the mics in kind of a random position but you know what whatever guys you know
the funny thing about technical difficulties is that sometimes you're
looking for these complicated solutions because we've had so many problems on
this show in the past with like capture cards being at the wrong settings and
like you know like here here just like the funny stupid stuff like this where
outputting over HDMI from a laptop by the way you know big thanks to Asus
g750jz sponsored laptop laptop of the show all that good stuff so you output
over a laptop over HDMI which in theory is a 1080p 60 Hertz signal but on our
capture card you don't set a progressive input you set 59.97 interlaced it's just
like stuff that unless you're some kind of savant you can't possibly be expected
to know and so we've done enough trial and error with this stuff that when
something doesn't work and I go oh no my laptop captures not working okay let's
try all the Hertz and try all the like I'm gonna I'm gonna grab like my tables
and yeah yeah yeah grab grab like you know half a dozen different laptops and
like the weird like adapters that you made by putting together multiple
adapters and then it turns out someone stepped on the blanking cable and pulled
it out of the capture card over on the other end which I can't see so that is
why we're late I am terribly sorry guys you deserve the very best from us and we
we were we were late today we are trying it we're trying to be better about all
that stuff but we are human or are we nope spoiler alert and it was revealed
later on in the show that actually they were livestock I was gonna do a sheep
now I don't know what to do you could go with cow cow just because you've been
losing weight lately doesn't mean that you don't have to make the cow noise
make the cow noise no speaking of speaking of paying people to do things
basically owning their souls you guys we did the most unusual sponsor
integration ever for fractal design on fast as possible that video will be up
tonight as long as Taren finishes editing it before he has to go to a
wedding over there and let me tell you guys it is something a little bit
different and yes indeed thank you twitch chat sheep is only a word nothing
more than that in fact if we break it down even further sheep is nothing but
five letters series of characters alright and the land show is just a
series of topics that are technology and gaming and all that great stuff so we've
got a few interesting things this week number one is hover bikes are evidently
an actual thing there is a hover bike it is going into production you can
pre-order one blah also the infinideck could be a more elegant omni directional
treadmill solution compared to the virtue x omni which we have checked out
but there are gonna be some challenges so we'll talk to you guys more about
that after l oh I'll let you talk so good either way LG is gonna be well they
already did update their privacy policy so that essentially you have to share
everything or get nothing we'll talk more about that later yeah and bungee
has done the hero move and saved halo combat evolved and custom edition and
we'll talk about that later they are so cool yeah I want their boots just so
that I can lick them so you don't necessarily have to be in the boots no
okay
There we go. The show today, okay put the things in the right places, is brought to
you by Squarespace, the fast easy way to create your own beautiful website. It's elegant,
it's smooth and they even have a song and I don't know why that says offer code sign
up at bit.ly slash HS share because that isn't right but 20% off elite prices with offer
code linus and you just go to squarespace.com. You don't have to actually worry about a special
URL. Our next sponsor is actually a new one and this one is one you guys are probably
gonna get pretty amped up about. Geekstakes 2014 is on and the sponsor is MODIS, a leading
IT staffing provider in the US, Canada, UK and actually they've got about 70 global offices.
Geekstakes 2014 though guys, all you gotta do is check out their Facebook page and like
it and you will be entered for a chance to win like 10 crazy prizes including an MSI
GS60 stealth gaming notebook. More on that later. And finally, yes, the G750JZ ROG notebook
and brought to you by JJ today and also my water bottle today is brought to you by JJ
and all of our topics today are brought to you by JJ and Asus. We're gonna be talking
Z97 with the one and only JJ from Asus and huge thanks to Asus for providing us with
these G750JZs that we use for the WAN show here. I was almost in a bit of an awkward
position where I was like, maybe it's the laptop's fault that I can't out put in screen
share and I was like, oh, that's gonna be like really, really awkward if I have to say
that, but it wasn't. So now I get to talk about the rock solid heart touching reliability
of the HDMI output on this notebook and I don't have to stress out about that other
stuff. I'm sorry. It definitely touched me. I don't know about the heart. It does kind
of touch you actually. It does touch intimately and it touches my junk. Yep. It touches my
junk and I'm okay with that because it actually doesn't run that hot. Yeah, that's true. For
a gaming notebook. I'm surprisingly okay with just like a nice comfortable warm. Yeah. Having
warm junk is not a bad thing. So we both comfortably spoon our notebooks. Yeah. Well no, for us
to call it spooning, we'd have to like kind of turn them around and just kind of bad for
usability. Sit like this with them. Yeah. But you know what? If I had a criticism of
a ASUS's latest gaming notebook. Reach around is not very easy. Reach around is very difficult
to manage. I need to make it so that the keyboard can pop out and then swivel around. Yeah.
So you can type backwards. The funny thing about ASUS is they have so many different
notebooks that they like probably have one like that. Like the Tai Chi. It's got screens
on both sides. Yes. Perfect. Okay, there we go. Oh, I love it. What the hell are we even
talking about? I don't know. Spooning laptops. No, we have an actual show. Can you just stay
focused for five minutes? I guess. I mean like, geez man. Twitch chat is not working
for me. So unfortunately I can't chat with you guys. Maybe it's because I got signed
out for some reason. I'm just going to go ahead and sign that baby back in. And then
let's kick off our first topic here you guys. Our first topic I believe is hoverbikes. Hoverbikes.
Let's do that. Okay, so you guys check this out. This is unreal. We're going to screen
share because we can do that. Apparently there's an advertisement. Oh, no way. Long summer
weekends are just around the corner. Oh, they have audio. Oh no, it's Twitch. No, yeah it
is. It's Twitch. It's that hardcore muted but still doing things. We could learn about
these. Oh, the ad goes away on its own. That's innovative. Beautiful. So there it is, you
guys. No skip button here. The world's first functional hoverbike, the Aero X. And this
is such a great, this is such a great, this is such a great tagline. The Aero X lets you
pretend to hover bike through the forests of Endor, which it legit actually does. So
this picture is not faked in any way. This isn't like the hover skateboard hoax. That
was so depressing. With, you know, Christopher Lloyd and Tony Hawk and like all these people
involved. And I was just like, what are you guys actually doing? And it was like right
before, but not on April Fools. Yeah, like it wasn't April Fools. I was just like, yeah,
this is just kind of mean to people because a lot of people really went for it. So I was
sad for them. Um, so basically this, the video here is actually from a prototype, um, back
in 2012 and I don't know if we've got audio here. I don't know if there's actually audio
on this, uh, on this video here. I'm just going to check really quick here. Yeah. Okay.
There's no audio on the video, but some of the interesting stuff actually happens a little
bit later. So some of the challenges that they went through were figuring out how to
counter the, um, like when you're, when you're first spinning up the rotors, there's a lot
of force that can cause it to, that can cause the bike to, to, to, to torque one way or
the other. They had to figure out how to counter that. They had to take some cues from quadrocopters
like the Para day, our drone with respect to how to track if you're just drifting in
the wind. Um, the idea though, and this is, this is the craziest thing about it. The idea
here is that if you ride a motorcycle, you should be able to straight up get on one of
these and ride it, which has someone who can ride a motorcycle is like pretty exciting.
Yeah. So they're going pretty slow in this video, but this is quite an old video. Oh
yeah. I saw this like years ago. Oh man, look at this. But what's cool about it is they're
giving us some specs about the finished one. So they're saying it can go up to 67 kilometers
an hour and up to 3.7 meters high, which doesn't sound like a ton, 72 kilometers an hour, sorry.
And up to 3.7 meters high, which doesn't sound that high. But think about this for a second,
especially the American viewers. Um, 3.7 meters is more than a story. Like that's more than
the height of like almost pretty much the highest ceiling you'd ever find in a house.
So you would, you could literally be driving around looking into second story windows if
something like this was ever street legal, which you probably shouldn't do. Yeah. And
you probably shouldn't do that. And the reason for the reason for the 3.7 meter height restriction
is actually so that you don't get classified as an aircraft. Um, in theory, I guess there's
no real reason why it couldn't go higher, but like someone's going to make like that
and they're going to die. Oh yeah, it's going to be like someone will die and then they're
going to set back personal flying vehicles like 10, 20 years and it's going to be terrible.
You are wrecking it for us. They have safety stuff too, which I thought was interesting.
Those like anti flip guide rails that you saw around the side in the video. Um, and
they're thinking about doing stuff like replacing those or adding on airbags, which I think
is really smart. That's actually either really smart or like just a totally bad idea. Like
how do you put an airbag on a motorcycle? I think it's designed more like that, that
motorcycle helmet that's an airbag or sorry, not motorcycle helmet, but like pedal biking
helmet because it'll, it'll note it, it'll register a fall and then so I think it's going
to be around the sides. So it could be more like a suit almost even or it's like I'm in
a free fall and it goes like a marshmallow man from Ghostbusters on me and it's like
lets itself pop. So you have the soft impact and then maybe you fall like a foot, but it's
no big deal. I don't think you'd want it to let itself pop because the thing about crumple
zones on cars is that they're designed to be weak, but strong enough because like, let's
say, okay, so let's, let's think about, it's not going to, it's a, it's a, unless they
make it foam, if it's an airbag, it's not going to crumple zone. Yeah, exactly. So like
if it popped, that's like kind of like crumple zone logic. Yeah, that's why I was thinking.
Yeah, so that's like probably terrible because like depending, okay, depending how you're
falling, right? Yeah. Because if the way that you crash is kind of like, you know, the one
stormtrooper or bike trooper or whatever they were called, you know why they had those?
Because there was an issue manufacturing like stormtrooper armor. So they're like, oh yeah,
we'll like redesign them. We'll call them like these troopers. This is all, this is
all hearsay. It's not validated, but that's a rumor I heard. So anyway, like the one guy
who gets thrown off the bike and goes into the tree and like what I think was one of
the most memorable Star Wars bad guy deaths, actually the guy who like hits the tree upside
down and then falls down. So if that was how you like fell off of it, like something disastrous
happened, you went flying off of it at 72 kilometers an hour, you would want it to be
solid enough. Yeah. My only bounce more than like, that's what I was worried about though
is exactly what you just said is bouncing because I don't want to bounce. I feel like
that would be a terrible thing. And you're just smacking something at 72 kilometers an
hour and then going bong. One way that you could absorb the impact without letting the
air out of the device is you could allow the air to shift around inside the bubble. So
not like fully inflated. Yeah. So like, so a little bit of relaxation or if you had like,
or if you had, um, you know, narrower gaps internally so that the air can't move extremely
quickly from one zone to another, but it could like flow. Yeah. Then you could keep it from
just bouncing off of trees or whatever. Yeah. Neither of us are terrible idea. Safety, you
know, Rangers. I thought that was super cool when they came up with a biking helmet that
inflates. It was just way too expensive if I remember correctly. Yeah, it was. Yeah.
It was really expensive. Um, and I don't even know that it was available in North America.
So I don't really think so. It was just like a university project. That's not how airbags
work Linus. I know that's not how airbags work. We're not talking about airbags. And
again, we're not safety engineers. So like, don't listen to any of that cause none of
that will happen. We would be, we would be safety fun engineers. I think what they're
talking about anyways was airbags on the side of the thing. I like this idea from Felix
are 90 a giant laser beam that destroys everything in front of you. Perfect. So you don't hit
it and you never have to worry about it because you know what? That's, that's why motorcyclists
on the track can crash at, you know, a couple of hundred kilometers an hour and actually
be much less likely to be injured or killed than someone who crashes on the street going
70 80 kilometers an hour because there's no obstacles. I thought you're going to say cause
you're a giant laser beams and I was like, no, it's like, yeah, the Ducati laser beam
will be, no, because what happens is if you, if you watch what happens when a motorcycle
is crashed, like it's still bad and you can still get like messed up real good, but they
skid on the gear, they slide on the gear. Whereas when you hit a lamppost, it's horrible.
Your slide stops. Yeah. I saw this gif, terrible segue, but I saw this gif of guys skateboarding
and the one guy flies off and a skateboard goes across and takes out a few people. One
of the guys jumps off his skateboard before he gets hit by the other skateboard and they're
going really fast. So that's like keep himself running, but he's going too quick and he dives
and he skims right beside this pole and he slides like really fast or beside it and if
you would have nailed it into it, that would have been really bad. Did you see the, did
you see the one of the skateboarder who lands on his ass at the bottom of a bike rail and
then like lands right on the skateboard? Yeah. And then just like rolls on by and the guy
gives him a high five. Oh, that was awesome. We should just turn this whole show into meme.
I know we should just like, we should cover all the memes. Ray William Johnson's not doing
equals three anymore. I think that there is a definite gap. Okay. Sorry guys. It's not
April fools, so I shouldn't be making jokes like that. We are not turning this into equals
three no equals equals when we're rebranding the show again and you guys will all hate
it again. Okay, let's do one more topic before we bring JJ on just because otherwise I feel
like we're not going to get any topics done today. Infinideck. Um, yeah, the Infinideck.
This you guys, this, this is, um, actually, uh, I, you know what, I'll let, I'll let you
introduce this topic. I'm going to fire up the video here though so that they can check
this out while you talk. So Omni was called a 360 degree treadmill essentially, but it
wasn't really, I don't know. It depends on, I guess how you want to look at that, but
I don't really see it as a treadmill because you just kind of slid shoes that were designed
for sliding. It's more like a tread cereal bowl that you stand in. Yeah. This is actually
a treadmill that can actually go in 360 degrees, which is very interesting. You can see they're
walking on crazy angles, but that's because the, the treads are moving in two different
directions, which allow that to be able to happen. So very interesting. It still has
tons of the same problems that Omni has and probably even more so in the idea of it not
being very easy to store, uh, being gigantic in general, being expensive, being expensive,
difficult to manufacture, difficult to manufacture, all that kind of stuff. Um, probably even
more so for most of those, it has tons of other issues too in terms of latency, getting
feedback from the game and it not reacting in time, you moving in a weird way and it
not reacting in time, all this kind of stuff. That being said, it's really early on, so
hopefully that kind of stuff can come later. Um, it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's going to
be expensive. I can't see this possibly because you got to think it's more advanced than a
normal treadmill. Yeah. And treadmills are already not that cheap. But then again, exercise
equipment seems to be the biggest gigantic scam in the entire world in terms of how much
that stuff costs versus how much it costs to manufacture. I mean, it's a weight, it's
literally a hunk of metal. The dumbbells that I have at my house are like just, it's one
solid piece. Like it's not one of those really nice ones. And even the paint on it is like,
it obviously dripped on the one side and they all look like that. They're like not even
that cheap and they're just completely crap, but it's just the cheapest ones that they
had. So I was like, whatever, I don't need a fancy one. It weighs a certain amount and
I pick it up and put it down. I'm not too worried about it. Like biggest scam ever.
You know, that would be, that would be a great business idea. So, no, no, not, I don't want
to do it, but, but if someone, if someone went, okay, we're going to make like environmentally
conscious exercise equipment. So basically all it is is like recycled metal and crap
and they just molded into the shape of things that people can lift and put down and they'll
just be like, look, this stuff legit didn't cost us any more than scrap metal costs. So
you cover the shipping, you cover our costs to turn it into this shape and we're good.
And also some profit, but not as much, but not that much. Yeah, not that much. That's
not a bad idea. I'm sure that would work pretty well actually. It's not the world's most horrible
idea. By Linus Media Group. Oh, we never, oh, we never said the, uh, the hover bike.
Uh, right. You have to put down 5,000 and the price is going to be 85,000. So you put
down 5,000 just to reserve one and they're not expecting them to actually be available
until 2017. So this is like some pretty hardcore preordering going on, but you know, expecting,
you know, clients like us border patrol or park rangers or let me be there. An off-road
vehicle to be the target for this. Um, maybe, maybe they're willing, maybe some of them
are willing to at least invest in one to find out if it's a good idea and then go from there.
Apparently someone has named them slick lifts, slick lifts. I think slick lifts are more
like the kind of thing I would want to wear in my shoes. Oh, slick lifts and they could
be like stylish. They could be like fancy colors because if, if we've learned anything
from Kickstarter, it's that people will kickstart the hell out of anything that's a completely
normal thing, but like different colors. Did you see that Kickstarter for brightly colored
USB, like micro cables? I was just like, really? And someone was like, Oh, you should cover
this. You should request a sample. And I'm like, what could I possibly say about hates
micro USB cables with all the fiery passion that I can conjure in my soul. Um, I hate
micro USB, so you know, a slightly more aesthetically pleasing micro USB cable is unlikely to light
a fire for me. Something I also want to bring up about Infinideck if we're going to be bouncing
around in topics is, uh, the, the, the possible resurgence and comeback of the arcade. I brought
this up when we first started talking because if you have like a home Infinideck, it's going
to be this little tiny thing. If you go to a giant arcade, it could be Infinideck style
infinite room. Yeah. And it could be like a whole room. And that kind of a thing might
cost a hundred thousand dollars. So you're not able to afford it in your house. Yeah.
And you might not have space for it like at all, but every arcade in the lower mainland
here in the Vancouver area is gone now because you can get so close to that experience at
home. Whereas this could be a complete revival for that business model where it's like, look,
you know, come in and pay 30 bucks an hour to use whatever you want. And with virtual
reality and the kinds of, I can imagine someone like Oculus having a professional grade option
versus a consumer grade option. So having like really advanced virtual reality with
much better sensors, low latency cameras for emotion tracking and all that. Built all around
into the room. Built into a room. I mean, that's the kind of thing that I would, I would go and I
would pay 30 bucks an hour to go and chill for a couple hours. I'd try out. Yeah. If they had VR
and AR experiences too, you can have both styles. That's my problem with the Infinideck though,
is I really don't think that stationary, okay, outside of markets where like places like Europe
and Japan where they're legitimately not going to have enough space for an augmented reality gaming
experience. I think that augmented reality is going to be the one that draws me much more than
VR. Like I would rather deal with the inconvenience of a backpack with like a heavy battery in it or
something and a front facing camera that augments what I see. And then you're going to get like
essentially paintball fields. Yes. Because one problem with that is if you just kind of cruise,
if you do it in your house, it's a very limited setup. Yes. Every map is going to be the same.
It's going to get really boring. If you do it outside, people are going to look at you like
you're absolutely insane and they're probably going to try and talk to you and that's going
to break the whole immersion experience. So it's going to have to be like a, like a VR field. I
think there's really cool. And you know what? It comes back to our tanks and RC tanks and planes
idea where like, Oh man, people might not even get that reference actually piloting, you know,
like a plane and being able to fire like virtual lasers and crap at other people's planes and like
take them down. The future is, the future is exciting. Um, all right, so why don't we bring
JJ on? Do you want to get them to join us here? I'm going to just tweet this out. Tune in live.
It's Twitch dot TV slash Linus tech. We actually have a watch page on Linus tech tips.com. I just
don't know the URL, which is sort of a terrible, terrible thing. Yeah. Okay. All right. So bring
on our, Oh, is it working there? Hello, sir. Can you hear me? I can hear you, sir. I can hear you,
sir. Fantastic. All right. So guys give JJ a warm welcome and uh, all that good stuff in the Twitch
chat. For those of you who don't know who this gentleman is, he is the tech guru of Asus who
knows all the things about all of the Asus. I swear, I swear you could ask him any question
about an Asus product, past, present, and probably even future. And he would know the answer, but
that third category, he probably couldn't tell you about it. So you were extremely nice. I thank
you. I thank you. I try my best. I try my best, but that is a very, that is a very humbling
introduction. So thank you. All right. So I think the, uh, the thing to do here is to invite people
on the Twitter boards to go ahead and we're going to do things a little bit differently this week,
rather than just tweeting at Linus tech, any questions you have about Asus products,
particularly Z 97 and H 97 motherboards, we want you to use hashtag and I don't remember what it
is anymore. And I can, uh, I can, I can see that that's going to be a problem for me. Okay. So I'm
going to invent one right off the bat. So it's going to be a hashtag when live, when live, I
thought it was one show live. Sure. Hashtag when show live, go ahead and include that hashtag with
your tweet. And we're going to be going through them and finding some good questions for JJ. But
in the meantime, I'm going to kick things off. I'm going to go, okay, look, Z 97. Um, it's no
gigantic secret that not a whole lot changed on the Intel side of things. So why don't you give
us like a top three reasons why maybe users shouldn't necessarily upgrade from Z 87 outright,
but for people upgrading to LGA 1150, why would they spend an extra couple bucks for Z 97 versus
Z 87? That's, you know, that's a really good, that's a really good question. Um, and I think
it's kind of a tricky question to answer because I think both me and you have, um, I'd say like a
different, I guess, approach to most people, because as we see hardware, every single
generation, right, we kind of might think of it from the bleeding edge where we're going to
upgrade from one platform to the next, but a lot of users, like you said, are necessarily sometimes
coming over from a platform from two, three, four, five years ago. I mean, we've got people that are
still coming over from P 45 or X 58 or different chipsets, but, um, I think for this generation,
you know, our goal, we always try to look at kind of two different perspectives of development,
you know, chip set develop and then board level development. So every generation, I think we try
to put in the effort to put in new functions and features that are going to make things interesting
and improve for the user's experience. So I think three things, um, I'm a rig fan once again, of
everything that we did on the auto tuning side for the motherboards. I think that the new
customization, uh, abilities that we have for this generation are pretty nuts as far as the
granularity and control that you have for dynamic real time auto overclocking. Um, I'm really, I'm
really digging a lot of the new stuff that we did on the audio implementation to extend, you know,
the previous designs that we had. And then I think kind of just total experience, you know, I think
most of us, when we go about building a system, um, we kind of think of building the system in a
lot of different ways. Sometimes it's the simplicity of just how smoothly something might work or how
kind of something you didn't realize in terms of just enabling like this generation, you know, for
us, it's easy to enable X and P, but we, you know, we still see based off of market survey data that,
you know, 50% of users never enable X and P on a motherboard. Um, right. So just having a physical
switch on the motherboard that now a user can just, you know, flip into the opposition, you know,
well, to me, it's something that I would never use in terms of having value for. We definitely know
that there's users out there that would go, wow, that just makes sense. And I can just do that. And
that gives me, um, you know, exactly what I'm using for, because that's what I paid for in terms of
the memory that I bought. So I have a question for you about the physical X and P switch. Is that
something that the system integrators were asking for as well? No, um, actually no, we didn't get any
of that feedback from the system integrators. That was really based purely on the perspective of
trying to find a more simplified solution. If you remember last generation, you know, we put in that
easy one touch UEFI option for the X and P function, right? And so this was just kind of the
evolution of that, of trying to give you, um, you know, a very easy way to do it, not only within the
UEFI, but a really easy way of doing it on the physical hardware level. So the next implementation
will be like, um, a giant red button this big with like a flashing led behind it. Push this. Yeah, do
this. Push this if you have memory. I think the next option is, you know, we're working on like on a
micro automaton, a little, you know, guy that will come inside the box and he'll ask you questions.
Do you need help? And he'll just do it for you. Exactly. He'll just kind of, you know, come on like your own
personal golem and then he'll go into your system and he'll just enable everything for you. You won't do
anything. He'll just, you just tell him, I want to do this and this and this and he'll automatically do it for
you. Can you create different skins for it? So there can be like, there can be like the, like the Cortana,
like, you know, digital girl. And then there can be like the, uh, like you remember, uh, mad mod Mike that
Nvidia, um, brand asset that was like the guy with like a huge backpack and like it's screwdrivers and
stuff. And then I think like a bonus one for someone who buys all the ASUS components possible. So only
people who have an ASUS, like motherboard graphics card, like a keyboard mouse sound card, and then it
unlocks like a JJ avatar. Yeah. That would be pretty awesome. You know, actually it's funny you talk about
that. We're, um, we're going to be hopefully doing in a little bit, sometime this quarter, we're going to be
releasing these like really cool limited edition, um, really highly articulated small ROG robots. Um, so for
like our diehard enthusiasts that really love, you know, ROG hardware and ASUS hardware, they're going to have
the opportunity to be able to pick up these really limited edition, high detail based figures. So, um, you
know, I think that's all just part of the experience, right? You know, all of us as builders, we love
dealing with hardware and anything that just makes things interesting and more engaging and adds to the
experience is always cool.
All right. So why don't I start with a first question from someone on the forum that actually, um, reached out
to me very politely and said, look, I'm sorry, I can't tune into the show live, but I really want to know the
answer to this. Why did you guys go for an expansion card versus building Thunderbolt into the motherboards
that you thought it made sense for? I mean, one of the things that you and I have talked about extensively
is the way that ASUS tries to build a motherboard according to how they think that user is going to use it
down to everything from whether to use just, you know, um, integrated Intel, uh, SATA connectors to
implementing a particular brand even of extra SATA connectors. So why didn't you guys go for something
like the WS? It was the one real criticism I had at that board. Why didn't you go, okay, look, this is a
workstation board. It should have Thunderbolt on it right off the bat. Yeah. Yeah. No, you make a really
good point. And that was a really hard decision to make. You know, for us, um, Thunderbolt is still continuing
to be kind of an emerging technology that we're seeing get utilized and we're heavily involved. You know, I
myself, I actually went to two Thunderbolt Plugfests this generation. We worked with, I think over 160
vendors that are making all kinds of Thunderbolt accessories. So we definitely still value in it. I mean, uh,
compared to any other vendor, no other vendor has more Thunderbolt solutions than us. And I think it just came
down to a question of resource, uh, layout consideration and cost. Um, you know, while there's definitely
going to be a segmentation, even within that content creation community, like you talked about for a WS model
that would see value in Thunderbolt, the majority of those users as a whole are not going to be utilizing
Thunderbolt. They will be utilizing your classic interconnects, whether they're going to be USB, um, or
whether it's going to be actually even gigabit based connectivity on a local based network. Um, so in that
situation, I think we saw the value of let's still give them that ability to be able to have Thunderbolt, right?
Um, on the boards, but not necessarily have to have them to pay the premium because when you do look at the cost,
the bomb costs of the bill of material costs on Thunderbolt, it is probably within the top
three most expensive hardware specs to put on a motherboard. So it's not like a small add on
cost. Sometimes there are some stuff that it's a really marginal cost to implement on the board. Um, so it's a pretty
pretty big increase in terms of impacting the MSRP. So the final retail price of the motherboard,
plus there is physical space, space layout considerations. So, um, this generation of us actually,
we did incorporate the same type of isolated audio design that we had started to implement on the
ROG series. So that kind of implementation balancing all that thing out in terms of space and real estate
and everything else out, it was just kind of a managed kind of implementation where we said, okay,
um, you know, probably makes sense, but we still have to balance everything out. And even little things like you wouldn't
keep in mind, like the, um, the Thunderbolt board still has 1394. So it's our only active
Z97 skew that actually has 1394. I did notice that because we still actually have users
in that content creation community. They've made really big investment for FireWire and actually the usage model is still actually
a little bit higher than Thunderbolt. We probably see that by the end of this year, finally eclipsing that Thunderbolt
will even be higher than the existing base of 1394. But that 1394 chip
takes up space, right? So if we probably maybe would have taken that out, could have probably maybe offset it. So it just
literally comes down to a balance factor. You know, we'd love to put everything that we could on there, but that's
kind of the best compromise. But the cool thing about it is, you know, Thunderbolt across what, like 16
skews and all you got to do is just drop in the card, right?
All right. I can see why you made the compromise. Now, here's something that I wish
everyone would quit compromising on and you can go you keep like let's call this like off the record.
Your opinion. I will do my best looking into the crystal ball.
When are we going to finally see 10 gigabit Ethernet? I've seen some of the guys in Twitch chat
talking about 10 gig because right now no one seems to be willing
to just do this and make it a consumer technology. I think Netgear has like
one 8 port switch on Newegg that's still hundreds of dollars
and you can buy NIC cards for in the 200 to 300 dollar range.
The cabling itself has caught up at this point. So you can get cat 6A cable
for a reasonable price. How much legitimately like if you had to just guess and
you can tell me the number is probably wrong. You can disclaim it. This number is wrong. But if I do
how much would a 10 gigabit implementation on a motherboard cost? And what's the problem
right now? Why can't we do it? It really comes down to just it's really it's a cost factor.
It's totally possible. We could entirely do it. And while there are stuff that I can't talk about
as far as on the current chipset portfolio, you can imagine that there's things coming down the pipeline later on where
that could be a possibility of something that you would want to be incorporated. So we are evaluating looking at 10 gig
solutions on base platforms, but more probably in the server and workstation demographic
than we would see in the traditional kind of like Z 97. So the performance kind of market space.
But from a cost standpoint, you're talking that you could easily take a motherboard that might, let's say, traditionally be let's say
like a 250 dollar motherboard 300 on motherboards. That's a relatively high end
enthusiast C 97 based board. And you could add an MSRP of beyond
200 dollars to be able to add 10 gig. So that's that's a huge cost increase
to the consumer. You know, I'm sure like foreign people would go, this is crazy.
Two hundred dollars more. Right. Of course, for the users that know the benefit of what they would be able
to do in leveraging a 10 gig solution, they would they would appreciate that. And they would also look at the cost
of going, hey, maybe an add in card is at least maybe 350 bucks.
So having to pay 200 dollars and having it integrated, I'm ready to do that.
But we were we're looking at actually, I think, at a more complete rollout strategy. You know, we're evaluating actually 10 gig.
Not just for our motherboards, but also for our entire networking division. So definitely stay tuned.
You know, you're going to see more of that coming down the pipeline from us. But, you know, it really just comes down to cost.
If users say, hey, we're willing to take on the cost, then we can do it. This same stuff even rolls
into like mini ITX for like really high end. We've done some really crazy, interesting designs for
X79 and trying to do a ultra small form factor X79 mini ITX.
And I'm not going to say it's impossible because we've made some really interesting design choices
to be able to do something like that. And then I have people tell me, oh, we'll do it. But then there's always that difference
between what's the real market reality and what's the niche reality of people saying,
oh, we'll buy this. Right. Yeah. Because, you know, for us to kick off a board,
you know, you're at least talking six to eight months development time, a high amount of R&D costs, bandwidth and resource and stuff like that.
And so I could probably make it. I could make an X79 mini ITX. It could be really interesting as far as the way it works.
But would you really be willing to pay, you know, four hundred fifty five hundred dollars for that board?
And that that would be a tough pill to swallow. I mean, I could see an X79
ITX board being worth a small premium, you know, maybe two hundred and fifty bucks, two hundred and seventy five bucks
for, you know, like let's let's call it like a deluxe class board, you know, something pretty equivalent to, you know,
a Z97 or a Z87 ITX board. But if you started to tell me it's four hundred five hundred dollars,
that's a really tough pill to swallow, especially when you factor in that you're going to need some other pretty specialized hardware to even build that rig.
You know, you're going to want Silverstone is, I think, the only one that I'm aware of with an 80 plus gold power supply.
That's a four hundred and fifty watt unit. That's an SFX power supply.
So this is this is a very special machine at this point. And you think about like how many times, guys,
viewers think about how many times on a forum you've seen a machine that special. How many times you've seen that power supply?
Yeah, I think the other thing, too, is, you know, I mean, we're OK making those type of advancements.
I mean, if you look at our history, we're not necessarily afraid to buck the trend and sometimes put on these really specialized technologies that roll out over time
to other products over time, you know, because we have users that realize that.
And that's part of the community. One of the really cool things about the PCDIY community is in itself that people will embrace the technology.
They'll pay a premium. And while not everybody benefits from it right away, actually, that's the really cool thing is that as products scale over time,
you know, that initial investment actually does scale out to more products over time.
You know, so as long as you can get enough of those people to be supportive of that, then you can see really cool innovative product like that.
It just depends. Do we really have enough people for these type of solutions?
And the same way I get every day, I get people asking me, I want high performance AM3 mini ITX, right?
Yeah. So stuff like that.
OK, now leading into investing in the future and it paying off for everyone, I think this is a great discussion topic.
And I don't worry, JJ, I'll let you talk about Z97 at some point.
Oh, no worries, man.
Let's talk PG278Q ROG Swift.
You had to do it, right? You just had to ask about it, right?
Yeah, but I got more. Oh, it gets more complicated than that because I'm going to also throw at you the Acer announcement today of their 4K G-Sync monitor.
And then I'm going to throw this at you again and I'm going to go, is this is this all just irrelevant with the VESA 1.2A standard coming out supporting AMD's FreeSync or ActiveSync?
Like, is G-Sync even relevant anymore?
Again, real thoughts. What do you think? You don't even have to give a concrete answer here.
Yeah. So you make a lot of really good points.
So I think first off, if we just tackle the first point in terms of G-Sync's relevancy, it's entirely relevant.
The first and foremost reason is because while you haven't seen physical MP product, it's already a technology that's proven.
It's in integrator solutions right now.
They're working on it and they're finalizing the products to come to the market.
So this is a big difference in, let's say something, a ratified specification or ratified standard that's coming into its play and then still has to be actually proven in real design and implementation.
I see.
So regardless of whether something is a physical implementation or a firmware layer specification or something that occurs on a much more minor level that's purely on a software basis, these also things have to be proven in the real world.
And I can tell you the learning curve just alone for our modern development team along with NVIDIA at actually taking what they thought was a monitor kind of driving circuit board and then having to approach that in the real world were two entirely different things.
We had to consider things that NVIDIA hadn't factored in like color calibration profile support, which is normally part of let's say the electronics package in a monitor.
But we had to work with their team to be able to actually integrate the ability to have color controls because that wasn't something that was inherently part of the FPGA package because NVIDIA was thinking from a different perspective.
So they went gaming.
It's funny because NVIDIA sometimes gets criticized for being, you know, oh, you guys are completely focused on grid or you're completely focused on mobile.
But then they go and they bring something like G-Sync to market and they literally haven't even thought about it beyond, yeah, gaming.
Yeah. And I mean, that's the reality of every company. I mean, sometimes you run up against, you know, experience and, you know, just your internal kind of perspective.
Right. And that's where it's a balance that they've worked with us to leverage our experience and monitor design.
And we're leveraging their experience at that IC based design in that package. Right. For what they're doing there.
So I think that still in that aspect, there's still a lot of logic and there's a lot of other things that NVIDIA is doing within the FPGA and the overall IP that developing behind G-Sync that in the long term,
not just right now, but what you're going to be able to do over time with it actually continues to paint the purpose of having a specialized IC.
Now, I love the aspect in ASUS, as you know, we're not we're not biased to any vendor. Right.
We produce AMD solutions, we produce NVIDIA, we produce Intel chipsets and we produce AMD chipsets.
So from our perspective, we want to be able to give the consumers the most choice possible. Right. Right.
So, you know, I in that perspective, right. You know what you're seeing with the new visa update, you're going to have more flexibility, have a more open ecosystem.
So that's great as well. But I think all of us at the end of the day, what we care first and foremost about is how something works, even if it's a proprietary solution, if it works really, really, really, really well and there's no issues with it.
I'm OK with it being proprietary if it works outstanding and it doesn't have any bugs and it doesn't have issues and it just works right.
I mean, that's that's a proven example of, you know, you're going to get a lot of people that they say, hey, we wish you gave more Linux support.
Well, it's really hard to have Linux support from a chipset development when you have 20 different distros that all have their different kernels and they all have to be compiled differently.
Right. When you then tell the chipset company, hey, you can design a driver for Windows and it's just one platform. Right.
So it's very much kind of that same thing. There's a lot of things to consider in that.
So I think G-Sync is still relevant. I still think we're going to totally embrace and look at how we can incorporate the updated VSA spec and monitors over time.
And then from there, you know, the 4K proposition, as far as that goes into it, I think everybody's interested to continue to see just improved gaming performance on all types of monitors, regardless of whether it's 4K, whether it's going to be new TNN, what's going to be IPS.
I don't think it matters. I think everybody just wants to continue to see improved and evolved monitor type designs.
So I give kudos. Hey, you know, Acer's done an interesting design there with the 4K. I think for us still, as you guys know, 4K is a really interesting technology.
I mean, we're launching our right now, our brand new PV monitor. It's going to be really pricing. I have one.
There you go. Right. So, you know, we're all behind that. But, you know, to every single one of these. Right.
When you factor in a monitor, there's so much more to consider than just the monitor. Right.
It's, you know, the games that you're playing. It's the GPUs that you're going to be running in the system. So there's a lot of different perspectives.
So for there's not going to be ever one monitor that rules them all. I think in that perspective. Right.
You can maybe get close. Maybe we could get pretty close to having some right specs, the stuff. But a lot of this is driven by so many different things.
So for us, we're going to continue to embrace, I think, all the technologies on the market and listen to you guys at what you guys want.
All right. Now, I have another question from Omid. Now, given that Intel didn't change much going from Z87 to Z97,
and I think you'd be hard pressed to find like, you know, a massive change log from the ASUS side, given that it wasn't really necessary.
Why are some reviewers finding they're getting better overclocking results and better temps on Z97 on the same Haswell chips?
You know, part of this is sometimes actually time differential. There's changes in the overall what's called MEI.
It's really interesting. We're seeing some of this. Some of the stuff we're asking reviewers to go back and evaluate,
because in our internal analysis, it's pretty much actually par for par.
But there are some technical implementations that sometimes actually reviewers don't fully evaluate.
One of the really things that's interesting with the fiber, so that integrated voltage regulator,
and then what's called your VCC in, as far as voltage, is that the voltage that you see defined within something like CPU-Z is not actually your real necessarily voltage.
That's the voltage that's actually being communicated by the fiber.
But the voltage or the VCC input can actually be lower than that voltage, and then based on efficiency, you can have a different measurement.
So two boards could actually be effectively giving you the same voltage, but can achieve it in different ways.
If let's say one has a lower VCC in and one has a higher VCC in, so that can account actually for temperature differential.
The other thing is that over time, if let's say they first tested some boards like six months ago,
and then new tuning has come out where they make optimizations to actually load policies,
and they make changes to actually different parts of the UEFI that change different actually conditioning parameters,
whether it's the VRM efficiency or different parameters, all those things can sometimes offset a little bit of numbers.
But I can tell you from our internal analysis, overall, users should generally, if you take a 4770K, 4670K,
between a Z87 platform and then a Z97 platform, the actual OC experience is pretty much linear.
It's the same. You're not getting a diminished experience, and you're not getting actually a better experience.
It's the same clocking experience.
For our boards, we do have a revised DRAM topology.
So DRAM topology scaling is even a little bit better, so you could even get higher.
But to real-world users, it's not really relevant because most users are maybe going up to 2,130 to 2,400.
So regardless that we can do higher memory dividers, it doesn't really impact the real user.
So most of this really just comes down to difference in sometimes the underlying code base,
changes in, let's say, voltage rules and policies that sometimes the viewers aren't always, let's say,
always understanding of or not maybe fully accounting for
because they might be looking for just one numerical value versus another numerical value.
All right. So I've got another one for you, I guess along the lines of Z87 to Z97 changes again,
because I did promise I'd give you an opportunity to cover that with us here,
is what are the biggest changes between or the biggest differences that you guys have aimed to deliver here
with the Z97 boards, whether it's compared to what the competition's doing,
and you don't have to name any names, or whether it's compared to the last generation Z87 implementations?
Well, for us, we're always in the game of pushing the envelope.
We're always going to try to look at what the experience is and can we make those experiences better,
regardless of what it is.
I think probably the biggest ones that we did, they might seem small,
but when you really look at them in the bigger picture, they were really hard to implement,
but they really give a whole other level of experience, are going to be really in the auto-tuning technologies
in the sound and with the fan controls.
But there's been improvements to every single aspect, but the fan control stuff is pretty awesome, right?
The last previous generations, we'd always talked about having that full fan header control for every single header,
three-pin and four-pin support, but this year, having the ability to go to every single header
and manually define whether it's a PWM or DC-based control is awesome,
because now that gives you the ability that if you want to put PWM splitters on there,
you want to get like a Source 530 and have those three front intake fans all be regulated by one chassis fan header
all in the same signal, bam, power those fans from the PSU, get them all tuned with the same actual fan curve
and you're rocking and rolling, right?
That's sweet because it just adds a whole other layer of granularity and control how you set up your airflow
and you set up your experience.
And you know what's funny is the thing that really blew me away about the new fan control
is one that you didn't even mention and that's the fact that it's within the UEFI now
and I can define all those curves in basic mode. I click one thing and I go, yep, header by header.
Here's the curve I want. I want it on a predefined curve. I want to do my own manual curve
because again, real talk time, this is a WAN show, we're casual, I don't really like AI Suite very much.
It has been a big problem for me at various times throughout its history
and while I haven't tried it in the last probably three to six months, I've tried it fairly recently enough
that I just am not a huge fan.
Whereas UEFI implementation of something like that, wow, what a godsend
because now I can really take advantage of that feature in a way that is bulletproof.
And one thing to not shoot at AI Suite despite I don't use it either
is that getting away from the software implementation is just nice anyways
because if you reformat your computer or change out of drive or do whatever
that's less that you have to think about when you're setting everything back up again.
Yeah, I think that applies more to you guys as reviewers, right?
Most users, they talk about actually how long they can try to keep rolling over their OS.
I see so many people take OSs from one chipset to another chipset and they don't even reinstall.
But I guess that'll be my challenge is to win you over
because that's one thing that we work really hard on is the software suite.
But that is a good example. We had to work really hard on actually putting in that full graphical fan curve,
the calibration and all that stuff. And literally it's redundant.
We spent time and effort to do something that we had already done two years before
but we did it just to be able to give more of our base of users more accessibility.
So whether it's guys that for whatever reason don't want to embrace the software,
well then we can give it to you in another direction and you can still get that same experience.
And then you added on rounding that all out, giving you the temperature input control per header.
I mean that's awesome, right? That you can go in and say,
hey, my front intake fan should not have to respond to my CPU, right?
Why can't that respond to my motherboard? Why can't that respond to my PCH?
Why can't that respond to another temperature input?
And I think the biggest part is a lot of time we get pigeon-held as being the premium vendor, the more expensive vendor.
Look at the Z97-8. Again, there is not a better value proposition board in my opinion.
A $140 motherboard that has that class of fan controls,
you know, I don't want to bring competitors into it.
You know guys, you know me long enough, I'm not that kind of guy that I bash on the other guys.
But Gigabyte, ASRock, MSI, none of them.
But everyone.
Everyone else.
None of them have that.
I'm going to just combo punch the entire team right now.
Their highest end motherboard doesn't have that fan control that I have on a $140 motherboard.
When you talk about value, I don't know how much it gets better than that from a value proposition.
You know what, the funny thing about you saying that is I can imagine already.
I mean there's a delay on the Twitch stream, but I can already imagine what's going to happen in about 20 seconds.
Where people are going to say, oh I don't care about that fan control, that doesn't have a value for me.
I don't really care, I like all my fans running at 100% or whatever else.
But my response to that is, you know what, there are some people who care a whole lot about that.
And two of them sitting in this room have spent over $150 on a software fan controller that basically...
Hardware fan controller.
Sorry, hardware fan controller.
That we have to configure through software that's much flakier than AI Suite has ever been.
Oh, that works.
Just to get that functionality that you guys are now including on a board that costs less than what we paid for an M cubed T balancer.
So someone out there appreciates it, even if not everybody does, and it is a definite value add.
Even if it's like possibly the only two people in Canada.
Well no, there's definitely, I mean we know for sure that it's a lot more people than just you guys.
You know, it's just the bigger thing is sometimes just edifying people and helping them understand this.
And it's hard, you know, we talked about this last time.
This is not an easy game to be in when there's so many features and there's so many functions to be cognizant and to be aware of.
But you know, we work on it.
But you know, like I said, the fan controls, I think the audio tuning stuff is awesome.
I mean this generation, you have an ability to do target temperature based overclocking.
So that if you want to have the overclock be limited to 70 C or 80 C, and it's only going to do it to that.
You know, having it be frequency based.
Having the app tuning stuff right where you can conditionally profile your application to a specific overclock.
And have that dynamically adjust things like network prioritization or audio stuff.
I mean, I think crazy stuff, if you start to really evaluate some of these functions and features, it's kind of crazy that you're getting this level of control.
And while you guys might not be using the software to make this end user available, the power and class of this functionality.
I don't think people thought, you know, especially three years ago, four years ago, every year people say, yeah, there's not more that you can do.
It's all over.
There's no more.
There's no more innovation that can be done.
And then you do stuff like this and people go, how come this hasn't been on a motherboard for the last five years?
Right.
And the funny thing is, even I find myself doing it sometimes where I'll be using all the latest stuff because that's what I generally use.
And then, well, no, really though, because whenever we're evaluating something, we don't benchmark whatever is five years old.
Yeah, but it doesn't happen very often.
But that's exactly it.
Is I'll be I'll be using all of this latest stuff.
And then the other day I was putting together a PF sense box and I dug I dug an H55 board out of a box somewhere.
And I was like, oh, yeah, it's got like a dual core.
So it's relatively low power consumption or whatever.
Also, the relatively low performance.
So I don't mind tying it up in that box just to try it out.
And I was blown away by just all the crap it didn't have.
Even though I didn't feel like between between age 55 and now I didn't really feel like there was any kind of huge generational improvement in features.
I was just like, oh, this thing like doesn't have anything.
It doesn't have like onboard buttons.
It doesn't have like going back to those like classic old school blue screen Phoenix BIOS setups.
I know it's like, oh, wow.
Yeah, this has been a while, actually.
And that's actually it's perfect that you bring that up because that's, you know, highlighting back to your I think your very first question.
Right. Or maybe like your second one about people upgrading.
This is where I think it's sometimes hard as you guys reviewers is that the value proposition, sometimes you kind of go this meh mentality.
Right. When a new chip that comes out because you guys are maybe looking at it right from the previous one.
But I think that we've done a whole lot to improve from 87 to 97.
But it is also really important to remember.
I mean, you guys have a really, really great community.
And so you guys know about the systems that these users have.
But, you know, imagine somebody right now coming over from an X 58 platform to just like our our dash or a pro motherboard and everything that they're getting just on the board level.
Right. Let's not forget the things that are chipset derived, but just on the board functionality level.
There's an insane amount of stuff that they totally just are not even remotely near coming over from that chipset to this chipset.
All right. So, J.J., this is this is a question from Lewis a moon.
And I tend to I tend to agree with him.
Why don't you use right angle USB three connectors?
So if you actually notice, we do use it on the Sabertooth series and we've actually done it now for, I think, three generations.
But we don't do it as a whole because we still see actually chassis compatibility issues.
So I think really the only company that's really kind of gung ho about it is EVGA.
And we've we've like I said, we just don't do it because we still see enough issues with that.
There are some chassis where the actual space, if you were to right angle that cable, it actually will obstruct into the hard drive cage.
So it's a bit tight in that spacing. And as you know, that USB three header is a fat, blocky header.
And it's really hard to deal with in terms of that.
What we're actually, I think, playing around with more is that we're coming we're trying to develop kind of like a USB three Q connector so that you could actually put that in.
And it'll have actually a flexible cable that you could then run through like your your your your routing holes in your chassis.
And the kind of the tricky thing about that is that there's a actual there's a cost.
So you actually have to pay a royalty cost every time you do like a USB three spec.
This is why this is why a lot of the chassis, if you notice, there's like a really big drop off between entry level chassis having front USB three and then all of them having USB two.
Right. And you saw like this weird area where there was like stuff from NZXT or Cooler Master, these other ones where they only have like one US one one front USB three.
Yeah, that's because the cost. So they charge you for this USB three header.
So, you know, we're looking at trying to do that, but then we would have to pay the cost for putting the adapter and do all that stuff.
But that's really what it comes down to is it's literally right now that if we saw more chassis now that the argument could be said, well, you know, if we do it maybe on higher end boards, maybe like pro and above, it's probably going to go into a chassis where there's more than enough space between where the board sits and where the hard drive case are.
Right. Yeah. But that's the hard part. Right. Is it we kind of have to balance that out. So I think for me, I'd rather do kind of the Q connector kind of thing. I think people would be OK with that.
So I think that's probably the direction we're moving closer towards than seeing the USB three header actually go right angle. And there is also a little bit there is a little bit of actually signal integrity issues that when you turn it actually to the right angle that you can actually change a little bit of some of the layout topology and stuff like that.
And since we don't want to have to go rework the entire board from that perspective. Right. You know, it makes a little bit more sense to save the work that we've already done.
OK, so let's talk Devil's Canyon. Are we going to see I mean, I already know the answer to this, but this is a question from Fabian.
Are we going to see Devil's Canyon CPUs work on your 97 boards? Are we going to see them work on your 87 boards?
So this is a tricky topic. So I'll give you guys as much information as I can on this point. Sure. Intel requires what's called MEI compliance for certain CPUs.
So there is you guys kind of know the option ROM, right? The option ROM on a serial controller, like on the Intel motherboards. Right.
So that's like the firmware for the SATA controller. And sometimes the new chips come out. There's actually new option ROM. Right.
Well, the same thing when a new chipset comes out, there's new M.E.I. firmware generally corresponding to that CPU.
So technically to support the new Devil's Canyon CPUs, you have to excuse me, you have to be running the new M.E.I. firmware.
So I believe it's nine dot one M.E.I. firmware. So all Z 97 motherboards have that. But for Z 87, they're running on an older M.E.I. firmware.
So you will actually have to backport that M.E.I. firmware block to those boards. Now, we've done some internal testing already and we have been able to actually backport this.
But as to, you know, what the timeframe may be for us to formally roll this out or whether we will formally roll that out, I can't state that at this time.
We're still evaluating because there's also a concern that we talked about this, I think last time with AMD, where there's always a little bit of trickiness.
When you backport new CPUs to an older chipset and you make the UEFI or the BIOS compatible for that, you don't want it to break the overall performance or the interoperability compatibility for the old CPU platform.
Right. Because we have to overall favor the majority of people that have the old CPU versus the new CPU, because most users, I mean, statistically on that old chipset aren't going to upgrade to a new CPU.
But they may go out there and they may download that new UEFI 4.6 or 4.7 and it maybe brings down their overhead a little bit because, you know, there's different code base and different that running around in there.
We try not to do that. So our rule of thumb is we try to keep the performance for the previous CPU the same or within a 5% margin.
If it doesn't adhere to that, then it's something that we might not do. And then there's also stories.
There is also resource limitations and things like that. As you guys know, there's another chipset that I can't talk about, but it's coming down later down the pipe.
So this is all just about a managed resource. But I think our track record has been pretty good in this regard.
So as soon as I have more information on what will happen specifically for Z87, you guys will definitely know.
I will make sure to let you guys know as far as how that works out. But right now, guaranteed 100% support is exclusive to Z97.
All right. So what I'd like to do is, guys, we're going to thank everyone for sending in their Q&A questions for JJ.
Thanks, JJ, for answering them. But hold on. I'm not quite done with you yet, JJ, because I'd love for you to hang around with us for one more topic that isn't a Q&A.
But this is something that I have personally bitched to you about. And now I may be getting my way.
I'm extremely excited and I would love to hear your thoughts on the rumor that Intel's upcoming Xeons,
including some pretty crazy like 18 core SKUs, may be unlocked or even water cooling optimized,
which has implications that I'm sure are fairly obvious to you for enthusiasts.
And this was posted originally on the forum by Luca P.
So let's let's. Oh, yeah. And the original article was from HardwareBot.org.
Sounds interesting to me. That's about all I can say. Oh, come on.
I wasn't expecting more than that, to be honest. Sounds interesting to me, you know.
You know, but I will preface this. I will preface this.
There's always a lot of interesting things that comes about on the interwebs, as you guys know,
and your guys's forums is a hotbed for a lot of this stuff circulating around and people discussing it.
And, you know, some of it is sometimes true and some of it's not true, you know,
but even around like the upcoming Devil's Canyon, there's been a lot of supposed communication
and validation at what people perceive to be truths that were existing before in the community.
And they think that all of a sudden there's been changes that all of a sudden have somehow aligned with these truths that they think existed about older CPUs
and are going to be all of a sudden, I guess, proven true for the refresh based CPUs.
And, you know, all things will come in time as far as you'll see the way things work out.
But, you know, like like it is, all things will come in time. Right. So that didn't sound like a denial.
You know, I can't like I said, I wish I could say more, but I just have to keep have to keep it tuned. Right.
You know, and I'm sure the moment that something is confirmed and validated, they're going to find out from you guys,
because you guys are great about giving everybody that information.
All right. Well, I'll tell you what, JJ, without you having to confirm or deny anything.
First of all, thank you very much for coming on the show. It was an absolute pleasure to have you on again.
And second of all, just like OK, just just like the conversation I had with Nvidia,
where I was I was swapping emails with my PR contact at like three in the morning,
whereas I said out of the blue, I'm just like, you know, shield two rumors are starting to float around.
And, you know, we're hearing screen resolution this. We're hearing that.
Obviously, the CPUs are the GP, whatever you want to call it.
I could really piss Nvidia off and call it an APU.
Obviously, that's been pretty much ready for a while. So I sent this email.
I'm like, hey, make sure I'm on the top of the list for a shield, too.
And he's just sends back lol. But that was all the response I needed.
I just made sure he heard me. JJ, man, make sure that if any of this,
if any of this enthusiast grade multi core overclocking unlock stuff happens,
whatever board you guys have, that is the very best one, whether that's a WS or whatever else.
Please make sure that I'm on the top of the list. Top of the list, man.
You guys, you guys are always on the top of my list. You guys are great.
Should we all should we all like kind of hug and kiss before we say bye?
We need to I'm not even trying to get one. We need to get you know, we got a healthy bromance going on.
It's all right. You know, I think we're all comfortable here.
You got to get us two of those boards if they exist, because he's going to steal one.
And I need to benchmark it. You know, I don't even care personally.
I could I could not take it home. That's fine. He's going to take it home.
So I need another one for testing. You know, I will give you one thing.
It's something I actually I wrote about it on the PC DIY site that that I handled the conflict for.
And but I think it's like a little bit lone fact. I don't know if you guys already kind of found out about it.
But since I couldn't give you a confirm or deny about what you guys asked about.
A lot of people have been asking about the Swift. One of the really cool things I can tell you for the Swift is, you know, the Swift.
You guys know all the new specs it'll have. But one of the new functions that also be it will be the first 3D vision 2560 enabled panel.
So you'll be able to game and actually at 3D resolutions beyond 1080.
So that's at least something maybe you guys didn't know about. Kind of cool.
I did not. I don't like 3D.
I know you don't like 3D, but some people do.
And you haven't tried it with a low persistence backlight monitor, have you?
That's true. No, I haven't.
So this should this could be very interesting.
I've tried the light boost hack, though.
All right. So thank you very much, JJ.
And we will hopefully have you on again, I guess, in another year when another.
Oh, no, because we're going to you can neither confirm nor deny that we're going to have another chipset sooner than that.
But why don't we all agree that we're going to we're going to reconvene sooner than a year from now?
Yeah, I definitely will say sooner than a year from now, we can reconvene.
And if any of your guys have any any questions that they want answered that I didn't answer, you can tell them they can post in the forum.
I'll jump back in there a little bit later tonight and I'll be more than happy to answer anybody's questions.
That's fantastic. All right. Thanks, JJ.
And thanks to thanks to all of our viewers.
If you guys want to just let JJ know, give him a big old thanks, JJ, in the Twitch chat or on Twitter or whatever else.
I'm sure he'll want to check that out.
But now it is time to cover our sponsors for the day.
So first up, we've got Squarespace.
Now, they asked us to do something a little bit different.
So normally we would say, OK, Squarespace is the beautiful way to create your own very own awesome, fantastic website.
And it's, you know, relatively inexpensive.
Actually, it's quite inexpensive.
They have 24 seven support. OK, all that stuff that I normally say this time.
They actually asked me for something very, very different.
And I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to play this here song that is known as I can really hear it.
I have it. That is, you can hear it. That is known as the Squarespace jingle.
Also, there might be some lip syncing going on in the corner up here.
Oh, it's muted. How dare you be muted. This is the song a day guy, by the way.
Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. All right. OK, OK.
We got we got we got the lyrics to.
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All the options you need to create a unique website.
They're constantly improving the platform and the tools.
And it's awesome that you want to make it so easy.
They fund all your favorite podcasts.
And that that, my friends, is the Squarespace song, and they sent this over to me and I was like, yeah, OK.
We can play this on the show, but I tell you what, guys, there is no way that we can take this seriously, because even though the song legit actually contains all the key selling points of Squarespace, it's it's just it's it's like it's not a serious song by any stretch of the imagination.
So, guys, the point of this is not necessarily to listen to it and kind of go, oh, now I completely understand Squarespace.
More than anything else is to go, look, this is a fun way to get the word out there about Squarespace and most importantly, a fun way to talk about how Squarespace funds some pretty awesome podcasts, including ours.
And it's a big reason that we are actually able to exist and able to do this kind of thing.
And that that was the whole thing in the chorus about we fund all your favorite podcasts because they're very proud of their role in supporting the podcast community, something that a lot of other companies are just not that interested in because the ROI is very difficult to measure.
So, guys, just remember, you want to make your own beautiful website.
His head over to Squarespace dot com slash Linus for a free trial and 10 percent off gets you get 10 percent off with offer code Linus.
There you go. Not my most not my most graceful, graceful read ever.
But speaking of graceful and perfect segues that couldn't be any better no matter what happened.
Modus is a new sponsor of the land show.
And you guys all need to like legitimately if you have a Facebook account and I know not all of you are going to, but you are going to want to head over to Facebook and head over to the Modus page.
So that's M-O-D-I-S because Geekstakes is going on right now, you guys.
And Geekstakes is was actually a collaborative thing that we worked on.
Austin Evans has been involved and it is basically a bunch of crazy awesome prizes.
Hey, guys, it's Geekstakes 2014.
No, but seriously, we helped pick all the prizes because they asked us for some insight into what our audience would want them to give away.
So here I'm just going to screen share really quick here.
So there you go. It's Facebook dot com slash Modus.
So Modus is an IT recruiter.
So not only do they give away a bunch of cool stuff, but you can submit your resume to them for free and they handle placements to Fortune 500 companies, little tiny startups and all throughout the IT industry.
It's a way of getting a job in the IT industry that, quite frankly, I had never actually considered.
I'd heard of it.
So it costs nothing for the actual user and major like big companies.
They asked me not to name any names, but big companies use these guys to fill some seriously cool positions.
I'm sure if you're one of the people that want to sign up for this, your Google food is probably good enough to kind of figure that out.
Yeah. So anyway, guys, the Geekstakes runs from May 23rd to June 6th.
And if you go back every day, you can get additional entries.
I do want to talk a little bit about what they are giving away.
So there's an MSI GS60.
That was that was my personal contribution.
I was like, OK, look, you guys, whatever other prizes you got, like, that's cool.
That's cool. But you want to make sure you've got like a sweet gaming notebook.
And that was one that was able to fit into the price that we were able to kind of take away from everything else and be able to hit.
They are giving away an Oculus Rift.
They are giving away a Parrot AR drone, a Lytro camera, that camera that you can focus after you take the picture.
They're giving away a Fire TV, a Sphero, that Bluetooth controlled ball pebble smartwatch.
That was my personal contribution as well.
Jaybird Bluebuds X Bluetooth earbud set.
Almost everything on this list is stuff we've reviewed in the past.
They're giving away an M45 gaming mouse, my personal favorite gaming mouse right now.
So, guys, definitely go and check that out.
Which brings us into our last sponsor.
Guys, if you haven't had enough ASUS on this show already, what on earth are you doing?
You know what? Just go back to the standard one, because we've got our ASUS ROG notebook right there.
If you haven't had enough ASUS on this show, I'm going to drink some ASUS Kool-Aid here some more and talk to you guys about the G750JZ.
I don't think we have any other ASUS things.
Okay.
So I was doing the WAN show and I brought a laptop.
I thought that I would rap, but you didn't give a crap top about my rhymes that just ain't that great.
But on the show, it's my show, so don't hate.
Oh my God, you prepped that, didn't you?
No, I actually didn't.
Really?
That was 100% freestyle.
That was pretty good.
I've freestyled better on the show before.
But anyway, the point, guys, is the G750JZ is a legit power gaming notebook.
Legit power, legit powerful gaming notebook.
I'm never going to make it through.
You know, it's legit power.
That should be their new tagline.
It's funny.
Rock solid, legit power.
The saddest part is I don't even think it's impossible.
No.
Can't even power.
Legit, literally can't even power.
Okay, so anyway, the point is, it's funny, because the way we talk about the G750JZ,
we eventually laboriously get the point across, but if I was Asus, I'd be like,
what are these guys doing over there?
But truthfully, and this is like the biggest tease ever, because I'm not going to tell you guys anything about it,
Asus just signed on with us for something really exciting.
It's a collaborative effort between me and Logan and some other guys potentially,
and they are going to be our presenting sponsor for it.
We're going to be talking about potentially another cool Asus gaming laptop,
and it is going to be absolutely like bat crap crazy.
Expect that to happen around the end of June.
But in the meantime, G750JZ is what I would consider to be about as good as it gets for a desktop replacement
without getting into that unreasonable size where it just doesn't really make any sense anymore,
and the battery life isn't that good.
Like, with the 750JZ, I can get through almost two full WAN shows on one charge,
in spite of the fact that it is a gaming notebook,
and if I am gaming, obviously battery life's not as good,
but I can get performance that is pretty close to what you could do on a modern generation desktop,
and actually probably about the same as what you could do on a last-gen high-performance gaming desktop
with a single GPU, an enthusiast-grade GPU.
You know what we should do?
You know how we make, like, Tech Quickie commercials for different companies every once in a while?
Oh, hold on. So, thanks Asus for sponsoring the WAN show
and providing us with these awesome laptops to use while we broadcast to you guys.
It's, like, pretty cool of them.
It's nice, considering my last one barely works anymore.
We should make a, like, Tech Quickie-style commercial thing for JZ laptops,
but we should make it where it's a rap battle featuring Linus,
and Linus has to, like, go through these, it's kind of like the Pokemon League, but in rap battle form,
so you have to, like, beat all these different rap battle trainer people,
and they all have, like, different styles, and you have to make your way through it,
and then when you win, you get a JZ laptop.
Okay. Oh, hey, guys. Oh, sorry. Sorry, sorry. Totally, totally off topic.
I've got, um, I've got our, what on earth, where is it? Okay, well, okay, anyway.
Um, back to the, back to the modus giveaway really quickly here, just screen share me.
Um, the first draw is in half an hour.
So, guys, seriously, legitimately, go check it out, go like the page right now,
and you'll be entered to win a stick and find.
So, that's that little Bluetooth sticker that Luke and I used for that fun little video we did
where we played hide the sausage.
So, guys, seriously, like, just go there now and go click it, because otherwise, um,
I will have to eat gruel for several weeks, and I don't think you would want that.
Twitch chat liked my idea.
What was your idea? Oh, I hate your idea. Your idea is stupid.
Why?
Your idea is bad, and you should feel bad.
I want to see you rap battle.
You want to see me rap battle?
Yeah.
Do you?
Yeah, I do, actually.
Oh, boy.
And yet, you don't want to make a foot flick music video.
Okay, okay. So, last show, you guys, I brought up the foot flick thing,
about how every nerd knows how to do the foot flicks.
They don't yank ethernet cables and destroy devices.
So, I was saying we should do, like, a really quick kind of tech tips video
on, like, everyone should know how to do the foot flick.
This is how you do the foot flick.
And his reaction was, awesome, but let's make it a music video.
Do the foot flick. Oh, oh, do the foot flick. Oh, oh.
So, making, like, new dance moves.
But part of the foot flick is you got to flick your foot back so hard that you fall forward.
Yeah.
So, the whole thing's going to have to be, like, this boom.
Yeah, it couldn't be the same person every time.
The idea is that, like, we'd have, like, one cable during the chorus,
and, like, one person would walk by and, like, do the foot flick,
and they, like, roll past it.
And then, like, the next person come by, do the foot flick.
And if you can't do the foot flick, you're going to be in trouble.
You're going to be on the ground, on the double.
And then, like, someone falls.
See, I would love to see you in a rap battle.
I think you could do it.
Oh, I love it.
I definitely think you could do it.
So, are we, yeah, I don't know.
We got to do something with the foot flick.
Okay, okay.
Whatever it ends up being.
We will do something with the foot flick.
I cannot promise nor threaten that it will be a rap battle or a music video,
but it will definitely be something.
All right, speaking of things that are definitely something, this is cool.
I mean, we don't often just find, you know, like, a little small PC announcement
and sort of make a big deal about it on the WAN Show,
unless it's a product that we think is, like, really, really different.
And this is still just an all-in-one mini PC, or not an all-in-one, pardon me.
It's still just a mini PC.
But look at it.
This is the ZBox Sphere.
And what it is, is it is a tiny PC.
Like, it's, okay, this isn't giving you guys much of an idea of the scale here.
So, this was posted on the forum by 4960x.
Seriously, people who put, like, years in their usernames
or, like, individual products in their usernames,
you guys gotta forward think a little bit more.
Anyway, it's about this big. I saw it first at CES,
but this thing's got a Core i5 processor in it
and is a full computer in the size of a Sphere.
And you know what?
They deserve some attention for this, for trying to think out, literally, outside the box.
Ohhhhhh.
No, you don't want to do that.
Oh, are you sweaty?
It's nasty.
Okay, well, the point is, they're thinking outside the box
in much the same way that Apple is getting so much attention for,
but who else is going to pay attention to Zotac
for doing something a little bit different other than us?
So, I've requested a review sample of that.
I do want to tell you guys more about it.
I think it's really cool.
You basically twist off the top for tool-less upgrades.
It takes a 2.5-inch SSD, an M-SATA SSD, and two SODIMM modules.
And, yeah, I think that is pretty darn cool.
Speaking of things that aren't pretty darn cool.
Oh, yeah.
What is, like, what?
So, this was posted on the forum by Nils Kersik,
and the original article is from Tweakers.net,
and basically, Google sent out a letter that was discovered by the Wall Street Journal.
Thank you, Wall Street Journal, for being cool.
This letter was sent to the Securities and Exchange Commission back in December,
arguing that they don't have to specify their revenues on mobile ads,
and one of the arguments that they brought up is that it's difficult to indicate mobile devices
because the definition keeps on changing.
Like, it's difficult to pin down.
What exactly is a mobile device?
So, they use possible future examples such as fridges, thermostats, glasses, and watches.
But the problem here is that even though Google hasn't talked or even indicated
that they have any plans of implementing ads on any of those kinds of devices,
it shows that they're thinking about it.
Like, how annoying would that be on something like a watch
where you have such limited real estate where it's like,
or, okay, but let's move away from sort of the watches we have today
and kind of go, okay, what about the watch of tomorrow where it has a holographic display or whatever else?
Could we be looking at a situation where you, like, are expected to look past an ad?
Or, like, if you look at it at the wrong angle, there's, like, an ad in your face?
Yeah, probably, and it's frustrating because this brings up the thing that we've talked about before, too,
which is where you totally buy a device and then that person that you bought the device from serves you ads,
which is crazy frustrating.
Okay, speaking of, so anyway, that's just, it was a very brief discussion topic there.
Speaking of buying a device and then having the rug completely pulled out from under you,
LG has, LG, guys, not cool, like, not cool what's going on here.
And as much as Noir's original post about this is super lame,
it just says silly LG and then is a link to the original source here.
That is not how we do things, Noir.
Still, I actually am not sure what else I could have said about it.
So the original article's from TechDirt.com and basically what happened is this gentleman didn't want to roll out an update to his two-year-old TV
that would change the privacy policy in such a way that he wasn't comfortable with.
So what LG...
With good reason.
Sorry?
With good reason.
With good reason.
So what it said was, yeah, when you use Live Plus, we may share certain viewing information, device information,
and basic usage information with third parties for advertising and analytics purposes
and enable the provision of information relevant to what you are viewing.
To third party vendors that LG Electronics may engage to provide services on its behalf from time to time,
such as to collect payment for content you purchase or to fulfill customer service requests or to provide advertising services.
Rap God.
The guy was like, yeah, no, that's not cool.
So LG basically goes, okay, well you can either accept it or you cannot use the smart TV features of your smart TV that you bought.
And it's not like he can just take it back to the store at this point.
It's a two-year-old TV.
That's better from Costco.
Even Costco doesn't take back two-year-old TVs anymore.
Oh, wow.
I think it's a three-month limit now.
Wow.
I can't even begin to understand how they feel like this is okay.
I mean, it's...
And they definitely do because it's very plainly written.
Yes.
That that's going to happen.
It's part of their policy that they can just not if you refuse to accept the usage changes.
And you know what?
They're not the only ones who have covered their butts in such a way that, you know,
they could just change anything at any time and you would just have to deal with it.
I just feel like, guys, when we hear about things like this, we have a responsibility
to not support the guys who are, if nothing else, even if everyone has this as part of
their policy, we can choose not to support the ones that are enforcing it.
And at least make the ones that aren't enforcing it kind of look at what's going on and go,
oh, okay, well...
Let's keep not enforcing this.
Let's keep not enforcing that because otherwise we are going to back ourselves into a corner
where we are just going to have no choice and we're not going to have another option.
I've never really been interested in smart TVs because I find that, honestly, most of
them are junk anyways.
They truly are.
So I wouldn't have bought one anyways, but this makes it so that if I had to, I would
specifically not buy an LG one.
Again, we have to try and vote with our wallets.
It rarely seems to work, but if we could try again, that would be fantastic.
Yeah, if we could just try that again, that would be great.
Thanks.
All right.
So big news this week, and I would love for you guys to, let's do like just a general
Twitter blitz Q&A.
We're getting pretty close to the end of the show.
And if you could specifically let me know because I have zero marketing support from
Microsoft.
I don't know a single person in PR or at their PR firm.
So for me to review the Surface 3, I'm going to straight up have to buy it.
So if you guys can let me know, like, are you, is some, cause I don't need another
laptop.
Got a G750JZ, yo.
Anyway, I don't need another laptop.
So if someone is like, yeah, I would totally buy that off you Linus without you having
to take a huge hit on it.
Or if you guys are like, look, this is totally worth the 1200 or so dollars you're going
to have to spend on a medium spec one to really, yeah, I know it's a lot of money.
And we really need you to review this.
We really need you to talk about this.
Guys, let me know how important this is to you.
But basically here it is.
The Verge was at the launch event.
They've got some pictures of it here.
And this looks like what I pretty much asked for back when they launched the original Surface
and the Surface RT.
It is thinner.
The keyboard implementation is better.
So they've got a backlit type cover now that actually mounts to the screen in a different
way.
So you can actually fold it up flat and then lay it against it so that it angles up a little
bit at the same time.
Um, the touch pad is bigger on the type cover.
What they, what they've effectively done is they've made it while the battery life is
still not quite there.
It's about eight hours, which is pretty good.
But when you compare that to what is it, 13 hours on the MacBook Air, Apple is like, ah,
I just, I want someone to beat them.
Batteries are holding everything back.
So anyway, the point is they have pretty much delivered what I asked for when they
first launched this device, a longer battery, um, great power consumption.
It's thinner, it's beautiful, it's more functional and it legitimately replaces both the tablet
and the notebook in a way that the original just couldn't do because the changes they've
made to the kickstand allow it instead of just locking into a position or two, uh, they,
it uses a friction mount to go anywhere from 22 to 150 degrees.
So you can sit the thing up in your lap and still have it be supported well enough that
you can use it that way.
Or you can lay it down flat and write on it with a 256 pressure layer or, um, pressure
level, uh, stylus and you can really use it in, in every possible way.
Apparently the front facing speakers sound great.
This is a real drawback of many devices out there that I just feel like do a crappy job
of implementing audio and I'm glad to see someone other than HTC taking front facing
speakers and how important they are seriously.
And like honestly guys, it's faster.
It just looks like one seriously cool device.
I really like that raise up that you can do.
I hope it actually, this is what I'm talking about.
Doesn't make it kind of flex down a lot while you're typing cause that would not be very good.
I don't know.
This is the kind of thing that I'd really like to, there's a closeup of the hinge.
This is all from the verge.
This is how you can lay it all the way down flat pretty much so you can draw on it.
Um, it's, it's really clean looking so that surface branding on the back of it is pretty
much all you see.
It apparently does get a little bit warm in use.
I actually like this placement of the windows button right here rather than the bottom one
because when I sit and use a tablet or even a notebook, I'm using my hands or a hand and
this is as good or better always than down here where it's more of a like you like grab
something and you're liable to accidentally press it as often as press it on purpose.
So, uh, let's, let's do that Twitter blitz.
Shall we guys?
We want to hear from you.
I feel bad.
We don't, I feel like we don't do enough Twitter interaction on this show anymore, but we just
have so much stuff to talk about.
Um, captain cake says, buy one, review it and return it.
Okay.
That is a good suggestion, but there is an issue with that and that's that if something
goes wrong and we like, you know, we scratch it or something, then we're in a pretty, we're
in a pretty bad situation.
Um, someone says they would rather see us check out the Lenovo X one carbon.
So that's from Ryan Jenkins.
Greg says, it's really cool, but I don't think the audience would be interested enough.
Well, that's the point of this Twitter blitz.
Let's uh, let's find out what the audience thinks about this is actually the speaking
of the audience.
There were a couple of things that I had in here that I wanted a, um, uh, a straw poll.
Okay.
One straw poll.
Luke, can you create a straw poll on the infinidex?
So that was that omni-directional treadmill we looked at before versus augmented reality.
Which one you would be more excited about if you could have a full setup of either of
them for the same price, let's say, and it supported all the same game.
Infinidex VR versus Infinidex AR versus no, just AR like running around out and about.
Uh, okay, so let's keep Twitter blitzing here.
Guys, someone says, don't buy it.
My ASUS TB 100 performs probably just as good.
If you can borrow it, do that, of course, but it's not worth your own money.
Delons.
Yeah, I know you want it.
Guys, by the way, this is the Delons who you can do two things for one of two things.
You can either thank him for being the one who does the land show table of contents or
you control him for being the one who makes the occasional mistake in the land show table
of contents.
But huge shout out to Delons because without him, the land show takes a lot longer for
us to get up because by the end of Friday, Luke and I are just exhausted and going back
and rewatching the show that we just broadcast and like creating a table of contents for
it is not real high on our list of things that we like super awesomely want to do.
And Delons was actually the one who came up with the idea of doing a condensed table of
contents and then the super detailed one that you guys can find topic by topic.
What interests you the most?
Hey, Twitch decided to allow me to be a mod again.
Oh, cool.
That's cool.
I wasn't this entire stream so far.
I would like to see the new surface, but wouldn't be the end of the world if I didn't get one.
Okay.
All right.
Lower your dongers because the mods are perma banning for flexing dongers.
The surface looks great.
Don't have the money now.
So much better than terrible.
Windows 8.1 is still a real challenge for me.
Like I still, you know, issues, man, you know what it is?
Ninety five, 98% of the time I'm 100% okay with it.
But then when I'm actually in a hurry to get something done and I swipe off the side of
my touch pad accidentally when I'm just trying to move the mouse, it, it really drives me
up the wall.
It really does in a way that I can't even rationally justify.
But and like when I accidentally, when I, when I fire up a new PC and I go to listen
to a song or look at a picture and it opens that garbage modern UI application that is
just less hurdles to jump worthless.
I just, it just, I just go, oh, and they have to sit and wait for it to launch.
And they're so slow, really slow.
They're slow to launch.
And it's just, I know it's only a few seconds and this is a total first world problem and
it's stupid, but it's not slow to launch the desktop app, but it's not slow to launch the
desktop app.
We're solving a problem that we never had.
Anyway.
Uh, yes, please do it says Sebastian.
Isn't it funny how you care more about the way your case interior looks and the way your
watch looks.
What's wrong with my watch?
I like this watch.
Actually, a lot of people have asked me, but this is a Cogito smartwatch.
I haven't spent much time with the app yet, so don't run out and buy them just because
I'm wearing it yet.
I will let you guys know what I think of it, but I've had a lot of people compliment me
on this watch to be perfectly honest.
Um, more people than the pebble with the pebble.
People are like, what is that with this one?
People are like, oh, what's that?
Yeah, 0.01 cares about Microsoft hardware.
Hashtag just get a Seuss to build it.
Uh, it would be really nice if you review the surface pro three already considered buying
it, buying the surface pro two.
Okay.
Someone says review a base surface three.
That's an interesting angle where we go, okay, here is the starting point cause I think most
everyone else is going to be looking at high end or mid range configurations.
Whereas if we go, okay, no, we're going to do like a really good review.
This is the surface three, by the way, you can also get these things by the way, by the
higher end model.
Go, go look at other people's reviews if you want to know what like the core I seven one
performs.
Like that's interesting.
It's not a bad idea.
It'd also save you some money.
Ashley.
Okay.
You were doing pretty well in this tweet up till the bit about putting 10 gigabit ethernet
on the surface for, I don't think that's going to happen so good.
Did we just, did we just lose a hockey game to the fins?
Is that the joke here?
What's going on in the world championships?
I haven't actually looked at it in the last couple of days.
I don't think we did last night.
Pretty sure we didn't lose last night.
Oh, world championships.
Yeah.
World championships.
Hockey.
I don't know.
I haven't, I haven't been paying that wanting team kind of coach Dave Tippett thought that
yeah, no, they beat the fins.
Yeah.
Screw you guys.
Um, okay.
I have the pro two.
It's awesome.
Review.
The pro three says beeps could do who is my, my favorite, whatever you are.
Cool guy.
Favorite dude.
Save the surface is the one to review.
Go for it.
Okay.
So it looks like people straight up really want me to check out the surface three.
Okay.
I'm going to, I'm going to order one today.
Okay.
I'll order one and uh, you know, if someone wants to, you know, buy it off of us on the
garage sale, I can promise you there'll be a bit of a deal, but it might not be a lot
cheaper than uh, you know, than a surface three that uh, you buy new, but it'll be in
great condition.
Really good care of it to the best of my ability here guys.
Um, Zach Janice says, why not just get a convertible notebook?
You know what?
It's a great question.
And uh, I was using a Dell XPS 12 for a long time, which is a convertible notebook.
The reason I would say that a surface three might make sense is that a convertible notebook
is not a tablet, whereas a surface three is a tablet, but it also has so much more capability
than a tablet because of the kickstand, because of the stylus, because of the ability to add
these keyboard accessories that are well implemented and not kludgy.
I also find that this tablet is going to be a lot thinner and smaller.
It's much thinner, much lighter.
So there are real reasons why surface makes sense beyond, uh, or uh, instead of a convertible
notebook.
Uh, apparently the I five model comes out two months sooner than the others.
So I guess we might end up just, uh, hitting that one.
I guess.
Uh, Phillip says, yeah, yeah, I'll definitely take it after you review it.
All right.
Fair enough.
Oh, we've got people asking about the modus sweepstakes or geek stakes.
Excuse me.
I think the draw is in eight minutes unless it was at nine.
Shoot.
I'm a dirty.
I think I'm at a bit of a loss here.
Okay.
Well either way guys, go back every weekday and make sure that you go, uh, that you go
check that out.
And thanks again to modus for sponsoring our show today.
Uh, have you seen the metal metal glasses, space glasses for AR?
No, I haven't.
But we don't click links on, uh, on Twitter, on the land show anymore after some bad experiences.
I don't think that's the best still grab of, uh, no, no.
Okay.
So that's about it.
Setting aside the money Nintendo and Sony has, what would be the ups and downs of Nintendo
rate up buying PlayStation?
I'd be down with Nintendo buying PlayStation.
They won't at all.
Yeah.
Cause I mean the thing is that it's not in their like model at all.
The thing that I think people need to get about Nintendo is that they're not having
trouble right now because they can't build a part, build a powerful gaming console or
because they can't pursue the whole third party, triple A. Well, okay.
They are having trouble pursuing third party, triple A gaming titles, but it's because of
the different approach that they believe in pursuing with, you know, multiple screens
and different controller schemas and all that kind of stuff.
It's not like Nintendo doesn't know how to build a brick with controllers plugged into
it.
Um, so they wouldn't buy PlayStation for the sake of the innovation of PS4 being a brick
with controllers wirelessly connected to it.
Versus being plugged into it.
They have wireless controllers, all Wiimos.
So I just think straight up, Nintendo just wouldn't even be interested, even if they
could afford it.
Nope, I don't think so either.
And I'm okay with that.
I think Wii U and I think 2DS, 3DS deserves a lot more attention and a lot more respect
than it gets because honestly, 2DS, 3DS is really fun.
They're integrated super well.
That's another thing people don't understand is everyone, everyone will complain for days
when Battlefield doesn't work off the bat and Titanfall is not very well optimized for
PC off the bat.
And there's like all these problems all over the place.
But then when every single Nintendo game, like ever, works completely flawlessly out
of the box, as far as I can think of off the top of my head, no one seems to really care.
I have a Wii U and I have a 2DS.
They're both absolutely fantastic.
Whenever anyone comes over, we often end up playing Wii U because PC games are great,
but they're great when your buddy is still at his house or you're landing and that's
actually kind of difficult to do all the time.
Kind of a pain in the butt.
So yeah, I don't know.
I think they deserve a lot more attention than they get.
I mean, speaking of their games all working flawlessly, the game spy servers shutting
down was a bit of a problem recently for DS owners who still want to play Mario Kart,
Wii owners who still want to play their games, but there's some good news out of all of this
as well.
This was originally posted by Bonsai99 on the forum and here's a post from Bungie.net.
Halo PC, Combat Evolved, and Custom Edition.
There's a new patch.
So the game spy servers went down, so you weren't going to be able to even look for
online servers because the server list server is gone.
So some dude in the community coded a new server list, Bungie put up some of their own
servers to host this stuff and things are rolling again.
One of the big things in the new patch was they did a whole bunch of small bug fixes.
So essentially the game should have died this month and Bungie was just like, nope, here's
patches fixing things.
Here's patches bringing the servers back.
You guys are good to go.
And that's awesome.
That's super cool.
Like so much more respect for Bungie now.
Yeah, so like it's fixing things like upper boundary on video resolution, fixing things
like, they're even fixing, they fixed active camo on Nvidia cards.
Like they're even fixing like graphical stuff.
Nevermind crashes or like, oh man, that is just so cool.
There was a bunch of different members of the community that brought up some of these
bugs and like different ways that they could fix it and whatnot.
And then that guy in the community coded this list and people, I know people are going to
come back and be like, oh well, they kept it up because like strong community focus
and the community kind of fixed everything for them.
Doesn't matter.
This happens all the time.
Yeah.
They're super dedicated people in so many different communities.
It's insane.
That ask really nicely, really nicely, even be allowed to fix it.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
This happens all the time.
It just, it took Bungie to actually accept this help and actually do it and then thank
those people, which I think is really cool.
I think this is just like the coolest, most like feeling happy, like gaming news that
like I just, I want to go buy a copy.
I want to go back and play Halo.
I just want to go buy a copy and like play the heck out of it.
Go play through the single player.
We should, like I've wanted to do this a long time.
Okay.
You know what guys?
You got to let us know.
You got to let us, you got to let us know.
Um, if we did a very small LAN event in Vancouver, would you guys be down to help us cover the
costs?
It would be a very small LAN event and it wouldn't be like at my house or anything.
So we would have to actually get a venue.
So it might not be that cheap.
Um, but would you guys be down to come and hang with us?
I have to say I haven't played much in the way of video games in the last little while.
And I firmly believe that a LAN is only fun as long as everyone is on the same page and
playing the same game.
So we would publish a games list and we would expect people to come and play those games
and have fun and eat some snacks.
But would you guys be down to come to something like that?
Even if it was like full on Nazi mode, anyone opens wow at this LAN, we will literally have
him pick you up, pick up your computer and throw both of you out the door.
We'll bring my brother too just in case.
Yeah, we'll bring your brother too just in case we need some more like thug muscle.
But there you go guys.
Would you be down to come?
Let us know on Twitter.
I'm not going to blitz it right now, but I will definitely check it out later and I'd
love to see the results of that strop goal that we were, that we created before.
So here, no, no, I'm just going to, we'll switch over to you here.
So in theory this will work now.
Strop hole was having an issue on Firefox, but I've got it up in Chrome.
Way to be strop hole.
Okay.
So here we go.
I did allow multiple votes.
Seriously?
I did allow multiple votes.
That's how it's going to be?
So I made it so that people could vote for multiple things and a lot of people still
just decided to vote for one thing.
And that was the Linus rap battle.
I got after you for posting like banana and all this other crap and all of our polls.
So I was like, you know what, whatever I can do it too.
So Linus rap battle wins with 70% of the votes and the rest of it got almost no votes.
This isn't even like statistically significant.
Not even close.
So both the other options got under 20%.
I hate you.
Infinidec VR coming in at 17% and AR not even getting 15% coming in at 13%.
Personally, I vote for AR running around, but Infinidec VR would be awesome as well.
And I think the nice smooth experience would probably come first to Infinidec VR style gaming.
Because being able to actively render things in AR, AI really, really well and on the fly
and stuff I think is not really going to happen for a little while.
Now it's at 69%.
That's perfect.
All right.
On that completely mature and sophisticated note, thank you guys very much for tuning
into the WAN Show.
We'll see you guys again next week and I'll probably, I don't think I'm going to do a
garage sale today, but I'll come back and stream for a couple minutes.
But then I got to go get the baby.
So, good stuff.
All right.
Seriously?
You got to pull the thing out.
Way to go.
What if I...
Oh, we just had Talk46 message us and let us know that the Mario Kart Wii community
also managed to create a custom server.
Well, it's a tweet so I don't know that the grammar is necessarily correct, but there
you go.
So...
That's pretty cool.