The WAN Show - Don't get SCAMMED when you buy an SSD - WAN Show December 4, 2020

Episode Date: December 7, 2020

Learn more about Kite at https://geni.us/aCUi Kite Download Link: https://lmg.gg/kite Keep your feet dry and get $25 off each pair at Vessi with offer code WANSHOW at https://www.vessi.com/wanshow Start your build today at https://www.buildredux.com/linus Check out Carpool Critics, our new movie podcast: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt-oJR5teQIjOAxCmIQvcgA Timestamps (Courtesy of Vistrus) 0:00:00 Intro 0:02:34 Sara Secret Shopper Interview 0:56:00 Tech News 0:56:13 RTX 3060 Ti Market 1:01:51 Rumors of AMD's answer to RTX 3060 Ti 1:02:23 SSD Makers swap parts without telling us 1:12:06 Thumb drives 1:12:48 Linus reviewing thumb drives 1:14:49 RISC-V record-breaking efficiency 1:18:33 Micron DRAM fab goes offline 1:20:10 ASUS & ASRock enables resizable BAR on Z490 1:21:58 lttstore.com 1:24:13 Super chats Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Luke, shove just a little bit to your right, just like a smidge. And we're live! Welcome to the WAN Show, ladies and gentlemen. We've got a fantastic show for you today with a special guest. We do have some tech news, so our highlight topics of the day are, of course, going to be SSD bait-in switching, meaning that you might not get the performance you expect when you buy a solid state drive and RISC-V CPUs looking to unofficially absolutely decimate Apple's M1 SoC's efficiency numbers. What could this mean for the future? Luke, what else we got? And the RTX 3060 Ti launched and immediately,

as everyone expected it would, and the micron fab went down for one hour and DRAM prices reflected that immediately, which is kind of sad. And of course, by popular demand, we have the one, the only, Sarah Budd as a guest today. That's right. The illustrator of the ABCs of gaming as she's best known.

Oh, wow. You have one with you. That is so awesome. Of course you do. I also have one behind me. Also, she's agent, what was it? Money nickel or something? I can't remember.

Sarah Jane Cash Nickel. Cash Nickel. So she is here for us to do a pretty sick Q&A session with you guys about what it was like being the secret agent for Secret Shopper. If there's anything you guys want to know, Sarah is here to answer your questions. Let's go ahead and roll that intro. It is going to be a fantastic show they can hear you by the way way. Just so you know.

I have no idea what you're laughing about, but they can definitely hear you. The show is brought to you today by Kite, Vessi Footwear, and Redux. And we will get you some more details about them a little bit later on. So why don't we just see if there's anything in here that's kind of secret, like tangentially secret shopper related maybe um no no not really there's basically nothing okay so why don't we just jump right into the secret shopper q a because honestly sarah i have some questions for you right out of the gate i mean how hard did you want to tear your freaking hair out being on the phone with Del for you probably spent, I mean, you probably spent hours on the phone with Del.

I did. Yes. Well, okay. Here, here, I have a tattoo that says patience. I don't know if you can see it, but I'm like a super patient person. So like those kinds of calls don't bother me at all. Like I was totally chill the whole time. Really?

I was dancing to the hold music. Yeah, I had no issues. It was kind of fun actually. That is not what... I don't think I've ever heard anyone describe being put on hold for hours as fun. Yeah. I mean... You know, that's cool.

Yeah. So, okay, fine then then so being on hold is fine but then i was totally chill the whole time really but what about like what about the okay fine what about scamming you sure yeah how about i didn't even realize how many times they asked me if i wanted to buy a warranty if i'm being honest with you i was just like so focused on making sure that i didn't seem nervous in the video that like I was totally chill during the whole call. I had no idea how many times I asked for warranty.

You must've known it was more than once though. Yes, yes, definitely. I kept looking over at Jake and he was giving me the look like, you know. It's so funny because when I was watching the footage back, I was even just like wow she is like such a professional like you were just you were honestly you were a better phone representative than half of the phone representatives that you talked to you were just like oh no thank you i'm

good thank you and then i did customer service for like three years so it's just ingrained in my brain to be nice to whoever you're talking to. And so that's just the kind of person I am now. Okay, fine then. I'm going to wait and see if... Actually, okay, we do have a couple of questions from people. Leland over on Floatplane asks, I mean, would you have felt different about it if you had spent your own $1,500?

Was part of it that this was just like company money la-di-da whatever it doesn't really matter i'm being paid right now i mean the thing is is i don't know anything really about pcs so i didn't know what i was buying in the first place so like if i was going into it knowing what i needed to buy then obviously i would feel differently um but like during the call i did i i it was fine you're just totally chill okay that's that's fair did you ever get the bacon scented face masks asks digidude 512 no they were sold out oh really you did try to buy it that is fantastic it was interesting i don't know i love it looking into i guess okay has the experience made you feel like learning to build your own pc this is one of my questions so i actually do have a PC of my own, but I had a lot of guidance when I was building it. But you did build it yourself?

I did build it, yes. Really? Oh, okay. Yes, yes. I just had a ton of direction. I didn't... Okay, I wasn't building it by myself. I had somebody with me, and so we were building it together, but it was basically me watching them build my pc for me um that's why when i'm like pulling out the ram sticks in the video i have no idea what i'm doing because like honestly i haven't really done it before yeah um i mean even as that gpu that was pretty crunchy to watch i mean even i think i felt physical pain watching

that section and i think a lot of the audience probably did as well that was yeah as someone who's made a brand out of like manhandling hardware on camera and like kind of meaning that stuff up even for me watching that was like i learned from the best i guess don't lie you don't watch the videos hey that one ramstick that i dropped you were behind me so like i blame you for that uh-huh uh-huh i don't even think you knew i was there yeah i mean she dropped ramstick you threw a ramstick i don't know i don't know which is worse. Okay, Nerdum asks, oh, if you guys are just tuning in, we've got Sarah, our one and only secret shopper.

Actually, we have two secret shoppers. We've had Agent Janice and Agent Sarah now, but she just wrapped up the latest run of Secret Shopper. So she's asking questions or answering questions from the audience about what the experience was like. Nerdum over on Floatplaneplane asks do you actually love roosters like would you describe yourself as a cock lover i'm a big animal lover sorry i had to throw that at you i love animals the entire comment section of that video

was like yes don't worry i i intentionally made that innuendo actually, if I'm being honest with you. But I do love animals, just to answer that question. All right, there we go. Roosters are in the vein of that. Got it. Psycho. I have one, I have one, I have one. Yeah, hit me.

So you have a computer, but if you need to buy a new computer and you decide to go the route of buying a pre-built, after this experience, which one of those brands would you go with? Ooh, that's a good question. So if I'm being honest, I can barely remember which companies I've been talked to. Didn't Origin do good or something? didn't origin do good or something well okay it kind of depends on how you uh it depends on how you interpret it yeah origin did a great job of the customer service you really liked the origin people but they shipped you a really slow computer if you want it to show up perfectly but you don't really care what it actually is then yeah fantastic yeah yeah it was in a crate they gave you a 50 dollar rgb they gave you a 50 prepaid visa for some reason and a t-shirt right yeah instead of just 50

dollars off the like computer in the first place which might have been smarter okay but for real i don't think i'd ever buy a pre-build i'm a really crafty person so i'd love to like actually build a pc on my own without guidance just like kind of do it okay interesting so audience audience what do you guys think of this as a video concept we do a follow-up to secret shopper where instead of sarah um you know putting all of her time and effort into dealing with like shady sales reps she puts her time and effort into with nothing but linus tech tips videos researching the parts we actually make her research the parts herself and building the pc herself so it's like a two-part shoot.

And then maybe what we could do to kind of simulate the experience of just being like a random that just wants to build a computer. You have like kind of lifelines, but they're in the form of like forum or Reddit posts or something like that. So I'm sitting there on like the other end of like a chat

or like you literally have to go online as tech tips forum or something like that and post your questions and if people are too slow like i can step in and answer them but you otherwise have to completely go through the process and then decide at the end would you do it yourself completely yourself without help or would you just buy a pre-built for what the difference in price is i feel like you should i feel like you should have her forum handle be anonymous yeah because if it's a real and maybe yours is too and you can answer to help but you won't know if it's a good answer from me or if it's just some random that would be so much fun oh my gosh can we do that and you guys should have a baseline one that's also built by like

jake or someone and then like test them at the end to see how they compare i kind of like it all right we'll have to give you a budget same thing just because it's like it's too easy if there's no budget that's not really even fun i've got a question people would have a budget yeah i've got a question from hp desk jet 500. Hey Sarah, what are your thoughts on secret shopper basically turning you into a meme? I Think this guy follows me on Twitter. I see his tweets all the time. Um, I Am fine with it. I guess I never thought I would reach meme level but like Linus watch out. I'm coming for you Oh, I know right. I'm trying to find it right now I don't know what the typical caption is for

it but it is oh yeah here it is all right here i'm just gonna flip over to my display capture here this is freaking amazing this picture like what even is that it's what i don't even know what part of the video that was from it's from when i dropped the gpu oh that's right hold on a second there it is there it is so there there there's sarah got it okay yeah fantastic it's absolutely freaking amazing like what what it what were you what was going through your head at that moment i mean i was literally just as cringe as anybody else watching that video. That's my cringe face to me dropping the GPU. Like, I knew it was bad. I know the GPU is one of the most expensive parts of the computer.

And I was just like, oh. It was so bad. Oh, my goodness. All right. Yeah. All right. Oh, this is a question from me. Where did you work as a CSR?

I feel like I should know this because, you know, I probably saw your resume at some point or another, but actually, maybe I didn't. Maybe I never saw your resume. I don't think I was involved in hiring you at all, was I? No, you weren't. Yeah, that explains how it happened. That's how we end up with all these Gen Zs around here. I think I was consulted. I think I was sort of given like a description of you and then the other top candidate and it was like okay do you want the one that's like lots of raw potential like good dragon energy but like kind of random or do you want the one that's like experienced and professional but probably not as much like dragon energy and then i'm not going to tell you which one you were because i would never comment on an hr decision you know on a live stream like this but uh

where exactly did you work um so i worked at a restaurant called mr mike's for a while as a hostess so you really learn to deal with people when you work in a restaurant because nobody's ever happy um and then i also worked uh at a thrift store for a while so yeah really it's a vibe yeah i'm gonna pop some tags only got 20 in my pocket you don't even know what song i'm singing do you you have no idea what song no i don't believe you it's thrift shop by macklemore all right fine fine all right okay all right well i had no reason to think that you would know what that song is. It's from before you were born. No, it's not.

I was going to say, I think that's a bit of a boomer song, though. Yeah. 2012. 2012. 2012. I'm pretty sure you weren't born yet. Oh, man. All right. What else we got here in the float plane chat ah oh man it's just like tons of spam omg yes we have to do that video concept is there anything that you wanted to say that you felt didn't come across in the videos um okay i got accused a lot of like helping out one of the people too much about about telling him that i haven't checked the ram stick yet but like during my call at the beginning he said this could

be the problem this could be the problem the ram stick could be the problem and so i just thought i would like bring that back up you did not really helping him because he did suggest it you were pretty helpful in some places you were like very helpful in some cases i was like honestly though none of the ones where you were super helpful ended up winning it anyway so yeah clearly it wasn't good enough i i just like helping people you know it was painful to like know exactly what was wrong with the computer and them like trying i probably not their hardest honestly but trying i wanted to be able to help them that's about it all right uh let me have a look uh speed demon had one brought up sarah versus

dennis sarah versus dennis i already know sarah would win like oh man dennis has even built multiple computers and still when i watched dennis did you see did you see dennis's video where he uh collabed with anthony uh where anthony was like uh instructing him through like fpv like fpv goggles and a camera that was installed on Dennis's forehead. And then Dennis is blindfolded trying to build a computer. And it was just, he actually broke the motherboard. Like I had to go, I had to re-bend a bunch of pins in the socket after.

It was painful. Meanwhile, me and Yvonne just like absolutely slayed it because she knows how to follow basic instructions like it was it was so hard to watch man so hard to watch um that video has a terrible like dislike ratio not because I think that it's not entertaining but I think people just couldn't like people don't like broken hardware too yeah I think they just couldn't. I thought it was just too hard. All right. Which one of the things... Ooh, this is interesting.

If you were buying your own... Let's say you were buying a pre-built. Out of everything we tested, which one do you think is the most important to you after the fact, after going through this with everyone? Initial sales, tech support, or the actual value of the product like which one holds the most weight for you i think the actual value of the product because like in

the end you want to make sure you're getting your money's worth of whatever you're buying um like customer support is important but like there's videos like we have on youtube where if you really need help fixing something you can just like look it up um and then like buying something over the phone doesn't really happen anymore um so yeah i think i think value is the most important part of like the whole secret shopper series miss but just are you critiquing the uh methodology of our secret shopper series i'm not the only one but that wasn't my question what we're doing is important i think what we're doing is important because we are showing companies what they're like uh to a regular customer um whether that's over the phone or through email

usually customer support is pretty similar so i don't know i i i am critiquing it but like not harshly maybe for part three it should have to be another like uninformed purchaser and they have to go through the online system and like whatever system they end up with is the system that they end up with and it's it that's how you grade essentially their their configurator i'll tell you right now the reason we do it the way that we do it is more from for like a production for production purposes not because i think that's necessarily how everyone would go and buy a computer computer the reason is that as luke as you and i have experienced during scrapyard wars time and time again the first episode of a scrapyard wars series is always just like us with our heads our faces

buried in our computers shopping online and it's not entertaining it's not interesting whereas if we were able to go through a physical market, it would be a lot more interesting for sure. Meanwhile, if you're talking to someone on the phone, it's like comedy gold because it is amazing how bad a job these companies do. And from my point of view, we're evaluating a service that they claim to offer. From my point of view, we're evaluating a service that they claim to offer. If you have a sales line, then someone who knows what they're doing should pick it up and advise you in a way that is not deceptive. It's that simple.

So yeah, I see the point that you guys are making. And it's not the first time we've gotten this feedback. It's just that's why we do it. We do it to make more entertaining content and because it's not an invalid time we've gotten this feedback. It's just, that's why we do it. We do it to make more entertaining content and because it's not an invalid way to buy a computer. What it also does... Oh, sorry, go ahead. Nope, finished it off.

Sorry, I thought you were done. What it also does is it reveals, you know, how these companies behave in the situation that allows them to apply the most pressure to the customer. It's much more difficult to apply a high pressure sales tactic to someone who is over email or over live chat where they can just easily ghost you than it is when you're on the phone. Once you have someone on the phone, you are a lot closer to making a sale. And that's just like basic sales principles. So these

companies that do have extremely robust and mature sales strategies are going to know that they can go after you harder when you're on the phone. So that's a third reason that I thought of on the spot, but it's a very valid one for us continuing to do it the way that we do. Totally. And you don't get to hear roosters if you're not over the phone. That's right. Exactly. Or get scammed by dell as easily um i have i have a question for for each of you actually and they're actually different questions and one of them is not related to this project at all but i'm gonna ask it first got it um sarah what is your favorite piece of merch that you have done design work on oh is she gonna spoil

the one that i'm about to announce i don't probably not i don't think that's my favorite um i loved doing the folding at home t-shirt because it was for a great initiative uh we were able to raise lots of money we raised a ton of money sarah like 60 grand or something like that it was crazy um and also it's just cool seeing I think that was the first t-shirt design that I did um and it was really cool for me to see people around the office wearing it um because like I've never done a project like that before so being able to see and then also people like tweeting pictures of them with their new folding at home t-shirt I was like is this what it's like it's that was a lot of fun you

know what's going to be a blast for you like just absolutely gonna blow your mind is when we can finally do ltx again and you are walking around on the floor at ltx and people are just like decked out in your designs it's crazy yeah it's it's going to be super fun like lloyd i remember talking to him after ltx um in 2019 and he was just like this is pretty cool because as a designer i mean obviously it's nice to get paid you know everybody needs to make money but as a designer uh just like for me as like a content creator like it's it's only so much fun to make videos if I'm just throwing them out into a void and nobody's watching them. It's only so much fun to design stuff that you think is cool, but it's really validating to see a bunch of people agree. And because it's going to be so long before another LTX, man, there are going to be a lot of Sarah designs walking around on the show floor.

And then people are going to start walking up to you and asking you to sign them which is like a whole other level of surreal are you ready yeah I don't know I really don't know even just releasing this like when it launched I was just like I illustrated an ABC book like I don't know how many people who get to say that in their lifetime and like that's super special for me I still need to stock up on a few of them and we've sold thousands of them which is pretty cool insane yeah insane pretty sick lttstore.com okay question for for linus now um and back back more on topic i guess yeah have any of those companies reached out since then have you talked to dell essentially but also have any of the other companies reached out since then have you talked to dell essentially but also have any of the other companies reached out um i don't think main gear has done anything as crazy as

last time i think last time they like put out a press release talking about how we praised their customer service and stuff like that i don't think they've done that this year but i haven't paid attention i buy power tweeted they were very proud of themselves i mean they've won two years in a row so they should be um you know they definitely had some things to fix and they acknowledged that in their tweet they said hey here's the like three or four things that we agree we could do better on but we're super proud that we have two crowns in a row now and we're looking forward to another one so they were jazzed as for dell i've seen them go on the defense on twitter a little bit they've acknowledged it both on the alienware handle and the dell cares

handle i think uh but they have not actually like contacted us to my knowledge what do you think about and this is we're maybe getting into the weeds here a little bit sure um but they legitimately scammed you yeah like uh are you gonna go after them no that's not my jam i mean if i was i was way more mad like completely outside of the like business relations stuff yeah they stole your money sort of so here's where dell i think gets off the hook if i was the litigious sort um i got an invoice that had those items on it so there's before you paid for it is that correct uh no i don't think so i think i had paid for it but i think that given that those items were on the invoice they can basically pull up the paper trail and say, look, we provided an invoice. We delivered exactly what it said on the invoice at the price that is shown on Dell.com to within a couple of dollars.

We are all good. Everything is all good. I think they'd get away with it and i think that's where that's where we were actually very close to changing the title of part four to uh dell defrauded us instead of dell scammed us uh or something like that uh i think that's what we settled on about legal things to comment on that but that sounds scam scam is not like uh like a legal term to my knowledge it's more of like a colloquial term they definitely like they ripped us off they scammed us but i don't think we could say that they defrauded us and

honestly i was far more angry um about the apple situation when we broke the computer which we were always up front about it's been extremely frustrating over the years to see people come back at us and say that we were expecting some kind of handout from Apple. We were not expecting a handout. We walked into the Apple store and said, hey, we broke this. You guys are the manufacturer. We would like to pay you to fix it. We understand that this is going to cost money. But as the manufacturer, we believe, however naively that might have been, we believe that you have the tools and the know-how to fix your own product. That's what happened. And they sent us away and there was no solution. And what made that particularly infuriating was that was a professional product. That is a different can

of worms. When some consumer desktop is sold with a high pressure sales tactic and antivirus and what was the other thing? And warranty that I didn't want, that's like, yeah, what else is new? When a professional product has absolutely no recourse whatsoever, if it is broken, that is not okay. That is something that could be, aside from the cost of the product, and it was an expensive product, iMac Pro, aside from the cost of the product, there's an opportunity cost. There's a business interruption cost to not having that equipment running potentially now luckily i'm in a situation where i don't really need that imac pro that badly my business can run just fine without it but if i was a small time you know freelance videographer or something and that

thing like didn't work and maybe it was my bad maybe it was there should be a way to fix it if I am able to pay for it. That was why I was so mad. So I don't know. To me, maybe I'm just desensitized to it. It's not because I have any kind of like special place in my heart for Dell. Don't get me wrong. I just, I don't know. I've bought enough things at Future Shop, which is what Best Buy here used to be called. Sort of.

It's complicated. But it was basically Canadian Best Buy. I bought enough things at Future Shop and Best Buy and like big box stores with commission hear used to be called uh sort of it's complicated but it was basically canadian best buy i bought enough things at future shop and best buy and like big box stores with commission structures like they have for selling warranty that like it just doesn't surprise me at all i i i think anytime you get into charging me more money i'm gonna get a little triggered but i think like it it if if i was in a in a future shop back in the day and they've got this commission structure and I tell the sales representative five times or whatever it ended up being that I don't want the whatever it's called. I don't remember anymore.

PSP or whatever. Yeah, the PSP. Product sales plan or product sales plan five times if i tell them that and then i go to pay and i'm like huh this is more expensive than i thought i must have miscalculated the tax or something in my head and then i walk out and while i'm walking out to look at my receipt and the psp is on there i would freak but here's the issue no matter how much you freak no matter how mad you are about it what's the worst that can happen what are you going to do take them to small claims court it's like actually a waste of your time yeah but i don't know there you go at least i'd be applying pressure see in this

situation what i would do is i would i would put them on blast on social media, which kind of happened by default. So I don't really know what you would do. My biggest worry is just people buying computers not knowing what they're buying. And then Dell bringing down the price of the computer just so they can add those warranties that they don't want. Well, that's what happened. Unfair.

Yeah, exactly. You gave them a budget and they basically, as far as I can tell, the representative maximized their commission. That was what they did. They slipped in. So however they get paid, we don't know exactly what the structure is,

but we know for sure, well, okay, we know for sure they get a bonus for selling warranty. That much was crystal clear. What we don't know is if they get more for selling a higher end system for example though so what they did apparently was they minimized the system because apparently they get less commission from that's what we're guessing and then maximized the services that they could put on they tried real hard to get you on the financing but they weren't going to be able to sign you up for credit without you noticing so they couldn't slip that in.

They slipped in everything that they could. And, you know, I don't even blame the sales rep, to be perfectly honest with you. To me, what that whole experience smelled like was a bad system. This is a system where Dell is not investigating these problems. Obviously, this is a system where Dell is incentivizing their salespeople to just badger the customer effectively. Like it was clearly a trained behavior. What was happening there? Oh, there you go. Two questions that I've got for you, Sarah, at this point.

Two questions that I've got for you, Sarah, at this point. What do you think your biggest one or maybe few pain points were? And what do you think your biggest one or maybe few good points of the experience were? It's hard for me to look at pain points honestly i i always am looking at the positive in any situation um so like um i honestly don't i'll go back i'll go back to my pain points and i think my positive experiences during secret shopper were just like talking to genuine reps for different companies. Like the guy who talked about bacon face masks.

Like, I just feel like you want that when you're trying to get help with your computer or trying to get help with anything, really. Having worked with customer service in the past, though, do you think that that representative would have an issue with other customers? Like you liked it. I feel like I would have a good time. No? I don't know. I don't think so. I think that a good rep could have adapted anyway.

Yeah, that's true. Like that's part of being a good customer service representative. Now, I didn't work in the restaurant industry, but I did work sales floor sales in a computer store. And you got to just develop a sense for it. Okay, this person doesn't want to make small talk. Okay, you know, let's get down to business. They just need a cable and they need to get the heck out of here. Versus like this person's like, doesn't really know the stuff very well and really wants to feel confident before they make their purchase and they need a lot of help or or there's the ones that just want affirmation they already know what they want but they just want you to like tell them it's a good idea and so you'll try to steer them to

something else like i would have this was this was a really classic one like back when uh when i was a sales rep amd was on top in terms of price to performance and oh uh oh sarah just lost the light um amd was on top for price to performance and wait no were they let me think oh how far back was it when was i sales rep i think so whatever the point yes yes they were and you'd have a lot of people coming in because they heard on tv or whatever and they'd be like okay i want to buy intel cpu and you'd say hey you know i'd really think that you should get this one. I think you'd be really happy with it. And they'd go, oh, yeah, you know what, thanks for sharing that with me. But you know, my brother's cousins, mother's daughter's dad said I should go Intel, it's the best. And

then you kind of you just back off. Because, you know, at the end of the day, you're it's above your pay grade to like get in arguments with people in the customer or in the on the sales floor and the the reality of it is so what if it's nine percent slower in the wind zip like the reality of it is they're going to get a computer that is going to work and probably going to be fine for whatever they need to do so like at the end of the day, who cares? As long as you gave them the best information you could, it's sort of, it's their decision. It's their life. It's their money. Right. Yeah, exactly. Um, so yeah, just, just talking to personable people was definitely a great part of my

experience. Um, and then, uh, that one guy who told me to take out the GPU, um, it was really funny when he said like, who knows, it could already be broken. Like, even though he told me to do the wrong thing, probably shouldn't have let me try to rip out that GPU for as long as he did. Um, he still made me feel better about it. So, I mean mean that's a positive and a negative in itself honestly because like for me as a customer it's different as a zoomer

how obvious was it to you that they should just like get on a quick facetime or like hangouts call with you like that's not even something that i thought about. Really? Yeah, truly. Oh, all right. I mean, if it was up to me, I wouldn't be calling anybody. I would see if I could figure out the problem on my own. But since that's not the charm of Secret Shopper, obviously, I had to go through the whole process. Okay, a bad, bad point. Okay, a bad, bad point. After seeing that Dell scammed me, or not necessarily scam me, but that made me mad. That made me mad, because they took advantage of me as a paying customer.

And that's really frustrating, because how many other people are they doing this to really? That's, that's the worst thing that i can think of at this point in time i do find it entertaining that your positive point actually has absolutely nothing to do with computers or the purchasing of them yeah i try to forget about the computer part all right oh man see i don't know what to do with this i just got an email from someone that claims to be from formerly a dell uh phone sales rep that basically kind of confirms a lot of the assumptions that we've made about how they've structured their sales process. And apparently it's like worse than I thought. Unfortunately, without us having any confirmation

from this person, I don't want to talk about it. But what I will do is I'm going to reach out to this person asking for proof that they worked at Dell. And can you back up any of these claims? I just, ever since watching it i've just been been like having having fun little daydreams about like the next follow-up video like the duel with dell yeah like i just i just want to see it go down you know i just some of that was so that like bothered me a lot i think some of these accusations are pretty big.

Some of these accusations in this email are like pretty explosive. So let's see how that goes. Let's see how that goes. It would be not great for our business to like go to war with Dell. But guys, I'll tell you what, if this turns out to be true, we're taking it public and that's just the way it's going to be because we can't ignore that stuff yes it's coming hopefully so bad i've got just a couple more questions for sarah olenek over on floatplane asks uh

sarah what got you into graphic design and what makes you love it oh this is such a great question. I've thought about this in my head many, many times before. I'll do a little life story really quick here. So in high school, I only took science and math courses, really. I did physics, pre-cal, chemistry, biology, and I enjoyed it. I wanted to go into university to study like biology stuff. I wanted to be a forensic pathologist, which is basically somebody who looks into dead bodies and trying to figure out the cause of death. But I wasn't that great at science. And I always loved doing art as a spare time activity. So when I was stressed, I just finished all my homework, I would be like, okay, I'm just gonna draw, I'm just gonna paint. And then my grandfather

bought me a computer in like grade seven. It was a little MacBook Air 11 inch. And I loved it. I used to play around with paint and stuff on there. So then going into university, I was like, and stuff on there. So then going into university, I was like, I'm just going to follow my passion, which I know there's like a meme that's like graphic design is a passion, but or is my passion. But it really is like as soon as I started, I realized that I loved combining art and technology. And that is essentially what graphic design is. And in my first semester, I did this project and submitted it to a worldwide contest and ended up winning like one of the awards. Oh, cool. So then I just figured out that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I finished my diploma and now I'm here.

So I guess it was meant to be. Yeah, we're your first job like out of school, aren't we? Yeah, pretty. Well, OK, I worked at a design agency in Vancouver for like three months um just doing freelance stuff um designing for uh developments so like doing naming for developments and branding for developments cool um but it was really boring yeah that would be pretty boring compared to like illustrating a children's book by the way yeah literally this is great uh paul gerarts actually just pointed out something that frankly i did not notice uh this is a super chat over on youtube are you aware that dell sold you the in-home service package and tried to get you to rma the product to the depot

yourself instead of suggesting to send someone i did not notice that was pointed out in the comments actually but yeah that's hilarious they are they're so bad like they're so bad that's brutal and villainry that hurts that honestly hurts the worst all right one more one more uh jason by three says great job with the abc book me and my girlfriend love it it's not really a question not really a question and i i lied there is one more thing that i wanted to uh talk about on the show before you go away? Yep. I think I have a feeling I know. New merch at LTTstore.com designed by the one and only

Ms. Butt. Oh yeah, ladies and gentlemen. We have tooks. Yep. Luke, do you have one? I do not have one. You do not have one? That's fine.

I have three. Sarah, what have one. All right. Well, that's fine. I will just have to model three You have three. I also have three. Okay, Sarah, what color are you gonna wear? And then I'll show the other two and we'll see which one sell better matches. All right, so you're going with that one Rock on. Well, then I don't I didn't need to open that. Oh Wait, you're wearing them over the head. Okay, can you can you just it looks kind of cool relax kids today and you're you're mean bad enough i see people wearing like toques and then they've got headphones over top of them anyway the point is we have toques that's what we call what you yankee doodles call

beanies and they're ltd really subtle branding. They've just got these, uh, Oh yeah. You can kind of see it. It catches the light there. They've just got a little LTT on the little, uh, leather or fabric. What's this called?

Sarah, is there a technical term for that thing? It's called a hem tag, a hem tag. Thank you for that. Yep. Very helpful. So they've got a logo on the hem tag and we've got three different colors.

So we've got the black on almost black. So I think we're calling that stealth. Is that right? I think so, yeah. What are the other two colors called, Sarah? This one's called dark heather aqua, I believe. And then this one is just light gray, but it has like the orange hem tag, which is super cute. This is the one I'm going with for today just because uh it kind of matches my shirt so i got the constellation shirt

i got the aqua i really wish i had an actual mirror right now because this is this is really hard to do in a not properly mirrored like uh looking at my camera feed everything's opposite all right we're gonna call that good enough so i've got my one that matches my constellation shirt here and sarah is just straight up memeing it up so thank you for that sarah ltt store.com ladies and gentlemen how much are we charging for these i i believe they're 1999 1999 the ltt beanie so let's go ahead and get the oh wow this is oh boy uh this is bad hold on a second i need to there we go look at this guy look at this face he's making i actually took that picture today so i that's exactly what i look like i love this one i love how did you

decide on the different uh hem tag designs like they're all different i don't know just designer instinct i guess and then a lot of back and forth with linus and nick um oh that's right i was involved just trying to decide what we thought would be best we wanted to have like a few really different options did you just say be best are you anti-bullying sorry go ahead go ahead no that's not that's not funny i'll save it um so like for this one it's colored and then this one is like a black leather and this one is a brown leather so like yeah it's just a few different options and then for colors we wanted to have kind of a fun color yeah um but it goes with everything like nick wears this beanie every day jono started wearing it every day it looks great i'm not gonna lie like it's a good color um and then this one for what like the

people who don't want to show off their their love for ltd this one is more stealthy they just want to quietly love ltd yeah exactly and then this one is just like the average beanie i would say all right well thank you very much for coming on the show today i am so sorry that you ended up uh stuck at work late um that's okay all right yeah anyway thanks everyone for sending in such great questions for sarah we will now we will now resume your regular wanshow programming. See you on Monday, Sarah. Sounds good. Bye, guys. Have a great weekend.

Bye. You too. And I think we need to do sponsor spots now. There we go. Actually, we need to do one more LTP store thing. Oh, my. This is a product that I am extremely excited about. Look at this. Is this not the cutest thing you ever saw?

It's a little cpu pillow that is actually pretty cute look at that it's got little pins on the bottom and everything so um okay this is one of those this is one of those situations where i probably should have been a little bit more flexible. These are really expensive. And the reason is that instead of going with the super cheap synthetic fill that everyone uses in these products because it's super cheap, I had recently bought an alpaca wool duvet for one of my kids because it was like on sale and it was exactly the same price as like the regular cotton one. I was like, oh, alpacas, they're pretty cool. So I bought it and I was like, oh my God, this stuff is amazing. So then we got the first samples. This is like many moons ago that we got the first samples of these CPU pillows. And I was just like, oh, these feel crappy.

What if we could get one full of alpaca wool? I want an alpaca wool one. So we got one and it was so nice. It was so squishy and just felt like so quality. But the small one was going to retail for like $40. Because it was so expensive or like $40. Whoa. Okay. Because it was so expensive or like $34.99 or something like that.

So I settled on 40% alpaca wool and 60% polyester. And it ends up feeling like really good, like way better than if it was just polyester, but saving a lot of price compared to the alpaca wool one. So then now let's get into the real problem with the alpaca wool, because we probably could have done like a $40 little thing just because like we could have been like, oh, yeah, it's a merch item, you know, support us, whatever. We know the pricing makes no sense. Instead, it is $19.99 for this one. We probably could have gotten away with that the big problem is that the big one would have cost over a hundred dollars at retail if we had done it with alpaca wool i think it would have been like one uh 129.99 uh based on like our our target margin uh but this one is

more like a couch sized slash bed size one and the other thing here is that this is the one that really benefits from the better wool uh more than the other one because instead of just being purely decorative like it also looks cool uh check out check this out lloyd did a great job of the attention to detail on this it's even got the little triangle yeah i've got the little triangle i was looking for it yeah as you were spinning it around i was like where's the triangle so this one um instead of just being decorative and looking cool it is actually comfortable enough to lay your head on and that was one of the big reasons that i insisted on us going with the uh blended fill for for this one as well so yes you have Do you have any concerns with bias claims

with these pillows? Bias claims? No, not really. Because I didn't even pick which CPU we were using. Lloyd just grabbed a CPU that was in the pile of like dead CPUs and he chose that as a model. What we will probably do is an AMD one in the future.

But the reason that after I saw the initial design, I didn't ask to change it was that this one to an average person, I think is more recognizable as a CPU. Whereas with AMD, we'd have to find some way to represent pins instead of pads. So it was a bit more challenging artwork wise. And Intel also has a larger green border so from the top like it looks more cpu like whereas the amd one would be like this super narrow band and like the proportions wouldn't be kind of as fun so it was it was less of like an intel versus amd thing you know this is clearly an intel cpu and it was more of just like uh you know what kind of looks

what looks cuter uh we've already we've already got people in floatplane chat being like do a limited run of 100 alpaca wool okay okay that if these sell well i want to do it i want to do like the cpu pillow extreme edition um but there's no guarantee that we're gonna do that i know right and then i wanted to do like i wanted to do a black black pcb yeah um and so like black on black and gold on the bottom like do extreme edition cpu uh we also sampled different colors at the top so there's a darker gray that i think could work really well with that one so i'm not saying it will happen but i'm also not saying that it won't happen um yeah that's pretty awesome people

like holy cow 70 pillow okay like for real though uh go shop at like pottery barn or whatever and it's not gonna look that bad and the difference is that these are 40 alpaca wool instead of just being like full of garbage so it really does add a lot of cost. Yeah. Oh, we should totally do. This is a great idea. Dogfish. Good case. There's lots of people talking about it.

We should do a thread ripper one. That's like a pillow. It would be so expensive, though. We could do like a pillowcase. Thread ripper pillowcase. Okay, I'm going to send that to nick right now uh this is this is maybe low-hanging fruit yeah given uh certain things that have been in the news recently um but as as someone who is completely detached and i have i have no idea

what what goes on in the designing and pricing of these products. It might just cost more if you don't use slave labor. Well, yeah, that's definitely a factor. That's why we haven't had underwear for like six months. Well, no, I mean, I have underwear, like I'm wearing underwear right now. That makes sense because I actually wanted to buy a three pack recently and couldn't and was like, what the heck? Yeah, so to make up for them being out of stock for so long we have a better supplier now that

we're happy with their factory conditions uh the order is in i believe it's actually in production and what um what we're doing to kind of make up for that we didn't have the v1 underwear for so long is we're going to do our v2 underwear we're going to launch that and we are also going to do like a our rerun a reprint of the v1 designs with the v2 waistband so if you really liked the v1 designs you will have a chance to get those i think it's going to be shortly after we launch the v2s cool oh oh man oh man love it love launching new merch stuff because it's like so fun especially when it's like just especially when okay couple things one we managed to hit the cold season with a like

cold weather product for a change usually our stuff gets delayed so much that we like miss the correct season for it by the time it's ready to ship and then two these cpu pillows these have been in the works for almost a year like oh man we have some crazy samples we got this one that's like the size of a dog bed at one point i was like how are we gonna ship this but it's like super cool uh man we've been working on it forever to get the feel just right get the cost somewhat sensible i know they're expensive um anyway yeah someone in float plane chat said oh no they said who would uh said but i i think they're including themselves in this like who else kind of but they're saying who would buy a 200 gpu body pillow oh man okay let's cross that bridge when we get to it because if it was body pillow size motherboard

blankets that might be like 250 like 300 also i already you guys could do a duvet cover i already have a mock-up for that beautiful i already have it's not motherboard it's gpu but i i lloyd has a design for it don't worry about it we're on it we're on it like honestly guys body pillow size that could be like 300 like honestly maybe 250 if we were like okay we're gonna eat it on some of the margin here because you guys like said you really wanted it but like that's ridiculous i i don't i don't think i don't think yeah yeah i i don't think so guys um silver x says please relaunch Constellation's shirt. We are working on it.

We have a new hire. She started a week ago. She actually knows things about pattern making and fashion design and stuff. I'm super excited. We got her from a Canadian men's fashion retailer that relocated their head office. And it's not that she wasn't like great at her job or whatever her references were great she just like didn't want to move to somewhere crappy and uh so we snagged her i'm super excited uh she's still on her probation so i can't tell you

like much more about her but i promise you'll meet her eventually you're gonna see some great products out of her super excited uh we should talk about some tech news what do you think we should we should do ad spots my dude oh uh yes uh the show today is sponsored by redux build redux.com is where you can get a system at retail pricing plus just a 75 build fee redux is trying to bring pc gaming to the masses and all builds come with a two-year warranty uh without a uh predatory upsell uh you just select your budget pick your game see how they perform and then let them build your pc um blah blah blah they don't cut corners on quality and you can start your build today build redux.com slash linus if you're not sure whether you should trust some random brand new PC builder, Digital Storm.

Yeah, they're like sort of not. Yeah, so they're not that new. Kite is a plugin that adds AI-powered code completions to your code editor or IDE, allowing programmers to code smarter and faster. Have you used Kite? Do you know about this? You're nodding. Oh, okay. They use machine learning-

I've heard of them. I've heard of them. I have not used it. To power their completions experience, allowing less memory, CPU, and battery usage on your computer. This allows for longer, more relevant, and less noisy complications. Kite's completions are sorted or ranked by relevance instead of popularity or the alphabet,

and they offer support for 16 programming languages, including Java, HTML, Kotlin, help me out. Nope. Okay. And Ruby, and seamlessly integrate with supported IDs already installed in your computer. It's one of those things I've never, I've seen it written. I've never heard it said out loud. I'm so sorry.

Best of all, Kite is free to use. So download it today at the link in the video description. Finally, the show is brought to you by Vessi Footwear. Vessi Footwear is known for making comfortable shoes that are light and, most importantly, water-resistant. You can walk in almost any terrain while keeping your feet dry. You can even have a water gun fight in the winter with your Vessi Footwear, and it'll keep your feet dry. I speak from experience. Go check out that video on Channel Superfun.

They've got their new weekend shoe. Okay, this has been my talking points forever. They have the weekend shoe. And they have a look that fits almost all occasions for men and women. You can get $25 off each pair with offer code WANSHOW at Vessi.com slash WANSHOW. All right, Luke, let's do some tech news. What do you want to talk about first? What was the, i can't remember

the last there was some program like programming language in the in the hiring video that you said that everyone freaked out about as well i don't want to talk about it i i think we should talk about 3060 ti 3060 ti i i don't think there's there's a lot of notes here i don't necessarily think we need to go like all the way through it but but the RTX 3060 Ti launched and it's gone. Yeah, it's gone already. You know what's crazy? Like we speculated in our review that the timing of the launch along with the pricing

suggests that Nvidia is targeting would-be console buyers. And it seems like Nvidia really played, other than not being able to make enough cards to fill the demand uh nvidia really played their cards right going aggressively after this launch window that slightly preceded the console launch with their high price products so that they could get as much revenue as possible out of the people that wanted next gen and had the coin to spend and then followed up with like this kind of this one, two, three, like, you know, punch, punch, uppercut combo with a $400 product that happens to be just exactly

what a next gen console costs. That's shipping right as you cannot buy a next gen console in time for the holidays. I mean, I saw a lot of people criticize us for pointing out that a PlayStation five and an RTX 3060 Ti are the same price saying well what about the rest of the computer you got to remember who our audience is guys like we're talking to computer enthusiasts i think it's a fair assumption that they own something that's like i mean what sandy bridge at worst probably and you could pair like a 2600k or a 3770k like an ivy bridge processor you could pair that with a 36 dti you'd be a little bottleneck or whatever but that's how a lot of people upgrade their systems piecemeal you do the gpu now and then a couple years down the

road uh you go and you do like a cpu motherboard upgrade or whatever the case may be. My girlfriend is running a 2600K and a 1080. Yeah, that's because you don't love her very much. I know, I know, I get it. I get it. My wife's running a 3770K, so not much better. I don't even think she has like an 80 series card and it's older than that. I think it's like uh i think it's 900 family like a 970 or something so yeah yeah yeah that's a self burn that's a self right there

um the craziest thing about this is that i wasn't even willing to give nvidia the benefit of the doubt we scripted our video before we had any indication that there would be shortages of the 3060 ti and we pretty much we reported proactively that there would be shortages of the 3060 ti very irresponsible this this goes back to a conversation we've had multiple times and a long time ago um about how like you could probably make review videos for graphics cards before the graphics cards come out um but this is now like you could probably do graphics card news yeah the graphics card news comes out it's like we're we're moving forward we totally pulled it off man we totally pulled it off we got away with one there we would have looked so stupid uh anyway we pulled it off and I was actually really worried because in the day before the launch, news started coming out of retailers saying,

well, actually, you know, we're feeling kind of bullish on this because we've got more supply of 3060 Ti than every other 30 series card combined up until this point. And I was like, oh, okay, let's see how this goes. But no, it's, while it seems like more gamers were able to get their hands on these than the other recent gpu launches there were not enough to go around and

as usual a big part of the problem is of course scalpers scalpers you know what's really funny i had someone blaming me for scalpers the other day like if like if influencers didn't review products and say that they were good that people wouldn't know they were good there's still like launch events and stuff like what like this somehow this is my fault so what i should lie i should say it's bad so that you can get one so because no one else will be in on the secret if people if people didn't know products were coming out they wouldn't have to rush to buy them they'd have no idea okay sure yeah exactly uh so anyway yeah looks like that whole thing is definitely happening they're going for anywhere from 600 to 750 bucks uh this

card is i mean it's it's a great looking card. You shouldn't be paying that kind of money for it. Just please wait, guys. Please. Okay. Wow. Here's one that went for MSRP. That's pretty sick. Wait, who sold this?

Okay. Glack 13. Wow. What a bro, you know? What a bro or sis. You know, all good. Is this Glack 13. Wow, what a bro, you know? What a bro or sis. You know, all good. Is this Glack again? What are you talking about?

What's up, Glack? Sorry, I'm screen sharing right now. I'm showing there's a seller that's selling 3060 TIs for MSRP. Okay, hold on a second. Who's this Glack? Is this just a store? Oh, you know what? I wonder if it's like a picture of it or

whatever i wonder if this is just a scammer because they've only got two feedback i don't know i don't know i don't know it's okay to be clear i'm not recommending you go buy a 3060 ti from glack over there uh yeah that did not happen on the show today i was like wondering if it was from like offshoot of galaxy or something like ebay store the good news is that rumors of an amd answer to the new card in january are starting to swirl so we might get an rx 6700 xt uh which will also be immediately sold out which will probably also be immediately sold out i mean if i'm amd like i can only get so much seven nanometer anything uh i don't know i mean the the cpu business unit's kind of the uh company darling at the moment if i was amd uh i know where i know what i'd be doing with my uh with my allocation all right speaking of uh okay now this is not segwayable but tom's

hardware is reporting that ssd bait and switching means you might not get the performance that you expect when you buy an ssd product you know part of me is actually kind of annoyed that this is in the news right now because just man i wish i'm gonna check this spreadsheet but i think it was like days ago that i was like hey yeah that's like a thing we should make a video about that um this should be illegal is the title that i wanted to have for the video so i'll probably still do it we'll do it in the next little bit but basically it talks about uh here's my notes taking a product that has been revised throughout its life cycle silently like an ssd hurting performance is my

notes and i put that in like a few days ago and now it's like breaking news and everybody's going to be talking about it that's okay i still have a good title so it shouldn't matter people will click the crap out of a title like that so it's fine i'm just i'm just annoyed anyway uh luke what do you think what do you think if the revision is documented if the revision is documented and does not negatively impact performance in any way that is not overcome by some other benefit then i'm fine with it silent revisions are fine what another benefit be like a like a cost down or something like that like if like let's say an ssd let's use an ssd as an example Like a cost down or something like that? it if like let's say an ssd they changed out the controller such that the sequential reads and writes no longer meet the manufacturer spec but the random performance is actually marginally better such that in a real world scenario that most customers would use it in it actually

performs a little better i'd say that's fine okay yeah that's my take on that yeah so what's going on here is the tom's hardware released a report this week regarding ssd manufacturers changing not just nan flash but also the ssd controllers that is really kind of crazy it's a much bigger change than changing the flash yeah the flash like that's i mean maybe not so hot but i'm not too surprised it's happening changing the whole controller is pretty wild. And there's ways you can change the flash that don't hurt the performance or don't in a meaningful way.

And I would maybe argue that this is why usually I'd say when you're doing benchmarks, you don't use your old numbers. But I guess in this case, they would have the old SSD. Yeah. So even if they rerun it, they would get the same numbers. Yeah. Still, you should rerun it. But yeah, in this case, that wouldn't have saved them at all. Completely ignore that. The report looks closely at specifically, but I'm sure it happens to more than just this. Adid is XPG SX8200 Pro. Tom's Hardware originally reviewed this back in 2018,

and the drive sat on their best SSDs list for quite some time. These running changes that have happened to this SSD have had a massive impact on performance, with a 41% slowdown in file copy performance. And it says in the document a 500 megabyte per second decline in light workloads after the unreported changes. Tis a big oof, sir. That's a massive oof, I would say.

That's pretty rough. As Tom's updated their top listed SSDs in favor of new releases, they noted that ADATA had changed their controller, firmware, and NAND. It's a new device entirely. Just with the same product name. What is this? Is it like Theseus' ship

or whatever? There's this story. I think it's Theseus' ship, but I don't fully remember. Where there's this ship, and through the course of sailing it over years and years and years ago it undergoes repairs constantly right sure but at a certain point every single part of the ship has been replaced is it the same ship ah here we go even though the materials

it's made of change the shape the name and the design stay the same so it is the same ship uh if either it is the same ship if other people think it's the same ship. That's another way of thinking about it. There's the whole philosophyfoundation.org ship of Theseus thing. Yep, okay, so that's a whole thing. Whole thing, whole rabbit hole. The SSD of Theseus. Is it the same SSD? If they can convince all of you that it's the same SSD,

then is it the same SSD? Yeah. The answer is no. Yeah, not when you change the controller firmware and name. The answer is no, you butt head. That's the real answer. You should change the name and sell it as something different. Now, it's not uncommon for manufacturers to be forced to change the parts that they use. For example, DRAM. I remember back when I first got into computers, there was a whole thing around WinBond BH5 chips being like the shiz and then being discontinued.

And then it was Samsung TCCDs. And then I think they were called UTTs. So UTT was short for untested, apparently. And a lot of manufacturers, notably OCZ, I shouldn't say manufacturers, a lot of manufacturers notably ocz i shouldn't say manufacturers a lot of dram sellers notably ocz would sell uh tccd products which were samsung chips that had really good overclocking characteristics very efficient they'd run at really low voltages and then they would have like basically the same or very similar product, like not easily discernible to the consumer that would have these UTT dies in them. And they were like great for overclocking. Like they would sell these like overclocking centric SKUs. And then they would just like warranty them like they would rate them to these crazy voltages that people were happy enough to pump through their RAM.

But they were just like crappy dies that were cheap. And so companies were just like OCZ, were just selling them as premium memory and then just warrantying them that these crazy voltages, knowing that a bunch of them were going to die. And it was like this whole, it was this whole crazy thing. And I forget where I was going with this story, but the point is, right, the point is BH5s went away.

TCCDs eventually went away. And that doesn't mean that all of a sudden a Corsair or OCZ or a Mushkin or whoever the case may be, that doesn't mean that all of a sudden they don't still need to sell like, you know, the 3200 megahertz CL5, you know, RAM kit. So they've got to put something on it. So in a lot of cases, the DRAM chips, and you'll see this with graphics cards too, the DRAM chips can change. And I'm okay with that, as long as they don't use anything that doesn't meet the spec. SSDs are one of those products where they can still reach the spec. If all they spec is like sequential reads and writes. They can still reach the spec without having the same performance characteristics. So it becomes this really kind of scary gray area for consumers.

I don't know if this is a note from Tom's Hardware or Hexis who have both reported on this, but it is a good best practice. If you want to know that exactly what you buy is going to be exactly what was reviewed 6, 9, 12, 18 months ago, then buying from an SSD manufacturer who is vertically integrated like Samsung is a pretty good bet. Intel, to my knowledge, also has not pulled these shenanigans, but I do know that some others i know kingston's done it i know adata's done it um have pulled this kind of crap um and not been very transparent about it i remember having a really funny experience once uh with a stick of corsair xms2 memory the revision like the version number so they'd have a part number and then a version number the version number was like 17 point something and i'm like how many different sets of dies have you had on this thing this is

incredible because ddr2 was around for a long time by that point and it just it amused me it amused me a lot that's that's all i have to say about that now i just realized i i had you on whoops didn't mean to do that i had you on a Whoops. Didn't mean to do that. I had you on a monitor. I don't normally have you on. So I realized this, this whole show I've just been looking like off the window. So sorry. I've now fixed that. Um, where did I put the WAN doc? But yeah, this is, uh, this is brutal. I don't necessarily think we need to go through a ton of the rest of the notes. Um, it covers a lot of stuff that uh that that you just covered to be completely honest um but yeah this is not good and i'm i'm

happy they released that i hope you release your video i think it'll be really interesting to dive into i i think some amount is fine and if the if the difference is relatively negligible, like it's not really that big of a deal. Like if the performance drop was like, if it existed and if it was measurable, but like it was pretty darn small, like sometimes you just got to do what you got to do. You might not be able to get the supplies

you had in the past. It's remarketing this whole new device is going to be a nightmare, blah, blah, blah. Like it sucks it's not good for the consumer it's not good for the the manufacturer it's not good for anybody but like maybe it has to happen but dropping 41 improvement yeah and all these other crazy things just it's completely unacceptable and the worst case is the ones where they like clearly know it's going to happen like they send out review devices and then like almost immediately

they rev the product yeah that's dirty and like this has been a thing in like thumb drives forever but the difference is that nobody ever cared because they were thumb drives um but i mean it's actually kind of funny to think about i remember like back in the early 2000s mid-2000s thumb drive reviews were totally a thing especially right around the time usb3 was coming out so it was like late 2000s thumb drive reviews absolutely a thing so you would send out your thumb drive for review it would be like the fastest one and then you just rev the flash put crappy flash on it and now you're selling a bunch of thumb drives that are garbage um but people think it's good and they're never going to benchmark it because it's a thumb drive. Who cares? Yeah, man.

Manufacturers always finding a way to do us dirty, eh? Sorry, I have to send you this. Oh, what's up? Do you remember this? I don't know if I have an easy way to check. Is this Discord? Oh, lordy. Patriot 16 gig holiday stocking USB drive unboxing and speed test.

Okay. There you go. Luke managed to dig it up. I have personally reviewed a thumb drive. Hold on a second. No, we're pulling this up. We're pulling this up, ladies and gentlemen. Here we go.

Let me just move this a little bit. There we go. There it is. Patriot 16 gig holiday stocking whatever thing here. We're going to listen to it together. I made that sound effect. I clinked a fork on a glass or something. Now you're probably thinking, deja vu. I've seen this before.

This is the Patriot holiday tree and the Patriot snow person, politically correct, USB flash drive. So the holiday tree is for wow the snow i was sassy hey snow person there's one that i didn't have before and i didn't know i was getting so i went and shot the video already but now we have the patriot holiday stocking so that is the how did i make a four minute video about a usb thumb drive about a like holiday themed 16 gig i think it was like a it was either a promotional item or we got them at like a really good price or something and look at that 12 megabytes a second oh and then oh it's dropping off a little bit i don't sound very impressed

all right we can put i don't think that was the only one we did i remember there being a tree no that i acknowledged it right at the beginning of that video i was like yeah yeah this is not the same thing again but slightly different housing i had one of those for years and years i pulled the tree off of it because it interfered with like everything when you tried to plug it in but i used it for many years it served me very well at 12 to 13 megabytes a second all right uh we should do our last couple of headline topics risk 5 cpu unofficially this is very important decimates apple's m1 efficiency this is not a big surprise if you've been following the risk 5 initiative uh but micromagic has a new prototype CPU that offers decent performance

with record-breaking efficiency. RISC-V, man, this is going to be... Honestly, I've seen some interesting analyst takes on NVIDIA's ARM purchase going like, yo, NVIDIA, what are you doing, brah? Like, ARM is at their peak right now in this moment right now like it is nothing but downhill from here now there's it's no guarantee that risk 5 is going to take off or whatever um you know we're still waiting for lin Linux to dominate the desktop. But as an open CPU architecture with no licensing fees or royalties or anything like that,

oh boy, there's a lot of room for some very smart people to be contributing. And they are. And there's a lot of room for some very, very cool things to happen. In fact, there are probably, there are are things cool things that are happening now but unlike arm users of risk 5 are not uh they're not uh required to disclose that they're using it so there could be products and projects out there that are running risk 5 silicon and you just don't even know because they're just a black box like there's you have no access to to poke and prod at them so uh micromagic advisor andy huang claimed that the cpu could produce 13 000 core marks with a

5 gigahertz clock at 1.1 volt with lower power configurations providing even better efficiency this the 3 gigahertz setup outperforms a snapdragon 820 in the Samsung Galaxy S7, and that is at just 69 milliwatts. Nice. Nice. What's a CoreMark? Good question. It's a deliberately simplified platform-neutral CPU benchmarking tool released by the Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium,

and it focuses solely on the core pipeline functions of a CPU, including basic read-write, integer, and control operations. Ars Technica independently ran CoreMark on an Apple M1 Mac Mini and a Ryzen 7 4700U for comparison, and the Ryzen 7 4700U was 13,956 iterations per second per watt, while the Apple M1 was 10,947 iterations per second per watt, and the MicroMagic cpu at three gigahertz was uh about 10 times either of them in terms of efficiency so if you want something that's like a smart watch that you actually don't have to charge for a week this could be the way there pretty freaking incredible we've actually talked about risk 5 before uh we did a video with Sci-5, who is kind of like a chip design assistance firm

that is already shipping tons of RISC-V silicon. And as far as I can tell, they've just been beavering away over there since the last time we talked to them. It's been quite a while. We should actually check back in with those guys it's not a competitor for traditional arm and x86 cpus in phone or laptop applications yet but it's much closer to them than previous risk 5 implementations have been so we are a long ways off but it is absolutely possible that something like this could take the market by storm pretty cool stuff yeah all right is there anything else that we think is really critical to cover here we did promise i think the micron fab thing is pretty cool all right talk through it one of

micron's fabs in taiwan went offline on thursday which startled the market very quickly and sent memory uh memory spot prices upwards due to supply uncertainty even though the fab was only offline for one hour the fab typically pumps out approximately 8.8 percent of the global dram supply okay approximately 125 000 wafers wafer states per month wow okay production facility mostly makes ddr4 and lp ddr4 memory using 10 nanometer class process techniques i just think that's wild to be clear when you lose power for an hour at a fab that's a lot more than just 1 24th of a day of lost productivity micron says they're expecting to have it back to normal within the next few days because my understanding although i don't know if this is

specifically true of dram but my understanding of many of these micro manufacturing techniques is that anything that is in flux in some state of the uh manufacturing process can be lost by a sudden power outage or a sudden offline uh state so it is my understanding of this is very rough but i thought it was a little bit more certain than that i thought it was lost uh i'm not sure i mean i don't know yeah it depends and there's going to be a bunch of time wasted like going through and like seeing checking yeah checking everything making like then making sure all the machines when you why did it go offline properly making sure it doesn't go offline again all that kind of stuff um oh and actually there's one more there's one more thing i want to talk about asus and asrock have enabled resizable bar on z490 so this is before intel even announced

official support for resizable bar on their platforms. And Asus and ASRock have apparently both released BIOSes for some Z490 motherboards with the ability to enable what is effectively AMD's smart access memory. But it's not because AMD says that smart access memory is like, it's like that, but like, there's like optimizations, man. Um, so what smart access memory does and what resizable bar enables is the CPU to access the GPUs entire memory directly. It's part of the PCI Express specification, meaning anyone can implement it. I just was expecting motherboard manufacturers to wait for Intel to say, yep, let's go ahead and do this. AMD's performance claims for smart access memory

have it at roughly 5% to 10% faster than without it, and we have seen that backed up in the real world. In fact, I think we've seen results even better than that range in terms of minimum frame times. So that's a big deal in terms of delivering a smoother gaming experience. And early performance data provided by Japanese tech website ASCII places the Intel-flavored

version at similar performance levels, hinting that there's nothing inherently special about AMD's Ryzen Radeon synergies. AMD says there's more to the story though so we're gonna have to see uh you know how this looks when nvidia implements it and intel officially supports it and we can do a bunch more testing on it but that's pretty exciting stuff yeah all right now it's time to go check out ltt store and see uh how many of are. Wow. You guys are that I did not see that one coming. I thought people were going to be like, what? Seventy dollars for a pillow. I'm going to get the little one. But the big pillow is outselling the little one by a significant margin.

Did not expect that. OK, well, now I know I always underestimate you guys. I'm like, oh, you know, maybe you'll be like price sensitive or whatever and we like try and i should have just gone full alpaca wool i should have just been like here's a tiny pillow it's 50 like it's the best tiny pillow you'll ever buy yeah exactly you can rest your tiny little head on it what do i tell you people oh man all right well i think that's so yeah there's a secret is there there's a secret pocket in the pillow no what's what's up but no no it's not a pocket uh why are you shoving money in it in one of the pictures oh there is a pocket i lied okay yes there's a secret pocket in the pillow well it, it's not a secret now, Luke. Way to go.

Or should I say kook? What? I forget why I called you that one day. Do you remember this reference? I called you K-U-K-E at some point, kook. Oh, no, I remember it. I don't remember why. I don't even remember when it was.

I don't remember why. I know what happened. The big one does not have the secret pocket, by the way. The real reason the secret pocket exists, actually actually is it's part of the manufacturing process um we have to like close it up and on the small one it was really hard to hide the seam to close it back up so this is where they filled it and then they just jam it back in there and then they put a zipper there so that the whole thing would just be like cleaner looking um so you can see that looks like totally clean where the zipper is yeah um and then we didn't have to do that on the big one uh nick claims the big one does have it but i don't think it does no because we didn't

have to do it on the big one so we okay i lied okay well why are these people why do i think that okay apparently the big one does have a big pocket look at that i can put my whole huge pocket all right nice put that in there never mind oh and nick is also reminding me to look at super chats why are you guys sending super chats instead of buying stuff on ltdstore.com like i i get it you want to support linus media joining or joining the over 20,000 subscribers on Floatplate. Exactly. Exactly. This is what I'm talking about. All right. Fine. We'll look at the Super Chats then.

I'm only going to have time to do a few. Dark Guy 2 asks, have you guys gotten in the EVE Spectrum? We have. I actually wanted to shoot that today, but I ran out of time. So I'll probably shoot it early next week. I'm really excited to check it out. Mal asks, hey Linus, with the USA just recently banning cotton from Xinjiang, do you guys make sure your inventory doesn't contain any forced labor cotton in the supply chain? I don't know about that specific region.

I am going to have to find out where this... Wait, no, we don't have any cotton. No cotton. It's alpaca wool and polyester. I think he probably means in the whole product stack. Oh. Well, we use American Apparel t-shirts. So I don't know where they're getting their cotton.

That's a great question and something we are going to have to investigate. Thank you. Andrew Wells says, money for you. No, you're doing it wrong. That's 20 US dollars. Buy a pillow. What are you doing?

Tim Jennings says, why spend three videos on customer support with Secret Shopper and use Agent Sarah when you did not factor any of that into the final result? This is an insult to customer support reps, and it shows they're not valued. What are you talking about? We totally factored it in when we gave our final scores. We 100% factored it in. All right. Robert Mail says, hi, celebrity guest. Oh, you missed her.

New house is 500 feet from available fiber service. ISP will not take $3,000 to wire a single house is 500 feet from available fiber service isp will not take three thousand dollars to wire a single house but will take 27 49 a month if i get a business account and they'll wire it then unbelievable sorry dude clayton says y'all got any gpus haha jk any information on 3070 ti or 3080 ti i would be surprised if they launch anything like that anytime soon. What else we got? We'll take their sweet time. I looked up American Apparel's policies and stuff. I haven't found a specific.

So for cotton, they specifically say most of our cotton comes from the U.S. because of its high quality and strong environmental sustainability and social responsibility practices. More than 75% of the cotton acreage where our cotton is grown is irrigated using naturally occurring rainwater only, blah, blah, blah. They have a whole page on their About Us People Dash Environment. Oh, sweet. They talk about how it's all ethically and sustainably made. Okay. Well, there you go.

Thank you for that. Luck Dragon says, My first and last pre-built PC was a Dell in 2007. Latest PC was inspired by y'all and Jay's two cents. Thank you. Oh, you're welcome. You're welcome. Matthew Court says,

First time watching live. Hi from New Delhi. Love the content. Any chance you could do a guide to overclocking the new 5000 series? Overclock your RAM, basically? I mean, AMD is pushing so hard to a red line that like there's not really a ton of headroom in ryzen which is like yeah i don't know take some of the fun out of it but like it's fine it means you get a ton of performance right out of the box right uh vorpal bunny says cute hat super chat thank you

for that and kinestic final super chat this Thank you for that. And Kinestic, final super chat. This last one. Do you support changing the industry standard name to graphics brick? No, I do not. We're going to keep calling them graphics cards. I see where you're getting at with this though. They're not really like card skinny anymore. No.

Oh, I lied. Pixel Plays. Is it machine washable? No, please do not machine wash your pillow you have to like clean it like you would any other pillow sorry uh so don't let your cat pee on it um dry clean only do not do not bleach do not tumble dry do not iron do not drop do not drop it's on the label says do not drop it all right dakota reno asks why are girls so confusing if i had the answer to that i would have a lot more money and fame than i do now

thanks for watching see you again next time same bad time same bad channel bye oh by the way letter kenny was not referencing us they were referencing the same thing we are referencing which is 1970s batman with the whole same bat time same bat channel thing see you later yes Outro Music