The WAN Show - I Have MORE to Say About Steam Deck - WAN Show August 6, 2021

Episode Date: August 9, 2021

Visit https://www.squarespace.com/WAN and use offer code WAN for 10% off Try FreshBooks free, for 30 days, no credit card required at https://www.freshbooks.com/wan Save 10% at Ridge Wallet with offer code WAN at https://www.ridge.com/WAN Check out our other Podcast: Carpool Critics Movie Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt-oJR5teQIjOAxCmIQvcgA Timestamps (courtesy of NoKi1119) [0:00] Chapters. [1:35] Intro. [2:10] Topic #1: Valve's Steam Deck.    3:25  Steam Deck is a Linux PC.    5:49  Hardware specs.    10:41  The Deck's screen.    17:26  Comments on LTT's video.    22:53  Valve's dedication.    29:39  Ergonomics, buttons and joystick.    37:31  Aggressive pricing. [44:38] Topic #2: Apple scans devices for CSAM.    47:31  Issues with monitoring privacy.    49:07  Possible exploitation. [51:38] Sponsors.    51:47  Freshbooks Accounting.    52:53  Ridge Wallet.    54:00  Squarespace Website Creator. [54:56] Topic #3: Activision's Blizzard.    55:14  Blizzard's President resigns.    56:24  Shareholders are suing too. [1:02:42] Topic #4: Do NOT buy from KWEST.    1:03:58  KWEST's "reasons" for not shipping orders.    1:05:07  Fake FDA, links and phone number. [1:05:41] LTTstore merch. [1:08:22] Topic #5: New TPM hacked within 30 minutes. [1:11:09] Topic #6: Corsair's DDR5 modules needs cooling. [1:14:45] Superchats. [1:26:04] Wrapping up. [1:26:22] Outro. 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 and we're live welcome to the web show ladies and gentlemen we've got a fantastic show lined up for you today i went to visit valve i mean we went from for years having no relationship with Valve whatsoever to all of a sudden I am hanging out at Valve headquarters getting an early look at what I think is going to be the hottest computer hardware release of the year the Steam Deck so I'm going to be giving you guys more of like behind the scenes I'll I'll talk about what it was like because in that video I had to be laser focused on making a video. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we can talk

through some of your guys' questions. I'm sure Luke has some questions. Did you watch the video? I did. You did. Okay, perfect. Yeah. So we're going to chat Steam Deck. we've also got uh this is a pretty big news item today apple has plans to scan photos on your device for child abuse material uh what this means for privacy in the future uh remains to be seen what else we got today luke we have more blizzard news oh no basically everything's horrible and it continues to be horrible. I don't think we've heard anything yet so far that has, like, alleviated any issues with the general situation. And also, don't buy GPUs from Quest. Okay.

They're on a quest to take your money and run. Hey, got him. Let's roll that intro. Don't give them the Quest reward. Okay? Jeez. money and run hey got him let's roll that intro don't give them the quest reward okay cheese and the show is brought to you today by fresh books ridge wallet and squarespace thanks so much you guys okay what was the headliner what did you start with let's talk about the steam deck shall we ah nice let's talk about the steam deck there There is a lot to go over. So for those

of you who missed the video that went up today, most of you watched it, but here is kind of the, the speeds and feeds in a, in a slowed down, a little bit more digestible fashion, because I was going, I was going a million miles a minute and i didn't really have a choice because i had a grand total from walking in the front door to walking out the front door i had about two and a half hours so that included more than half an hour of being inside the building but not allowed to touch the steam deck yet and that included about 20 minutes and change of packing up my things not being allowed to touch the Steam Deck and and walking out um so we were you know we were my big thing going into it was that this is a piece of hardware that I'm really excited about um it's a category

of devices that I really love. Portable gaming PCs. I mean, it's kind of like how way back when I was in university, right? I was super into small form factor gaming PCs. And this is kind of like that, but on ROIDs, right? The smallest form factor gaming PC. Because it's more than just a handheld console it is a full-fledged pc the fact that it has a usbc like docking connector on it means that you can power this thing thanks to usb power delivery off of a device that can run

a display peripherals high speed networking the sky is the freaking limit. It is running a desktop-grade Linux operating system. All Valve has done is they've put a bunch of development work into their Proton. It's not an emulator. It's more like a translation layer between DirectX and, well, whether it's Vulkan or OpenGL, I guess it doesn't really matter, to Proton because both of those are supported on Linux. So they've put this development work into this kind of this translation layer. And then this basically what is Steam big picture skin that runs on top of the translation layer to play your games. But other than that, it's just Linux.

It's just it's running freaking Linux. You know, unlike what nintendo allows you to do you can say hey look i actually don't want to play games right now and you can do whatever the f**k you want that is so cool it's just a computer man like if i was in charge of which i'm not and it's a good thing because this is a terrible catch like uh or like uh tagline but uh you know i would say you know my marketing for it would be it's just a computer man steam deck that's that's not how they're going to market it they're really going to focus on it as a gaming device and that's that's the right thing to do

because you want to get this in the hands of gamers you want to you want it to be the same kind of slick polished experience uh navigating the store, navigating your game library that you would have on other handheld consoles. Not that there are that many of them these days, but with also the flexibility to go way deeper than that. I mean, now all of a sudden, you've got the Steam mod workshop. You're not just playing the game the way it's meant to be played. You can play it however the heck you want. I love that. I mean, play the game how you want. That's a better tagline. That's a way more on message tagline. Also still not good enough, but I'm coming up with these on the spot. So give me a break here.

So the basics of the specs. It's got four Zen 2 CPU cores. So that actually puts it behind some other handhelds that are on the market already. The A&Neo, for example, has six Zen 2 cores, 12 threads. The one in the Steam Deck is running at 2.4 to 3.5 gigahertz. And then the big headline for the Steam Deck is obviously the RDNA2 GPU. So this is a custom piece of silicon that Valve has clearly made a major commitment with AMD to have made that has eight RDNA2 CUs at 1 to 1.6 gigahertz. What that means in practical terms from our limited time hands-on

is that the Steam Deck compared to previous APUs, which are using Vega graphics, it could have as much as 50% more performance in GPU-heavy applications. Now, I said something that was a little bit unclear in the video. I said, I'm one of the first people in the world to be hands-on with an rdna2 apu you could make the argument that the xbox series x and the playstation 5 and for that matter uh no just those ones yeah you could make the argument that those are apus that are rdna2 but i had excluded them because i didn't consider them similar enough to the kinds of processors that you would find in a in a laptop or in a in an off-the-shelf you know handheld because what Valve's built here is a little bit more off the shelf it's just kind of ahead of the shelf if you understand what I mean

unlike the Xbox Series X or the PlayStation 5, for example, it doesn't use graphics memory. And that's one of the reasons that those consoles perform so well is that when the CPU and GPU have to share that bandwidth to the system memory, the faster the memory can go, the better. So that's why you see these ultra-wide memory buses to this just turbocharged graphics memory but in a handheld device like the i keep forgetting i keep wanting to call it a stream deck like the steam deck you can't afford

the power that running gddr6x memory would cost you or you know something crazy like that so really it's it's more akin to what you will be able to get in an off-the-shelf ultrabook or thin and light laptop in six to nine months whenever AMD actually releases their 6000 series APUs with RDNA2 graphics. It's just that you're getting it earlier before AMD is ready to ship these APUs with Zen 3. So that's the point of clarification I wanted to offer there is that this is an utterly unique product. It's Zen 2 plus RDNA 2. So it kind of straddles that generational line.

And that's what's allowing Valve to start shipping these things before AMD is ready to deliver their 6000 series mobile chips, mobile APUs. So it has 16 gigs of LPDDR5 memory, and the timing looks right. Given that regular DDR5 is starting to make headlines, Corsair was talking about the cooling solutions that they've had to design for their upcoming DDR5 memory modules. I'm actually kind of surprised that's not in the doc for this week. Luke, do you want to just throw a note in there that we should talk about desktop DDR5? So this is low power DDR5 running at 5.5 million transfers per second. So it's in 32-bit quad channel. So that is significantly more

bandwidth than you would have running just dual channel, regular low power GDR4 like you would in a modern system. And it's especially important because again, the CPU and GPU are sharing that bandwidth. And it should be noted that this is still way less bandwidth than even a mid-tier GPU from, you know, five years ago, honestly speaking. Like, let's, here, hold on a second. Let's run the numbers. Like, what does a, what does a 1060, GTX 1060 memory bandwidth? It's rated for 192 gigabytes per second. So we're at less than half of that by my napkin math. Guys, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on that, but it's not a lot. But remember too, that this is a

GPU that doesn't have nearly the same kind of performance characteristics as a 1060 i'm expecting this to be a very well balanced system and i'm excited for that now let's talk about the screen so 1280 by 800 i feel like i covered this in pretty good depth uh during the video but uh luke i think this is where this is where you might want to chime in how do you feel about the screen because i know that not everyone agrees with my take on it not by a long shot i think i mostly do actually um i i like an ideal world i would want the resolution to be higher but there is uh some amount of performance benefit from having a smaller resolution screen absolutely um and uh not just in terms of like more frames per second there's also performance benefit in regards to battery so um that is kind of nice but i think my probably biggest qualm with it is it not being oled which is i think something that you

share i do i do i we're mostly on the same board there and and you made a really interesting observation in the video that I didn't think about going into it, but makes a lot of sense. For content viewing, yeah, that's probably not going to feel that great. But yeah, for games, I don't think it's too bad. Obviously, I wouldn't want that in a desktop format, but you can dock it and then you can have another monitor, right? In a mobile experience, that's a compromise that I'm happy to take, personally.

Yeah, it's an interesting note how you talk about the battery improvement from going for a lower resolution. So there's a few kind of elements to that. One of them is that you might make the argument, well, Luke, come on. You could just have a 1080p display and run your games at 720. We are way past, in my opinion, and this is going to be a hot take. Some people are not going to like this, but I think we are way past the pixel density threshold where running at native resolution is necessary. There, I said it. At a normal distance, looking at moving content, okay? So I'm not talking, you know,

fine text while you're sending emails or word processing or anything like that. Or, you know, anything that requires pixel perfect precision, like photo retouching or video editing. I'm talking about consuming content. I first had this realization when we did our review of the LG Ultra Fine.

This must have been about three years ago at this point. So it's that 5K monitor that LG released that only worked in 5K on a Mac, but you could run on a PC as long as it had Thunderbolt, if I recall correctly, but it would only run at 4K. And to my eye, there was no difference. I couldn't tell the difference between 4K and 5K at that size if we had two different monitors side by side. And I couldn't even tell when the 5K monitor was running 4K.

Now, for those of you who are young, this concept of making sure that you're always running your display at native resolution is a relatively new idea. making sure that you're always running your display at native resolution is a relatively new idea. CRTs had kind of a factory optimal suggested resolution, but because they were just a gun firing at these little electrons, I can't remember what they're firing. They're firing something at a phosphor-coated glass piece. The dots that it fired, you could fire them anywhere. So you could run them out of spec.

You could say, let's say you bought a CRT that was 1600 by 1260 hertz. Well, you could maybe run that at 1280 by 960 would have been the correct aspect ratio for crt so 1280 by 960 75 or 85 hertz so you could decide how you wanted to run the display and both of them would look equally sharp then along came lcds and if you ran them at anything other than their native resolution they would look like absolute garbage. But that was more true in the days when monitors were 19 inches running at 1280 by 1024. That is not a lot of pixels. Here, we're talking about something that is 7 inches running at 1280 by 800. It is one quarter the size. And so at a reasonable viewing distance, I would make the argument that whether you were running a 720p native panel or a 1080p panel,

you could easily just run your game at 720p and most people probably wouldn't notice the difference. In fact, many phone manufacturers already do this with their 1440p panels. They'll have them run at 1080p in order to save battery because it's less work for the GPU to render. So if someone were to say, well, Valve should have just put a 1080p display so I could have the best of both worlds and run it at 720p, you might be forgetting something. If it's an emissive, or excuse me, not an emissive display, if it is a backlit display, or excuse me, not an emissive display, if it is a backlit display, when you increase the pixel density, so that is of the actual film itself of the panel, when you increase the pixel density, you increase the amount of actual wiring, like every, every pixel has to have power and signal,

right? So you increase the actual amount of wiring that is in that layer and what you do is you increase the amount of backlight strength that is needed to shine through it so valve going with a seven i'm i keep calling it 720p even though it's 1280 by 800 it's 16 by 10 rather than 16 by 9 but i'm going to use them interchangeably here i'm sorry um so even though valve went with a 720p like an hd panel um i think it was justified from a from a power savings perspective and from a from an expectation setting perspective this thing is not going to be running games at 1080p 60 fps not triple a games especially not new ones you would absolutely be able to run older games like that. You want to play some Psychonauts on your Steam Deck.

That would be a great experience. And 1080p, yeah, it would be sharper. But I think you could also get a lot of the way there by super sampling the game anyway, if you really wanted to. And because it's just a PC, you can do that. Fine. Render the game at 1080p. Now, obviously, that's something we didn't have time or tools to test. We weren't even allowed to capture game footage.

But I would make the argument, or I would guess, I would hypothesize that we'd get a lot of the way there, running at 1280x800, super sampled to 1920 by 1200 and then rescaled for the display i think we'd get a lot of that that sharpness back right i have a unless you're continuing to go through things i have a series of questions oh okay give me a couple more things so it's got all right let me let me do a couple more things so it's um USB-C with DisplayPort 1.4, 40-watt-hour battery that they say is going to give you two to eight hours of battery life. And I'm actually compiling some of the really good questions

that I've seen in the comments for that video. I did read the vast majority of them, and I'm going to compile any of the excellent ones from the stream today so that I can make sure that as we plan our follow-up content on the Steam Deck, because that will absolutely be coming, we finally have a responsive rep at Valve

who seems genuinely excited to work with us to bring you guys this information. So as we're planning out our future content, I want to keep all of this in mind. So I've already had some good questions about the screen resolution and Netflix consumption. I want to keep all of this in mind. So I've already had some good questions about The screen resolution and Netflix consumption So I had said that Netflix looks kind of trashy in when I was viewing it there I had blamed it on the resolution of the display that might actually be be excuse me

That might actually be more because I was stuck with Netflix's crappy 720p bitrate Netflix is limited to 720p on Linux. This is a DRM issue. So I wanted to ask Valve, hey, are you guys working on this? Because I suspect that. So what we're going to need to do is we're going to need to test higher bitrate content on that display, which we can easily do because it's a pc whoo um to see if the problem is netflix just delivering a looking stream to the steam deck um so that's something it's often a problem to be honest when people do testing with netflix because there's also like bandwidth things and like a lot of other stuff that will change like netflix will detect what bandwidth you have and give you a

different level and even if they detect incorrectly they'll just give you a lower bandwidth rate like absolutely they're gonna lean on lower but anyways um will battery thumbsticks or buttons be swappable even if it's with difficulty that's something that i want to talk about because it's a sustainable thing as well i don't want to see devices thrown in the e-waste bin um people want to know if the emmc model can be upgraded with an ssd could that perhaps be the best of both worlds you have a small boot emmc essentially and then you go in after the fact and upgrade it with an ssd because i believe it's been confirmed by valve that the emmc model will still have the m.2 slot so as if it's linux i mean there's no reason it couldn't have two drives or more i mean there's

no reason you couldn't plug in a usbc steam library along with your micro sd steam library if loading time sucked you know maybe someone will make like a pack that kind of clips on to the back of it or something and has like extra battery because it's a type c port right it could have extra battery it could have storage in it. That is a brilliant idea. Oh, crap. Someone's going to do it now before I set the LTT engineers on it. How cool of an accessory would that be, though? That'd be sweet.

So it's just got a C to C kind of pass-through, so you can charge the pack and the Steam Deck. And then it's got an expanded library. You could even just have another m.2 slot in it so people could put in whatever drive they want and you could have a gigantic bare bones library yeah um steam deck accessory idea you could you could have like a bundle option where it comes with the drive um but yeah i'd sell the bare bones kit because you're selling to hardcores anyway so who cares exactly right like that's something that's nice is whenever

we do product development we know it's going to go to people who like know what they're doing exactly no offense to other youtubers communities no offense i'm sure you guys know what you're doing too as long as the task is no more complicated than picking your nose. Excuse me. Sorry, but did I say that out loud? Okay. So yeah, why don't you hit me with some of these questions? Okay. First one is not a question.

It's a comment, but I found it quite funny. They said we could hear Linus being loud in the tested.com video. Okay. I was trying. That's hilarious. I was trying. We had so little time

and it was a really echoey room. I was actually, I even saw people comment on the video that I sounded more quiet than usual. That was because I was trying to be respectful of the other people that were shooting, like, you know, five meters away, if that. So there were four of us in the room and i was i was doing my best but i just there was no such thing i mean other people were talking through mine as well um i just happened to have my mic close to my mouth so we were able to post-process that and were able to mostly get rid of it um but we were we all just had to talk over each other we didn't have a choice we had an hour and a half hands-on with, like I said,

what I think is the biggest hardware release of the year. So I did my best. I did my best. Just an observation that I had was, first of all, it felt very old school. You like scrambling through what felt like a very large hotel suite with a bunch of tools trying to get all the information you could um so that was a fun kind of nostalgia trip watching that yeah thanks well it was me and

ed right that is yeah and hearing ed like trip about stuff from the background was great as well like yeah that was that was actually very cool i enjoyed it a lot but um how many i know you showed a few like you couldn't test the controllers you couldn't do capture that kind of stuff how many things and what things were you not able to do whether it was time or because they didn't want you to uh well one of the things i wasn't able to do due to time was i mean they limited what games we were allowed to show and i asked them why because uh you know we've run into this before at trade shows right luke um so i asked them why, because, you know, we've run into this before at trade shows, right, Luke? So I asked them why.

And they said, you know what, honestly, we don't think or we don't know that there's any legal reason that we couldn't get away with. You know, you're an independent media outlet. Whatever game you install on it, you know, what control do we have over that? Like, you know, they said they didn't know that it would actually be a legal problem but for them it was more about the relationship managing those relationships this is something they disclosed during the meeting but i it didn't make its way into the video because it wasn't about the steam deck but valve has literally hundreds in this engineering i think this is an e uh what is it i I made some notes. You know what? I don't have them here with me. It's engineering validation two. These are EV2 samples and

they are considering these, as far as I can tell, dev kit ready. Those units arrived literally the day, two days before we got there and they loaded a new build on them at almost midnight before we came in and filmed in the morning and like luke as a developer how crazy is that that's absolutely psyched to put a new software build on something the night before you show it to they could have they could have have rolled back, but that's still... That is insane. That's cool, though. I don't know.

I like those kind of pushes when you're doing stuff at midnight before the day, but anyways. So what it came down to... Oh, I'm not done. I didn't even answer the question yet. So what it came down to was respect.

Valve wanted to respect those developers and give them a chance to get their dev kits, which were in the basement of the building we were in, apparently to get their dev kits which were in the basement of the building we were in apparently get their dev kits in the mail and see their game running on the steam deck give them some time to tune it to target it right and then show the game running on the steam deck because no developer wants controls or whatever yeah like i don't think about it this way because i'm a hardware enthusiast that's my that's my that's my jam right so i just think of games that i don't play as benchmarks you know

like to me to me they're they're if i don't if i'm not into them it's just uh you know how valid of a benchmark is it is it reproducible does it have a built-in tool do people actually care about this what does it tell us about this this piece of hardware when we run this game on it? Does it tell us how good the CPU is? Does it tell us how good the GPU is? Does it tell us both? I just think of games as kind of benchmarks. So to me, it's like, well, who cares, right? I'll just run it on it and it runs as well as it does. And all I care about is the relative performance to other hardware. But no, okay, I can see from a game developer's perspective, if their game is running well as it does and all i care about is the relative performance to other hardware but no okay i can see from a game developer's perspective if their game is running choppy they feel you know

bad that's not good yeah that's not their game being enjoyed properly that's not what it's about for them that's their art and so valve got specific permission from every game developer whose game was pre-installed on those consoles to include it and it was very gracious of so many of them to allow their games to be included there were like 30 games on it so that's another thing that i didn't get a chance to cover i didn't even get to scratch the surface of the games that were installed on it and in fact the only reason that i focused on doom eternal and cs go and witcher 3 was because I needed CSGO to run my display latency test. And then Doom Eternal and Witcher 3 were games that I happened to preload

on my Aya Neo, which I really wanted to show side to side because I had no idea what games were going to be there. And Valve did not allow me to plug my own Steam library into the Steam Deck because I had games

that the developers had not authorized to be shown. So that's the whole story behind why I showed the games that I did. I had some people upset that I didn't focus enough on the touchpads. I had Anno preloaded. I was like, am I going to be able to install Uplay on this thing? Can I run Anno? Get the touchpads going? I was ready, guys.

I was ready for it i wanted to do it but uh i just didn't have enough time those are things that i definitely want to explore in follow-up content one of my questions is specifically about ano but i'm not there yet um okay okay i saw i i i noticed witcher 3 as well and i actually forgot about that during these notes but uh i saw doom i saw counter-strike i saw transistor all of those games are notoriously well running games that's true that's true but doom eternal was running at uh medium so native resolution medium i wasn't even making use of more modern features like dynamic resolution scaling, for example, that are just, you know, whether the hardware purists like us like it or not. Those are just going to be part of gaming moving forward, upscaling, dynamic resolution scaling, things like that.

And so, you know, demanding games like a Dirt 5, for example, that runs on the Aeneo at about 30 FPS at low. That means that I would expect the Steam Deck to hit 40 to 45, maybe even a little bit more, because I suspect that we're memory bandwidth bottlenecked at that point. And the Steam Deck should have more muscle to flex when it comes to heavily like gpu memory bottlenecked situations um i i'm really bullish on the performance i think that we might have to we might have to accept dynamic resolution scaling we might have to accept turning down in-game details but i mean if low spec gamer has taught us anything it's that until you prove it doesn't run it'll run and there's a there's a lot more hardware in the steam deck than he's often working with like yeah don't kid yourself

this is a this is a powerful little machine now staying on the topic of games i have a bunch of hardware questions as well but staying on the topics of games um i know the steam controller originally was super super cool and something that got uh pushed around a lot when the steam controller came out was civ because you could play games like save on your tv which was previously not really a thing unless you had one of those couch commander setups that no one owns um so it like wasn't really a thing yeah um how are the ergonomics in general and i have a lot of questions here but i'm gonna start with okay um did you try just using the touchpads because that looked like a thumbs way down position for me did you try just

using the touchpads during standard period of time so the touchpads in my opinion in my opinion the touchpads are on there because valve believes that they enable gaming experiences that are simply not practical with a joystick or a d-pad configuration because they're touch sensitive and you can use them as trackpads because they've got this advanced haptic feedback built into them the touchpads are they're there for a reason there's there's games you're not going to want to play with a joystick like an rts for example just like on the original steam controller but in my opinion the touchpads are were were second class citizens when it came to ergonomics. Being like it.

That was how I felt. Even though I have smaller hands, therefore, compared to someone whose thumbs come over more to kind of get in here and access something. For me, it's a relatively small motion, but it was less comfortable to use the touchpads than it was to use either the joystick or the D-pad. Now, related to that question, both the joystick and the d-pad, this is something that

almost no controllers do well. Pretty much every controller out there is primarily a joystick controller or primarily a d-pad controller. And also there's that other thing bolted onto it, right? We've all experienced it. And there's ones that try to be both there's that modular thrust master run for example where you can actually switch the places but the thing is even if you could move them you know physically move them around on the controller the reality of it is the contours are designed for your thumb to hover above like where a thumb stick would be or to sit flat like where a d-pad would be. It's not the same. It's just not the same. I think the Steam Deck is the closest that I've seen

to something that is perfectly balanced for both. So whether you want to play SNES games and use the D-pad exclusively, or you want to play PlayStation games, PC games, games that are more joystick optimized, you will be, in my opinion, at least 99% comfortable. Neither of them interferes with the other at all. Speaking of the triggers and the joysticks and the D-pad,

effectively all of that stuff, we know their touchpads are pretty good, okay, whatever, they're tuning in the haptics, whatever, but touch pads are like pretty good okay whatever they're tuning in the haptics whatever but we saw they're pretty good with the steam controller joysticks triggers d-pads really hard to get right what are your comments on those okay i like the d-pad it's solid um you know me i'm pretty picky about d-pads it's not a super clicky d-pad but manages to not feel mushy it really does remind me of a just a good simple classic d-pad like you'd have on the snes for example um the buttons hard to evaluate because the let me i'm trying to think what the

the b button is kind of hanging off the edge so a x and y all felt pretty good not super clicky like i remember razor did a controller a number of years ago they had these hyper clicky like like they felt like a mouse switch under them um so they're not clicky like that but they're fine i would describe them as fine the one that hangs off the edge they've got some tuning to do because right now it feels and sounds markedly different from the other three but they're aware of that that's something that they're that's something that they're working on the joysticks felt excellent i know one of the big concerns about this product is joystick drift now obviously that's something i can't evaluate in this curated supervised experience with these brand new devices right they haven't they haven't

been worn out yet but what i noticed is that the joysticks are not a mobile style joystick so when you look at the profile shots where i hold up the a and neo and the steam deck kind of one on top of the other like this the steam deck is about double the profile and part of that is the ergo grips for the bottom of bottoms of your hands and part of that is the much higher profile more desktop uh profile joysticks so the a and neo has more of like a low profile kind of mobile joystick not nearly as bad as the uh which one was the 3ds one where you slid the joystick around 3ds excel or something like that oh one of those anyway yeah not as bad as that but very similar or whatever yeah yeah very similar to what you'd find on a nintendo switch none of them uh i think valve has some tuning to do in terms of

uh like mixing so the uh the acceleration curve on uh joystick movement i wouldn't mind seeing that adjusted a little bit it just it felt a little bit uh different to me but i also don't have a ton of experience playing games with a joystick so it could just be something that i was imagining um the hardware though the hardware felt good and and i i'm pretty confident in the hardware right now cool okay um more things uh ed has an interesting ed had an interesting comment about like hand meat and it touching the touchpad.

I know you said you'd have to try to make that happen. Oh, not a problem, in my opinion. Really? Even for like monster hand, like bigger than me hand people? In my opinion, not a problem because it's the angle that your hand's coming in. Because like here, I'm going to kind of, I'll change my angle a little bit. Like you're holding it like this, right? So the bigger your hands are, the more you're going gonna kind of i'll change my angle a little bit like you're holding it like this right so the bigger your hands are the more you're gonna kind of curl around it but that's

still gonna leave that gap there you're never gonna you're never gonna touch that touch pad i don't i don't see that as a potential problem at all okay okay i just wanted to like super clarify on that um we're we're getting a little bit in the weeds here now. Do you think, I know Valve with SteamOS has wanted other manufacturers involved the whole time. When they made the Steam PC, a big part of their showcase was other manufacturers. Somewhere in one of their announcements about the Steam Deck,

I remember something about them wanting to make this and then kind of pass it off do you think other hardware manufacturers are going to jump on it this is this is very different than the visit down to valve but i think other hardware manufacturers have already jumped on they just aren't the big names yet right like i mean i mean yeah i mean more of the like normie companies. Like do you think like Asus is going to make a Asus deck? Asus probably has prototypes in their lab and is probably sitting there punching themselves in the face over and over and over and over again

that they let Valve get out ahead of them on this instead of having hardware sitting there ready for SteamOS to run on it that is my that is my opinion i i think that they are absolutely mobilizing a crack team of engineers to to come out and fight this thing head on i think that valve is not making it easy though which is interesting so valve with steam machines it was very clear that that was a third party ecosystem play in fact i don't believe they even they sold one as a first party one didn't they but it was manufactured by someone else and they were very upfront about it if i recall correctly they didn't

really want anything to do with it and their showcase at like ces had a huge lineup of different manufacturers exactly valve was a different approach was all about we're building an ecosystem i don't get that vibe i think valve is kind of feeling kind of jaded from the their last experience going to market with ecosystem partners and they are they're loaded for bear here like the steam the steam deck is priced aggressively we've talked about this on the WAN show before. And you see people complaining about the pricing. But compared to what, guys? Compared to what? Compared to anything that is real and actually exists,

the hardware is extremely aggressively priced for what it is. And so while Valve might totally be open to someone coming in and creating a Steam Deck competitor and a product that runs SteamOS, in fact, AYA might ship a SteamOS preloaded device because it'll save them a Windows license. at that pricing, it's going to be really difficult for anyone to undercut Valve because I get the vibe that if they're making money, it's razor thin. And really the play is more support for gaming on Linux, which gets gaming out from under Microsoft's shackles. You could kind of think of it. it frees gaming it frees gamers from the windows ecosystem um and it also generates revenue for valve because on linux steam is going to be the thing their proton compatibility layer is going to be the thing to their credit they've kept it very open though nothing prevents Nothing prevents you from running Proton without SteamOS.

There's a couple of clarifications I want to go through, too. Someone mentioned in Flowplane chat, and yes, absolutely, you could stream games to the Steam Deck. Sorry. You could use your own computer. You could use a different service. Sure. Yep, definitely a thing.

There was another thing that I wanted to clarify, but I don't remember but no big deal um okay last of all what do you think this is this is i saw this comment in in flow plane i'm a little disappointed i didn't think about it myself um but what do you think about the viability of just like strapping one of these to your back and plug it in an index? If I had thought I had time to set up the base stations, I would have taken my index down and tried to play Beat Saber on it. Don't imagine for a second that you're going to be playing a game like Half-Life Alyx at, you know, full desktop gaming pc fidelity but i don't see any reason why something like a a quest 2 uh plugged into this thing uh couldn't work or really i mean any other any other vr headset i i don't

see any reason why it couldn't play beat saber yeah yeah awesome cool i think that's, I think that's it for, for my round of questions. Um, Oh, you mentioned the, you mentioned that it felt good in your hands. It does. Even with the additional weight, it's no problem. Yeah. It feels, it feels good in the hands. The extra size helps because it's a little less dense and it's also well balanced. That's sometimes more important than the actual weight, like what the balance of a device is. I've reviewed phones before that are exactly the same weight as another phone, but they're really top heavy.

So they kind of always feel like they're going to fall out of your hand when you're holding them. It's so important. And I think they did an excellent job of nailing that down. Cool. Cool. Okay. I guess that's pretty much it for the Steam Deck. Have you been checking Floatplane Chat seeing if they had any other questions?

Are we good? I have been monitoring for the most part. I think we're pretty okay all right cool excellent uh why don't we move on people want to talk about this is pretty unrelated there's been a few different questions about crossing the border oh yeah okay i mean that was oh and i haven't even talked about any more behind the scenes at valve um yeah it's cool i i think they've got more than one space but the space that i was in was yeah it was super clean um everyone there was super nice i've never really had the privilege of talking to anyone

at valve before other than uh one one bloke who appeared to be the only developer working on steam in-home streaming back when it first started up so the ability to have your your steam gaming rig uh run a game and then stream it to something else this is way before the steam deck became a thing and valve took it seriously they had one person working on it as far as i could tell and i did get in touch with that individual um we're on steam. I have him as a Steam friend. And that was the only way I was ever able to interact with anyone at Valve. That's been... Oh, and we had a PR rep that replied to my emails, I think twice.

Once I managed to get my hands on a piece of index hardware that I otherwise couldn't get because it was out of stock. And another time I got some game keys. So that was that. That's it. That's been the extent of my interaction with Valve. Most of the Valve products we've covered in the past, we've just we've just had to buy them. We've had no kind of advantage whatsoever.

So it was really nice to finally get engaged with some folks there. They seem super nice they seem super excited about this product and what it means because it's a lot more than just steam deck like this is this is gaming on linux guys that's the real play here that's what this is about this is about the pc not just being a big gray box anymore now it's a sleek little black handheld thing and it's not just windows anymore it's not just intel anymore. It's not just Intel anymore. This is the ultimate underdog story here other than Valve. You know, you got AMD, Linux.

It's exciting. It's super exciting, guys. So, yeah, that was really cool. One of the other things I wasn't allowed to do was unplug and plug things in a lot. They were worried that could cause problems. I wasn't allowed to try out my Thunderbolt 4 dock. I had thought it was possible that...

I mean, this is a custom SoC. It has a custom GPU in it, for all I know. Maybe it has USB 4. And one way to check that would have been to plug in a thunderbolt 4 peripheral and see if it works uh so i wasn't able to do that what else what else did i want to do i mean what about the back buds oh they feel good they feel good maybe a little stiff on the on these ones like if it was for me but then the flip side of that is that i'm unlikely to ever use them because i'm an old dog it's hard to learn new tricks and so the fact that they're stiff means i will never accidentally

press them i was gonna say you generally want those to be stiff um yeah because you don't want to accidentally press it like you said so i wish the i wish the triggers were a little deeper that's one thing. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Why don't we move on to our next topic for today, guys? Do you want to talk Blizzard? I feel like I've talked a lot. I just got signed out.

But I'm down. I'll just be a moment. No, I'll talk through the Apple news. Apple has created an incredibly complicated system to deal with child sexual abuse material, and it is all done locally on your device before it is uploaded to Apple's servers. But what they're going to be doing is scanning iPhones for child abuse material. So Apple published a technical document that explains how their child safety features, developed in collaboration with child safety experts, work. It covers three areas. So one is communication safety and messages. and sending sexually explicit materials that is going to create some awkward conversations,

which is probably a good thing for people to be talking to their kids about sexting and, you know, those pictures and what might ultimately happen to them. But what it means on the phone is that this type of content will be blurred when a child receives it and the child will be warned about it. Parents will be notified if the child opens it. And likewise, if the child sends a sexually explicit photo, messages will, likewise, oh, likewise, if the child sends a sexually explicit photo, messages will use on-device machine learning to analyze image attachments. Okay, so part two of this is detecting child sexual abuse material on device. So Apple has chosen to scan

for it on the device rather than on their iCloud servers. I can see why Apple just wouldn't want it on their iCloud servers any more than necessary. And working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and other groups and agencies, they've created an unreadable, that's a dangerous word to use, unreadable database of image hashes to compare your device's images to. So then before uploading a photo to iCloud Photos, it is compared against this database locally on the phone. If there's a match, the device creates a cryptographic safety voucher and uploads both to iCloud Photos. After an undisclosed threshold is exceeded, Apple will then be able to interpret the contents of the vouchers,

the uploaded images, and the matching CSAM images. So CSAM is child sexual abuse material. And these will be manually reviewed. What a job. And it confirmed. Oh, it makes my skin crawl. And if confirmed, the account will be disabled and a report sent to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Users can, of course, appeal if they feel they've been mistakenly flagged.

Finally, number three is expanded guidance in Syrian search. Users can ask how to report CSAM or child exploitation and will be pointed to resources. Okay, so this one is loaded, right? So industry watchers have expressed concern that the system and its implementation could be a uh well a proverbial slippery slope if apple is all of a sudden monitoring what kind of photos you're allowed to have on your phone or send or receive what else will they be monitoring and okay while this might not be a problem in uh countries with you know freedom of expression and freedom of speech laws that protect its citizens. What will other jurisdictions? I mean, I would like to think we can all agree that child

pornography is abhorrent and should be illegal. But there are certainly places on earth where things that we would consider to be just basic human rights might be illegal, especially for certain oppressed groups. So what is to prevent Apple from creating these types of systems, whether it is voluntarily, as it appears to have been the case here, or whether it is by force, by law, unless they want to exit a market. We've already seen them kowtow to the Chinese when they set up a data center in China that holds all Chinese users' user data. That data center effectively does not belong to Apple. And as we all know, any data center that you have physical access to, you own. the center that you have physical access to, you own. The Chinese government has effectively, through a proxy, physical access to it. So what does this mean? Edward Snowden piped in saying,

Apple is rolling out mass surveillance to the entire world with this. Make no mistake, if they scan for kiddie porn today, they can scan for anything tomorrow. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for a for a company that refused to unlock the phone of an alleged serial killer. This is a weird move. This is an interesting turn.

Yeah. I'm not saying that, I'm not even going to try to decide what's worse, child abuse or killing non-children people. Like, they're both terrible. They're both unforgivable. Things are bad. But it just seems to me that to decide, you know know one of them is not worth trying to police and one of them is is it feels like a bit of an arbitrary line is what i'm kind of trying to say right now yeah yeah i hear that for sure really you're not gonna say anything i don't i don't know what to say dude it's like you you

wanna you wanna hammer hammer down on what i guess is now called what is it c sam um but yeah snowden has a point right like if they scan for this, someone will scan for anything. And like by someone, like you were kind of alluding to, like it won't even necessarily be Apple. If the ability is out there, other people will have it. It'll happen at some point. And you don't know what data they're going to be able to be looking for. And this has nothing.

I know one of the common defenses that people come to here is like, well, just don't break the law and it's like well um as i hope the last kind of few years have made a little bit more obvious sometimes it's not exactly that simple um and sometimes yeah i don't know yeah yeah not a fan personally it's difficult i think i think that's it i think that i'm just gonna have to this is gonna have to be a line in the sand for me if apple is going to say you know kind of like how they say they're an environmentally conscious company if they're gonna say that they're a privacy conscious company this is a step too far in my opinion um yeah speaking of a step too far uh blizzard or do you want to do sponsor spots yeah let's get through the sponsor spots okay the show is brought to you by fresh books fresh books is the

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guides, or you can contact their support team 24-7 to help you build your site. Don't wait. Go to squarespace.com forward slash WAN and use offer code WAN to get 10% off today. All right. What are we doing next? Blizzard. All right. Hit me. It it's long but i'm going to try to power through it so we've been talking about blizzard for the last two weeks i think there's tons of stuff going on you guys have probably been following it they're getting sued by the the almost just said province of california the state of california um but there's been some new stuff going on effective immediately blizzard ceo I've usually heard him referred to as Blizzard President.

Maybe he's both. I don't know. Not anymore. But Blizzard CEO J. Allen Brack is no longer CEO. He's going to be replaced by a duo team. He's being replaced by Jen O'Neill and Mike Ybarra, who will co-lead the company. J. Allen Brack said in response, I'm confident that Jen O'Neill and Mike Ybarra will provide the co-lead the company. JL and Brack said in response, I'm confident that Jen O'Neill

and Mike Ybarra will provide the leadership Blizzard needs to fully utilize... Basically, he says they're going to be good. JL and Brack has been a part of Blizzard for a very long time. He joined Blizzard in 2005 to work on World of Warcraft as a producer. By 2008, he

was the production director for WoW. By 2014, he was executive producer and vice president of WoW. And in late 2018, he replaced Mike Morhaime as president of Blizzard Entertainment. Yeah, I thought he was just president. Maybe it's both. I don't know. Today, I'm going to skip over some of the details about like, yeah, this is on the heels of what we've been talking about for the last few weeks. If you're interested, feel free to look it up. There's a lot of details online. Yeah, the shareholders are suing Blizzard, which is an interesting, interesting take.

They're creating a second lawsuit for the company to face. the lawsuit claims that executives made false and misleading statements during the SEC filings and failed to disclose a number of complaints made to the company's HR department over those years. It also cites unrest amongst employees as thousands signed an open letter condemning Activision Blizzard's initial response, followed by a walkout involving hundreds of developers. That being said, in response to the state of of california soon blizzard the stock went and then has already fully recovered so um investors don't really actually care all that much um yep as long as they continue to make that warcraft money oh gotta make that warcraft money which isn't making them as much money as of late which is um you know

interesting something that has been constantly stunning me though is oh i guess we should bring that part up that you're reading oh no i was just i'm just skimming go ahead okay cool something that has constantly stunned me about this whole situation is that the the the big dog or the big rat the uh the ceo of the parent company, Activision Blizzard, Bobby Kotick, he has somehow dodged almost everything so far. It's been amazing, rather impressive, I would say. The only thing that he's really been involved in in this whole process that I've seen online is him saying that the initial response was tone deaf and then immediately hiring a union busting firm. So I was kind of wondering what was what's going on? What's going on with Bobby, right?

So I just looked him up just to see like if he has anything in the background there. And this is this is not his first bout of issues with sexual harassment. Not at all. We've been digging into Blizzard's past skeletons. A lot of the news in this harassment suit is from many years past, so I think it's okay to look into Bobby's past. Bobby Kotick and Andrew Gordon, head of Goldman Sachs Investment Banking Division in Los Angeles, created a company called Cove Management as a company to manage a private Gulfstream 3 private jet, or a, yeah, sure, whatever, that they jointly owned. And they hired former actress Cynthia Madvig as a flight attendant. Why does that matter? Well, in 2006, their pilot, Phil Berg, allegedly began a pattern of sexual harassment towards Madvig. She reported this to

Gordon, the Goldman Sachs guy, who completely ignored her complaints. And then shortly afterwards, after she had filed these complaints for sexual harassment, Kotick just fired her. This began a three-year-long legal dance in which Kotick said directly that he would not be extorted and that he would ruin the plaintiff and her attorney and see to it that Ms. Madvig would never work again. This was in response to his first set of attorneys advising him to settle for $200,000. After cycling through a few different sets of attorneys, he ended up doing just that, settling with Madvig in April 2008, paying $200,000, plus Madvig's legal fees of $475,000, in addition to settling in court, because he tried to underpay them with his attorneys, for over $1.4 million, which, you know, is all well and good,

because during the Madvig case, he stated that he that he was worth one half billion dollars and he didn't mind spending some of it on attorney's fees but that's okay because he makes well over 30 million dollars a year just from activision blizzard has a lot of other side ventures going on and in 2016 made somewhere around 200 million dollars in the form of a one-time bonus so who really cares about uh sexual harassment when you're rich because you can just pay it off yeah i heard you can just grab them by the yeah yeah it's easy if you got enough money you just make the problem go away why is that why like what i mean okay i guess i know the answer because what i was going to ask was why does that work like that? And the answer is $1.4 million.

Yeah. Oh, no, more than that. So 1.4 plus $675,000. So about $2 million is the answer to that question. And you know what the craziest part of that story is, is that we're talking about someone that, relatively speaking, has their own notoriety like has a reputation right like has has something to kind of lean on and go yeah you

you know who i am you recognize me remember me i was in that thing um this guy did something if if you're a a nobody you know then what How easily are you swept under the rug? It's terrifying. Otak has been kind of a treasure trove of amazing quotes, and I wasn't surprised I found those amazing quotes when I dove down that story too, because in the past he's said some pretty wild things. He's been really, really open about moving his games

to an annualized structure so that they can be properly exploited like he said that literally um when he started taking over at activision blizzard um he said where is it where is this quote one sec the goal was that i had uh the goal that i had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into activision about 10 years ago was to take all of the fun out of making video games um kodak did this by creating an employee incentive program that really rewards profit and nothing else he continued his rant by saying he wanted to instill skepticism pessimism and fear in his company as motivation for making games um in the midst of a recession he said we are very good at keeping people focused

on the deep depression epic okay neat sweet yeah he's a he's a he's he's really cool he's super cool all right buy more blizzard games uh but what you shouldn't buy is a gpu from quest they are west apparently that's really important because there is another retailer or something that that has a very similar sounding name so it's kwest all right well there's a mega thread over on reddit but thousands of users in the r slash graphics card sub have been discussing an apparent scam website quest kwest again kwest that's the bad quest many people primarily in the united states were greeted with many ads at the start of the year up until even the last few weeks to buy gpus from a website called quest at a glance it looked legitimate with a reasonably large catalog of technology.

They had a live chat, clean checkout process, and GPUs were marked up in price, but not to nearly the same degree as other retailers and were listed as being in stock or pre-order. So they clearly went out of their way to make it look good, but not too good to be true. Many people have been waiting for order updates or are actively in the process of disputing charges with their banks and have been for several months. A small handful of people have received GPUs in poorly double packaged Quest boxes, but even some of the comments from these users have noted the sketchy nature of the website. A majority of people have reported a variety of reasons that Quest has provided as to why they haven't been shipping out orders, from a legal dispute between the CEO and his wife, to supplier

problems, which apparently means Quest is unable to refund customers for the product because they didn't have it in the first place. Wait, for the product they didn't have in the first place, but they have the money. So despite an abundance of evidence and thousands of people affected there hasn't been any press coverage of it apparently up until now luckily looking up quest seems to bring up the reddit thread before people even before you even see a single mention of the website itself previously quest.com was a share your interest response type website with an old homepage dated to 2013. Then in 2020, it went dark briefly before apparently becoming a PPE selling company, which then started selling GPUs.

So if you have any doubt that this company might in fact not be a scam operation, the site itself, tech.quest.com, is now riddled with errors, missing pages, and factually incorrect information the graphics card listings have been completely removed and many of their other products have pages that can't be added to the cart or are priced well above market rates oh the supposed quest inc fda registration um is fake the phone number referenced on the website is not real some image links are default images of the Shopify theme or their placeholders. Their terms of service

is not a terms of service. Their privacy policy is non-existent and the footer links don't resolve aside from the Instagram, the Facebook links to Shopify's Facebook. So guys, watch out. That was the whole real point of that. We're just going through.

These guys are bad people. They are trying to steal your money and run don't give them your money you know who you should give your money to lttstore.com another fantastic shopify website yeah but this one actually like ships you a thing um when you yeah when you when you when you order a thing hold a second. I have no idea how my display... Hey, it worked. Okay. Oh, wow. Oh, interesting.

That's supposed to be purple. Um, I have my monitor in HDR mode and it bungs up screen capture, apparently. So now we know that. Anyway, the point is... Mousepads! They're back. They're beautiful. You can get them now in any size you want for $29.99. That's right. We've got 90 centimeters, 100 centimeters, 1200 centimeters, all those different widthss and we've got different depths 30 centimeters 40 50 60 and 70 so we've got pretty much everything rocking and the floatplane team by the way Luke has done a great job of the variant changes that they've made to the website it's now really easy

to shop for different variants of products yay they'll take you right down to a picture of that particular size which is super cool and very soon because i know some people have actually been been mentioning it in regards to the mouse pad there will be uh back in stock notifications including for specific variants that is coming pretty sweet great job floatplane team. So guys, go get it before they are gone. We did restock as many of them as humanly possible. But yeah, this screen capture is horrible. I know. I'm sorry.

There's something for everyone, though, whether you just want something that's exactly the right size for you that you've never been able to find or whether you just want the most possible mouse pad for your dollar i'm pretty sure that 1.2 meters by 70 centimeters one for 29.99 is a good enough deal that you could just cut it up into multiple mouse pads if you really wanted to you wouldn't have the nicely finished edges anymore at least on some of the edges but yeah it's it's it's it's a good mouse pad good price it's three and a half millimeters thick which is a custom thickness i personally think it is a great balance between responsiveness

and comfort um i don't think there's really much else to say about it it's beautiful it's beautiful all right what else we got for topics today i've been signed out of google docs thank you so much google for signing me out so luke you're on your own uh we've got tpms are hackable we've got uh oh okay that's awkward yeah just a little bit uh because windows 11 just in case people aren't sure why we're saying that an organization hired uh dolos group a security consultancy, to investigate the security of their network. Dolos Group was provided with a new Lenovo computer pre-configured with the organization's standard security stack. The researchers were quickly able to determine that the laptop was only using the TPM itself as a security measure for the BitLocker drive encryption

with no PIN or password. In order to extract the data off the drive standalone though they would need to get this key from the tpm the tpm was using a serial peripheral interface or spi to communicate with the rest of the system and in combination with the fact that bitlocker doesn't use the latest tpm standards encrypted communications uh dolos group realized they may be able to extract said key. Using a SLA, that's a crazy word, SLA logic analyzer connected to the CMOS, they were able to capture all data moving through the chip and used an open source tool called BitLocker SPI toolkit on GitHub to isolate the decryption key. With the key, the researchers were able to decrypt the drive and bypass the need to log in entirely on the next boot by simply replacing ultiman.exe

with command.exe. Oh boy. Although this does still require knowledge of the hardware and software to pull off, the fact that something like this can be executed in less than 30 minutes is noteworthy. Granted, even just at, we've always said, if you have access to the physical hardware, you have access to everything. Granted, even just adding a drive encryption password that needs to be matched up with the decryption key can greatly, by a lot, greatly improve security of an encrypted machine. an encrypted machine tpms do offer functionality beyond strong encryption keys and are a good idea but without actually taking proper measures in the first place and appropriate caution their functionality can just become a minor inconvenience for an attacker more than anything else that reminds me of this old meme that showed a boxing ring and it had like millions of dollars of security hardware all perfectly configured and then it had like some dude at a

keyboard and it was like basic pebcac who will win um yeah users not using things properly can defeat a lot of very well intentioned and very well built security so all right good luck everybody uh what else we got today? Man, I guess that's... Boy, is that pretty much it? I mean, we probably have some super chats from the second half of the show when I remembered to click the thing. So the first one I have here is...

DeskLog DDR5? Oh, yeah, we can talk about that. Sure, yeah. Corsair DDR5. I mean, I'm just going to be reading off of whatever article i read earlier there we go corsair ddr5 modules boy my screen capture really is awful ddr5 modules will require better cooling so in a nutshell ram finally going to be cool it just might because

the big reason that ddr5 memory is going to require so much cooling, actually, there are a couple of main reasons. One is that at the speeds that sort of JDEK module manufacturers are going to be building them, so this is like Micron, Samsung, those guys, DDR5 might not be appreciably faster than DDR4. So in order to hit these maximum speeds that memory makers, like enthusiast memory makers,

like Corsair or Mushkin or whoever want to hit, they're going to have to be overclocking the modules. So we're talking running as high as 1.6 volts, potentially, on these 1.1 volt modules. So these things could be running toasty. Also, DDR5 moves the power delivery from the motherboard onto the memory module itself so ddr5 modules could end up being a more complex and therefore expensive and be much much hotter especially if they're meant to manage very precisely these uh extremely high voltages

so it could very well be that liquid cooling your memory for the first time ever could result in notably better speed and stability compared to uh just running your running your module naked yeah oh that is hilarious i mean i guess that's pretty much that's pretty much it i mean corsair is not new to the cooling game so i'm sure they're going to get this all figured out and i guess their their experience designing power supplies over the last 10 years is probably coming in handy too now that uh you can't i mean it used to be we made fun of corsair oh and what are they going to make next well now all that expertise is paying off isn't it now that you have to put a power supply on your memory i have a i have an off-topic ltt store question hit me is the mouse pad washable

can you well ivory mouse pad to a certain degree is washable but can you like machine wash it we don't specifically advertise it as such but i have personally done it and it was fine i would recommend machine washing it cold you can also just hand wash it um yeah one thing to watch out for is don't like anything dyed. You don't want to scrub one spot too much and then not wash the rest of it ever. So when you wash it, you should wash the whole thing. But you just want to set it out to dry, folded like the face side out so that when you put it down on your desk, it won't curl up. And then just, yeah, let it dry, throw it on your desk and you're good to go uh mine actually was stayed quite color fast other yeah i could i couldn't tell the difference between before and after washing so it's uh yeah pretty good did you

machine wash it cold yep yep yeah that's what you did okay and don't put it in the dryer so machine machine wash cold hang to dry i'm not actually endorsing it. I'm just saying I did it and it was fine. That's as far as I'm going. Cool. Yeah. But yeah, it'll be fine. All right.

Super chats. Hey, thanks Mitchell. Sandeep says, what do you think about an LTE version of the steam deck? I think that's pretty cool, but given that it's a device that doesn't have a keyboard and the touchscreen

keyboard experience is not great, the touchpads could change it a little. But given that this doesn't have a really great way to input text, I think that that's less relevant to me than just running it without a network connection. I think running it

without a network connection is fine. Not like you couldn't hotspot it um felix asks did linus get to meet lord gaben i did not unfortunately isn't he living like new zealand or something oh i don't know um troy cook says don't forget about diablo 2 resurrected dollars diablo 2 resurrected dollars hey got him ari arian says should i go for an rog flow x13 or a macbook pro 16 base for adobe after effects my workflow is really heavy much more than the budget 4k machine oh man oh it's tough i don't know that i would be going for a laptop at all for a really heavy workload as you describe it um and I it's a really bad time to buy an Intel MacBook you know what I'm saying like I just uh oof your timing is is is terrible I don't really like I don't really like either of those. For a really heavy, those are Arjen's words,

Arjen's words, really heavy Adobe After Effects workload. I would want something more akin to like a thick boy that really has ample cooling, something with as many sodium slots as you can put in it because you're going to want more memory. Sam says, please check out the recently reviewed Comma 3. Yeah, I actually do want to check it out i i don't own a car that supports it right now i was thinking of upgrading my minivan just so that i can use it uh the 2021 odysseys do support it and it just feels really stupid to

upgrade from a 2018 odyssey to a 2021 odyssey but my 2018 does not have support uh Henry Plays asks us to rate the film Happy Gilmore out of 10 please Luke hit me Happy Gilmore wow I don't think I've seen that I was I have 14 I I barely even remember the plot um Adam Sandler plays adam sandler playing a hockey player who is not good at hockey he becomes a golfer and four four i like it because it's also a pun okay well that's pretty good uh i'm i'm giving it a big fat nine nine great like it i don't really remember it very much i haven't watched it as an adult so it could be terrible but But I watched it many, many times as a child and adolescent. And I thought it was very funny. I think I only ever saw it once.

My favorite kind of stupid movie was Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. That's a great movie, too. Big fan. Yeah. Big fan. I watch that a lot best line in happy gilmore is like skeezy the skeezy rival says i eat pieces of like you for breakfast and happy's like you eat pieces of breakfast like that's disgusting right you know who would do that it's great i remember like

something weird with like an alligator or something like i i can barely remember the movie genuinely yeah that's probably fine um moire says word on ltd store super chats been waiting to pull the trigger on a hundred dollar order and mystery shirts have already gone out of stock in the meantime guys we are oh man we are not close yeah don't wait we've got we've got other stuff coming for the lcd store first that is on the docket but not yet uh this is a good super chat sort of i don't know whatever whatever an anthony chat is anthony chat i saw a highlighted comment go by on twitch chat asking about the anti-glare screen a lot of people seemed to think it was less vibrant or bright than the pure glass. How did it look in person?

It looked darn close. I would have to have a meter to see how close it is, but it looked quite sharp. It looked very bright. I had limited time. I didn't get to take both of them over to the window, make sure they were at the same brightness. So that's the kind of thing you're going to have to... If I'd had more time, I would have.

But we're going to have to wait to get the full answer for. Johnny Retta Henley Jr. says, Move to Plow Plain, it's the best! I got drunk, JR6955. Alrighty then. Mark asks if I am allergic to red oak. I am not. That is confirmed. Sorry, we didn't.

There was a floatplane exclusive, Luke, that had some of the cutting room floor stuff from Alex's Intel Extreme Tech upgrade. And one of them, I think, was me testing to find out if I'm allergic to red oak. I rubbed it on myself. And the answer is no. But the answer was not in the video.

Right. That was answered in the video comments. I think Alex replied to someone who asked. Lars says, hello, I have an LG 49-inch ultrawide monitor, model 49WL95C-WE, and i dinged the plastic bezel i think i found a replacement one it says it is a frame assembly but there are no pictures and the website seems sketchy at best i think this is a classic cool story bro moment yeah lars you didn't ask a question that's a pretty cool story though um. That is probably the part, which is what I think you're asking. But the only way to know for sure would be to message the seller and see if they reply,

which would also be a good exercise in figuring out if they're sketchy or not. Forstin Pyro says, have you heard about the Titanfall 2 hackers? I know that there's some kind of controversy. I don't know the details. i haven't read into it parker jones oh go ahead it's it's been plaguing all the titanfall things including apex to a certain degree um there's been like weird retaliation war it's been it's been pretty messy i i haven't really bothered including it in the doc. It seems like we're maybe starting to wrap up. Maybe.

There was a community fix pushed that I think actually fixed things or massively improved things or did something of the sort. So maybe once everything wraps up, I'll do like a kind of a here's what happened. Okay. Yeah. Digital Mike says, Luke, thanks for the tip on Clayton Gate Pizza. Parker Jones asks, Swacket V2 when?

My V1 has been well loved and I'm due for a replacement. The product is finalized. We are waiting on manufacturing. Manufacturing is backed up it's a mess man clothing industry is a mess right now oh um orion graves asks as a network slash systems engineer would you suggest dell's new xps 15 2021 version i mean it's a good laptop but you're supporting dell who has been known for kind of being buttheads lately and stuff.

And now that the frame.work, which, by the way, I have not made a final decision on, now that the framework laptop exists, there is something you could buy to support a more open approach to laptops as a network slash systems engineer. But I mean, you will probably be very happy with your xps 15 not as happy as you could be with a modular self-repairable laptop go down to frame.word samuel asks hey just waiting for the back-to-school laptop guide to make a purchase will it happen well we're not calling it a back-to-school laptop guide because if we called it that and made straight up recommendations for individual models, they would all just go out of stock immediately because that's how things are now. But we are

going to do a how to buy a laptop guide and it will include some honorable mentions. So yes, we are doing it. We're just not going to call it that. Darren asks, do you think Apple will come up with a Steam Deck Challenger? Absolutely not. Apple has for many, many years gone out of their way to not acknowledge gamers and gaming. I mean, the lengths that developers had to go to to get controllers working on the iPhone. We were talking with, oh man, what's that? Rainway, Rainway. They make a streaming thing, getting proper mouse support so you could play mouse games on the iPhone streaming from a

gaming device to it. It's just, Apple just does not seem to care. And it's just, I don't know, it's weird. It's like, what? Do they not have any gamers who work there everyone plays video games now the year is not 1992 like video games aren't this weird niche thing that people nerds play in their mom's basement it's just like normal stuff i don't get it james ryan asks with the rise in popularity of linux are you considering a dedicated linux channel it's something that is absolutely on our radar as something that could be, you know, akin to our dedicated Mac channel. Maybe it's something that I never host because, you know, I think you guys know that that's not been my jam over the years, although I am considering another switch to Linux adventure or another switch to adventure, this time linux i did

try it with mac os in the past it's also you said earlier in the show in the in the show that you you are of a hardware focus um and you can do hardware focus videos you have done and could do hardware focus videos that have linux involved with it on ltd absolutely but if it was focused on the software that is linux it's not entirely your jam so i don't think you'd have to be involved we did do a how to install it guide recently but anthony was in charge of that from start to finish and that was totally fine and honestly i think even if you had the linux channel you could still do that on the main channel absolutely yeah yep all right lars says i couldn't fit it in but yes my question is are a front bezel and a frame assembly the same thing okay i still did answer your question to the best of my ability though lars you're just going to have to ask them what it is uh sfx works last super chat trying to

do research on mineral oil cooling for a server saw your old mineral oil video but it's a fish tank for consumers and they got sued will you make another one no it's not practical i'm getting sued has nothing to do with the integrity of the product um it had to do with with patent patlling um and there's there is lots of information out there for mineral mineral cooling for servers i'm sure you'll find it all right i think that's it thank you everyone ladies and gentlemen and everything in between for tuning into the land show we will see you again next week same bad time same bad channel bye Thanks for watching!