What's up, y'all?
Welcome to the WAN Show.
We're gonna have a fantastic, fantastic show
for you guys today.
I saw a conspiracy theory that the only way
that I could have had such a bad take on the RTX 3080 Ti
was to generate more views when I inevitably had to apologize
for how bad my review was.
So-
And this is where those views are gonna come from.
Tell your friends, get them on the WAN Show.
Let's go.
Let's go.
Let's go.
Let's get some views.
Best WAN Show ever.
Let's do it.
Cause we're gonna be talking about it.
We're gonna be talking about our largely positive review
of the RTX 3080 Ti when the vast majority
of the rest of the tech press said
it was not a very good bargain.
Okay, yeah, we're gonna dig right into that.
In other news, AMD's Computex keynote was awesome
and there's a lot to discuss
about how much sweet technology AMD
has coming down the pipe.
What else we got today?
The leaked CD Projekt Red code,
sorry, I should say data was sort of made public, sort of.
The source code for Cyberpunk 2077,
the source code for Red Engine,
the source code for Witcher 3,
the source code for Thronebreaker
and all this other stuff all leaked,
but it's essentially all password protected.
So we'll see how strong that is.
Also, as vaguely as I can possibly go,
Huawei goes its own way.
Goes its own way.
That's funny.
That's a funny play on that.
That's a joke.
I like it.
Good joke, good joke.
Let's roll that intro.
Yeah, oops, I'm supposed to be doing something.
Oops, I'm supposed to be doing something.
Right, right, we have sponsors like this one.
Seasonic, Ridge Wallet, Tux Care.
That's good stuff.
All right, naturally, we're gonna have to jump
right into the biggest, meatiest,
most delicious topic of the day.
And that is, of course, the backlash we faced
over our review of the RTX 3080 Ti.
And man, there's a lot of, everyone even internally
is getting in on this one.
This is in the WAN Show doc.
Anthony prepared it.
Of course, as you guys know, Anthony is our GPU editor.
So he was the one who benchmarked the cards
and actually wrote the bulk of the review.
He and I sat down together as we always do
and talked through it.
We were both happy with what we had put out there.
And of course you guys did not agree so much,
but even Riley's getting in on it.
He's got comments in the doc.
He's like, hey, make sure you emphasize this part.
So let's go through it.
Our review of the RTX 3080 Ti was largely positive
based on our position for the card,
which is that it's pretty much a cheaper version
of the RTX 3090, which if you guys remember,
had an MSRP of 1500 US dollars.
And it's not like this is based on nothing.
All of its core specifications are within 2.5% of the 3090
except for the frame buffer size, which is half.
And we talked about this in the video,
the fact that it has half the frame buffer
means that if for whatever reason,
like say for example, a global Silicon shortage
and video was having trouble getting enough
of the GDDR6X memory that they need to put on the board,
they would be able to make twice as many 3080 TIs
compared to how many 3090s they could build.
Performance testing put it at or above the RTX 3090
in most scenarios.
So our takeaway was that, yeah, it sucks
that it's more expensive than the RX 6900 XT,
but it's still a good value.
Hold on, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.
Luke, stop, just relax.
Everyone relax.
Good value, you have to listen to the rest of the sentence,
for anyone who was looking at the RTX 3090 for gaming.
And-
So to be clear, that doesn't mean for everyone.
I want you to reanalyze that sentence for a moment.
Okay.
People that were already shopping for a 3090.
Yes.
This is a good value.
We also framed it as a good value
if you can get it at MSRP during the scalpocalypse.
Okay.
This sentiment was not shared by the entire tech community.
Gamer's Nexus claimed the card was a waste of money
saying gamers were being robbed blind.
All right, that's the quote.
They even announced that they left the keynote early
in disgust.
Hardware Unboxed called it a shameless money grab
saying Nvidia failed to read the room.
Hardware Canucks proclaimed that the 3080 Ti
was not a new hope for gamers.
But okay, why?
As it turns out, people thought the RTX 3080 Ti
was going to be more similar to an RTX 3080
and that it would be priced accordingly.
Not only that, but the perception is that these GPUs
would otherwise be destined for RTX 3080s.
And what's happening is rather than taking 3090s
and making more of them,
Nvidia is taking what would have been 3080s
and marking them up.
So as a result, reviewers have pointed out
that the performance is a mere seven to 10% better
than the RTX 3080 for a hefty double the MSRP, almost.
So it's $1,200 versus $700.
That looks an awful lot like the scalping behavior
that we and other tech outlets have decried
over the last months.
But the problem is that it is not a beefed up 3080.
It is a very ever so slightly nerfed 3090.
Both of those cards, the 3080 and the 3090
do use a GA-102 GPU, but they are not entirely
the same thing.
And we've already had the conversation
about the RTX 3090s pricing.
It is really high and it was really high before.
And the intention, which has been,
the rumors have been swirling about a 3080 Ti for months.
The intention was clearly to plug the massive gap
that AMD's RX 6900 XT blew in Nvidia's lineup
coming in at 999.
Okay, so there's all of that.
And actually, you know what?
I'm not quite done with that because Gamers Nexus,
I love Steve, but saying gamers are being robbed blind
is sort of implies that they are being robbed.
You don't have to give Nvidia your money.
And in fact, if you are a price sensitive buyer,
I would go as far as to say that you should not be shopping
for a top tier, absolute highest spec GPU,
which to me, this is.
It matches the performance of the 3090.
Why are you even having this conversation?
This is clearly a halo part and a $1,200,
12, like 1250 or whatever it worked out to,
a 12, $1,300 price point for a top spec,
absolute top of the line GPU is hardly a new concept
even before there was a worldwide Silicon shortage.
So it's like, yeah, sure, fine.
It's not a great bang for the buck.
Was it ever going to be?
When was the last time we had an 80 Ti card
that was like bang for the buck?
Hold on a second, I'm gonna check something real quick.
2080 Ti MSRP at launch, just curious.
So the 2080 Ti launched at 999 plus.
Okay, on nvidia.com, I just hope this isn't,
I hope this isn't ENUS.
Yeah, on nvidia.com, the latest pricing
for a founder's edition,
cause remember founder's edition is not necessarily
the lowest price variant, a founder's edition is $1,200.
So yeah, it's not a great deal,
but what did you guys think was going to happen?
That Nvidia was going to somehow,
I mean, they've had earnings calls,
they've had investor calls,
they've said this shortage is going to last
throughout the rest of this year.
So did you think that they had somehow managed
to magically find more supply
and that like this was going to be the new hope for gamers
as hardware connects thought it might be?
What new hope for gamers?
Nvidia has already come out publicly and said,
there's no new hope for gamers.
Yeah, so it's like, yeah, that sucks, that really sucks.
But why are you shooting the messenger here?
I don't really understand it.
There have been some ADTI launches,
like the 1080 TI was actually like pretty strong
for bang for the buck,
but I don't think that's a normality.
So 1080 TI is an interesting one
because it's used the same GPU
as the Titan of that generation and launched,
however, I forget how many months later than the 1080,
but it was based on a completely different GPU.
Nvidia, I'm trying to remember,
cause there was that trend for a while
where ever since from Maxwell on,
we were for a little while, we were getting,
cause 680 was whatever 04
and then 780 was the top, the largest die.
And then 980 was back to the smaller die again.
And then the TIs have always been based on the largest die
in the particular architectural family.
So you can kind of go back in Nvidia's history
and find examples to prove either point.
What I'm trying to say is that
this is not without precedent at all.
So 1080 TIs MSRP at launch was actually $700, yes.
And that was the top performance card at the time, yep.
So anyway, hold on, let's keep going.
But like I was saying, it's not necessarily a normality,
just because there is one that you can point at
doesn't necessarily mean that it happens all the time.
So, okay, moving on a little bit here
to the concept of MSRP itself.
What an MSRP is, is a manufacturer suggested retail price.
And I don't expect our average viewer to have this context,
but Nvidia's manufacturer suggested retail prices
are sort of a big load of bull.
And there's a couple of reasons for that.
So number one is that Nvidia doesn't manufacture anything.
So what's a manufacturer suggested retail price
from someone who doesn't actually manufacture anything?
TSMC makes the dies, Micron or Samsung
makes the DRAM or whoever else.
Someone like Foxconn is going to make the actual boards.
I know Cooler Master is heavily involved
in OEM manufacturing of things like coolers,
in some cases, GPU coolers.
Nvidia actually manufactures nothing.
They contract everything,
which doesn't mean that they don't have great technology
or that they don't have a role to play
in the pricing of products based on their technology.
But what it means is that they actually don't have
to give a if any money gets made at MSRP,
because where Nvidia makes their money
is in the sale of the GPUs.
And I believe the memory is usually included
as part of the package that Nvidia allocates
to their various board partners.
Nvidia makes their money at actually an earlier stage
in the stream.
And it's only with the most more recent edition
of founders editions that Nvidia has even gotten involved
in being a board partner for their own products.
So Nvidia makes their money at this completely separate tier
and leaves anywhere in the neighborhood of as low as,
I've heard as low as like 1% profit
for their board partners to hit MSRP.
And which is ridiculous.
And remember too.
It's not the end of the line.
Remember too, that just because a board partner
could hit MSRP doesn't mean that they actually want
to focus on that board because a lot of the time,
the way that a board partner like an EVGA or an ASUS
wants to differentiate their product is by making it better
than the bare minimum that Nvidia specified.
So what interest does an Nvidia board partner have
in shipping a product that they believe to be not up
to the standard that gamers who are spending,
let's say $1,000 or $1,200, it doesn't matter.
Whatever the standard of build quality,
a gamer who's paying that much would want to spend
at no margin.
What is in it for them?
All they stand to do is make no money
and potentially damage their brand.
Great.
I'm an EVGA, I'm super into that, right?
Wrong, obviously.
So that's why you often see the launch cards
come in at MSRP or at least reasonably close.
And then unless there's a glut of supply
and not enough demand,
what you'll see is you'll see these super clocked
or strict or classified or what's an aorists or whatever.
Yeah, you'll see all these other variants pop up
at anywhere from 50 to 100 to even like $200
over the MSRP.
That's because Nvidia doesn't care
about their partners making margin at MSRP.
So MSRPs in the first place are kind of nonsense
from Nvidia.
Now gamers nexus' take is that the MSRP difference
is comparable to the RTX 3080s at the time of launch
and that scalping will scale accordingly.
But that's not typically how it works
in the second hand or in the secondary market.
So, I mean, I know a thing or two
about shopping for used GPUs.
We've now done, what is it?
Eight Scrapyard Wars or something along those lines.
And if there's anything that I've learned
from all the time that I've spent,
not just filming Scrapyard Wars,
but also being a bargain hunter on the secondary market
when I was building PCs for friends or clients
or for myself, I would often flip hardware
so that I could just like try everything
and then not actually have to pay for it.
Cause if I just buy it and sell it
for the same as what I pay,
then effectively I got to use it for free, right?
I just had the cashflow tied up.
So I've been playing this game for a long time.
I don't know how much used hardware
Steve has ever actually bought in his life,
but the way that it works is typically
it's way, way more closely tied
to actual real world performance
and what else is available on the market.
And that is the way, and that has always been the way.
So something that performs way better,
has more of a value proposition,
regardless of what the MSRP is,
is typically going to be worth way more.
And something that has a lesser value proposition
is typically not going to just scale, you know,
by the, according to the same percentage of inflation
over MSRP as another product would.
I have never seen it work that way.
The reality of it is the secondary market
is a more pure what the market will bear
in terms of pricing than what you see
from like a manufacturer,
from a manufacturer suggested retail price.
And that's something that I would be,
I'd be happy to go toe to toe with Steve on,
because I think that is just based on,
I don't know what he's,
I really don't know what he's basing that on, honestly.
So now let's talk about, you know,
whether the $700 MSRP RTX 3080 actually even exists.
So here's some Asus MSRPs as of March without tariffs.
They've got the Strixo C RTX 3090,
that is an $1,849 card.
We've got their RX 6800 XT, that is $909.
This is Asus's MSRP.
Remember, this is the actual manufacturer.
We've got the Strixo C RTX 3080 at $899.
And then we've got the Asus dual RTX 3070 at $649.
That is $50 less than Nvidia's MSRP for the 3080.
But remember that that is Asus's low-end 3070.
Then there's the tariffs.
So anything being shipped to the US from China
is subject to, oh, what is it again?
I forget if it's 15%.
I can't remember, we had to deal with this
for a verified actual gamer program, but it's substantial.
So corrected for tariffs,
those MSRPs are now $2,200 for that Strixo C 3090,
over $1,000 for the 6800 XT.
Nick just messaged, he says it's around 25%.
Over $1,000 for the RTX 3080
and $679 for the 3070.
Now, something that is also really interesting
that we learned from verified actual gamer program
is not every card coming into the US
is subject to the tariffs.
So EVGA, for example, was able to get way closer
to the original MSRPs of the 3070s
that we sold through verified actual gamer program
because those boards were manufactured in Taiwan.
But here's a problem.
Remember, you're Nvidia, right?
Think about, put yourself in Nvidia's shoes.
You have a lot more forces weighing on you
than just what gamers would like a card to be priced at.
Like something as simple as a capacitor
could easily have gone up in price 200, 300, 400%
because of the worldwide electronics supply situation
that's going on right now.
So you have pricing pressure on you.
It's obvious that DRAM pricing pressure
was a big part of the reason for the existence
of the 3080 Ti.
Like there's a reason they cut it in half from the 3090
and kept everything else basically the same.
So you could have pricing pressure on you.
You could have pressure from your resellers, for example.
They might say, hey, don't price these things too low
because let's say I'm a micro center, for example,
and I'm looking at it going,
why am I not able to take advantage of any of the margin
that clearly the market will bear in these products?
And Nvidia might say, look,
we're gonna prioritize gamers over your concerns there.
You know, forget it.
You guys should be happy to have GPUs at all.
And great, they can do that.
But they also have other forces on them.
Like say, for example, they're board partners.
Let's say, for example, that I am a,
I'm trying to think.
Okay, let's say I'm pallet.
To my knowledge, pallet manufacturers
all of their boards in China.
So, oh, wait, shoot.
Pallet might be a bad example
because I don't think they're in North America anymore.
I know they were for a bit.
I'm gonna have to double check.
I'm sorry, guys, give me a second here.
Pallet, they might've pulled out.
Yeah, there's like one RTX 2060 dual
or something like that, whatever.
I can't think of anyone else off the top of my head.
It's not terribly important.
The point is Nvidia has board partners
that do the vast majority,
if not all of their board manufacturing in China.
If Nvidia were to set an MSRP
that is literally below
what that board partner could achieve
once the tariffs are applied,
which remember are about 25%.
And you can, if you're American,
you can thank your government for that.
If they were to do that,
they would be putting that part board partner
at a huge disadvantage compared to their other partners.
I'm not saying that Nvidia did
or did make pricing decisions based on this.
I'm saying that it's something that they have to consider.
So Nvidia still sells founder's edition cards
at the launch MSRP.
That's one of the biggest arguments against our take,
but there's a problem with that.
Good luck getting one, right?
Like if you can get one, great.
It's sort of been that way too.
Not just during the shortage.
It's often been quite difficult
to get a founder's edition card.
Oh, it's been basically impossible.
I mean, Nvidia has...
I'm having trouble hearing you.
What, Siri, I'm not talking to you.
Yeah, it's been basically impossible
to get your hands on one of those in the first place,
let alone now.
And besides, if you do, great, do it.
My advice would be the same.
All I'm saying is if you are in a particular price band
and you find a GPU in stock at MSRP,
including the 3080 Ti, you go for it.
And if you're sitting there going, well, it's a bad deal,
then don't buy it.
If you had to calculate how many FPS per dollar,
you are not the customer for a 3080 Ti in the first place.
So why are you mad?
What's the point of getting mad?
Like I remember this, I remember this.
I came into my job at NCIX as a buyer, right?
As an enthusiast, but a sensible enthusiast, right?
Like I never went out and bought, you know,
an Athlon 64 X2 4800 plus, you know, an FX processor, right?
I'd never bought an extreme edition.
The only times I ever bought top tier GPUs were temporarily.
Like I still remember the time I bought two 7800 GTXs,
like spent my, emptied my entire bank account as a student
on two 7800 GTXs, because there was this guy
that I like had done other smaller deals with
that I knew was just a baller.
And he would sell them at like crazy prices.
Like he'd take a $400 bath on these things
compared to what they were worth,
just to like get rid of them
because money just meant nothing to him.
So I bought them at way less than what they were worth.
I ran them for like two weeks,
terrified that some news was gonna come out,
that a replacement was coming
and the value was gonna tank.
And then I flipped them.
I was like, that was fun.
I tried SLI.
That was super cool.
See you later.
Because, right, so I came into my job at NCIX
having only really like experienced really high end,
top spec hardware as like a fun, scary experiment.
And I thought, I thought going in,
I was like, nobody actually buys that stuff, right?
It's like, look, I'm smart enough
to read the review on a non-tech.
You know, you should get the Q6600
if you want basically the whole shebang
in terms of performance,
instead of springing for the QX6700.
I can't remember if it was a 67 or a 68 at the launch.
But the point is,
instead of spending twice as much on an extreme edition,
you should get 90 plus percent of the performance
for half the price.
And then you should just overclock it
if you really want more performance, obviously.
That was my point of view.
But I had never had the experience
of actually seeing the sales numbers and realizing,
oh wow, people actually buy that stuff.
Yeah, there's a completely different set of buyers out there
to whom the difference between a $3,000 computer
and a $6,000 computer is not particularly meaningful.
That's the customer that the 3080 Ti was created for.
It is what it is.
And even if you're not that customer,
honestly, and this is maybe a even more controversial take,
let's say that you don't have any money
or you don't have that kind of money to spend on a GPU.
If I found a 3080 Ti and I like desperately needed the money
and I had no problem scalping,
then I should just buy it.
And then I should resell it.
3080 Ti, if you see it on a shelf at MSRP,
pretty much no matter who you are, you should just buy it.
If you're someone who's in that price range
shopping for a GPU, you should buy it.
If you're someone who's not in that price range
and you're willing to scalp it,
then you'd be crazy not to buy it.
It is what it is.
If you're willing to scalp it, which is kind of a not,
I don't have the beat button yet,
but it's not a great exactly thing to do.
Yeah, we're not supportive of that.
We've gone out of our way.
We've spent a lot of time and money.
I mean, the Floatplane team has spent a lot of time
and I've spent a lot of money paying them
to develop the Verified Actual Gamer program.
Every single GPU that came into our hands
from manufacturers went out at MSRP.
In some cases, we were making as little
as three and a half percent profit.
I don't care.
It was about getting cards in the hands of gamers
and the Verified Actual Gamer program,
even though we haven't done any drops,
is still very much alive.
So if manufacturers actually wanted these cards
to go out at MSRP, we would be happy to enable it.
I'm just saying the take, you might not like it,
but you also just might not be the customer
for that product.
And you hope this doesn't trickle down
because that argument is all good
until like the next series of cards
is scaled up above reasonable numbers
because they're basing off of whatever, whatever,
but that's not what we're seeing here technically.
And I think there's a lot of evidence of that.
I, yeah, it's interesting.
There are some people, people in research positions,
people that need these cards genuinely for work,
and that kind of sucks.
But again, it's not really based,
the pricing isn't really based off of the card
that I think a lot of people are assuming it is.
So there's a couple more things here.
Riley has a really good note in that budget gamers
frustrated by more freaking high-end cards
are certainly justified in being frustrated.
I mean, totally.
It's very clear from the launch of, what is it?
The RX 6600, what's the mobile?
Yeah, the RX 6600 mobile that AMD just launched.
It's clear that AMD had a mainstream GPU that was developed
and they just never released a desktop product based on it
because clearly if they have a limited amount of silicon,
they were better off just producing
their higher end products.
Yeah, and I'm sure Nvidia was ready to rock
with replacements for the 1600 series and 1650 series,
or yeah, sorry, the 1600 series as well.
But I mean, at that point, yeah, you can be mad.
But from a business standpoint,
I also understand if you can't even meet the demand
for your RTX 3090s, why are you releasing more products?
And that's something that we've said before.
In this case, it's a product that seems to be designed
to alleviate the supply issues
as opposed to do anything else.
So in terms of market positioning,
the 3080 Ti is a less expensive 3090
and that makes it a great deal
if you were a potential 3090 buyer.
But, and this is another Riley note,
the question is who was asking for this?
Yeah, that's a great question
and I can see why people are mad.
But I'm also standing behind what we said.
For that particular buyer,
the fact that there's gonna be more of them
than there were 3090s,
which will help you get your hands
on that level of performance at hopefully a lower price
at MSRP instead of from a scalper is a good deal.
So to be clear, I'm not saying hardware Canucks was wrong.
I'm not saying that gamer's nexus was wrong.
Actually gamer's nexus was wrong about one thing.
The idea that scalper prices are just derived from MSRP
and based on, yeah, it just doesn't work that way.
But I'm not saying gamer's nexus
or hardware unboxed was wrong about it,
being a money grab or not being a good deal.
I don't think to put words in his mouth,
which I could even be wrong about.
I don't think he's saying you should be happy
about it necessarily either.
Me?
It's just, yeah, it's probably not for you.
It's not for you.
Yeah.
And for the people that it's for, it's fine.
There's been a really weird normalization.
I feel like when I was first building computers,
the cards that people were really excited about
from the Nvidia side,
their numbers are easy to follow,
were like the 60s and 70s.
Yep.
Yeah, 6600 GT, that was a good card.
That was a sweet card.
I don't know.
It's timing wasn't exactly the greatest,
but I remember being super excited about my 2060.
And I wrote that thing out for like four years.
Yeah.
And there's been a lot of hype.
Did I say 2060?
I meant 260.
Yeah, 2060 wasn't a great bang for the buck.
No, and I never had one.
I had a 260 and I wrote that out for a long time
and it was great.
And I remember a new battlefield came out.
I don't remember which one it was, I'm sorry,
but a new battlefield came out
and it was like starting to get to the point
where I was like, all right, this is a little rough.
And then I finally upgraded.
I think there's this culture going around right now
where you have to run everything at ultra
and you have to get 120 FPS,
which like those things are great.
Don't get me wrong.
Fantastic, love the experience.
But when you can't do it,
like you don't need to break your bank for it.
It's okay.
You'll be all right.
You'll live.
You're probably just playing like League of Legends anyways,
just to be completely honest.
Like, I don't know.
You almost certainly don't need this.
And if you do, yeah, sucks that you're buying
during a scalping, pandemic,
Silicon shortage mixture of horribleness.
And that's about it.
Jonathan in the YouTube chat says,
this passive aggressiveness and grandstanding
is so damn annoying sometimes.
Everything you are accusing others of,
you did or are doing now.
See, the thing is, I don't know how to respond to that.
Like, I don't shape the reality, right?
And I'm not being passive aggressive.
I'm being extremely forthright with y'all.
I'm telling you, look, this is what it is.
There's a shortage.
These are business decisions.
This is why they made them for that particular buyer
at the high end of the market,
which still has not had its demand satisfied.
It's a good deal.
For a value buyer, yeah, it's a bad deal,
but you weren't the customer.
It's not a value card.
It's not a value card.
And I mean, honestly,
something that's been really frustrating for me
as part of Verified Actual Gamer program
is every single participant, okay?
Every single one of them.
I have asked, hey, can we do something more mainstream?
Can we do a 1650 or a 1660?
Can we do something that's actually affordable?
And every single one of them has come back and said,
I can't get you any allocation of that.
And you can absolutely be furious about it, 100%.
It just has nothing to do with the 38 ETI.
Yeah.
All right.
I think it's probably time for us to move on then.
That was a chungus topic.
Do we do sponsors now or do we move on?
No, let's move on to something else.
Oh my, oh man, this is hilarious.
Do you remember that Luke was wrong?
Like sort of meme thing.
Yeah, yeah.
Do we need to do a Linus was wrong shirt?
Like if people are gonna call me,
if people are gonna call me like, it's amazing.
The accusations that I get anytime someone
doesn't agree with me,
it's like, Linus is on the take from Nvidia.
I am hardly-
He's being paid off by this group or this group.
I am hardly on speaking terms.
With anyone who wears a green name tag right now.
Yeah.
And I'm partially, not partially,
I'm a little surprised people forget that.
That wasn't even that long ago.
Like this is recent news, the like war between LTT
and Nvidia.
And this, and I can tell you something right now.
Linus is not about to necessarily work to fix that.
Like he's gonna stand by his words and like just,
but he's also not going to say that something that they do
is like horrible when it's not.
Swapode says, come on,
it's like you guys aren't even listening.
I'm sorry, I don't know how to deal with this.
Nvidia hasn't sold an enthusiast card at MSRP
for well over four years.
Don't just blame the pandemic.
Nvidia is not a manufacturer.
That was like, that was like at least a quarter
of this whole conversation.
That's a really, really important point.
Nvidia is not a manufacturer.
The MSRPs are ultimately set by the manufacturers
of the cards and they are based on external factors.
Like what their costs are, whether there are tariffs.
It is what it is.
Like I-
Is it expensive?
Yeah.
Yeah.
But top end GPUs have always been expensive.
They've always been expensive.
What was the price of the stupid GTX 690?
Ooh.
I forget.
I remember that being astronomical.
I don't remember right now.
And to be clear, it might not sound that high
before he says it.
It might not even sound that high,
but things constantly scale.
Yeah, so it was a grand, it was a grand back in the day.
And the stupidest thing about it
was that it performed worse than two 680s.
And because it was clocked lower,
because it was a like dual card,
it just made no sense.
But you gotta understand,
whether something makes sense is always within the context
of the time that it was released.
The 690 made no sense because you could get two 680s.
So at the cost of just having a couple more
PCI express slots taken up,
you could get better performance by just getting two 680s.
But the reason that the 3080 Ti does make sense
is that in the context of this time,
if you can get it at MSRP,
it's probably the best deal you're gonna get.
And I'm sorry, and that sucks.
And we really are actually doing something about it.
We're trying.
Verified Actual Gamer Program
has put cards in gamers hands at MSRP.
We did everything we possibly could.
We started a computer hardware store.
Like what else can I possibly do?
I can whine about it.
I can walk out of a press conference.
Do you think Nvidia cares?
If I walk out of their press conference,
they literally don't eat.
Like I sent an email saying,
hey, thanks, it was really refreshing
that you guys were super straightforward
in your manner of communication
over various aspects of this launch.
Because Nvidia, we have a long history of them
basically playing cloak and dagger games
is what I tell them.
I say, look, it's enough with the cloak and dagger,
just stop and just communicate clearly.
I've said it on many occasions.
And so I was really pleased
that they were just forthright in their communication
for a change.
And I didn't even get a response.
Straight up, didn't even get a reply.
Don't imagine for a second
that I'm somehow on Nvidia's payroll here,
or that I'm somehow cozy with Nvidia.
That's actually not the way it works.
Anthony attended the briefing.
I don't know.
I just don't know what else to say to people sometimes.
Go have your conspiracy theory, right?
There's nothing that I can say
to make you believe me, I think.
And that's ultimately it.
They're not, it's, yeah.
The horde as a whole is not going to care or listen.
They're just mad.
And they're mad that the thing is expensive.
Rawr, thing too much, don't want to pay.
Yeah, that's fine.
But it's not for you, dude.
You don't have to build blinged out systems.
Build blinged out systems on PC part picker.
It's really fun.
I used to do it all the time.
Spend way too much money on PC part picker,
but don't check out.
Z Y says Linus's argument is deceitful
because he's ignoring the performance of the 3080 non-TI.
Your argument is deceitful
because you are ignoring the real world pricing
of the 3080 non-TI.
The 3080 non-TI is not available for 699 US dollars.
Go buy one then.
Good luck.
And to be clear,
he doesn't even just mean because of scalpers.
Like it's not available for that anywhere.
You can't buy that from a store either.
So it is what it is.
Like I understand this is having a huge impact
on people's enthusiasm for computer hardware.
Like we see it.
Like we see it in the sentiment in our community,
but this is beyond our control.
The good news is there's some cool stuff.
Why don't we change gears and talk about AMD?
Because AMD has really done a lot to make gaming
and life better for gamers over the last few years.
I don't know, yeah.
Let's start with FidelityFX Super Resolution.
Finally, it's coming.
AMD has an upscaling feature
that's positioned to challenge
NVIDIA's deep learning super sampling,
offering up to two times the performance in games at 4K
with ray tracing turned on.
Their keynote showed Godfall with a 59% increase
in performance at 4K at ultra quality.
However, it's important to note
that super resolution is not just a copy of DLSS,
which isn't necessarily a good thing.
So it actually supports hardware
from both AMD and NVIDIA, which is cool.
So it launched the feature supported on RX 6000,
RX 5000, RX 500 and GTX 10 series
and newer NVIDIA GPUs.
And Ryzen processors with Radeon graphics on board
are actually supported too.
But it uses a different upscaling technique
that doesn't use an AI model like NVIDIA's.
So developers are responsible
for implementing the FSR code in their games
and they have full ownership over the final product,
which means that how good or not good it looks
could come down to the game developer's implementation.
Or if it's actually going to be implemented.
But what it also means is that AMD doesn't need
to partner with game developers to get FSR in games.
Like DLSS, it has multiple quality modes.
So you can set it to ultra quality, balanced or performance
and ultra quality can boost frame rates 50% or more
while retaining as much detail as possible.
And then as you go down,
each performance mode gives you a higher frame rate
at the cost of image quality.
In May, AMD published a patent for gaming super resolution
that revealed a hybrid super sampling approach
that will combine linear and nonlinear upscaling technology.
So the original low res image passes through
a linear upscaling network
and then a nonlinear upscaling network at the same time,
extracting different bits of information through each path.
And then FSR then combines these images
to create a pixel grid that expands on each pixel
for a high res image.
So then after some cleanup,
you're gonna get your reconstructed image.
The patent also confirms that super resolution
will work on multiple devices.
Say for example, a computer, okay, we knew that one
or a gaming device or handheld device or set top box or TV.
So that's pretty neat.
Right now, AMD supports over a hundred GPUs and CPUs
and has a release date of June 22nd.
Like the rest of the FidelityFX suite,
you can access the setting in game for supported titles
as long as you have a supported graphics card.
It's available on PC only for the time being,
but I would be shocked if it doesn't show up
on RDNA 2 based consoles
like the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5.
There are over 20 game developers
planning to use it in their games and engine in 2021.
And all of that's really cool,
but based on even like low-res slides
from AMD's presentation about it,
it really doesn't look very good.
And anything that relies on developers
is always highly questionable
because it's been extremely documented for many, many years,
the ever-changing landscape and hyper competitiveness
of game development leads to things being dropped off
and scopes being reduced or massive, massive crunch times.
And they don't necessarily want to add that on.
So stuff like this, where they're like,
yeah, it's in the developer's hands,
often just gets dropped.
So yeah, we'll see how it goes.
It just didn't look that sharp.
I mean, a big part of why DLSS works so well
is that NVIDIA works with the game developer
to get samples of what the assets
are supposed to look like at high resolution,
and then uses that to inform how it upscales
the lower resolution native rendering
that the GPU is actually doing.
So without that machine learning element,
I mean, realistically, it was never gonna match the results
of deep learning super sampling.
But a lot of people are never gonna look that closely at it.
And as long as they get more FPS,
then I guess they're gonna be happy.
It's just definitely going to bear further investigation.
I'm sure the likes of Hardware Unboxed
are gonna do multiple videos,
really digging in pixel by pixel into how it goes.
I mean, this is definitely something
we're gonna wanna look into ourselves as well,
because when, yeah, whether it's a digital foundry
is probably gonna look into this a lot,
whether it's AMD or NVIDIA,
whenever they come up with a feature that's like,
hey, like those guys have, but we've got it now too.
You gotta kind of go, okay, but do you?
Do you really though?
Is it really?
And it's such a funny thing
that we're going back to rendering hacks.
I mean, do you remember back in the days of like,
oh man, you gotta go way back to Nvidia's FX series, right?
Like when they were just way, way behind the performance
and importantly, the image quality
of AMD's Radeon 9000 series,
there were all kinds of little driver tricks
that the hardware press at the time were finding out
that Nvidia or ATI, as they were known back then,
were implementing.
You know, whether it was shortcuts that they were taking
where they detected certain applications like benchmarks,
or whether it was, you know,
cheaper, lower quality rendering approaches
that they were sort of quietly implementing in the driver
without telling anybody.
These days, or not these days, I should say,
then for a long time,
after getting called on it so many times
and committing not to do it,
Nvidia and ATI AMD both cleaned up their act
for a very long time.
And then the funny thing is,
we're now kind of going back to those days
where not only do we accept that both AMD and Nvidia
are using their own sort of divergent paths
to hackily make their performance better,
we're embracing it.
I mean, from like a purist standpoint,
where, you know, to me, if you're gaming at 4K,
if you're not actually rendering natively at 4K,
are you really gaming at 4K?
I find it kind of amusing that even people like me
are coming around to it,
because the reality of it is in a fast paced scene,
most people are not gonna notice the difference
between DLSS and native resolution rendering.
They're just not gonna notice it.
They're just not going to.
I don't know that the same will be true
of FidelityFX super resolution.
However, just based on what I've seen so far,
which is not much,
it looks like it might end up just looking like Vaseline
smeared over the screen, but-
And it might get better over time,
but that's not something to buy a product based off of.
Matthew Way gets it.
There's nothing robbery about buying a luxury product.
Yeah, it's not a good value,
but nobody's forcing you to buy it.
And I think the price is silly
and we've laughed at luxury products on the show before.
And that's not something that will necessarily change,
but yeah, they're really expensive.
That's part of the, yeah, it's part of it.
I mean, as part of our,
oh man, I don't wanna get back on this topic,
but as part of our script review for that video,
Anthony and I went on eBay and we took a variety of GPUs,
2080 TIs, 2080s, 3080s, 3070s.
And we went through and we went, okay,
what is the actual real world street price for these things?
I think-
And compared to those, it's a great deal.
Something that hit me more, to be honest,
and I knew this already, but I still,
is not even the scalped eBay prices,
but what they're actually being sold at at stores
versus Nvidia's stated price.
Like that difference is quite huge.
Yeah.
In other good news, back to AMD, new APUs.
So this is really exciting.
We did a video about AMD's Ryzen 5000, excuse me,
4000 series APUs quite recently.
And I was really frustrated to find out that,
well, not to find out,
I was really frustrated that AMD had this product
with good onboard graphics, Zen 2 cores,
and it was an OEM only part.
Now, usually you think back, Luke,
like to all the OEM only parts
that we've seen over the years,
remember Nvidia's GeForce 800 series?
Yeah, me either.
Yeah, 300 series.
Oh, am I thinking of 300?
Oh, I'm sorry.
Whatever.
I think it was both.
Was it both?
I think so.
8,000 series?
Maybe it was 8,000, sorry, 8,000 series.
Did I say thousand?
It doesn't matter.
It is, you know, remember these product generations
that have been effectively skipped,
except that they actually did exist,
but only as OEM only parts
that were basically just rebranded
the previous generation thing.
Absolutely nothing changed
just to make it seem like it was newer and better.
Yeah, right, okay, right.
So those are the kind of thing
that I am used to seeing as an OEM only part.
But then AMD comes out
and they've got what in my mind
was one of the best CPUs in their lineup
for value gamers at a time when gamers need value products,
something that they can game on today
while they wait out this storm.
And they went and they made the things OEM only.
They had them, but you could only get them
in a pre-built system from a tier one.
Well, AMD answered my prayers here
and the 5600G and 5700G are extremely exciting products.
The 5600G is six cores, 12 threads,
Zen 3, Vega 7 graphics.
It's got the same 65 watt TDP as the 5600 non-G,
which doesn't exist anymore.
So the 5600X and except it has onboard graphics
and there's just no downside to me.
These look like a fantastic way to go
because you get the benefit of onboard graphics
and you basically don't have to pay for it.
Your motherboard probably has outputs on it already.
Darling, off you go on live.
Out you go.
Sorry about that, what was I talking about?
Right, so you get a GPU, you get something
you can actually use and you don't have to pay for it.
And one of the things that I actually found over the years
that I didn't consider back when Intel
first started putting onboard graphics directly
on their CPUs with Clarkdale
is that it's really good for resale value.
Because think about it, just because you're gonna have
a dedicated graphics card anyway
and you don't need the onboard graphics
doesn't mean that whoever you turn around
and flip that chip to, especially now that AMD
is innovating so quickly with their CPUs
that you actually could feel like you need to upgrade
every generation or two.
Whoever it is that you're gonna turn around
and flip that CPU to, they might not, sorry.
You don't.
You don't what?
I lost track of that.
You said you might feel like you need to upgrade
every generation or two.
Oh yeah, you don't.
I'm just, yeah.
You know my opinion on people buying stuff
way above what they need.
Yes, that's true.
But I just feel like it's getting worse.
I don't know.
I don't know why.
Maybe it isn't.
I could be entirely wrong.
But like the anger over the 3080 TI pricing
and just like processors.
Like old processors is still doing so well.
Yeah, you can still game on a 7700K just fine.
I recently did a test.
I'm potentially doing a home theater piece.
This is totally off the side.
Wow, this is quite the tangent.
Okay, carry on, Luke.
Sorry, sorry.
I do wanna go there for a second though.
So I took apart my girlfriend's computer
and we rebuilt it with some of my old hardware, right?
Yep.
So the stuff that was previously in Geodude
is essentially my girlfriend's new computer in a new case.
I took the board that she had,
which was this ITX board with a 2600K on it.
Guess what that does when you pair it with a good GPU?
Pretty good.
Totally fine.
Even though it's a 2600K, it runs VR games.
At like decently acceptable rates.
Ridiculous.
It's amazing.
That is a CPU that is 10 years old.
It is 10 years old.
And sure, you might be susceptible to meltdown inspector,
but I think the GF's gaming rig,
probably kind of a non-concern.
Yeah.
Probably a non-issue.
It's fantastic.
Like you don't necessarily need this stuff.
You can relax.
It's okay.
Sorry, continue.
Back to another reason that a CPU
with good integrated graphics is awesome for resale
is that just because you were just gonna use it
with a dedicated graphics card,
doesn't mean that whoever you sell it to
was gonna wanna do that.
So having the one that has onboard graphics I've found
has actually made a significant difference
to how much demand there is for it
once the time comes to flip it.
Just something that I noticed over the years
participating in the secondary market.
So the higher end one, the 5700G,
this is a really cool product.
It's eight core 16 threads, 4.6 gigahertz boost,
65 watt TDP on that one as well.
Vega eight integrated graphics with eight CUs,
five to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, 359.
That CPU and wow, I'm going to,
I'm sure someone's gonna dig up this clip years from now
and find a way to make me super wrong about this.
But that CPU could be your 2600K.
That CPU could be the one you are still running in 10 years.
I see no reason why not.
There, hot take.
I don't know whether you're wrong or not.
I want someone to dig this up
because I would love to see this down the line.
I would actually love to see like a video on this CPU
in X amount of years,
because that kind of stuff is very, very interesting.
And yeah, that's awesome.
Very well balanced, really cool processor.
Yeah, so that's cool.
And the fact that it's available at a price
that is actually attainable is great.
Apparently Gamers Nexus is in the chat.
Gamers Nexus, no one needs to upgrade every generation.
Only when your current card is starting to fall behind.
You know what?
That's a really interesting conversation.
Talking about how outraged people are about 3080 Ti.
I'm looking at it going,
how many people are really buying
top tier graphics cards anyway?
Is part of it just that people
are getting like pulled up,
like pulled along in this FOMO, this like-
I feel like, yeah.
Just kind of losing track, you know?
Like just like losing the plot here.
I went three years or something like that
without upgrading the GPU in my primary rig.
Not because I can't afford it.
Not because I can't just literally
pluck one off a shelf at work and bring it home,
but because I didn't need it.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
You don't have to have the fastest GPU.
Apparently, no, that's a fake Steve.
All right, well, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry, I thought it was a real Steve.
Wait, no, fake Steve.
That's not fake Steve.
There's a verified check mark, fake?
I don't think so.
There's a fake Gamers Nexus in here.
Ignore that one.
So no, real Steve is actually here.
I just don't know which Steve I'm talking to right now.
Oh no, oh no.
Oh man.
Now I'm in trouble.
The only way to know if it's a real Steve
would just be to call him.
I'm kind of done with this topic though.
Is you guys doing a course for gamers?
Course, sorry, a what now?
Do you remember those?
We used to make, I think it was like once a year,
we'd do course for gamers.
It was a video.
Yeah, we should totally do it.
How many courses do you need for gaming?
Yeah, we should revisit that.
Maybe with the, you know what?
We could do it around the launch of the 5700G.
That would be awesome.
Just kind of say, okay,
how overkill is eight course for gaming today?
And kind of exploring that
because it will be very overkill for gaming today.
And is this the kind of thing, I hate to use the F word,
but is this a CPU that could be future proof?
I would make the argument based on what I know today
that it is a real solid bet to be a real great investment.
I think future proof becomes less of a swear word
when you're doing it with value oriented devices,
if that makes sense, or products.
Oh, absolutely.
I'm future proofing by buying this individual part
that's $1,200 or $1,800 or whatever.
Yeah, that's ridiculous.
Don't do that.
Don't do that because of future proofing.
But when you're buying something that's already evaluated,
I mean, you're like a really cool additional thing
that is beyond just all the reasons
why I already want to buy this thing
is that it might also be future proofing me in a few ways.
That's fantastic.
The best future proofing is bang for the buck.
And I'll tell you why.
Because if you buy the top end one,
that is twice the price for 10% more performance,
yes, you are going to get more of a lifespan
out of that product in terms of
it meeting a minimum bar of performance
than if you had bought a cheaper one.
But there's a couple of problems with that logic.
Number one is that you bought a top spec product.
So clearly you have very high expectations
in terms of performance.
Realistically, there is no future proofing.
You're going to resell it and you're going to upgrade it.
So, okay, fine.
That's a very different type of customer
and you just shouldn't even really be having
the future proofing conversation.
You should just say, I like to spend a lot
because I'm a mad baller and I'm into that and just own it.
Number two is that future proofing
is not about what you buy today.
It's about optimization of your funds.
This is something that would always drive me crazy
in the computer store.
If someone would come in and they'd want to spend way more
on something that's way more expensive
for a small amount less money because,
well, I have the money for a PC today
and I'm ready to buy it today
and I don't want to, I just want whatever's the best today.
And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
If you have $4,000 today,
you quite literally have $2,000 today
and $2,000 two years from now.
And I would try to explain this to people
and they would just, they would fight me on it.
And I would end up just letting them spend the money
the vast majority of the time, but they just,
they couldn't wrap their brain around
with how fast the computer industry moves.
And that was especially true back then.
You are so much better off spending $2,000 today,
keeping that $2,000 in, I don't care,
put it in a GIC, it doesn't matter.
Keep that $2,000, have the discipline, keep it.
And then in a couple of years,
buy another one and you will have two computers.
You'll have one that is a good computer still
because it was $2,000
and you will have another one
that is faster than what you would have bought
for $4,000 in the first place.
And you can just sell, if you don't want two computers,
you can sell your old one
and that makes the price of the new one ridiculously low.
It used to drive me so crazy because the math is so simple,
but people just, they didn't want to hear it, you know?
Oh Lordy, I've got a call from one Steven Burke.
Oh boy.
This is the real, is this the real Gamer's Nexus?
I was listening to your stream
and I'm back four minutes,
but you just read a quote from me
that I didn't type from chat, so that's a fake person.
Yes, yes, we got it.
That was the wrong Gamer's Nexus.
We got warned by the chat.
So I wasn't gonna call you during your stream
until I saw you reading fake Gamer's Nexus quotes.
I thought I better make sure this doesn't go south.
Oh, that's weird.
Hold on a second.
It's still on the earpiece,
even though I've got it set to speaker.
Yeah, I don't know if the stream can hear it or not,
but at least the mic that I hear you through-
Steve, what are you saying?
I was just saying that I wanted to call and interrupt you
to make sure you weren't gonna read more quotes
from a fake GN account
because I didn't want to get in trouble
for what a counterfeit was saying.
Yeah, no, no, no.
Don't worry, Steve.
You're not in trouble.
You could never say anything that would upset me.
Don't worry about it.
So the thing is, I mean, okay, for the viewers out there,
you guys gotta understand,
Steve and I have disagreed about a great many things.
We are not, we're not always on the same page.
And that's okay.
That's the beauty of an independent press, right?
Right.
That's part of the reason why we-
Yeah, I mean, we've got a different,
actually, I want, you know, am I on speaker?
Can people hear me?
Absolutely.
They're saying in the chat, they can hear you.
One thing, so there's a few things you said
on this podcast I don't necessarily agree with,
but I actually don't care too much about that.
One thing I did want to point out though
is I saw a good amount of comments on your review
that were like, I think there's money involved
and mine has got paid for his opinion.
I just, I would like to point out that I know how busy I am
and I don't have like 50 employees.
I really don't think Linus, you know,
is concerned about what opinion to have
from Nvidia of all people.
So I just thought that was,
it's more likely that there's a lot of links in your chain,
first of all.
So, you know, to actually get to a review,
you publish that video about how you guys make videos
and to actually get to a review requires a lot more people
in the LNG chain than it does for us.
So the, the opinion will be flavored by more people,
you know, at your company than at ours.
So that's, that's part of the difference, but yeah, yeah.
Absolutely.
I just want to point that out.
It's sort of like a, is it Occam's razor?
Is that the easiest solution is the most likely one?
Yes, pretty much.
Well, the thing is, a lot of people think that, you know,
Nvidia or AMD or Intel or whatever
are basically bribing the tech media.
But the problem is that the surest way to out yourself
as a fan boy is to accuse someone else of being a paid shill
because it basically just demonstrates that you're,
you don't want to,
or you're not capable of making an objective argument
and you would rather just throw sticks and stones.
Yeah, I mean, I, like,
I just thought that there were legitimate reasons
to disagree over opinions on the product, but I just,
I was kind of disheartened to see how many were like,
there's money involved.
And it's like, I mean,
Linus could say something about lttstore.com
and make more money than whatever Nvidia would be willing
to pay for that opinion anyway.
You're like, you and I both know that's true.
They are, they are so cheap.
It just seems silly.
Oh man.
Good old, good old Nvidia.
Yep.
All right.
Well, thanks.
Thanks for calling in Steve.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Have a good show.
All right.
Have a good weekend.
You too.
Oh, that's great.
So yeah.
I unfortunately couldn't hear a single word that he said.
Oh, sorry, Luke.
Yeah.
He basically said that we should just go back
to having you do all the GPU reviews.
Cause clearly Anthony and I can't handle it.
I'm kidding.
No, he didn't.
Anthony is the best than he dude.
No, no, he didn't.
He didn't, he didn't say that at all.
All right.
Let's, oh, speaking of making more money than Nvidia
would be willing to pay me.
Let's talk to, hey, who's our sponsors for the show today?
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The show is also brought to you by Tuxcare.
And I'm just going to leave Ridge Wallets banner up,
I guess.
Is that, is that how this works?
Thanks to Tuxcare for sponsoring today's video.
Tuxcare helps enterprise companies take care of support,
maintenance and security of Linux systems.
And the portfolio of Tuxcare services includes live
patching for Linux kernels, shared libraries,
virtualization, databases and embedded devices.
They also provide enterprises with end of life Linux support
and they try to provide official support
for the new CentOS replacement Alma Linux OS.
Oh man, we're going to have to deal with that
at some point in the near future here.
Our, our vault is running CentOS like six or something.
Thankfully.
A little bit, a little bit yikes.
There's Tuxcare.
Tuxcare services are installed on more than half a million
enterprise Linux systems and you can check them out
and apply for a free proof of concept at the link below
on Tuxcare's website.
That's Tuxcare.com.
The show is also brought to you by Seasonic.
Thanks to Seasonic for sponsoring today's video.
Their prime ultra titanium PC power supplies feature ultra
high efficiency with their 80 plus titanium rating.
They are fully modular.
They feature hybrid fan control.
So they are silent when they are not being used heavily.
And when they do spin up their fans,
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that mean they're still pretty darn quiet.
They offer up to a 50,000 hour life expectancy
along with a 12 year warranty.
And you can check them out at the link below
on Seasonic's website or on Amazon,
which is also linked down below.
All right.
Sorry, I keep having to shift the stupid things around.
So.
Server upgrade sponsored video from Tuxcare.
I know, right?
When's it happening?
I don't know Pulse.
Pulseway always tries to get in on our server videos.
So I don't know if Tuxcare is even gonna get a crack at it.
They can try though.
They can try.
What if you just do them both at the same time?
Oh, double dip and Nvidia.
I'll get Nvidia to pay for it too.
Yeah.
That'll be good.
All right.
Let's talk about, oh, we've got a new shirt on lttstore.com.
Speaking of things that make a lot more money than Nvidia.
Check this out.
I actually really liked this one.
Sarah did a fantastic job of the design.
Yeah.
It's the do not drop shirt.
So she took some of the designs that she created
for our sticker packs.
Actually, I think most of them
are from the first sticker pack.
And made like, apparently this is cool now or something.
Having like graphics on the back of the shirt like that.
So that's pretty neat.
Hey, look at that.
Got some new shirt models.
Got Madison and Mark and more Madison
and more me.
I don't even know.
I don't even know what I'm doing here,
but I got my hands in my pockets.
Got more Madison.
Got, that appears to be, who is that?
Is that James?
Who wears that watch?
I actually don't know.
Hey, got A prime.
Anyway, so if you're into that kind of style,
this is gonna be one of the last black shirts we launched.
We finally seem to have locked in a shirt supplier
that meets both our supply and not both,
our supply quality and factory conditions requirements.
So I'm really, really excited,
but it'll be like with the way shipping is worldwide
right now, either we'll be paying like thousands
and thousands of dollars extra for air shipping,
or it'll be a very, very long time.
Mouse pad restock is now delayed at least two weeks
cause there were COVID exposures at the port that we ship
from that factory with.
So the container has just been sitting there
for like two weeks.
Yeah, man, worldwide logistics is a show right now.
It's bad.
It's bad.
Oh, actually there's one other bit of news for LTT store.
That's only like not really product related at all.
This has been a big project for, well, actually
this particular thing I don't think has been a big project,
but this has been a project
that the float plane team has worked on.
We now have reviews.
Look at that.
So if you've bought something before,
you should be able to leave a verified review
and we really do want your feedback guys.
So please feel free, leave, leave reviews.
Let us know what you think.
Hey, good stuff.
Finally got reviews, woo.
It's exciting.
There's more cool stuff coming for the store.
Some of it's backend so you guys won't see it,
but there's also fun stuff for you too.
Hey, I like the backend.
Me too.
Okay, our next topic is,
is Intel really stretching the definition
of what a NUC is at this point?
The original source is Tom's hardware here.
And do you remember when Intel first announced
the NUC, NUC original announcement?
Let's go find that.
What is that?
Wow, I don't even know if we're gonna be able
to find anything that old.
Did it look like an evil toaster back then?
I don't think so.
Okay, next unit of computing.
Nobody uses that terminology anymore.
So maybe that'll bring up older articles.
That's a good call.
2012, here it is.
Review, Intel's next unit of computing
from the tech report.
That's a NUC, okay?
And the whole idea,
the reason they called it the next unit of computing
was that it was supposed to be super small,
but still have a desktop-like performance
rather than being limited by the performance of,
hey, look, it's Scott Watson's hand,
rather than being limited by the performance
of then low power CPUs like their Atom lineup.
Okay, so that's a NUC,
but is this really a NUC?
That's a USB port for scale.
This is the, what is this?
The Beast Canyon?
And it's like pretty much the same.
Okay, hey, hey, speaking of my fellow former members
of the tech press,
there's a Ryan Shrout holding a Beast Canyon NUC.
So let's go back.
This is a Scott Watson holding a NUC, okay?
And this is a Ryan Shrout holding a new NUC.
I don't know.
I don't know if it's really a NUC anymore,
but it definitely supports discrete graphics,
cards up to 12 inches long.
It uses Intel's compute element platform,
which takes, we've actually reviewed a product
that uses it already.
I forget what exactly that one was called.
It kind of doesn't matter
because I can't imagine too many people bought them.
Ah, the NUC9 Extreme, that was the one.
So it uses Intel's compute element platform,
which takes the CPU, RAM, storage, all that stuff,
and actually was storage on it?
I don't think it was on it,
but CPU RAM for sure, and kind of you plunk it in.
It's got the cooler all built in as a single module.
And you could like,
it plugs into kind of like a PCI express slot type thing.
It's equipped with H-series Intel chips
instead of U-series, which is neat.
So the Phantom Canyon NUC,
which was legitimately actually small,
but had more limited performance.
It's had more limited performance.
So it's H-series, so that's faster, I guess.
Does anyone care?
The volume is wild, but there's some stats here,
which is crazy.
That's an eight liter footprint,
but there's a small form factor PC case.
Is that Loke or Luke?
Oh yeah, the Loki, I think is how we pronounce the ghost.
The Loki ghost S1 is 8.2.
Yeah.
Practically the same.
Yeah, that's a problem.
What are we doing?
What are we doing?
Because the thing is you can, okay, okay.
You can make the argument that,
well, yeah, but the Loki ghost is really expensive.
That's true, but so is the Beast Canyon.
So your defense of the Beast Canyon in that case
would kind of fall apart a little bit.
Now, I don't know if there are too many system integrators
that are actually building pre-built systems
in the Loki ghost.
And that's an advantage that the Beast Canyon will have
is if you're an SI and you're looking to pump these things
out, it is not that easy building a DIY computer
in an eight liter chassis.
That's not something that's just for,
even your average technician to do at scale
and not make mistakes, right?
Or not have to spend a lot of time like,
oh, shoot, now I get it.
Now, oh, we've got a DOA piece of hardware.
Now I have to spend an hour and a half
taking this thing apart,
another half an hour putting it back together.
So from like a business standpoint,
I can understand that offering pre-builts
in a Loki ghost S1 is not necessarily the best idea.
But for the DIY community,
yeah, it's a tough argument.
But there are customers out there for it.
I remember having this conversation
with whoever the writer was for our most recent Nook review
where they basically went, okay, yeah,
I wrote it in the context of,
I thought the customer was like this person.
I'm like, what do you mean you thought?
Go find out who the customer is.
If you don't actually know who the customer is,
how can you possibly write the review
tailored to the people who should actually care about it?
And they're like, well, how do I do that?
I'm like, well, you go
and you look at the previous generation product
and you read customer reviews.
You find out what the people who actually bought this thing
liked about it, disliked about it.
Obviously you have to filter it
cause there's gonna be a lot of fake reviews in there.
And then you address those concerns.
If people are saying, hey, this one runs way too hot.
Well, then we need to investigate that.
We need to look at the new one.
Does it run cooler?
If they say the performance was really good,
we need to investigate that too.
Have they made compromises to the performance?
And maybe sometimes we take that approach to a fault
like with the 3080 Ti review
where we reviewed it in the context of,
hey, you're shopping for a thousand plus dollar graphics
card.
Sorry guys.
But we've also gotten some super chats during the show
that are like, you guys are bang on.
I was shopping for a graphics card in that price point.
I bought it.
I'm thrilled.
Like, okay.
But then maybe we should, I don't know.
Like, well, sometimes I don't know what to do you guys,
you know, should we tailor our reviews
to the largest audience possible?
Should we tailor our reviews to the people
who are legitimately looking to buy the thing?
Should we tailor our reviews to just the tech interested,
the enthusiasts that are our kin?
You know, I don't know
because you end up writing a surprisingly different video
from all of those different perspectives
and we can't do all of them.
Now I'm just kind of chatting at you guys.
We have a couple more headline topics.
Luke, do you want to talk us through
Huawei going their own way?
Huawei going their own way, yeah.
So quite a while ago, we talked on the WAN show
and so did tons of other places about the US
kind of pushing out Huawei and some other stuff.
Two years ago, two years after Huawei was added
to the US entity list that banned them
from using US technologies they have,
so they can't use Android OS anymore.
They have officially released
their alternative smartphone operating system, Harmony OS 2.0.
That's really fast, just putting that out there.
That is super fast.
Hopefully it's good, but that is super fast.
The company wants to see the OS be integrated
into a stack of OSs with versions extending to a car OS,
a smart things OS, so yeah,
they're just trying to replace the operating system stack
that you would see with other similar devices
due to having Android auto
and whatever the Apple one is called in your car, et cetera.
The Huawei P40 and Mate X2, among others,
will be the smartphones to get the OS as an update
and it will be shipped with the Huawei Watch
and MatePad Pro tablet and released throughout their lineup
through to the end of the year.
The company denies that Harmony OS is a derivative of Android
and that no single line of code
is identical to that of Android.
Interesting.
This is a big part of the reason why I'm like,
that was really fast,
because if it was like, okay, whatever,
but if it's not, that's pretty crazy impressive.
Ars Technica has trouble seeing
how different Harmony OS is from Android.
This continues to be the weird journey
the reporter had to take to get to access the SDK
and emulator, which involved, among many other things,
sending him, sending his US passport photo.
That's really-
Wow, this is nuts.
Hold on, I'm bringing this up.
So a two-day background check, and here's Harmony OS.
Yep, that looks very different from Android.
Okay.
A device info app identifies Harmony OS as Android 10.
So that's interesting.
Yep, this is getting really awkward really fast.
This is a, wow, this looks like a great article.
This is awesome.
I'm gonna go read this as soon as the show is over.
Anyway, the point is, yeah, so Luke,
your first reaction to Harmony OS 2.0 as a thing was like,
wow, that's really fast.
I think we might've gotten to the bottom of it.
Yeah, yeah, that makes a little bit more sense.
Okay, it takes a lot to make these things.
Like it takes a really significant amount of time
and investment, and two years to generate that is wild.
And my immediate reaction was, okay,
there's either tons of stolen stuff,
and then there's like, there's no identical lines,
so it's like, okay.
The other option is that it's horrible.
It sounds like there might be tons of stolen stuff.
I think that's maybe the direction that we're going.
No, no, no, not Huawei.
We'll have to, sorry?
No, no, no, not Huawei.
They wouldn't do that, of course not.
Definitely not.
No, no, no.
Where's my check, CCP?
Yeah, as if.
And in other news, the leaked CD Projekt RED data
has been made public, question mark?
So data-
Yeah, so like I said in the intro,
the source code for Cyberpunk 2077,
the source code for the RED engine,
the source code for Witcher 3, previous and next gen,
so I believe that's talking about consoles,
source code for Thronebreaker,
and the PS5, PS4 Switch, and Xbox Series X SDK.
So that is a lot of stuff,
and that is a lot of important stuff.
As far as my understanding goes,
it is all password protected.
I don't know how intensely.
I don't believe I've seen specifics on that,
so I don't know if it's gonna be
like super well encrypted or anything.
I suspect so, but we'll see.
This data was an article that we're talking about
way previously on WAN Show
where the people that acquired it
were trying to sell it for a starting bit of a million dollars
or a buyout of seven million dollars.
Then they took it off the forum and sold it discreetly.
We assumed that that may have been them
just not really being able to sell it, but who knows?
Maybe they did get some offer
that satisfied them off platform.
It's definitely possible.
This is extremely valuable data.
It's not that valuable if you have no way
of decrypting it though.
That is a bit of an issue, but we don't know.
The data was posted via a torrent.
The SDK archives are not password protected.
Oh, okay, so just the source codes are.
Oh, they claim they have the passwords
for the other archives,
so they say they're the ones who password protected them,
but they want a $10,000 donation.
They're claiming these donations
will go toward charity fundraising.
What even is this?
This is stupid.
Don't send them 10 grand.
It's a good deal in the context of the price
of stolen other CD project.
Sorry.
It's a great deal.
It's a good deal.
No one else, you can't buy this or anything like it.
If you were in the market,
if you were in the market for $10,000 worth of stolen data,
this is good stolen data.
This is fantastic data.
It's a great price.
Don't be, please don't take this seriously.
I'd sometimes.
You like the data.
Sometimes I just like movies.
Sometimes I say stuff like this
and I will actually get unironic, angry emails
asking why I'm promoting, you know,
sell a buying stolen goods.
I'm not, please, please.
No, it's verbal irony, please.
So yeah, verbal irony means you say one thing
and you mean the opposite thing.
So I will give you the straightforward version now.
Do not buy this.
It is a bad idea.
And it's a bad idea for me to carry on the show
cause I think that's pretty much it.
Oh wait, Super Chats.
Super Chats.
Why did we get so many Super Chats today?
Why are you guys so into this?
Tuner Builder asks, will the 3080 Ti
be coming to the verified actual gamer program?
We do have one partner that has managed to get us
some 3080 Ti allocation.
Yes.
So I don't know.
Don't buy it or do buy it.
It doesn't matter.
It's up to you.
I don't care.
The performance graphs are what they are
and the price is what it is.
You do the math there.
Is that better?
Is that what you guys want?
Jason says, first time watching the WAN Show live.
Thanks Linus.
You were the gateway into me being crazy excited about tech.
Take my money.
Hey, thanks Jason.
Adam says, do you think Samsung will ever return to form
with the note line
and make a note worth taking over from the note nine?
I don't think so.
I think that the days of headphone jacks
and iris scanners and whatever are pretty much done.
Now I can't tell if this message was sent to me
because it's news for the WAN Show,
but I'm gonna assume no.
I'm gonna ask though.
Sorry?
The one from me?
No.
Okay.
Wait, I didn't even get your message.
Oh, I sent you one early on in the show.
No, it's for after.
It's fine.
Okay, cool.
I think that this person who messaged me
might not have realized that I am live right now.
So I'm not gonna talk about that unless they confirm.
The SLK66 says agreed,
but they shouldn't claim they're trying to help gamers
at all.
Just saying, hey, we want money deal with it.
Yeah, a hundred percent.
But they also never claimed to be helping value gamers.
They're helping the very, very top end,
most premium of their customers,
which is a legitimate path.
You don't have to like it,
but I mean, they are gamers.
I saw a message in the chat earlier.
It was like, Linus needs to stop pretending
that he needs to make videos for his audience
instead of just people who have lots of money to spend.
It's like, well, believe it or not, they're in there.
Like, and for the rest of us,
we can at least like enjoy the computer porn
of all this high-end stuff, right?
Like it's, there's a reason that we get a lot more views
on a review of a high-end product
than we do of a low-end product.
Morphologist, the guy that kind of collabed
with Tech Wiki for the Star Citizen episode.
Tech Link, but yes.
Tech Link, sorry, so many channels.
He has an insane computer.
He's also like an architect that reviews the architecture
of gigantic spaceships.
Like it's really specialized and really cool, but
it's not every gamer, you know?
Jack Philpott, really great question.
Hey Linus, I was wondering who was the writer
for the Wish PC video?
I was bored at work and I just re-watched it,
but their voice was altered because they were on probation.
It would be cool to know it was Colin.
Thermo Life, so were we going to have
Rolling Wanshow intros or is this the intro
for the next five years?
Okay, no, no, I'll get a new one.
I'll get a new one.
Tim Davis, love the show.
Definitely my LTT favorite content.
Got my final exams from medical school next week.
You guys keep me saying, hey, good luck, Tim.
Go for it.
The world kind of needs more doctors right now.
So rock it.
Alex Young, hey Linus and Luke, thanks for teaching
bored radar tech on night shift,
everything I need to know to build my Ryzen 9
and 3090 snow blind rig.
Hey, thanks Alex.
Happy to help out.
Howard says, would you ship cards for verified
actual gamer program to Brazil?
I've avoided signing up because of this, but cards beyond.
Okay, so the problem is that Brazil
has enormous import tariffs.
So we would have no problem shipping it there,
but you would be on the hook for tariffs.
So don't imagine that the price you see on our store
is the price you'll end up paying.
If you don't like it, there's nothing we can do about it.
The issue is with your government.
The Kazagor says, my biggest gripe
with the 3080 TI is they're focusing on the top end
rather than releasing more low end products
that could produce far more units per wafer.
That is totally, totally a fair observation, 100%.
Yep.
The reality of it was though,
is that a 3080 TI was never going to be that.
So we reviewed the 3080 TI as a 3080 TI,
but I think that's a really good point
that we could have brought up is,
yeah, sure, but where is a 3050?
Yep, that's a really, really, really good point.
Ethan says, talked to my friends in 3D art,
they all said they're going 3090 or would settle on a 3080,
but that the 3080 TI makes no sense for the price.
Well, I don't really,
I actually just totally don't really get that.
If they're in 3D art, then yeah, sure, go 3090,
because you need that VRAM,
but I don't really see how the 3080 figures into it at all,
especially because-
You need the VRAM, that's a weird-
You can't actually get it for the MSRP.
So the difference in price between the 3080 and the 3080 TI
is only a theoretical difference in price,
the way that most people are talking about it.
It's not real world.
Sten Serbin says, does MSRP matter for AMD?
They have exactly the same pressures on them.
Like their cards are also like, okay, sure.
So the MSRP, here, let's play a little game.
Let's play a little game called by the RX,
hold on a second.
Radeon RX 6900 XT, okay, we're gonna play this game.
So the MSRP for this card is 999 US dollars.
Okay, that's nice, that's not what they cost.
And even at these prices, they're not in stock.
You gotta go all the way up to $2,700
to actually add one to your cart.
Am I happy about this?
Is this good?
No, but in the context of that pricing for the 6900 XT,
the 3080 TI looks pretty good.
Like, what do you guys want from me?
Ah, all right, Jesse says,
my Gigabyte Eagle 3080 TI doesn't fit in my case.
Anyone have a founder's edition to trade me?
This is really not the right place for that message, Jesse.
Good luck though.
Oh man, oh man.
Jack Meyer says, Luke must have been gas lit
before this segment.
Linus seems to be defending Nvidia
and trashing Gamer's Nexus, which is a wild take.
I love Steve, I don't know.
Steve's freaking fantastic.
Gamer's Nexus is fantastic.
I don't think Linus was trashing them either.
I don't think that's how that went at all.
They said you trashed them.
Oh no, Linus seems to be trashing.
Oh no, they said I trashed.
They said I trashed Steve, apparently.
Yeah, I was gonna be like, hold on, wait a second.
So I don't think Linus trashed Steve.
I didn't get to hear literally a word that Steve said
could do the mic setup,
but I'm assuming there wasn't like a fight there.
Like that's not the conversation that's going on.
Linus mentioned earlier in the show,
a lot of times when someone points out like,
oh, this person's a shill.
It's very often, not always,
but very often because the person saying that is a fan boy
and that paints their vision.
And I think that might be happening here.
There's a disagreement in how things went,
but there isn't a fight.
I don't like that the thing is so expensive,
but I understand why, and it's not for me,
and it's probably not for you.
And that's like its whole own conversation, right?
Like I don't care if a Louis Vuitton bag is $50,000.
I genuinely have no clue whatsoever how much they cost
because I don't care.
It's not for me.
It doesn't matter.
I do care if backpacks for some reason, no, I don't.
I don't buy backpacks.
I have the same backpack for like 11 years.
That I gave you for free.
You're so cheap.
So maybe that doesn't really count.
But like, I do care if something that I generally buy
and is, which is basically always going to be a value
for dollar purchase.
Not necessarily always, but basically always.
I do care if that thing goes up in price.
And that sucks.
We've talked about that with graphics cards in the past
because that's happened.
There's been generational jumps
that are much more than inflation.
And we've pointed it out and been unhappy about it.
Yup.
In this case, I don't think it is.
They took their top end part,
they replaced it with a different top end part
that is cheaper.
So yeah, we already said the 3090 is not a great deal,
but in the context of the current market,
the 3080 Ti is looking pretty good.
I didn't make the rules for that.
Dima says, as a lifelong Apple fan boy,
I hate that your criticism of Apple is always so accurate.
Thanks, I guess.
My criticism of Apple comes from a place of love,
not necessarily for Apple directly, but for tech.
And the issue that I have with Apple
is that they so often set trends that are blindly followed
by the rest of the tech industry,
that I have to be upset when they do something
because if it's the wrong direction or it's anti-consumer
or whatever the case may, or anti-environment,
it's something that is going to become a plague
that infects the entire tech space.
That's a lot of the time where my criticism
for Apple comes from.
And then the other part of the time,
it comes from their complete and utter arrogance
and disdain for the demands of their users.
Like, you know, something as simple as, you know,
we actually shot our review of the new iPad Pro today,
and it's just this amazing,
just unbelievable piece of hardware.
Like, wow.
And it doesn't have a progress bar
on network file transfers because you, you know,
like it's just the conscious decisions that Apple makes
to not make their products compete with each other
or not make them too good for the users.
I just, because it violates some arbitrary philosophical
up their own butt nonsense.
Like, I just, I can't, I just have such a hard time with it.
All right.
Oh, wow.
The LTT profile pic was Linus cosplaying Jobs.
Yeah, that was quite a while ago.
That was a long time ago.
That's funny though, but yeah.
Steve says, finally pulled the trigger
on an EK 3090 water block for my graduation.
Hopefully I don't break my only graphics card.
That would be really bad.
That would be such a shame.
Oh my goodness.
You'll probably be fine.
But yeah, that would be, that'd be horrible.
Louis says, Best Buy did an in-store only launch.
I could afford it.
So I bought a 3080 Ti.
I was ready to pay that price for a 3080 anyway.
People have been annoying, but I'm happy with my card.
Thanks for saying this.
There's, there you go.
There you go.
You might not be Louis, but Louis is out there.
Nick says, however you see it.
AIB cards at crazy markups versus MSRP is a PR problem.
100%, Nvidia could cap AIB prices
and price appropriately to protect their image.
Yeah, but that would cost Nvidia their sweet, sweet margin.
All you have to do is look at Nvidia's earnings,
their public company, to see how much more profit they make
compared to their partners on their products.
Oh boy.
Oh man, there's wow.
There's so many super chats today.
Nope says, I've never seen a YouTube channel like LTT.
It's been awesome to see you guys.
Grow as a company, keep it up.
You're truly poggers.
Hey, thanks so much.
I think poggers is a good thing.
Melody says, I thought it was refreshing
to see different tech influencers
bringing different perspectives to the table.
I really appreciated how your take
wasn't the easy slam video.
It could have been,
nuance and diversity of opinion is a good thing.
Yeah, we could have just slammed it.
We could have just said it's expensive.
It's bad, but not everything that's expensive
is inherently bad.
And you have to review everything within the context
of the current state.
Chai says, hey, if you're still looking
for motorcycle airbags,
you should look into the Helite Turtle.
It doesn't have a subscription service.
Its action is mechanical and it inflates
with a replaceable CO2 cylinder.
That sounds awesome.
And Sean D says, the only difference between a 3080
and a 3080 Ti is a GA-102 with more passing SMs,
two additional one gigabyte GDDR6 chips.
The rest is the same card.
It costs them $30 more to make than 3080,
but they charge $50 more.
Guess what? That ain't new.
The difference between an extreme edition CPU
back in the day and the $400, you know,
cheapo one was a little bit more cash that was good.
And...
And they were ludicrous.
And I laughed at most people that bought them,
unless you got it through the retail edge program,
cause you were an employee at some store.
And then you got it at like a ridiculously lower price.
Sean D, it's time to take the red pill, man.
It's time to take the red pill cause every,
everything is, it's all the same.
It's all made of sand.
It's all made of sand.
Sorry.
It's just sand.
All right.
Thanks Alex Potvan.
Wait a second.
What is that?
That's not that Alex Potvan, is it?
Did he send a super chat?
I don't know what to spend my survey rewards on.
Hold on a second.
Is there a way to like,
is there a way to like go to this user's profile?
Is it actually that one?
Okay. Usually if you are who I think you are,
I'm the one who's supposed to give you the money,
not the other way around.
You said survey rewards.
Yeah, but still.
I don't think it's cash.
I don't think you can pull it out in cash.
Oh really?
I don't think you can pull it out in cash.
Really? Okay.
I think it's like you spend it within the,
I could be wrong,
but I think you're supposed to like spend it
within the ecosystem, like a credit kind of thing.
Okay. Neat.
Interesting.
All right.
So thanks for tuning into the WAN Show.
We will see you again next week.
Same bad time, same bad channel.
Hope you guys enjoyed the show today.
I had fun.
I had fun.
Yeah. Heck yeah.
Did I not say bye?
Are you waiting for me to say bye?
What happens if I don't say bye?
Like ever?
We just, I guess,
let's not worry about that.
Bye.
There we go.
And it is, it is that Alex,
the one that works at Linus Media Group.
Okay.
Oh man.
Terrible.