The WAN Show - Addressing my Bad Take on RTX 3080 Ti - WAN Show Jun 4, 2021

Episode Date: June 7, 2021

Help your IT team take care of support, maintenance, and security for Enterprise Linux systems with TuxCare at https://hubs.ly/H0NDWk10 Save 10% at Ridge Wallet with offer code WAN at https://www.ridge.com/WAN Buy a Seasonic Ultra Titanium PSU On Amazon: https://geni.us/q4lnefC On Newegg: https://lmg.gg/8KV3S Check out Other Podcasts: Carpool Critics Movie Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt-oJR5teQIjOAxCmIQvcgA Timestamps (Courtesy of Kaspar Zubarev) 2:16 - Sponsors 2:30 - About the review 11:40 - Nvidia's MSRP is bull***t 15:20 - Secondary market is more "fair" 17:30 - Does 3080 for $700 exist? 22:00 - Founder's are not an easy catch 27:45 - Budget gamers suffer 29:50 - Some thoughts about comments 35:20 - Linus explodes and roasts Nvidia 39:15 - AMD time and FSR 47:50 - New APUs 57:20 - Don't buy top-tier for future-proofing 59:56 - surprise phonecall 1:10:08 - NUC coverage Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You know what's great about ambition? You can't see it. Some things look ambitious, but looks can be deceiving. For example, a runner could be training for a marathon, or they could be late for the bus. You never know. Ambition is on the inside. So that goal to beat your personal best? Keep chasing it. Drive your ambition. Mitsubishi Motors. What's up, y'all? Welcome to the WAN show. We're going to 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 this is where those views are going to come from this

tell your friends get them on the way and show let's go let's go let's get some views so ever because we're going to be we're going to be talking about it we're going to 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 going to dig right into that. In other news, AMD's Computex keynote was awesome. 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, or 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 cd or cyberpunk 2077 the source code for red engine the source code for witcher 3 the source code for throne breaker and all this other stuff all but it's essentially all password protected um so we'll see uh how strong that is got also as vaguely as i can possibly go hua 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 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 $1,500. And it's not like this is based on nothing. All of its core specifications are within two and a half percent 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, NVIDIA 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 3080Ti's compared to how many 3090's 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. 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, 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 gamers 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 7% to 10% better than the RTX 3080 for a hefty double the MSRP, almost. So it's $1,200 versus $700. 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 GA102 GPU, but they are not entirely the same thing. And we've already had the conversation

about the RTX 3090's 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 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 1200 12 like 1250 or whatever it worked out to a 12 1300 price point for a top 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 going to 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 in U.S. and on video dot com, the latest pricing for it for a founder's edition, because remember, founder's edition is not necessarily the lowest price variant. A founder's edition is twelve hundred dollars. 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 this was going to be the new hope for gamers as hardware canucks 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 the 1080i was actually like i'm real pretty strong for bang for the buck but i don't think that's a normality so 1080i is an interesting one because it 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, because there was that trend for a while where ever since from Maxwell on on we were for a little

while we were getting you know because 680 was whatever oh four and then 780 was the 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 1080Ti's MSRP at launch was actually 700 yes and that was the top performance card at the time yep so anyway hold on let's uh let's keep going 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 um 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 bulls**t. 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 DICE. 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 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 one percent 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 a thousand dollars or twelve hundred dollars 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 superclocked

or stricts or classified or, you know, what's that, AORUS 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 um now gamers nexus's take is that the msrp difference is

comparable to the rtx 3080s at the 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, you know, not actually have to pay for it. Because 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 have 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 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 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. 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 Strix OC 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 Strix OC RTX 3080 at $899. And then we've got the Asus Dual RTX 3070 at $649. That is $50 less than NVID 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 2200 for that strixo c3090 over a thousand dollars for the 6800 xt uh nick just messaged he says it's around 25 yeah over a thousand dollars 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 percent because of the worldwide electronics supply situation that's going on right now so you have

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 going to 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, their board partners. Let's say, for example, that I am a, I'm trying to think. Okay, let's say I'm Palette. To my knowledge, Palette manufactures all of their boards in China. So, oh, wait, shoot, Palette 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 palette they might have pulled out yeah there's like one rtx 2060 dual or something like that whatever um 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 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 founders edition cards at the launch MSRP. That's one of the biggest arguments against our take but there's a problem with that um good luck getting one right like if you can get one it's sort of been that way too not not just during the shortage yeah um it's often been quite difficult to get a founder's

edition card oh it's been basically 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 64X2 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 27800 GTXs like spent my emptied my entire bank account as a student on 27800 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 to like get rid of them because money just meant nothing to them. So I bought them at way less than what they were worth. I ran them for like two weeks, terrified that some news was going to come out, that a replacement was coming and the value was going to 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 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 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 68 at 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 an 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 desperately needed the money and I had no problem scalping, then I should just buy it and then I should resell 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 you're

willing to scalp it which is kind of a not i don't have that the the beat button yet but it's not a great exactly thing to do yeah we're not 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 on 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, until like the next series of cards is, is scaled up above reasonable numbers because they're basing off of whatever, whatever, but that's, that's not what we're seeing here technically. Um, and I think there's a lot of evidence of that. I, yeah, it's interesting. There's, there are some people, people in in research positions people that need these cards genuinely for for work um and that kind of sucks but again it's 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 uh there's a couple more things here riley has a really good note and 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, thex 6600 mobile that amd just launched it's clear that amd had a mainstream gpu that was developed uh and they just you know never released a desktop product based on it because you know clearly if they have a limited amount of silicon they were better off just producing their higher end products yeah and i'm i'm sure nvidia was ready to rock with replacements for the 1600 series and 1650 series as well yeah sorry the 1600 series as well but i mean at that point yeah you can 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 going to 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 Gamers Nexus was wrong. Actually, Gamers Nexus was wrong about one thing. The idea that scalper prices are just derived from MSRP.

Yeah, it just doesn't work that way. But I'm not saying Gamers Nexus or Hardware Unboxed was wrong about it, you know, being a money grab or not being a good deal. I don't think to put words words in his mouth which i could even be wrong about um i don't think he's saying you should be happy about it necessarily either me it's just it's just yeah it's 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 like i feel like when i was first building computers uh the cards that people really excited about

from the nvidia side their numbers are easy to follow were like the 60s and 70s yep yeah that was a good card that was a sweet card i i like i don't know it's it's timing wasn't exactly the greatest but i remember being super excited about my 2060. And I rode that thing out for like four years. And there's been a lot of hype. Did I say 2060? I meant 260. 2060 wasn't a great bang for the buck. No, and I never had one.

I had a 260 and I rode 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. 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. I don't... See, the thing is, I don't know how to respond to that. Like, I don't... 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 that was the chungest topic do we uh do we do sponsors now or do we move on um no let's let's move on to let's move on to something else um oh my oh man this is hilarious uh do you remember that uh 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 going to call me, if people are going to 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. 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. And I'm partially, not partially, I'm a little surprised people forget that. That wasn't even that long ago.

This is recent news, the war between LTT and NVIDIA. And I can tell you something right now. Linus is not about to necessarily work to fix that. He's going to stand by his words. But he's also not going to say that something that they do is like horrible when it's not uh 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 Whether there are tariffs. It is what it is. Like, I... Is it expensive? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah. But top-end GPUs have always been expensive. They've always been expensive. What was the price of the stupid GTX 690? I forget. I remember that being astronomical astronomical i don't remember right now it was 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 it just made no it 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 going to 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? 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 I go have your, go have your conspiracy theory, right? Like there's nothing that I can say to make you believe me. And that's ultimately it. They're not, it's yeah. The, the,

the horde as a, 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

PartPicker. It's really fun. I used to do it all the time. Spend way too much money on PC PartPicker. But don't check out. ZY says, Linus's argument is deceitful because he's ignoring the performance of the 3080 non-ti uh 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 6.99 us dollars go buy one then. Good luck.

And to be clear, he doesn't even just mean because of scalpers. It's not available for that anywhere. You can't buy that from a store either. So it is what it is. I understand. This is having a huge impact on people's enthusiasm for computer hardware. We see it.

We see it in the sentiment in our community. but this is beyond our control the good news is there's some cool stuff uh 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 uh 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 features 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. 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 going to 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 100 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 10 game developers planning to use it in their games and engine to 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 there's 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, oh yeah it's in the developer's hands often just gets dropped so yeah we'll see how it goes um it just didn't 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 going to match the results of deep learning supersampling. But a lot of people are never going to look that closely at it. And as long as they get more FPS, then I guess they're going to be happy. It's just definitely going to bear further investigation. I'm sure the likes of Hardware Unboxed are going to do multiple videos, really digging in pixel by pixel into how it goes. investigation i'm sure the likes of hardware unboxed are going to do multiple videos really

digging in pixel by pixel into how it goes i mean this is definitely something we're going to want to look into ourselves as well because when yeah whether it's a digital foundry is probably going to 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 go you got to go way back to like nvidia's fx series right like when they were they were just way way behind the performance and importantly the image quality of amd's radeon 9000 series um 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. Whether it was shortcuts that they were taking when they detected certain applications like benchmarks, or whether it was cheaper, lower quality rendering approaches that they were sort of quietly implementing in the driver without telling anybody these days are 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 to cut to hackily make their performance better we're embracing it i mean I mean, from a purist standpoint, where 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 is in a fast-paced scene most people are not going to notice the difference between dlss and native resolution rendering they're just not going to i don't know that the same will be true of fidelity effects 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 and it might get better over

time but that's that's not something to buy a product based off of uh 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 and i pretty much i think 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 uh yeah they're really expensive that's part of the yeah it's part of it i mean as as part of our oh man i don't want to 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, 2080Ti's, 2080's, 3080's, 3070's. And we went through and we went, okay, what is the actual real world street price for these things?

And compared to those, it's a great deal. Something that hit me more to be honest and and i knew this already but i still uh is is not even the the scalped ebay prices but the what they're actually being sold at stores versus nvidia's stated price like that difference is quite huge yeah uh 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 amd had this product with good onboard graphics uh zen two cores and it was a an oem only part now usually you think back luke like to all the oem

only parts that we've seen over the years uh remember nvidia's geforce 800 series yeah me either yeah 300 series was 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 doesn't matter the point is uh 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 um 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, 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, I'm live.

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 going to 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 going to turn around and flip that CPU to, they might not sorry you don't you don't what i lost you said you might feel like you need to upgrade every generation oh yeah you don't i'm just i'm just this yeah you know my opinion on people buying stuff way above what they need yes but i just feel like it's it's getting it's getting worse i don't know i don't know why. Maybe it isn't. I could be entirely wrong.

But the anger over the 3080 Ti pricing and just processors. Old processors are still doing so well. Yeah. You can still get them on a 7700K just fine. I recently did a test. I'm potentially doing a home theater piece. This is totally off the side This is quite the tangent

Okay carry on Luke Sorry I do want to 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 um 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 i it's it's amazing that is a cpu that is 10 years old it is 10 years old years old and sure you might be susceptible to meltdown inspector but i i think the gf's uh gaming rig probably kind of a non-concern yeah probably a non-issue it's fantastic like you don't you don't necessarily need this stuff you can you can relax it's okay a non-issue it's fantastic like you don't you don't necessarily need this stuff you can 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 going to use it with a dedicated graphics card doesn't mean that whoever you sell it to was going to want to 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 8 core 16 threads, 4.6 gigahertz boost, 65-watt TDP on that one as well, Vega 8 integrated graphics with 8CUs, 5-core, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, 359. That CPU, and wow, I'm going to, I'm sure someone's going to 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 care 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 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. You know, talking about how outraged people are about 3080 Ti, when 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 are getting like pulled up like pulled along in this fomo this like i feel like yeah just kind of there's a lot of losing track you know yeah like just like losing the plot here like i i went i went three years or something like that without without 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. It's the verified checkmark 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. 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 now now i'm in now i'm in trouble the only way to know if it's a real steve would just

be to call him um i'm kind of done with this topic though is you guys doing a uh course for gamers course sorry what now do you remember those we we used to make i think it was like once a year we'd do course for gamers it was a video um yeah we should totally do it how many courses yeah yeah we should revisit that maybe with the uh you know what we could do it around the uh the launch of the 5700g that would be awesome just kind of say okay how how you know how overkill is eight cores 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 when you're going like I'm I'm future proofing by buying this individual part that's twelve hundred dollars or eighteen hundred dollars yeah that's that's ridiculous don't do that $1,800 or whatever. Yeah, that's ridiculous. Don't do that. Don't buy that because of future-proofing. But when you're buying something that's already a value item and 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 just a, that's a very different, 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 is 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, you know, 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. 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. 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 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 they didn't want to hear it you know oh lordy i've got a call from one steven burke oh wait is this the real is this the real gamers nexus i was listening to your stream and 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 Gamers Nexus.

We got warned by the chat. I wasn't going to call you during your stream until I saw you reading fake Gamers Nexus quotes. I better make sure this doesn't 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 i don't know if the stream can hear it or not but at least the mic that i hear you what are you saying i was just saying that i wanted to uh call and interrupt you to make sure you weren't going to read more quotes from a fake gm account

because i didn't want to get in trouble for what uh 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 don't worry about it we so the thing is i mean okay for the viewers out there you guys got to understand steve and i have disagreed about a great many things we 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 it's part of the reason why we yeah i mean that's we've got a different actually i want you know am i on speaker can people hear me absolutely they're they're saying in the chat they can hear you one thing there's 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 minus got paid paid for his opinion. 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 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 people so i just i just i thought that was it's it's more likely that there's a a lot of links in your chain first of all so you have 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 at your company than at ours.

So that's part of the difference. Yep. Yeah. Absolutely. I just want to point that out. It's sort of like an outcomes raiser. 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 fanboy is to accuse someone else of being a paid shill. Right. 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, I like, I just thought 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, why not? Could say something about LTT store.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.

It just, it just, they are so cheap. Oh man. Good old, they are it just it just they are so cheap oh man good old good old nvidia yep all right well thanks thanks for calling in steve yeah yeah have a good uh show all right have a good weekend oh that's great so yeah um i unfortunately couldn't hear a single word that he said oh sorry luke yeah he basically said that um we should just go back to having you do all the gpu reviews because clearly anthony and i can't handle it i'm no he didn't know he's 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? Shout out to ShipStation for sponsoring today's WAN show. So you've started your own online store, you're selling products that people want, and orders are starting to come in. Now you need to ship those products out.

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Easily compare carriers and choose the best solution every time. Ship more in less time and use code when to get a 60-day free trial that's two months free of no hassle stress-free shipping just head to shipstation.com click on the microphone at the top of the page and type in when make ship happen it's time to get back to the show all right sorry i gotta keep having to shift the stupid things around so server upgrade sponsored video from tux care i know right when's it happening i don't know pulse get it going pulseway always tries to get in on our server videos so i i don't know if tux care is even going to get a crack at it they can try though they can try what if you just do them both at

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 uh things that make a lot more money than nvidia check this out i actually really like this one sarah did a fantastic job of the design yeah it's the do not drop shirt uh 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 uh made like apparently this is this is cool now or something having like graphics on the on the back of the shirt like that so that's pretty neat hey look, look at that. Got some

new shirt models. Got Madison and Mark and more Madison and more me. 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. 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 going to be one of the last black shirts we launch.

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 uh mousepad restock is now delayed at least two weeks because there were COVID exposures at the port that we shipped 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 um 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 reviews. Let us know what you think. Hey, good stuff. Finally got reviews. Woo! It's exciting. And there's more cool stuff coming for the store. Some of it's back end, so you guys won't see it.

But there's also fun stuff for you, too. Hey, I like the back end me too okay our next topic is is intel really stretching the definition of what a nook is at this point um the original source is tom's hardware here and do you remember when intel first announced the nook original announcement? Let's go find that. What is that? Wow, I don't even know if we're going to 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 nook 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 desktop like performance rather than being limited by the performance of, hey, look, it's Scott Wasson's hand, rather than being limited by the performance of then low-power CPUs like their Atom lineup. Okay, so that's a nook. But is this really a nook? That's a USB port for scale. This is the, what is this, a nook? That's a USB port for scale. This is the, what is this?

The Beast Canyon? And it's like pretty much, okay. Hey, hey, speaking of my fellow former members of the tech press, there's a Ryan Shrout holding a Beast Canyon nook. So let's go back. This is a Scott Wasson holding a nook, okay? And this is a Ryan Shrson holding a nook okay and this is a ryan shroud holding a nook i don't know i don't know if it's really a nook anymore but it definitely supports discrete graphics cards up to 12 inches long um 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 uh so the phantom canyon nook which was legitimately actually small but um had more limited performance um it's had more performance so it's h series so that's faster i guess does anyone follow you miss wild there's there's some stats here which is crazy

that's an eight liter footprint but there's there's a small form factor pc case the is it is that loke or luke oh yeah the loki i think is the loki ghost s1 is 8.2 yeah practically the same yeah that's 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 lokey ghost is really expensive um that's true but so is the beast canyon so your your 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 low-key ghost and that's an advantage that the beast canyon will have is if you're uh if you're an si and you're looking to pump these things out it is it is not that easy building a diy computer in an eight liter chassis that that's not something

that's just for you know even your average technician to do at scale and and not make mistakes right or not have to spend a lot of time like oh you know 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 it pre-builds in a low-key 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 it was, 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 because there's going to be a lot of fake reviews in there. you know, 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, OK. 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't know because you end up writing a surprisingly different video from all those different perspectives and we can't do all of them i don't know now i'm just kind of now i'm just kind of chatting at you guys um we have we have a couple more headline topics uh luke do you want to talk us through huawei going their own way ha ha 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, SmartThings 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, etc. 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 mate pad 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 that's 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 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 that's pretty crazy impressive uh ours technica has trouble seeing how different harmony os is from android this continues to be the weird journey journey the reporter had to take to get to access the sdk and emulator which uh involved among many other things sending him sending his u.s passport photo that's wow this is nuts hold on i'm bringing i'm bringing this up so a two-day background check um and here's harmony os yep that looks very different from android huh okay a device info app identifies harmony os as android 10 so that's interesting

um yep this is getting really awkward really fast this is a wow this looks like a great article uh this is awesome i i'm gonna go read this as soon as the show is over anyway the point is um yeah so luke your first reaction to harmony os 2.0 is a thing was like wow that's really fast i think we might have gotten to the bottom of it yeah yeah that makes a little bit more sense okay okay it's 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 my immediate reaction was okay there's either tons of stolen stuff and then there's like there's no identical line so it's okay um the the other option is that it's horrible um 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. Sorry? No, no, no, not Huawei. They wouldn't do that, of course. No. 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? Yeah, so like you said in other news, the leaked CD Projekt Red data has been made public? 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 going to 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 Wancho, where the people that acquired it were trying to sell it for a starting bid of a million dollars or a buyout of seven million dollars. And 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. Yeah. But we don't know uh the data was posted via a torrent the sdk archives are not password protected oh okay so just the source codes are uh 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 ten thousand dollar 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 projects sorry it's a great deal it's a good deal there's no no one else you can't buy this if you were if you were in the market if you were in the market for ten thousand dollars worth of stolen data this is this is good stolen data this is fantastic data it's a great price don't be don't don't please don't take this seriously i'd sometimes sometimes i sometimes i say stuff like this and I will actually get unironic, angry emails asking why I'm promoting, you know, 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 because 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 uh tutor builder asks will the 3d 80 ti be coming to the verified actual gamer program we do have one partner that has managed to get us some 30 80 ti allocation yes so um 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 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 9? 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 going to assume no. I'm going to ask though. Sorry? No. 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? No. Okay, no. 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 going to 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, 100%. 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 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 TechWiki for the Star Citizen episode. TechLynx, but yes. TechLynx, sorry. So many channels. Fair point.

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 rewatched 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 Wan show 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 for medical school next week. You guys keep me sane. 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 board radar tech on Night Shift. Everything I need to know to build my ryzen 9 and 3090 snowblind rig hey thanks alex happy to help out uh 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 stores, 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. Kazragor 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 3DR, 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 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 Buy the RX. Hold on a second. Radeon RX 6900 XT. Okay, we're going to play this game.

So the MSRP for this card is $999. Okay, that's nice um that's not what they cost and even at these prices they're not in stock you got to go all the way up to 2700 to actually add one to your cart am i happy about this good? No. But in the context of that pricing for the 6900 XT, the 3080 Ti looks pretty good. What do you guys want from me? All right. Jesse says, my Gigabyte Eagle 3080 Ti doesn't fit in my case. Anyone have a Founders 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 gaslit before this segment linus seems to be defending nvidia and trashing gamers nexus which is a wild take i i love steve i i don't know i i've steve's freaking fantastic um gamers 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 i'm 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

trash 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 that linus mentioned earlier in the show. A lot of times when 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 fanboy. 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 of something that i generally buy and is is

which is basically always going to be a value for dollar purchase um 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. 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 i didn't make the rules for that uh dima says as a lifelong apple fanboy 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 it's if it's the wrong direction or it's anti-consumer or whatever the case may be 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. 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 i just i can't i just have such a hard time with it um all right the ltt profile pic was linus cosplaying jobs yeah that was that was quite a while ago that was a long time ago it's funny though but yeah uh 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 you'll probably be fine but yeah that would be uh that'd be horrible lewis says uh best buy did an

in-store only launch i could afford it so i bought a80 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 you go. There you go. You might not be Lewis, but Lewis 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. Wow, there's so many super chats today nope says i've never seen a youtube channel like ltd it's been awesome to see you guys grow as a company

uh keep it up you're truly poggers hey thanks so much i think poggers is a good thing uh melody says yeah yeah 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 30d and a 3080 ti is a ga102 with more passing sms two additional one gigabyte gddr6 chips the rest is the same card it cost them 30 more to make than 3080 but they charge 500 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 because you're an employee at some store and then you got it at like a ridiculously lower price sean d it's time it's time to take the red pill man it's time to take the red pill because uh every 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 uh thanks Alex Potvan wait a second what is that that's not that alex pot van 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 this is there a way to like go to this user's profile is it actually that one um 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 survey rewards yeah but still i don't think it's cash i don't think you are, I'm the one who's supposed to give you the money, not the other way around. No, 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? 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 that, Alex. The one that works for our line of speaking group. Okay. Oh, man. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible.

Terrible. Terrible.