look
29:47SPEAKERAt which games like oh, hey, you know what it uses an unreal engine or uses a specific thing
29:53SPEAKERThen you know for sure that that game is gonna benefit from the cache
29:59SPEAKERUnless somebody has done the work and I don't know about it
30:01SPEAKERLike I still feel like a lot of times it's a crapshoot you don't
30:05SPEAKERPeople are buying new hardware thinking about games in the future and being like, oh, well, whatever game is coming up
30:11SPEAKERWill it benefit from the 3d V cache?
30:13SPEAKERIt doesn't seem like we have a magic ball quite yet
30:16SPEAKERbut for the most part
30:18SPEAKERLike I like my gaming machine has a 3d V cache part in it because I'm like, you know what when it does benefit it
30:24SPEAKERwhole boy that benefit is huge and we were we were debating on one of the recent episodes of the full nerd about the best
30:32SPEAKERWe at the end of the year. We always kind of like debate live about the the best CPU hardware that came out this year and
30:39SPEAKERGordon I mean Gordon was pretty much always like he always just votes for the the biggest most expensive thing
30:47SPEAKERSo he was pushing for the 7850 X 3d or even the 14900 K kind of thing
30:53SPEAKERBut I like I brought up the benchmark charts. My pick was the 7800 X 3d and I was like listen
30:59SPEAKERthe 7800 X 3d at half the price of the 14900 K
31:03SPEAKERlike
31:04SPEAKERBeat it. I mean not just matched it but beat it in in specific games
31:09SPEAKERAnd when it did it was like super beneficial like that. That's crazy to think of a CPU
31:14SPEAKERThat's half the price was matching or beating
31:17SPEAKERThe 14900 K well, so I mean I was just say this is part of the overall theme of the year for me
31:22SPEAKERAnd if this kind of applied to last year too, right is we've reached a point where?
31:27SPEAKERWe're not seeing advancements on process technology driving performance forward. So that means that like the the vendors can't bin out
31:35SPEAKERYou know ten different, you know a thousand different CPUs and pick the two fastest ones and sell those as $1,000 part anymore
31:41SPEAKERI mean, they're trying still they do
31:45SPEAKERBut like the impact of that isn't as much and so we're having this we're seeing them have to do
31:50SPEAKERmuch more clever, you know complete design changes or
31:54SPEAKERenhancements to the actual CPUs in order to justify those high-end parts
31:59SPEAKERyeah, and and it's it's it puts the person who's the you know,
32:04SPEAKERThe purchaser and an interesting interesting conundrum because you like you said you're seeing these mid-range parts that are performing almost as well as
32:11SPEAKERthe high-end in all but the weird edge cases that people benchmark and
32:16SPEAKERAnd it's it's a it's a real shift especially on the CPU side and the GPU sides a little bit different the GPU side
32:23SPEAKERYou know Nvidia especially is just throwing enormous amounts of compute at the high-end GPU market
32:28SPEAKERyeah, and and you know, like you've reached a point where we're building CPUs or
32:34SPEAKERcomputers around these enormous 800 watt video cards
32:41SPEAKERIt's a little bit of a different it's a little bit of a different situation but it's also the first year
32:47SPEAKERlike
32:48SPEAKERWe're in a weird spot. We were talking about this at work on the in the in the context of like what minimum spec for a
32:53SPEAKERvideo game should be in 2023 and
32:56SPEAKERIt's a weird time because everybody there's a bunch of people with 2000 series and video cards out there
33:02SPEAKERWho in their head because they weren't able to buy a video card for the last three years
33:07SPEAKERThink oh, yeah, my compete my video cards really new
33:10SPEAKERWhen in reality they have they have a five-year-old five-year-old video card, right and it's it's
33:18SPEAKERlike
33:19SPEAKERThose two thoughts can both be true in your head and not be true in the real world
33:24SPEAKERYeah, it's it's a it's a weird. It's a weird situation to like did you see market?
33:30SPEAKERLike what's going on with I guess here's my question Brad
33:34SPEAKERAnd I Brad I mean Adam. Okay, I was like wait, hold on
33:40SPEAKERWhat the hell's going on with video cards this year
33:43SPEAKERGod, I mean not as much as people wanted, right?
33:48SPEAKERso I will I would say we listed out the the GPUs that actually got announced and launched this year and it's mostly in the
33:54SPEAKERquote-unquote mid-range
33:56SPEAKERBut that's yeah, that's still is a lot of people bitching about can we cuss here? I'm sorry
34:05SPEAKERYou know like people really bitching about like hey
34:09SPEAKERThe what used to be high-end is now mid-range. What the hell you know like in terms of price in terms of price
34:17SPEAKERYeah, like you know there's been a lot of Nvidia kind of reshuffling
34:21SPEAKERYou know what what certain things mean in the space like a what you you know?
34:27SPEAKERTraditionally used to be a 60 class is now a for a 70 class
34:31SPEAKERKind of thing like you know so typically I'd say before the 2000 series
34:36SPEAKERI was always solidly a 70 class so like a 40 70
34:41SPEAKER90 70 you know
34:43SPEAKEREven a 40 60 was my first GPU kind of thing
34:47SPEAKERYou know and I think and like that was like that was only a couple hundred bucks
34:50SPEAKERBut now to get into that class. I mean you're talking about twice the price now
34:55SPEAKERSo there's still a lot of like bellyaching about like pricing and how everything's kind of shifted upward
35:00SPEAKERI mean a lot of it does come with awesome performance and these new 40 series GPUs
35:06SPEAKERFrom Nvidia are super efficient like crazily efficient
35:11SPEAKERSo like I mean there's in you know the the NV ink performance the ray tracing performance like you're getting a lot with these GPUs for
35:19SPEAKERsure
35:20SPEAKERBut also it just it comes with that feeling of like man. I used to be able to get this GPU for half the price
35:27SPEAKERWell it and so I part of it is in videos redone their naming scheme for everything yeah
35:35SPEAKERBut like also the 1080 launched at $600
35:40SPEAKERRight founders edition. Yeah, which was higher than the AIB models
35:44SPEAKERYeah, yeah, that's kind of the opposite
35:47SPEAKERIt's funny you think about for me. There's these high water part mark parts that kind of this
35:53SPEAKERRemind me of what things used to cost right right right like the geforce 3 was a $400 video card if we want to go
35:59SPEAKERAll the way back to 2003 you know it's look some stuff has happened
36:03SPEAKERThere's been a little bit of inflation things are more expensive
36:06SPEAKERObviously, it's a more expensive to build part now that it was the geforce 3 in 2003 or 20 years ago
36:13SPEAKERbut I
36:15SPEAKERthink that the established price for that now the difference now is that a
36:22SPEAKER4060 is a perfectly capable video card
36:25SPEAKERIt's like more than capable video card for playing games at 1080p. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right
36:29SPEAKERI mean a lot of people would still argue that like the bus width and the VRAM size like shit
36:36SPEAKERYou should be getting more VRAM for that price, which I get but I mean at the same time
36:41SPEAKERYes, you if you're loading it up and playing it in 1080p the lane that it's intended to you can get some damn good
36:46SPEAKERperformance out of it yeah, so that's the that's interesting the
36:51SPEAKERThing is the wild card and all of this for me
36:53SPEAKERAnd it didn't really apply this year as much as it
36:54SPEAKERI think it will apply next year in the year after assuming Intel doesn't pull out of the graphics market for the third or fourth time
37:03SPEAKERIs that it's gonna be a three it looks like it's gonna be a legit three-way race right the arc stuff launch
37:10SPEAKERAnd it's okay. It's not like the first for first gen their performance has been good
37:15SPEAKERit's been getting consistently better with driver updates and
37:19SPEAKERLike and by better it's not even just like small shifts
37:24SPEAKERI mean we have seen some small shifts, but we had a series by one of our freelancers Keith May
37:29SPEAKEREvery month for six months. He was looking at arc driver updates and
37:34SPEAKERWe'd stopped it. We need to do. I think we did like a year check-in as well
37:38SPEAKERI got maybe we were supposed to and we didn't but like the the improvements in some of these games
37:45SPEAKERmostly with different
37:47SPEAKERwith different
37:49SPEAKERApis, so you know DX 12 was like for the most part solid, but the DX 9
37:55SPEAKERPerformance was bad, so you know they they had this big
37:58SPEAKERReveal of like hey, you know what this new newest driver
38:01SPEAKERUpless DX 9 performance by 100% or whatever and so like yeah where it is now is
38:07SPEAKERMuch better place. I'm sorry. I should say the the arc ace you know
38:13SPEAKER770
38:14SPEAKER750 they did announce their launch the a 580
38:18SPEAKERSo like their cards that are on the market right now like have seen substantial improvements
38:24SPEAKERBut they still stumble every once in a while like starfield had a problem out the gate where if you had an art card
38:30SPEAKERYou just couldn't play it so you know they still have some stumbling blocks
38:34SPEAKERBut I do feel like that team internally is like learning a lot, and it's not just applying to their their discrete cards
38:41SPEAKERwith Meteor Lake
38:43SPEAKERIt has new Arc graphics core and like they're seeing some big improvements there, so you know
38:50SPEAKERIt's we're in this weird spot as journalists where we just want to risk report kind of what's going on
38:56SPEAKERBut at the same time me personally as a person
38:59SPEAKERI'm I am rooting for Intel to to continue and try to be a third player in this space because
39:05SPEAKERMore competition is better for everyone right yeah
39:08SPEAKERBut yeah at the same time it still is just a little hard to recommend an art card unless you know it
39:14SPEAKERIt's somebody who can tinker a little bit, right?
39:18SPEAKERYeah, like it still comes with that caveat. I think that's the normal first-gen right like this is this is
39:24SPEAKERLike Intel has been making GPUs for a really long time
39:26SPEAKERThey just jammed inside CPUs, and it's a little bit of a different market, right?
39:32SPEAKERBut yeah, I think it's it's an interesting place for them to be and and it's I
39:38SPEAKER100% agree that it's good that there's other
39:40SPEAKEROther vendors in that space now well and overall for GPUs one of the the big things that we had talked about was
39:48SPEAKERTom Pitt, or I'm sorry not Tom Petty John Petty John Petty two different people
39:53SPEAKERJohn Petty research. He does some really good. You know he's an analyst. That's some really good insights into the
40:01SPEAKERInto what's going on buying trends and things like that very high level he had a report talking about
40:07SPEAKERGPU sales figures like being down
40:12SPEAKERFor like ten years running like if you look at the chart
40:15SPEAKERI have a link in here if you look at the chart is just like sales for ten years
40:18SPEAKERIt's just going down and down down kind of thing
40:22SPEAKERIt's starting to slowly climb up
40:25SPEAKERBut yeah like GP discrete GPU sales is like still not where it used to be and it signals
40:32SPEAKERYou know some things like I think it is kind of a hard buying market once again
40:36SPEAKERThe prices are up people are I think holding on to hardware a lot longer
40:40SPEAKERWe actually have somebody in our discord who has a 970 and like is just like holding on for dear life to it
40:47SPEAKERLike I will tell you
40:49SPEAKERWe have people playing the anacrusis right now on 970s right like 970 is a perfectly viable machine for
40:57SPEAKERdx11
40:59SPEAKERFor for 1080p dx11 games for a lot of them. Yeah, right like I think yeah, it's weird
41:06SPEAKERBut then also even with all the the bitching people are doing about Nvidia
41:11SPEAKERlike Nvidia's market share in the GPU space just is just massive like
41:17SPEAKERAMD over the you know past couple years have had some really good cards especially price to performance
41:23SPEAKERLike their new GPU out right now the 7800 XT
41:27SPEAKERIs kind of like what everyone's turning to is like hey, that's kind of like the sweet spot in terms of price and performance
41:33SPEAKERIt's not perfect, but it's still a you know pretty good sweet spot if you're buying new
41:38SPEAKERAnd yeah even AMD with all their wins that they pull off like just can't break that in video market share
41:46SPEAKERIt's just crazy
41:47SPEAKERYou know here, and here's the thing the unfortunate thing for AMD is that?
41:53SPEAKERNvidia invests a lot of money in developer relations and AMD
41:57SPEAKEREither can't or doesn't do the same at the same level. It's a much smaller team over there
42:03SPEAKERYeah, it's it's it's it's an unfortunate situation for AMD
42:09SPEAKERBecause it puts them in these weird situations where if you like to play new games the day it comes out
42:15SPEAKERThen you're probably best bet is to buy an Nvidia card because it's more likely to run on that
42:21SPEAKERMainly at this point because like to bake lights in unreal you have to have an Nvidia card, right?
42:28SPEAKERSo that means every developer who does any kind of like work with lighting or any of that stuff is probably running on an Nvidia
42:34SPEAKERCard which means that they play their game on an Nvidia card means they find the Nvidia bugs
42:38SPEAKERAnd then they find the AMD bugs later
42:41SPEAKERand and
42:42SPEAKERyou know it's a it's a it's an unfortunate fact of
42:47SPEAKERLife in the in the game industry these days, so
42:51SPEAKERYeah, it's it's a wild time
42:53SPEAKER14th gen came out this year which seemed like a real
42:56SPEAKERrespin of
42:58SPEAKERThis is Intel's 14th gen just just so we're full disclosure in
43:02SPEAKERWell, it's a lot like 13th gen Adam. Yeah 14th gen desktop parts so while on the laptop
43:09SPEAKERThey are moving to a completely different architecture
43:12SPEAKER14th gen on the desktop is kind of a stopgap. I mean yeah, they just took it's a raptor like refresh
43:18SPEAKERI that's when I kind of stepped in and did my first official CPU reviews for PC world which was
43:26SPEAKERamazing and also
43:28SPEAKERProbably the best time to do it too because the the stakes were really low
43:31SPEAKERYou just copied and pasted and changed all the 13th to 14th and talked about the memory controller a little bit
43:37SPEAKERI did not do that. I did not do that, but
43:40SPEAKERYeah, so for the the desktop. I mean like
43:44SPEAKERYeah, whatever. It's fine Intel needed a new car smell. They have the new car smell on the market. That's fine
43:50SPEAKERBut yeah for the laptop part meteor lake was kind of the big announcement
43:55SPEAKERIn the in the summer, and then it just barely launched in the middle of December
44:01SPEAKERWhich is traditionally not a great time to launch a major CPU architecture
44:05SPEAKERSo what if you're not super confident in that is it a good time for that?
44:10SPEAKERYou know, I don't know it you want like it's just a little bit of sales not a lot of sales
44:15SPEAKERYou just want to ease them out there kind of take the temperature of the market see how people like it
44:20SPEAKERIs it a good time in that situation?
44:22SPEAKERYou know, I mean there's people always throw around the term paper launch right like oh, hey
44:27SPEAKERYou have a launch on paper, but you don't actually have product it product is out
44:31SPEAKERI do I I was able to buy a laptop on Newegg
44:34SPEAKERThere's okay, you know the there are there were some companies that had hardware out there for sure
44:40SPEAKERSo it didn't feel like to me at least quote-unquote a traditional paper launch kind of thing
44:45SPEAKERBut yeah, the timing is real weird and and honestly
44:48SPEAKERI like I don't know the behind the scenes of the timing of launching mid-december
44:53SPEAKERBut it feels like hey, we were gonna do it at CES, but we needed it to do to do it in this calendar year
45:00SPEAKERSo let's push it up a little bit
45:02SPEAKERBut really like as as we're kind of looking at what's coming up in CES
45:06SPEAKERWhich I will be at in a week from this time. I'm so sorry. Yeah, right
45:11SPEAKERThat like I think that's gonna be the real unveiling of meteor lake and well, I'm sorry
45:18SPEAKERIt's Intel core ultra processors. Yeah meteor lake is the code name for their first triplet design, right?
45:24SPEAKERYeah, the architecture it we're kind of in a weird spot where now then the numbering scheme now
45:30SPEAKERWe've actually seen it and that we still haven't seen the full stack
45:33SPEAKERSo it's kind of hard to compare apples to apples
45:35SPEAKERBut like right now we're kind of resetting back to one then the numbering is like that. They're not calling it first gen
45:43SPEAKERThey're not they're not calling it series one or these other things. We've heard about but essentially this is
45:49SPEAKERWe're resetting the counter back to first gen which to the Intel right. Yeah, so first generation right now
45:57SPEAKEREverything's just called the Intel core ultra processors
46:01SPEAKERBut yeah anyway, so I I haven't had enough
46:04SPEAKERSo we had a freelancer at PC world who did a review article for the website. I personally haven't had enough time
46:14SPEAKEREven though I have hardware II and I haven't had enough time to look at it
46:17SPEAKERGordon is still out on medical leave so he hasn't had time
46:20SPEAKERBut I mean he has been following the news closely and like we've been chatting all the time and he's like, man
46:26SPEAKERI you know, I wish I could test this or that or why is this launch feel so weird and you know, like
46:32SPEAKERYeah, it's a weird it's an interesting like
46:37SPEAKERSo the reason these triplet designs are one of the reasons these triplet designs are interesting is because they require a lot of work
46:42SPEAKEROn the Windows side, I think in order to get the most out of the hardware
46:45SPEAKERThe other thing about launching a laptop first to me is like I don't know about you
46:49SPEAKERBut my use case for a laptop is dramatically different than my use case for a desktop
46:54SPEAKERDesktop, I want as much performance as possible all the time
46:58SPEAKERUntil the cable is hot coming from the the power cable is warm coming out of the wall boy. You might want to check that
47:06SPEAKERBut on a laptop
47:07SPEAKERReally? All I care about is that when I open the lid that it turns on and that it doesn't feel slow
47:13SPEAKERRight, which is a different a different mark
47:15SPEAKERyou know, that's the hard thing with laptops and why personally I have a hard time like covering them is because
47:23SPEAKEREveryone has different needs out of a laptop. Some people just really care about battery life
47:28SPEAKERsome people do care about performance and use it as like a desktop replacement and want the most powerful thing and
47:35SPEAKERthere's just so many variations in between like, you know, it is hard to like for me at least to make a
47:41SPEAKERDefinitive advice to be like hey, you know what? This is the laptop. You should get her. That's the laptop. You should get so
47:47SPEAKERYeah, it's it's nuts
47:49SPEAKERYeah
47:50SPEAKERThe nice thing about buying desktops and building desktops is that you assume if somebody's going to go to the trouble of having a three
47:56SPEAKERFoot tall box in there in their office. They probably care about performance
48:00SPEAKERSo, you know though I gotta say I'm not gonna put any family members on blast
48:04SPEAKERBut I had a family member who was recently talking about having some performance problems
48:10SPEAKERand when
48:11SPEAKERThey went to go finally do some trouble troubleshooting
48:15SPEAKERthey realized that they have never installed drivers or updated drivers since they originally
48:22SPEAKERBuilt the box and it and then when they did they were like, oh my god. I got like double the performance
48:28SPEAKERThis is amazing. And I was like, oh my god
48:30SPEAKERSo well, so not everyone building boxes, you know is hey and no shame
48:37SPEAKERYou know, there are a lot of people out there, right?
48:39SPEAKERYeah, we all learn but there are a lot of people out there who just build a box
48:42SPEAKERYou know and then just don't think about it and just try to play on it
48:46SPEAKERWere they just running Windows Update drivers and it was doing okay. That's kind of amazing actually
48:51SPEAKERwell, so honestly it became
48:54SPEAKERIt didn't become a thing until they got a new monitor
48:56SPEAKERSo they had a 1080p 60 monitor and the hardware was fine for that
49:01SPEAKERAnd then when they got a new monitor, they realized it was like a 1440p
49:06SPEAKER144 Hertz that's when they were like wait weird. I'm not getting what I should be getting here or what they thought they should be getting
49:15SPEAKERSo
49:16SPEAKERWow, that's a that's amazing
49:19SPEAKERSo, okay last CPU kind of integrated thing Apple rolled out m3s this year and m2s m2s were earlier this year
49:27SPEAKERWell, m2 m2 launched late last year. Yeah specific m2 came out this year right? Yeah
49:35SPEAKERLike they remain interesting, but they're kind of it as with most Apple stuff
49:40SPEAKERIt ends up on an island by itself, right? Because it's not like it's not like you can get your Intel your your Windows running
49:47SPEAKERMac anymore. It's it's you just yeah, you're over no s10 land no matter what I guess
49:53SPEAKERYeah, I mean it we don't officially cover Apple stuff, you know
49:58SPEAKERGordon definitely does look at Apple stuff and we use it to compare to Windows stuff. But also I don't know me personally
50:05SPEAKERI'm I'm of the mindset of like hey if you're gonna get a Mac
50:09SPEAKERYou don't really care to compare it against Windows and if you're getting a Windows one
50:13SPEAKERYou don't really care to compare it against Mac
50:15SPEAKERLike it's it's good theoretically to kind of see how all this stuff is shaking out
50:19SPEAKERBut like from a buying decision like like how many people are actually out there being like, hmm
50:24SPEAKERShould I get a Mac or should I get a PC, you know?
50:26SPEAKERSo I think the place that that hits is in the the kind of the high-end laptop like not like the pro laptop
50:32SPEAKERBut the high-end the consumer laptop range where I think Apple drives a lot of a lot of the market based on
50:40SPEAKERHey
50:41SPEAKERI want a thin like like then light ultra books existed because of the the MacBook Air, right?
50:48SPEAKERLike they've done a lot of they've done a lot of hey
50:51SPEAKERyou can buy a cheap a good enough computer to do all of the stuff that a normal person uses a computer for for
50:57SPEAKER900 a thousand dollars and it will look cool and have like three days of battery life and all sorts of other stuff, too
51:03SPEAKERI I mean I remain I still think that the stuff that Apple's doing with them to m3 is maybe the most interesting
51:11SPEAKERWork that's happening in CPUs right now because they're getting this incredible perf out of these really small light
51:19SPEAKERyou know SOC's I
51:22SPEAKERI do I do have some issues with the way that they market the m2 ultras
51:28SPEAKERAgainst like 40 90s and I'm like man, that's not exactly how that works. You're comparing it
51:34SPEAKERYou're you've got a really really nice mobile GPU and you're comparing it to this monster and you're like, yeah
51:40SPEAKEROurs is better in like some really specific tests
51:43SPEAKERSo hey pro res guess what pro res works really well on Apple Hardware. Yeah
51:49SPEAKERpress press
51:51SPEAKEROkay, so a couple more quick hits we're running up on time here
51:55SPEAKERBut the machine learning stuff really popular there was there was Wow, you hear popular
52:03SPEAKERCertain certain values of popular. Yeah. Yeah
52:05SPEAKERI mean if you would think about like the the ratio of people talking about AI to you know
52:10SPEAKERActually how much it's being used. I I still don't fully know but yeah AI
52:14SPEAKEREverybody is talking about AI. Well, so so this is the year chat GPT and Dolly and stable diffusion and all the image generators
52:24SPEAKERBecame much more accessible this year
52:27SPEAKERPeople been doing damage generation and deep fakes and stuff like that for a while
52:31SPEAKERbut now you can just open up a web page and type some stuff in and 20 seconds later you get an image and
52:38SPEAKERIt's interesting cuz like
52:41SPEAKERWildly different experiences in different communities like my tech the tech communities. I live in
52:45SPEAKERPeople are strongly enthusiastic about this because you can people who can't draw can make drawings that look like something an artist would make now
52:54SPEAKEROddly, they're not surprisingly at all. I guess in the art communities. They're like, hey, this is just copyright infringement in a different scale
53:02SPEAKERAnd and hey, maybe don't use your AI image generators because they're bad
53:06SPEAKERWhich is also a completely fair situation to be in. Yeah
53:12SPEAKERnow we I don't think we're I think at some point Brad and I are gonna dig into the kind of ethical and social ramifications of
53:19SPEAKERcopyright infringement at mass scale
53:22SPEAKERthe the thing I'll say is
53:25SPEAKERmaybe don't use text generators for your legal cases and places where people are going to
53:30SPEAKERLike go to jail or die if you if you make mistakes
53:35SPEAKERBecause they're basically like computerized lying machines
53:39SPEAKERBut there are a handful of really good places where machine learning is having an impact in and is actually doing something useful
53:45SPEAKERYeah
53:46SPEAKERI think we can all look at our at our newer phones and see that the the voice recognition stuff is
53:52SPEAKERDramatically better now than it was even two years ago. And that's that's a result of those improvements
53:58SPEAKERDLSS 3.5 for Nvidia users on on a high-end for series cards like the gate the drum the video card can just make up frames
54:06SPEAKERIn between the to fill in to fill in gaps in your frame rate. Yeah, I still feel weird about that
54:12SPEAKERBut you know, it's I'm glad it's there. It is it is a viable option
54:16SPEAKERit's I've spent a fair amount of time experimenting with that in cyberpunk mostly and
54:22SPEAKERIt's it's a it's like it's one of those ones that I'm like
54:26SPEAKERWell, this is gonna be really cool next generation when they kind of work out the kinks in that
54:29SPEAKERSometimes it feels a little hinky
54:31SPEAKERSometimes it feels really good and I wouldn't even know that it's turned on
54:33SPEAKERLike it's it is firmly a feature that I probably don't turn on right now for the most part unless unless you you really need it
54:41SPEAKERI mean there are definitely people who you know
54:43SPEAKERDon't care that much about latency and things like that and there's like, oh I get extra frames awesome then cool
54:50SPEAKERI mean if you if you don't notice it then, you know reap the benefits more power to you. The number is bigger when it's on
54:57SPEAKERAdam yeah
55:00SPEAKERSame thing for ray tracing like we're seeing the
55:03SPEAKERYou're getting the equivalent of more rays cast in your in your ray tracing games so that your your lighting looks a little bit better
55:09SPEAKERand better quality too with the
55:11SPEAKERRay reconstruction technique in deal assist 3.5. So yeah
55:16SPEAKERBut then the place that I'm most excited we talked about this a little bit with Kishore last week
55:20SPEAKERIs with science stuff like there's there's now
55:23SPEAKERFor places where there's established data sets, for example, like radio radiology screenings radiological screenings
55:30SPEAKERThere are first-pass breast cancer
55:34SPEAKERScanners that can they can read a
55:36SPEAKERX-ray, you know mammogram and detect tumors or at least flag something that a human needs to look at
55:43SPEAKERSo that so that you can get a faster look better better results less likely, you know
55:49SPEAKERIt's like a second line of defense for a human that might have missed something or or or whatever
55:54SPEAKERSo at least take out like the busy work, right like hey, you know what somebody's doctors way too busy to look over the fine detail
56:01SPEAKERSo let machine learning kind of scrape it over and let you know if you need to yeah that and that and the hey
56:07SPEAKERHere's something that's a little questionable that the machine noticed that the human maybe doesn't right like every the problem with people is we all
56:14SPEAKERHave bad days, right?
56:15SPEAKERSo if you're if you if you have something on your eye that day and you have a little bit of a headache you miss
56:20SPEAKERsomething that's that's a bad outcome for the person who's
56:23SPEAKERScreening you saw. I think this is the year that phones were boring
56:32SPEAKERUnfortunately, I would say for the most part phones have been boring for a while as somebody who used to cover phones like and I always love
56:40SPEAKERBleeding-edge new technology a lot of the companies that used to do that like LG like or HTC
56:46SPEAKERThey're just not around anymore
56:48SPEAKERAnd at this point, you know
56:49SPEAKERIt's such a massive market that it's it's better to iterate than try to do anything super revolutionary except for folding phones
56:57SPEAKERI love folding phones. I have always wanted the biggest phone I can get in my pocket
57:03SPEAKERFor the past couple years. I've been using
57:06SPEAKERSamsung fold but this year I just barely got the the one plus open which is like
57:13SPEAKERYeah, well like it is it is an awesome phone in a lot of ways and specifically they figured out the camera
57:20SPEAKERFinally on folding phones because that was always kind of like a weak point of it
57:24SPEAKERSo, I don't know a ghoul had their pixel fold which day, you know
57:28SPEAKERI'm not a not a big pixel fan to begin with and you know
57:32SPEAKERIt's not I don't think it's the best folding phone out there
57:35SPEAKERBut like my wife she she's on the opposite end. She wants the smallest phone ever and
57:42SPEAKERShe recently switched to the the Samsung
57:47SPEAKERFlip no. No. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a folder. She's
57:54SPEAKERYeah, and she
57:56SPEAKERAbsolutely loves it because when it's when it's in that flipped mode
57:59SPEAKERShe can actually fit it in her pockets and she's just like this is awesome
58:02SPEAKERSo like I I do I do feel like folding flipping
58:07SPEAKERBending all that kind of stuff like is is like getting better and better
58:11SPEAKERDo you feel like the screen is getting to a better like like?
58:16SPEAKERWhen we had we West was on we talked about this because he's a he's a West Finland PC gamer is a longtime flip phone
58:22SPEAKERfolding phone aficionado
58:24SPEAKERHe was still
58:27SPEAKERHe described a degree of anxiety that I think I'm probably not comfortable with on my phones
58:32SPEAKERWhich is a funny thing to say given that a phone usually lasts between one and two years for me before I switch to the
58:37SPEAKERnext one
58:39SPEAKERBut but yeah, do you do you like do you think about it when you when you're unfolding your phone?
58:43SPEAKERDo you think oh, I just used one of the 1500 folds I have for this thing or whatever it is
58:46SPEAKERso I had that same feeling going into it and I got the the the galaxy z fold 3 two years ago and I
58:54SPEAKERIntentionally wanted to kind of like not baby it to say hey, you know what saw I didn't put a case on it
59:01SPEAKERWhen the screen protector the built-in screen protector
59:04SPEAKERFor the inside screen started to kind of like show some cracks and peels and dirt coming up
59:10SPEAKERI intentionally ripped off the screen protector and was like, okay
59:13SPEAKERLet's just see how it worked because and I'll say I did this because I was talking to
59:18SPEAKERSomebody in my company who has that who had a fold
59:21SPEAKERNo a flipping phone
59:24SPEAKERAnd I showed him I was like man
59:26SPEAKERI'm starting to get like dust and bubbles underneath the screen protector and he's like, oh, yeah mine did that too and I was like
59:30SPEAKEROh, did you send it in? He's like now I just ripped the thing off and I was like, oh
59:35SPEAKERYou're not supposed to do that. But huh? Okay, I guess people are doing it
59:39SPEAKERThis is the screen protector that reviewers famously ripped off because they thought it was like the manufacturing film, right?
59:43SPEAKERYeah, you're not supposed to and I think people have kind of learned that but I intentionally ripped it off and use it fine
59:50SPEAKERSo I used it for about a year with the the screen protector off
59:54SPEAKERAnd I mean it started to get like little grooves in it
59:58SPEAKERLike I wasn't intentionally hammering on it, but it started to get little grooves in it where I would mostly use my thumb
1:00:03SPEAKERRight, but you'd have to kind of look at it at a certain angle
1:00:06SPEAKERBut but the actual where the fold actually happens the crease definitely was starting to get like cracks in the middle
1:00:14SPEAKERso like but that was two years of use and and
1:00:18SPEAKEROnce again, like I dropped it a ton and like that thing was like built like a tank
1:00:22SPEAKERSo I didn't I didn't worry about that the actual folding mechanism. I didn't worry about it at all
1:00:28SPEAKERLike I never had any problems with that. It was a screen that was kind of you know, but even then
1:00:34SPEAKERIt was not that big of a deal
1:00:35SPEAKERIt's funny because like the little micro scratches that you get on your phone just by putting it in out of your pocket
1:00:41SPEAKERMake me so crazy that I put screen protectors on my phones like the moment
1:00:45SPEAKERI unwrapped them so that I can just when I start getting to any of the micro scratches
1:00:48SPEAKERI just pop one off and put a new one on. Oh, you're giving me hives over here Adam. This is what I'm saying
1:00:53SPEAKERI will say it's on the inside, right?
1:00:55SPEAKERYeah, so like this was just of normal use and once again if you use the screen protector, so it is
1:01:01SPEAKERUnder warranty like I think I started to get some bubbles and dirt underneath that screen protector like about nine months in yeah
1:01:08SPEAKERAnd that's when I was like, I'm just gonna rip the whole thing off
1:01:10SPEAKERBut you can get it replaced under warranty by Samsung for free though
1:01:15SPEAKERLike, you know most people I think would just take it in and kind of get that
1:01:19SPEAKERYeah screen protector replaced and not have a problem that makes that makes more sense. Yeah
1:01:25SPEAKEROkay, we're to our favorite part of the part of the episode. I think
1:01:30SPEAKERtime for the scene drama
1:01:32SPEAKERYou just you just put a bullet point on here. This is a Seuss and I don't know what this one is
1:01:37SPEAKERSorry, JJ. Yeah. Well, it was a couple things
1:01:41SPEAKERYeah, you know
1:01:42SPEAKERbe being a company that has a lot makes a lot of stuff like
1:01:48SPEAKERAsus Asus makes a lot of stuff and some of it, you know hits and and some of it is something I would
1:01:56SPEAKERYou know how I have no problem using a see stuff
1:01:59SPEAKERBut some of it is just like ooh boy you you kind of screwed up on that for one reason or another
1:02:04SPEAKERone of them was the ROG Ally they started having problems with the SD card reader because
1:02:09SPEAKERThey ended up putting the SD card reader right by where the heat vents from the system. So, you know
1:02:17SPEAKERSG card readers were failing. Whoops. Okay. What's that a solder situation or is that a or do they say I
1:02:24SPEAKERknow they didn't really
1:02:26SPEAKERThey kind of like said hey listen to your if you're having these problems like we will cover that and you know
1:02:31SPEAKERThat kind of stuff, but I don't think they said specifically what was what was going on?
1:02:36SPEAKERSo yeah, I mean there's that but then I would say kind of the biggest one is the motherboard stuff
1:02:42SPEAKERAnd if this wasn't just an Asus thing
1:02:46SPEAKERBrad had a lot of anxiety around his
1:02:49SPEAKER7950 X 3d
1:02:51SPEAKERYou know, but yeah, there was these voltage issues with motherboards
1:02:55SPEAKERAsus was kind of leading the pack out there as some of them that were burning up CPUs
1:03:01SPEAKERAnd had some really bad
1:03:05SPEAKERMessaging around what was going on kind of thing. So yeah, I don't know like, you know, well
1:03:11SPEAKERYeah, and then we also had this problem with the AMD
1:03:15SPEAKERWith a large fairly large number of Ryzen some motherboards this year
1:03:20SPEAKERWhere they just started kind of failing sporadically over time, right?
1:03:25SPEAKERYeah, that was a voltage thing. Okay. Yeah, so so the upshot is it created a
1:03:32SPEAKERinconsistent but but inevitable failure
1:03:36SPEAKERfor
1:03:37SPEAKERThese what are essentially pretty high-end motherboards. It seemed like well not even just high-end
1:03:42SPEAKERI mean, I think the thing is that over the course of the past number of years
1:03:46SPEAKERMotherboard manufacturers have always wanted the biggest number on the box, right?
1:03:50SPEAKERAnd so like they've been playing with pushing that bleeding edge and just going right up to it
1:03:55SPEAKERAnd I think they finally found where that edge is
1:04:00SPEAKERAnd it wasn't just I will say it wasn't just the motherboard manufacturers
1:04:03SPEAKERSome of it was on AMD and how they you know deal with voltage and things like that
1:04:07SPEAKERSo it you know kind of made everyone be like, okay. Well, we need to stop and look at how much voltage is going in
1:04:13SPEAKERHow much voltage you know should be supported like what's you know, all that kind of stuff?
1:04:18SPEAKERSo I think it ended up being kind of a good thing to stop and kind of reevaluate like hey
1:04:23SPEAKERYou know what don't always push the bleeding edge on some of this stuff
1:04:27SPEAKERBut yeah, I mean it but once again like Brad had a lot of times where I was messaging with him and he's like I do
1:04:34SPEAKERI'm scared man. Like and I was like, hey listen, like your voltage if you're checking it, you know
1:04:39SPEAKERYour voltage is saying where's that? I wouldn't worry about it too much, but it caused him a lot of heartache
1:04:46SPEAKERif we
1:04:48SPEAKERlike if the positive outcome of this whole thing is that everybody has a
1:04:53SPEAKERYo, here's the just how to run this motherboard at complete stock
1:04:58SPEAKERbutton
1:04:59SPEAKERThat would be a good addition. Like I think I think we're in a place where that would be nice because it's about the the
1:05:04SPEAKERBiases are really complicated. Now. There's a bazillion options, especially in in in
1:05:10SPEAKERYou know the the higher-end boards and it's hard to know. Oh
1:05:17SPEAKERYeah, we talked about this on the full nerd last time I was on I think wouldn't when we were when I was there with Steve
1:05:21SPEAKERAnd like most people see from Cambridge Nexus most people don't realize
1:05:27SPEAKERthat
1:05:30SPEAKERRunning memory at the XMP
1:05:32SPEAKERSettings is overclocking at this point overclocking. Yeah, so like it's a it's a weird
1:05:38SPEAKERlike we've got into this weird situation where everybody's just overclocking everything all the time and now nobody's
1:05:44SPEAKEROverclocking because it's just the way everybody runs their computers and it's a cool thing now. Yeah, exactly
1:05:50SPEAKERWell, we should we should do more under vaulting. That's the that's the I love it. That's the hottest take of all. Yeah
1:05:56SPEAKERCouple more quick hits you you you have bad PC ports here. I would say some of these are just bad games Adam
1:06:02SPEAKERBut go run down the list, you know
1:06:04SPEAKERYeah, well, I mean it was it was something we yeah it and it depends on the game
1:06:09SPEAKERBut yeah, the the last of us that came out on PC Jedi
1:06:12SPEAKERsurvivor Redfall Hogwarts
1:06:15SPEAKERLegacy Diablo 4 star field. I mean there were so many games that came out that had
1:06:21SPEAKERissues
1:06:23SPEAKERWhether it was I mean a lot of people point to the developers being lazy. They didn't optimize for XYZ game
1:06:30SPEAKERThat's how it works guys. Yeah, right
1:06:33SPEAKERYeah, and we had a lot of discussion
1:06:36SPEAKERI feel like people got sick of us talking about it on our podcast a little bit because we were like I was bringing in
1:06:42SPEAKERMultiple different people to be like hey
1:06:44SPEAKERHow do you know what's going on with this with these developers and quote-unquote lazy ports and things like that?
1:06:50SPEAKERSo some of it's that some of it was all performance suffer was there like control and UI stuff as well
1:06:56SPEAKERDo you feel like uh, I mean, I think I think the the idea of
1:07:03SPEAKERHey, it's not optimized to run the way that I think it should on my hardware is one part of it
1:07:09SPEAKERI think one of one of it is hey
1:07:11SPEAKERI want to use the the most bleeding-edge tech and guess what it's not there and I'm talking specifically about star field
1:07:17SPEAKERWhy didn't they have DLSS? Oh because AMD gave them money to not implement it or whatnot. I think some of it is like
1:07:26SPEAKERLike being able to put options in there like like I think of like red fall where it's just like the settings menu in there
1:07:32SPEAKERWas just like junk
1:07:33SPEAKERIt was hard to know if anything was actually making a change
1:07:37SPEAKERPerformance wise at all and no matter what you would always have these huge stutter drops in these specific places
1:07:42SPEAKERso I honestly like I it's just it runs the gamut of
1:07:46SPEAKEReverything
1:07:48SPEAKERYeah, it's it's um, it's funny the red fall the other red fall
1:07:53SPEAKERThe star field thing is interesting because you know, it's a Microsoft Studio now and they're building primarily presumably for Xbox consoles
1:08:02SPEAKERThat that purchase happened midway through the development cycle for that game
1:08:06SPEAKERbut
1:08:07SPEAKERIt makes sense that they'd run the native version of FSR
1:08:11SPEAKERAMD's FSR rather than DLSS. I look no will AMD gave them money
1:08:16SPEAKERI mean look it's all of this is complicated
1:08:21SPEAKERRami Esmail says that every game that ever ships is a miracle which is which is I think
1:08:27SPEAKERAccurate given my experience makes sense
1:08:29SPEAKERI will also tell you that I have had people yell at me on the message boards and we have a very small game that
1:08:34SPEAKERThat literally in compared to Diablo 4 and starfield literally no one plays
1:08:40SPEAKERBut I've had somebody tell me that with the straight face that a 1070 with 16 gigs of RAM on a I think a
1:08:48SPEAKER9600 and Intel 9600 CPU
1:08:51SPEAKERShould be able to run not running the they were like, hey the game runs at 60 frames a second
1:08:57SPEAKERI should be getting 90 to 120 frames a second on this. I'm like, I love that you think that it's very sweet. I
1:09:05SPEAKERpeople have weird expectations about performance on
1:09:08SPEAKERsome means but back to the GPU thing right when a GPU, you know is costing twice the amount of money that it used to like
1:09:15SPEAKERI totally get where somebody's like, hey, you know what like I paid for this, you know
1:09:20SPEAKERVery expensive graphics card and usually usually on the PC you can power through problems
1:09:26SPEAKERBut we're seeing you know
1:09:27SPEAKERA lot of these things were it's just like no matter even if you have the highest hardware
1:09:31SPEAKERYou cannot power through some of these problems
1:09:33SPEAKERWell, it's it's funny you say that because I literally had a support a support ticket the other day
1:09:39SPEAKERWhere I helped somebody out with a problem and they were like, I have a 40 90. I have a 13 900 K
1:09:43SPEAKERHere's I'm only getting this frame rate
1:09:45SPEAKERI was like I have the exact same computer you have and I'm seeing
1:09:49SPEAKERLiterally a 50% increase in performance that you're seeing and we went and I and I took the time and I troubleshooted with the guy
1:09:55SPEAKERI was like, hey, by the way
1:09:57SPEAKERGuess what? Your problem is your memory clocks are at Jeddak defaults and not not the XMP settings
1:10:03SPEAKERSo you're you're under clocking your memory and as a result
1:10:08SPEAKERRunning games he was running the RAM at stock. Yeah
1:10:12SPEAKERYeah, but but I mean but but like ue4 is really memory memory speed dependent. So yeah anyway
1:10:20SPEAKERIt's a weird it's a weird situation to be in. It's always a weird situation
1:10:24SPEAKERLet's see. Let's see Apple stop selling the Apple watch that seems like a whoops
1:10:28SPEAKERI think Brad and I might talk about this in a full episode at some point cuz it's kind of interesting story
1:10:31SPEAKERDidn't it didn't it come back? Isn't that I thought the latest news is that oh actually we're allowing it again
1:10:38SPEAKERI don't know. I once again, I don't follow Apple too closely boys Adam
1:10:44SPEAKERLet's see, it looks like if I I'm gonna go hit buy on this Apple watch ultra to do it. Let's see
1:10:50SPEAKERI think I'll get a
1:10:52SPEAKERYeah, it's for science. I'll tell my wife that and let you know how it goes
1:10:56SPEAKERWhy'd you buy a why'd you buy a $900 watch? No trade-in? No, of course not buy now
1:11:02SPEAKERLet's see. This is the most exciting segment we've ever done
1:11:05SPEAKERYou gotta go buy an Apple watch might as well get a credit card with my active lifestyle leaving the house all the time. Yeah
1:11:12SPEAKERYou don't wanna break it
1:11:15SPEAKER$799 I can pick it up in storage a day at Apple Valley Fair. Yeah. So yeah, it's back on the market
1:11:21SPEAKERJoe Biden must need an Apple watch for Christmas for somebody
1:11:25SPEAKERYeah, Tim Apple went immediately to Joe Biden and said hey listen, come on. We gotta figure this out. That's Joe America
1:11:31SPEAKEROh, yeah
1:11:33SPEAKERBut but no so they they had a the patent a patent judgment go against them on
1:11:40SPEAKERLike the way this works is interesting
1:11:42SPEAKERI guess I think Brad are gonna probably do a whole episode about it or yes part of an episode
1:11:45SPEAKERWould be interesting him interesting story Apple also skipped a year on the iPad Pro
1:11:50SPEAKERThey rolled out the m2 ones last like November. I think I feel like I bought one right after they came out
1:11:56SPEAKERBut maybe there's a couple weeks
1:11:58SPEAKERAnd then just kind of didn't do another one this year
1:12:00SPEAKERWhich is you know as a person who purchased the last one and if I okay with that on the other hand
1:12:06SPEAKERM3 seems like a nice upgrade. So, you know, maybe maybe more iPad next year
1:12:13SPEAKERAnd then the 12 volt to buy a 2x6
1:12:16SPEAKERYeah, so obviously one of the big things last year with the launch of the 40 series was oh my god
1:12:21SPEAKERMy 12 volt high power cables are melting my system. I mean well only a
1:12:27SPEAKERSmallish number what had it happening to them?
1:12:30SPEAKERBut because of that the the all the powers that PCIe sig got together to say hey, you know what?
1:12:37SPEAKERWe're gonna do a slight revision and I have actually seen personally in the wild my first
1:12:43SPEAKERPower supplies that have the 12 volt 2x6 power connector, which you know, it's it's not the revision that I think people were screaming for
1:12:50SPEAKERbut specifically, you know, it does it deal with some of the
1:12:55SPEAKERSeeding issues to make sure hey, it's fully seated
1:12:58SPEAKERThis is specifically for the power supply to GPU supplemental power. Yes
1:13:04SPEAKERYeah, the you know, the the big change of like hey, you don't have three eight pin PCI power plugs
1:13:11SPEAKERNow you just have one
1:13:13SPEAKER12 volt high power cable and
1:13:16SPEAKERYeah, like I still like the cable as long as it's seated properly
1:13:20SPEAKERLike I would much rather use a smaller cable than than a much larger cable
1:13:25SPEAKERAnd also the benefits that you get from the ATX 3.0 spec is is really nice
1:13:31SPEAKERSo the you know, this is just a slight iteration
1:13:35SPEAKERBut I think at this point a lot of that is behind us now for the most part
1:13:40SPEAKERPeople are on their outreach ponies about something else
1:13:43SPEAKERThe the the interesting thing to me is so is the new cable gonna be backwards compatible with the old cards or is this a third?
1:13:51SPEAKERNew cable in the last three generations. I did have that question at least according to Gordon
1:13:56SPEAKERHe says it is backwards compatible. So that's good. Yeah, so like the
1:14:03SPEAKERThe oh, yeah
1:14:04SPEAKEROh, yeah
1:14:05SPEAKERYeah, because I was we were building a PC that had the new cable in the new power supply that we were using
1:14:11SPEAKERBut we also wanted to use a sleeved cable and we only had the older 12 volt high power cable
1:14:17SPEAKERAnd that it still works. It works. Okay, it works. It just you get the benefits from using the 12-volt 2x6
1:14:25SPEAKERGot it. Okay, that sounds good
1:14:27SPEAKERAnd what's going on?
1:14:28SPEAKERThere's a there's a slot standard coming to write a power powered slot standard to deliver the power through the motherboard theoretically at some point
1:14:35SPEAKERYeah, I mean this kind of goes into my favorite tech of the year a little bit
1:14:39SPEAKERBut the at Computechs Asus was showing off a GPU that didn't have a dedicated
1:14:46SPEAKERCable running to it and instead they they added a had probably like an inch
1:14:53SPEAKERafter the PCIe
1:14:55SPEAKERby 16 slot
1:14:57SPEAKERYou know just kind of like further down the card and then a subsequent slot slot on the motherboard to deliver power
1:15:04SPEAKERWe don't know a ton about it. We know what kind of like comes from a server standard that's out there
1:15:09SPEAKERWe don't know the theoretical limits of like how much power it can feed through there
1:15:13SPEAKERBut essentially the idea is you actually 12 plug in a 12 volt high power cable to your motherboard and it just delivers the the power
1:15:21SPEAKERThrough into that slot. Got it. Asus is the only one so far that has talked about having that standard, you know
1:15:29SPEAKERRunning that much power through the motherboard seems like it could be potentially fraught too, right? You know, yeah
1:15:34SPEAKERIt's not something that I would feel excited about right now unless it's you know
1:15:39SPEAKERto be okay, so I'm not you know, like chomping at the bit to get it and I you know
1:15:45SPEAKERBut I see that I see the benefit there and you know
1:15:47SPEAKERIt would be nice if it becomes a thing but also at the same time then if you buy this GPU
1:15:54SPEAKERYou're kind of stuck with it because it literally does not have a you know
1:15:58SPEAKERAny other slot to deliver power so you can't take that GPU and use it in a traditional system
1:16:03SPEAKERSo it seems like a better solution would be to build a bridge that goes
1:16:08SPEAKERIt like to build a thing that goes in and loops around and then hooks into the into the top of the video card
1:16:15SPEAKERBut what do I know Oh Adams digging around? Yes. Sorry. I'm grabbing a GPU
1:16:19SPEAKERI know this is not a video podcast, but I so one of the other things that we saw was
1:16:25SPEAKERPutting the 12 volt high power connector
1:16:27SPEAKERBy the bottom. Yeah, like kind of on the same side as where the PCIe slot is
1:16:32SPEAKERSo when you're feeding the cables through from the back of your case
1:16:35SPEAKERYou're just going straight into the video card rather than trying to like loop it around to the to the side or even to the back
1:16:42SPEAKERSo yeah, I like that but also it really depends on the case. So yeah an open spec
1:16:49SPEAKERYeah, that's that's that's interesting. Okay, so
1:16:52SPEAKERLast last little bit here. What's what's some of your favorite stuff this year Adam? What's what's the stuff that got you excited?
1:16:58SPEAKERMaybe the small stuff maybe the big stuff doesn't matter
1:17:00SPEAKERYou know, like I I will say this is something we've talked about since CES
1:17:05SPEAKER2023 and ended up being kind of a big deal for the industry
1:17:09SPEAKERBut hey will did you know that fan technology has kind of been the same for a long time?
1:17:15SPEAKERWell, yeah
1:17:16SPEAKERyou hook a motor on a thing and you put the blades aimed a specific way and then the
1:17:20SPEAKERThen the air moves and it makes a whooshing sound
1:17:24SPEAKERYou know, and that's how it's worked for a while and guess I mean it still works in a lot of cases
1:17:29SPEAKERBut at CES 2023 Gordon and I saw a company called for systems
1:17:35SPEAKERAnd they had this technology called the air jet they had two different variations the air jet mini and the air jet Pro
1:17:40SPEAKERI think was the bigger one and what this is aiming to do is to
1:17:46SPEAKERrevolutionize cooling technology, especially in small
1:17:51SPEAKERHardware so like they they had some demos at CES so far
1:17:55SPEAKERThey actually did release a piece of hardware actually have it back here a zotac mini
1:18:00SPEAKERPC
1:18:02SPEAKERLike it's like a point-of-sale kind of system like a real small
1:18:05SPEAKERIt's like a solid-state cooler though, right? Yeah. Yeah. So yeah long story short
1:18:09SPEAKERI actually have one here because last time I was here they they gave it to me but it's like the the size of
1:18:15SPEAKERWell, you see a battery. Yeah. Yeah, and so it's solid-state cooling
1:18:21SPEAKERYou know a lot of people were kind of
1:18:23SPEAKERDebating on if it is actually solid-state
1:18:26SPEAKERBut the the idea is that it has no motors it is and all the efficiency of the cooling technology
1:18:32SPEAKERJust go look up PC world air jet. You'll see some deeper explanations about it
1:18:37SPEAKERBut the idea is that with this thin and light device it has immense back pressure
1:18:42SPEAKERTo be able to bake break the boundary layer of heat
1:18:46SPEAKERSo I guess there's this thing or like there's a boundary layer over
1:18:49SPEAKERYou know anything that gets really hot and traditional cooling fans has a hard time breaking through that and like
1:18:56SPEAKERGetting the the cool air
1:18:58SPEAKERover it and this is aimed at
1:19:02SPEAKERReally using the back pressure to break that boundary layer and exhaust it out of the system
1:19:07SPEAKERThe benefits are is that it's really small
1:19:10SPEAKERI mean and they they had I don't have it here, but they at their demos they compared it to the fan
1:19:15SPEAKERYou know that is traditionally in a laptop and they're saying that this thing is way much more efficient and also
1:19:24SPEAKERSilent because it doesn't have spinning blades, so you know like you can hear when it's at full load
1:19:30SPEAKERYou can hear the air coming out, but the actual system itself doesn't have
1:19:34SPEAKERMoving parts to like make a sound that's interesting. Yeah, so I mean they've showed us a ton of demos. You know
1:19:41SPEAKERthere's only one actual piece of hardware that has it that has hit the the
1:19:47SPEAKERMarket, but like they continue like I love going and meeting with the people over there because they're always kind of looking at new things
1:19:53SPEAKERAnd and you know just trying new new
1:19:58SPEAKERLike variations of tech that's out there, so you know they they have laptops
1:20:03SPEAKERThey they even had a our latest video was about a MacBook Air that replaced this, but worked the same performance as a pro
1:20:12SPEAKERSSDs
1:20:13SPEAKERYou know one of the big things that we've always yelled about since the beginning is like hey
1:20:17SPEAKERIt would be awesome to have this in a steam deck
1:20:20SPEAKERAnd you they're like yeah, we know we know it would be awesome
1:20:25SPEAKERSo like yeah long story short like this air jet. I truly believe could revolutionize how we cool small
1:20:34SPEAKERElectronic devices, so this is the floor air jet is what this is called. Yeah, f ro re air jet go intercut
1:20:43SPEAKERSo I like like I've seen a lot of things in the years
1:20:46SPEAKERYou know I mean, I haven't been here as long as you were Gordon in tech, but like of all the things
1:20:52SPEAKERI've seen this is like been one of the things that has like gotten me truly excited
1:20:55SPEAKERI like joke about not being excited to not go to CS
1:20:59SPEAKERBut walking around the back alleys of the of like the the disused halls where it's just a bazillion small booths
1:21:07SPEAKERmissing this stuff like I remember we saw a
1:21:10SPEAKERHydrophobic nano coating back in one of those areas three years before anybody shipped anything that was actually in a you know
1:21:18SPEAKERThat made your phone waterproof
1:21:21SPEAKERThe eye tracking and all the different weird like you you you walk around the you walk around the back end of the of the
1:21:28SPEAKERWell, I can't recall it is it stacked on top of each other, but it's like this enormous like 10 football fields of conventional
1:21:34SPEAKERYeah, and you see five you if you if you have the right kind of eyes you can see five years into the future back
1:21:39SPEAKERThere which is fun. It's wild should I do another one or do you want to do?
1:21:44SPEAKERWell, I was gonna say I'm actually wearing one of mine. I bought a pair of
1:21:48SPEAKERSteel series wireless headphones last year nice the so I've always been a studio headphone guy
1:21:55SPEAKERFor fairly obvious reasons, but it turns out when you sit in the same desk for 10 or 12 hours a day
1:22:00SPEAKERAnd you walk it's nice to not have to take your headphones off to walk into the kitchen and get a drink yeah
1:22:04SPEAKERAnd and or to dig around into the desk or whatever and you haven't had any latency issues, or so
1:22:11SPEAKERI did a fair amount of research when I got these they're really expensive. It's the steel series Arctis Nova Pro
1:22:19SPEAKERWireless mm-hmm, and they have their basically. It's the only low latency headset. I could find that had a line in
1:22:27SPEAKERAn analog line end because most of the USB devices yeah, yeah, so
1:22:32SPEAKERIt has a tiny bit of latency. It's like 110 milliseconds if I had to guess like having having done a fair amount of latency
1:22:39SPEAKERanalysis on foo stuff
1:22:41SPEAKERThat that seems about right
1:22:43SPEAKERIt's less than 200 more than more. It's detectable, but not not annoying okay, and it has a little like
1:22:53SPEAKERDesktop control unit how does that?
1:22:55SPEAKERYeah, it has a little breakout box that actually also charges the second battery so you have two batteries
1:23:01SPEAKERSwap back and forth oh that's so when you're when your battery conks out
1:23:04SPEAKERYou just pop the side off and switch a new battery in and as long as you like do it within
1:23:08SPEAKERI think eight or nine seconds. You don't even have to like hit the power button again. It just turns back on thing
1:23:14SPEAKERI don't actually use any of the USB stuff
1:23:17SPEAKERI just have it like I'm literally running off of USB power and then pipe in an audio signal from my analog mixer
1:23:25SPEAKERand I do so the
1:23:27SPEAKERfor the audio nerds I
1:23:29SPEAKERmy
1:23:31SPEAKERMy ears are a little bit lower than they are traditionally
1:23:35SPEAKEROn on a wired set of headphones mm-hmm, but it's it's it's nice and I can do Bluetooth
1:23:42SPEAKERI can hook it up to my phone
1:23:43SPEAKERSo if I need to take a call or something like that I can pop out the little side mic
1:23:46SPEAKERHook it up to the Bluetooth listen to music or a podcast or whatever and have that all mix in on the same
1:23:51SPEAKERThe same headphones without a bunch of weird software on my computer, which I quite like that's awesome
1:23:58SPEAKERYeah, the the other options on low latency wireless are basically DJ headphones
1:24:03SPEAKERThat are crazy expensive and all had weird sound profiles that didn't didn't seem good for the stuff that I do
1:24:10SPEAKERBoth the sound mixing on the game and playing games and listening to music so here. We are nice
1:24:17SPEAKERAnother one that I was excited about this year is
1:24:21SPEAKERWe talked a lot about a PC world the the ATX 3.0 spec. I'm sorry the ATX
1:24:28SPEAKERcase system spec
1:24:31SPEAKERYeah, I think everybody does that honestly Adam. I I just the other day
1:24:36SPEAKERI was eating a bowl of captain crunches Christmas crunch
1:24:39SPEAKERIt's a fabulous seasonal cereal with my daughter, and we were talking about ATX 3.0. You too. I had no idea
1:24:45SPEAKERbut yeah, so the the ATX spec on systems have been around for decades right you know and
1:24:52SPEAKERThe the way we build a tower PC has pretty much stayed the same
1:24:56SPEAKERFor a long time and what's happening now?
1:24:59SPEAKERIs that companies are starting to kind of think outside the box and and one of them is this whole?
1:25:07SPEAKERThere's not a quick and easy way to kind of say it
1:25:09SPEAKERbut like the idea of putting the motherboard headers on the backside so
1:25:15SPEAKERThe the you get a couple benefits from this yeah, so like instead of having all those ugly wires visible through your your nice
1:25:24SPEAKERGlass side panel now. Yeah, you have the wires on the back
1:25:28SPEAKERThey say it helps with maybe airflow, but I'm like
1:25:32SPEAKERSeems like bunk to me
1:25:33SPEAKERBut but like you know it seems like all the benefits of like putting a hole behind your CPU bracket on the motherboard tray
1:25:41SPEAKERBut just for everything so that it's also like it like all of the stuff
1:25:46SPEAKERThat's a pain in the ass chicks access around your cooler or your RAM or whatever is suddenly on the backside
1:25:51SPEAKERIt's you just take the back case off to adjust your why that sounds fabulous like so imagine imagine building a system, right?
1:25:58SPEAKERyou I typically like to build outside the
1:26:02SPEAKERThe motherboard stuff outside of the case so I put the CPU in the RAM the SSD all that kind of stuff
1:26:07SPEAKERYou know prep it put it in the case and then when you plug in the power supply stuff you have to do that dance
1:26:12SPEAKERWhere you get the cable you route it through the hole that you think it needs to go in then you go to the other
1:26:17SPEAKERSide of the case and oh man, it's the wrong hole
1:26:19SPEAKERI need to take it back out put it back in writes that whole dance of going side to side
1:26:24SPEAKERThis is once you put the motherboard in
1:26:27SPEAKEREverything is right there like so you plug in the the the power supply, and then you've route your cables literally
1:26:34SPEAKERJust you know okay. It goes there goes there goes there goes there
1:26:36SPEAKERI mean, there's a you know a couple ways that it doesn't work obviously for the GPU
1:26:42SPEAKERI mean Asus is taking it to the next extreme by having that power slot
1:26:47SPEAKERSo that you just plug 12-volt high power in your motherboard in the back, and then that works so in some cases
1:26:53SPEAKERYou'll still need to route a PCI power to your GPU in the traditional way. You just put a hole though
1:27:00SPEAKERYeah, right in the middle of the motherboard ran the run the cable through there exactly so the I don't know like
1:27:07SPEAKERThe we saw a lot this at Computech's a lot of companies getting into this space and right now like it's still
1:27:14SPEAKERIt's still early days companies need to work together to make this kind of like a viable system
1:27:19SPEAKERBecause you want the motherboard in the case to have the same kind of cutouts and put in the same places
1:27:25SPEAKERThere are companies working working together to make this a reality, but this is kind of for traditional tower systems
1:27:33SPEAKERthis is like the the like the next evolution and some people aren't super excited about it, but I
1:27:40SPEAKERWas excited about it already when we saw the Computech's and then I got more excited about it once
1:27:45SPEAKERI actually built my first system in it, and I can't talk about that system because it's under embargo for a little bit
1:27:51SPEAKERJust subscribe over on PC world and go watch the video, but building my first system in it like I've built many systems
1:27:57SPEAKERI'm sure you've built many systems, so this wasn't like
1:28:00SPEAKERRevolutionary, but it was just like so easy and I can imagine for you first-time builders
1:28:06SPEAKERLike not having to do that that snake cable dance and making sure you're plugging into the right spot like
1:28:12SPEAKERJust it just feels like it. This is gonna be like
1:28:16SPEAKERGroundbreaking for like just building in a system. Well. Yeah, I mean yeah
1:28:20SPEAKERIt's like I think about plugging in the 12-volt CPU power right and how especially if you're in a small mid tower
1:28:27SPEAKERthat getting getting the getting those big fat power cables around and getting them to turn the corner and getting them in in a
1:28:34SPEAKERPlace that doesn't look janky. Yeah is is always a pain in the ass
1:28:38SPEAKERYeah
1:28:39SPEAKERAnd it's like to me it really brings me back to like when we first started having CPUs that had backplane mounts
1:28:45SPEAKERAnd that's me coolers that had backplane mounts and and suddenly cooler master was like hey
1:28:50SPEAKERYou know what we just cut a hole in the board where the CPU goes so that you can unscrew it without having to dismantle
1:28:56SPEAKERThe entire PC to change the CPU cooler you're welcome. Yeah, and and like
1:29:01SPEAKERIt really makes a difference now the the like you said the place that we could really mess this up is if we have a hardware
1:29:07SPEAKERCompatibility lists for your motherboard and cases now. Yeah, we're like the case holes only line up with certain cases and certain motherboards
1:29:14SPEAKERI I would hope that we would not create that
1:29:18SPEAKERproblem for ourselves
1:29:20SPEAKEROnce again, I do know of a handful of companies that are actually working together to make sure that hey
1:29:26SPEAKERYou know what you have a different system
1:29:28SPEAKERI have a different system, but at least at the end of the day the the cutout zones for the case are
1:29:34SPEAKERIn similar places that you're not going to get screwed
1:29:37SPEAKERYeah, so I and I mean Gordon always likes to point out like if you look at the actual ATX spec
1:29:42SPEAKERIt's actually pretty damn loose
1:29:44SPEAKERIt just all the companies kind of like we're able to come together and just agree to something and it's been that way for decades
1:29:51SPEAKERSo like I do believe that that we can get there to a you know a similar spot
1:29:57SPEAKERAnd trust you got to trust the community man. Yeah. Yeah, and it's not you know
1:30:01SPEAKERIt's not groundbreaking like a BTX or you know an actual complete change to the ATX spec
1:30:07SPEAKERBut it is the next step along the way in my mind
1:30:12SPEAKERSo so my next thing we talked about this a lot of the podcasts
1:30:15SPEAKERI won't belabor it but there's two pieces of open-source software that have completely changed the way I use
1:30:21SPEAKERNot the way I use but the way I manipulate my computer fan control
1:30:25SPEAKERWhich I think you introduced me to is an open-source fan curve editor
1:30:30SPEAKEROh, it's so good. You you can do it does stuff that you can do in other applications
1:30:35SPEAKERIt's not it's but it bundles them all in one place
1:30:39SPEAKERAnd lets you make detailed and well-defined
1:30:44SPEAKERFan curves and behaviors for your fans
1:30:46SPEAKERSo for example
1:30:47SPEAKERYou can set it so that it runs one curve
1:30:50SPEAKERwhen the CPU temperature is below this point and a different curve when the CPU temperature goes up to the to the under load temperature and
1:30:57SPEAKERit just switches automatically between the two and it's it's it means that you don't have to hear your PC when you when you're not
1:31:04SPEAKERDoing something and you do
1:31:06SPEAKERYeah, but you can still turn it up so you get max performance if you want when you're under high load
1:31:11SPEAKERWell, and it literally puts every single fan in your system in one easy to to handle place
1:31:18SPEAKERRight, like like asterisk assuming your hardware is all supported exactly. Yeah
1:31:22SPEAKERSo it's like for me. It's like, you know, I used to have a different
1:31:28SPEAKERApplication that ran the fans for the AIO
1:31:30SPEAKERI had a different application that would run the case fans
1:31:34SPEAKERIf I wanted to control any sort of the fan curves on the GPU, that would be another application
1:31:39SPEAKERThis literally puts everything into one and adds those features that you're talking about
1:31:44SPEAKERI and I know you talked with Brad recently about it, too
1:31:47SPEAKERBut when I was telling him the about the history sis kind of stuff because he was like, man
1:31:52SPEAKERMy system does get loud really quick, you know, and I'm like, oh well
1:31:55SPEAKERIt's ramping up based off of CPU package temperature
1:31:58SPEAKERYou can tell it not to ramp up so quick, you know under those spiky loads kind of thing
1:32:03SPEAKERand you're just like really, you know, like yeah, that's
1:32:07SPEAKERAnd and for me having it all in one place is nice not having to go into the BIOS to make
1:32:12SPEAKERAdjustments is really really convenient because that's what I used to do
1:32:15SPEAKERAnd then the other thing is my my water cooler is supported
1:32:20SPEAKERSo I can base my fan speed on the water temperature rather than the CPU temperature
1:32:25SPEAKERWhich is kind of automatically does the history sis for you huge. But yeah, it means that I actually am
1:32:31SPEAKERSpinning up the fans based on the amount of energy in the water rather than the amount of energy
1:32:36SPEAKERThan the instantaneous measurement of the heat coming off the CPU, which is nice and I don't know about you
1:32:42SPEAKERBut I definitely kicked some money to the person who developed this because I'm just like it's free
1:32:47SPEAKERBut I want you to can keep going and and honestly like the past whatever months I've been using it
1:32:52SPEAKERI mean updates are coming out hot and heavy
1:32:55SPEAKERYeah, he I had a problem with a piece of hardware. He helped me out
1:32:58SPEAKERI chucked some money over there after that and I need to add him on my on my github monthly monthly subs, I think
1:33:06SPEAKERBut it's just one guy and he's using
1:33:09SPEAKEROpen-source libraries that connect all the hardware on the same front open RGB is the same idea
1:33:15SPEAKERBut for all everything that has lights in your computer
1:33:18SPEAKERAnd it is broadly supported using a series of all open source
1:33:23SPEAKERother open source projects
1:33:25SPEAKERIt also provides an API that other things can connect to so if you want to use
1:33:31SPEAKERLike Aurora or a camera with the Aurora replacement is called Artemis
1:33:38SPEAKERTo interface to get like fancy game lighting onto your RGB lights. You can do that
1:33:44SPEAKERHow many I'm sorry real quick. How many people use the game specific lighting?
1:33:48SPEAKERYou know anybody are you I did so when I played a lot of overwatch and I had a logic keyboard that was supported
1:33:53SPEAKERI did because it would change colors when you change characters
1:33:57SPEAKERbut then they introduced a bunch of skins that didn't match the colors of the of the like
1:34:01SPEAKERWhat's the diva skin once you had a blue diva skin the pink diva keyboard didn't make as much sense and like
1:34:08SPEAKERWhatever. Okay. Um, look I'm a tasteful Northern Lights on all of my lights
1:34:15SPEAKERbut the benefit for open RGB is that you can set up all of your lighting all of your things with lights in one place and
1:34:22SPEAKERApply the same changes to all of them at the same time
1:34:25SPEAKERYou can do maps like mine mine goes from top to bottom throughout the case the RAM, you know
1:34:30SPEAKERIt's all synchronized nicely. I spent a fair
1:34:32SPEAKERI don't want to say an embarrassing amount of time, but I spent a fair amount of time figuring out how to do that
1:34:36SPEAKERI'm really happy with it. I'm never going to touch it again probably awesome, but it just kind of quietly runs and
1:34:42SPEAKERIf you have a QMK compatible keyboard
1:34:46SPEAKERYou can even hook that in to open RGB now so you can get real-time lighting on a real real ass keyboard
1:34:53SPEAKERWhich was the thing I didn't think was possible because of the low power CPUs that they put in those keyboards Wow, but
1:34:59SPEAKERSome enterprising people figured it out for a lot of the most popular, you know, like like RGB
1:35:07SPEAKERmechanical keyboards out there, so
1:35:09SPEAKERYeah, it's a it's a cool thing. Nice. Well, my last cool thing that I was excited about this year. I saw I'm
1:35:18SPEAKERoriginally went to school for audio engineering back in 2008 and even then we were talking about how the
1:35:24SPEAKERfrequency spectrum that wireless devices worked on who was you know, the the audio professionals
1:35:31SPEAKERYou know, we're getting the short end of the stick and just over time
1:35:34SPEAKERWe're gonna get less and less of that spectrum, right? So a couple years ago
1:35:38SPEAKERWe did switch to Wi-Fi direct based systems and and I I had I had some problems
1:35:44SPEAKEREspecially when we go to trade shows like where everybody's using Wi-Fi like we had some series dips
1:35:52SPEAKEROur strategy at CES and e3 was just to carry a 25 foot long XLR cable, right?
1:35:59SPEAKERLike I literally carried a loop of XLR cable everywhere
1:36:01SPEAKERI went with a stick mic on it and I'd Chuck it to Joey when it was time to record a bit, right?
1:36:06SPEAKERYes, it worked every time. Yeah, right
1:36:09SPEAKERso so this year and believe me we we have
1:36:14SPEAKERWe bought way too many wireless audio systems
1:36:17SPEAKEROver the past couple years to try to find one that works well for our air or our workflow
1:36:23SPEAKERBut this year road introduced actually just bought a second one the road wireless Pro. So
1:36:30SPEAKERThis isn't too much different from some of the other wireless systems. Like the DJI mic is actually pretty awesome
1:36:37SPEAKERThe original road wireless systems are awesome
1:36:40SPEAKERbut what the Pro introduces is onboard recording of 32-bit float which Oh
1:36:46SPEAKER32-bit float if people who don't know is is a good way to think of it is like high dynamic range for audio or
1:36:54SPEAKERlike
1:36:56SPEAKERlike
1:36:57SPEAKERI'm trying to think well, so you think about like if you're if you're if you're looking at audio recording
1:37:04SPEAKERyou're taking a number of samples per second and and the size of each of those samples is
1:37:10SPEAKERIt determines how much how much audio gets captured basically, right?
1:37:14SPEAKERSo if you're recording a 48 kilohertz, you're recording forty eight thousand slices every second and each of those
1:37:21SPEAKERSlices is either 16-bit integer
1:37:23SPEAKER24-bit integer integer. I think you do 24 4-bit float now to our 32-bit float, right? Yeah, and so 32-bit float
1:37:31SPEAKERSo 32 bits gives you the most
1:37:34SPEAKERYou know diamond diamond like range of whatever the frequency is going to be but 32-bit float
1:37:41SPEAKEREssentially captures it
1:37:43SPEAKERlike in
1:37:45SPEAKERYeah, high civility and also the summer. Sorry, I'm
1:37:50SPEAKERExplaining the the math bad here, but the the idea is that no matter how hot that you have the gain or how quiet?
1:37:56SPEAKERYou can bring it back in post like in in camera
1:38:02SPEAKERYeah, so the idea is that like, you know when you shoot
1:38:06SPEAKERJPEGs versus raw on
1:38:08SPEAKERCameras raw as always has the most information and you just kind of can kind of bring things back if oh, man
1:38:14SPEAKERI overexposed but it's okay. I shot it in raw. I can kind of bring it down
1:38:17SPEAKERWell, cuz that's all you're capturing what this what the sensor like you're capturing the the state of the sensor rather than an image
1:38:24SPEAKERYeah, yeah
1:38:25SPEAKERSo non 32-bit float is a way to think of like that's a JPEG you're you're you're baked in if you know
1:38:31SPEAKERYou had some sort of distortion. Maybe you had the mic gains clipping too much. You can't really get that
1:38:36SPEAKERIt's a square wave. You literally can't get that data back. Yeah, but 32-bit float
1:38:41SPEAKERYou're like, oh man. I was clipping. That's okay. I can bring it down it
1:38:45SPEAKERRetains all of that information at a much wider, you know variation than the non float
1:38:51SPEAKERHow do you sync that back in though?
1:38:55SPEAKERWell, so yeah, so is that just like a failsafe or is that yeah
1:38:59SPEAKERSo the the connection to to the camera, right?
1:39:02SPEAKERCuz it's a wireless system from the receiver to the I'm sorry from the transmitter to the receiver
1:39:07SPEAKERThe receiver plugs into the camera and you don't get 32-bit float
1:39:11SPEAKEROf course getting the system but if you record it internally then you just plug it into your system grab the the 32-bit float file
1:39:19SPEAKERPut it in your editing software sync it up and you know, and then you've got the highest fidelity. So honestly like
1:39:26SPEAKERLike we we were fine without the 32-bit float
1:39:30SPEAKERYou know, it's because we were trying to solve the the issues of dropout between transmitter and receiver
1:39:36SPEAKERyeah, but this at least gives me that that I don't know just that back up and that that feeling of like
1:39:42SPEAKERHey, if something really goes wrong
1:39:44SPEAKERI have it recorded internally and I have it recorded in a way that like, you know, something has to go real wrong
1:39:51SPEAKERTo to not be able to get it back
1:39:56SPEAKERYou just clap at the start of every every piece, you know, the funny thing is like I've been doing audio since 2008
1:40:02SPEAKERI don't really clap anymore. Like I can I can just sync up waveforms like like that
1:40:08SPEAKERWaveforms. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so I don't really clap or do any any sort of sync at the beginning of stuff
1:40:13SPEAKERI can just do it visually like no problem, but
1:40:17SPEAKERYeah, it's it's awesome. Like like I definitely feel like we're we're in a really good spot with wireless
1:40:24SPEAKERtransmitters and yeah, I'm excited to use these at CES because we have two two systems now and
1:40:32SPEAKERCES is gonna be the first time where we get to like really, you know, test it out and put it through paces
1:40:38SPEAKERAre you still carrying the 20-foot XLR cable just in case?
1:40:43SPEAKERActually funny so we do a live recording of our podcast from CES and we're going the other way where we were
1:40:51SPEAKERUsing our wireless devices usually for the show, but now like we have we've run into so many problems and not all of its
1:40:59SPEAKERwireless transmission related and I was like, you know what, let's just dumb down that whole system and just plug everything wired because
1:41:05SPEAKERLet's just do that. So sometimes it's just easier, right? Yeah. Yeah, so
1:41:10SPEAKERIt's it's when we switch from the old analog Sennheiser's
1:41:15SPEAKERTo the digital Sony's it was it was the first time that we could reliably use those on the show floor because the analog
1:41:21SPEAKERSennheiser's would crash into even with 200 channels. You'd crash into somebody else's channel occasionally. You get like interesting. It's okay some
1:41:29SPEAKERYou know some Japanese TV station recording a piece. I
1:41:33SPEAKERwill say what one sorry one less thing we used to cover RSA the
1:41:39SPEAKERsecurity conference here at the Moscone Center and
1:41:42SPEAKERThey specifically would have you register, you know as a as somebody who was a shooter
1:41:49SPEAKERand they would give you a
1:41:51SPEAKERpersonally
1:41:53SPEAKERspecified frequency
1:41:55SPEAKERWow number one it was it was kind of at first it was like ah, this is a pain in the butt
1:41:59SPEAKERWe got to go into the office. We got a register
1:42:01SPEAKERThey got to give us the frequency and you know, we have no way to maneuver around it
1:42:05SPEAKERBut then once we were at the show, we were like, oh wow
1:42:08SPEAKERThis is great because we know nobody else has this frequency. So like I know CES can't do it
1:42:14SPEAKERIt's a much larger scale than RSA but like that was like the best of the best
1:42:18SPEAKERI think the worst one we ever went to his nab which is the National Association of Broadcasters
1:42:23SPEAKERYeah, and it was just all camera and audio here and like nothing wireless worked ever
1:42:27SPEAKERIt was it would have been a nightmare to demo that stuff. Anyway
1:42:31SPEAKERMy last one is a is a big one
1:42:33SPEAKERthis was for me the year that USB C became the main cable I carry and really the
1:42:38SPEAKERlike I got a phone that has USB C my
1:42:42SPEAKERI do carry a key or mag safe charging pad with me most places. Mm-hmm, but for the most part everything else
1:42:50SPEAKERIt's all see now. I it's it's such a beautiful future
1:42:54SPEAKERI mean there are still some like pain points in there like Gordon definitely has done some testing
1:42:59SPEAKERHe has one of those little boxes that you can test
1:43:02SPEAKERUSB C like charging speeds and stuff
1:43:05SPEAKERSo like, you know, not every cable is equal or every like wall wart
1:43:10SPEAKERYou know that you plug into but at the same time man having everything terminated in one
1:43:15SPEAKERSingle kind of termination is like it's it's awesome. Well and and like I went through and replaced we used to have
1:43:22SPEAKERLike I had a big 7-port USB
1:43:25SPEAKERCharger USB a charger that was probably a 20 watt max
1:43:29SPEAKERBehind the bed that like would run snake cables up to the nightstands
1:43:33SPEAKERthat's just a mag safe and a cheat and a see now and and we're like
1:43:40SPEAKERTurns out it's easier there. I put one next to the couch. It would like there's chargers everywhere
1:43:44SPEAKERThey're all the same charger. Everybody can use the same thing except for my daughter who's still on a lightning iPad
1:43:49SPEAKERBut everything other than that, you're gonna have to sit down have the talk with her. I think well
1:43:54SPEAKERLook when she wants to buy her own new iPad, she's both
1:43:59SPEAKERBut yeah, it's it's a it's a it's a good it's a good future I'm excited about
1:44:06SPEAKERlike like problems aside the fact that it's the same connector for data and power and
1:44:12SPEAKERPower varies widely from data and all that. It's it's confusing to people. I understand it. I'm happy with it
1:44:19SPEAKERIt's important to me this year
1:44:21SPEAKERYeah, and I do feel like this was the year that that switch was made even for me to where I was like
1:44:27SPEAKERHey, you know what there I have a couple edge cases that is still micro USB, but for the most part all see baby
1:44:34SPEAKERYeah, I think it's all the game pad. I think it's the last of the micro USB game pads went away this year and
1:44:40SPEAKERAnd and then the the lightning dying on the high-end iPhones was a was a surprisingly
1:44:46SPEAKERI didn't think it was gonna be that impactful because I don't really turn I thought I didn't plug my phone in that much
1:44:51SPEAKERExcept for I do it every single time I get in the car. So, oh, yeah. Yeah
1:44:56SPEAKERanyway
1:44:57SPEAKERAdam thank you so much for coming by and and
1:45:00SPEAKERRevisiting the year. What was yeah. No, it was it was a crazy year. And so thank you. Thank you again. I appreciate it
1:45:08SPEAKERWill you can let out know how he did as a substitute Brad on the discord? Where can people find you Adam?
1:45:14SPEAKERPC world comm is the website, but I am mostly on
1:45:19SPEAKERyoutube.com forward slash PC world all the all the fun PC world videos
1:45:22SPEAKERI am either shooting editing or in so yeah go over there in our podcast the full nerd
1:45:29SPEAKERWe have will on every once a while and we need to have you back for sure. Yeah, I'd love to love to it's always
1:45:35SPEAKERIt's always good to come over and talk to you and Gordon Brad and whoever else happens to be around on any given week
1:45:40SPEAKERIt's it's a it's a it's a good show
1:45:42SPEAKEREspecially if you like to talk about the ins and outs of the PCs that of the the PC hardware's of the PC world
1:45:48SPEAKERYeah, yeah the PC world
1:45:50SPEAKERThank you so much Adam, and we will have to have you gone again soon. I'd love to thank you so much for Adam
1:45:56SPEAKERfor coming by and and you should definitely check it check out the full nerd at
1:46:00SPEAKERwherever fine podcasts are found
1:46:03SPEAKERAs always Brad will made a tech pod is a 100% listener supported show
1:46:08SPEAKERWe appreciate everybody who supports us whether it's on patreon at patreon.com slash check pod again
1:46:14SPEAKERThat's patreon.com slash check pod or just by telling your friends about us
1:46:19SPEAKERWe appreciate all of you all this is the last episode of the year
1:46:22SPEAKERSo for Brad, I'd like to thank everybody but especially thank our executive producer to your patrons
1:46:28SPEAKERincluding Andrew slosky bunny fiend comma the
1:46:33SPEAKERPaddle Creek games makers a fractured veil David Allen James kamek Joel Krauska Jordan lippett Nick Johnston
1:46:40SPEAKERThread Club supports desks and pets
1:46:43SPEAKERTwinkle Twinkie and Pantheon makers of the HS 3 high-speed 3d printer
1:46:48SPEAKERIt's the last episode of the month. We'll be back next week with the Q&A
1:46:51SPEAKERI think Brad's we're thinking Brad will be back for that, but if he's not we'll welcome for the plan B
1:46:57SPEAKERSince this is the last episode of the month we want to also thank our associate producer to your patrons
1:47:02SPEAKERincluding Alejandro Navarro Andre and Burke and
1:47:05SPEAKERAndrew young Arthur geese Ben Tolman Eric Eric Frey Eric Klein
1:47:11SPEAKEREric the fourth soon to be the first after the great Eric war. That's a lot of Eric's where we're still we're holding strong
1:47:16SPEAKERIt for Eric's and sadly no Erica's
1:47:19SPEAKERFelix Kramer Ram Banks Chad Rita Matt Walker parentheses Walkman 8080 close parentheses
1:47:26SPEAKERNathan Phelps Sanchik Kumar Steve Lin Thomas J. And Tom Hilton. Thank you all so so much and thanks everybody
1:47:34SPEAKERAs always if you subscribe to the Pat podcast you get access to the discord you get the patreon exclusive episode
1:47:40SPEAKERThe discord is is a constant source of joy in my life
1:47:43SPEAKERSo I appreciate everybody who participates and and jumps in over there
1:47:47SPEAKERI hope everybody is a safe and happy new year, and we will see you all next year. Thanks for listening. Bye
1:47:56SPEAKERyou
1:48:26SPEAKERyou