 Holy crap, we're live! Welcome everybody to, I think this is like my fifth or sixth livestream, something like that. Either way, I think I'm getting a little bit more used to the routine. I see there's lots and lots of people joining us in the chat already. Actually not that many, but we're starting so, you know, hopefully more people will tune in soon. I've got a lot of really cool stuff to talk about today, and as usual, we'll be doing a fair amount of Q&A, mostly on Twitter. So guys, if you're not already following me on Twitter, make sure that you put in the thing. It's like the at symbol or something. At symbol, Linus Tech. Follow me on Twitter because that is the way to interact with the show. However, there are some challenges with Twitter. Twitter is not actually the best platform ever. And you know what? Actually, I've come up with another topic for tonight's livestream. And that is the fact that I absolutely hate Hootsuite. It's the stupidest thing ever. And I'm going to show you guys all the reasons I hate it. And I really hope someone from Twitter or Hootsuite, or someone who knows someone who knows someone at Hootsuite, is watching this because, yeah, it's not very good. Whoa, and I've got an audio echo going here. Hold on a second. I'm going to go ahead and turn that there down. And of course, because my cat chewed up my volume control, I actually have a really hard time adjusting it. Yeah, it won't turn off. Come on. There we go. There we go. All right. So let's open that back up. Hootsuite, it's not very good. There's my note for later. So I guess what we'll do is we'll just get started here. So, huge... Well, first of all, I guess thanks for tuning in, guys. We've got like 300 people watching already, so that's outstanding. Given that I haven't... You know what? Let's give the guys who are waiting for the YouTube video, let's give them a chance to tune in. I'm actually super impressed with... And yes, the giveaway announcement will be today. And I'm sorry for that tweet where I called it a GTX 670. It is not a 670. My bad. It is a GTX 660 Ti, which is also a perfectly good graphics card. And by perfectly good, I mean awesome. So yeah, we're going to do that later. And where was I going with that? Yes. Oh, yes, right. My YouTube video isn't even up yet. So the YouTube viewers haven't even had a chance to tune in because the first recording I did... Like, I do a recording and then I upload that to YouTube so that they can tune in and then they can see the live stream. But unfortunately, the first one I recorded didn't have any sound, so I uploaded it. And fortunately, I realized that it had no sound before anyone actually looked at it. And I mean, I know I have technical problems with my videos sometimes, but... Yeah, I'm trying to avoid them, trying to avoid them as much as possible. So let's see if... I just want to make sure that video is up. Let's go ahead and check if the YouTube viewers are going to have a chance to tune in yet. Yes, it is up. There are nine comments and five views. And poor this guy. I mean, what is this name? Here. I have no idea. I have no idea what this name is. Here, check this out. Like, I don't stand a chance of reading this. Anyway, he just wants to go to work and I'm very sorry that my live stream is going to be interfering with work because that's very sad. And I hope that you do tune in either way. So I guess let's get started. Topic number one today is NVIDIA's green light. I'd love to see on Twitter or on the chat, on Twitch, who here is familiar with what green light refers to? Okay, Oscar says Venezuela says hi. That's cool, Oscar. Hi to Venezuela as well. Okay, Jason says, hey Linus, you're live. Is the speed of your RAM important to overclocking? No. Generally speaking, not really. It's less of a factor now that we have unlocked processors. So RAM didn't matter back in the day when AMD had unlocked multipliers. And then RAM mattered a lot in the socket 478 days. RAM was everything. Getting high performance, high frequency RAM was the only way you were going to get the maximum overclock out of your CPU. And then both Intel and AMD now have unlocked processors. So you actually don't even need to adjust your RAM speed in order to get whatever overclocking you want. Adrian wants to know how I know Logan. Honestly, I don't really know Logan. I've never met him in person. Just we've exchanged tweets and emails and YouTube private messages over the last sort of while here. That's about it. We only really know each other through like the YouTube brotherhood. So I'm late tonight. Brian, I am not late tonight. I was exactly on time. I was about as on time as someone could ever be for a live stream that starts when they show up. No matter what I do, no matter what I do, I'm on time. So no one I'm not familiar with Greenlight. Oh, this is great. Greenlight is extremely interesting. So it started with the Fermi architecture cards. And what Greenlight basically is is, OK, let's say Galaxy, for example. Galaxy, Colorful, Palette. Actually, I don't know if Colorful is a GeForce partner. I don't remember. Whatever. They're not in North America. So let's go with the GeForce partners. MSI, SuCVGA, all of these guys. What Greenlight means is they create a design for a card. So if you guys aren't familiar with how an add-in board partner works, basically, NVIDIA designs a chipset. So that's a GK104, for example. GK104 is the chip that's on a 660Ti. It's also the chip on a 670, a 680, and a 690, but there's two of them. So they have a chipset. Then they do a reference design where they take that chipset and they completely design a product around it. So they'll put on an amount of memory. They'll put a suggested memory RAM speed, frequency, timings. They'll design a power delivery system and they'll make a PCB for it. They'll do a cooler. That is a reference card. So it's actually designed in every possible way by NVIDIA, although NVIDIA manufactures nothing. NVIDIA's chips themselves are manufactured by a third party such as TSMC, and their cards themselves are actually usually manufactured by someone else as well. So when NVIDIA does a new launch, for example, they launch a reference GTX 680, that means one of their add-in board partners was probably contracted to produce all the reference 680s, which then the other partners have to put their sticker on and they're kind of doing it as a favor for NVIDIA, so they probably don't make a whole lot of money on it and all of that. But that's... OK, reference design. Now, the add-in board partners are more than welcome to design their own many aspects of the GPUs. So you've seen EVGA with their umpteen billion different versions of every GPU, where they've got a super clock and a super super clock and a further win and a further win plus and a super super clock plus, and a classified. They've got so many cards. So some of those have different cooling solutions. Some of them have different clock speeds. Some of them have different power delivery, which will enable better overclocking. Some of them will have different amounts of RAM, so they might be 2 gigs, 3 gigs, 4 gigs, 6 gigs, doesn't matter. These are all the different things that the add-in board partners can do. They can add different display outputs. So a great example was EVGA's 570 HD, where they actually added, and this isn't a 570, but they added a display port out, which none of the other 570s really had. They were mostly dual DVI with a mini HDMI. Another example would be Galaxy's 570 MDT, which actually had triple display outputs on a 570 before NVIDIA officially introduced that feature with the 600 series. So we've got reference designs, then we have add-in board partner designs, and that's anything that was designed by someone other than NVIDIA and doesn't look like that standard NVIDIA card. So green light means that NVIDIA has to approve or give the green light, the go-ahead, to any design that a manufacturer submits before it gets released to market. So what does this mean? There's a lot of different sides to the story, so I'm going to give you guys a little bit of the history of what's happened to bring the green light program to light recently. So number one is MSI's power edition cards. They're power edition cards, they're hawk edition cards. NVIDIA has a certain spec, so this is aside from the cooler and the clock speed and whatever, they have a certain spec for how much voltage they want to apply to the GPU, how much voltage they want to apply to different parts of the kit that is used to make up this graphics card where the add-in board partner can design all the other stuff. And what MSI was doing was they were allowing the GPUs to be overvolted and overclocked in a way that NVIDIA did not authorize. Now, Tom's Hardware did a fantastic article. Actually, it was the German site that I think did the original article, but there's an English version that's sort of shorter and easier to read for people who don't read German like me. And what they basically discovered was that MSI was dramatically overvolting one of the components on this board in order to achieve the results they were getting. I mean, a 660 Ti power edition when maximum overclocked could actually run right there with a GTX 670 reference card when they were both at their maximum overclocks, which basically means you'd have to have rocks in your head in order to buy a 670 reference card when this 660 Ti power edition was just as fast once you overclocked it. So they discovered that's what they were doing. It was also then discovered that MSI is revising the cards in order to adhere to NVIDIA's guidelines with respect to GPU voltages and the overall design of the card to get it sort of green lighted again. Now, green light doesn't mean that MSI cannot release the product. You can see they released the 660 Ti power edition, even though it was not running according to spec. So what NVIDIA has basically come out and said in the last day or so is that it's not a matter of them red lighting a product. They're not saying, okay, you can't release this product to the market. But what they are saying to the add-in board partners is if you release this product, we are not going to warranty the components that you bought from us. So basically, they're voiding the add-in board partners warranty for overclocking outside of the certain threshold that NVIDIA wants overclocked. Another example is EVGA 680 classified that is no longer sold with the EVBOT utility that allowed it to be overvolted. Okay, so a couple of different ways to interpret this. Number one is you could kind of go, rah, rah, rah, rabble, rabble, rabble. NVIDIA is limiting the board partners in terms of what they can do, in terms of the designs they can bring to market, the performance they can deliver to gamers. So that's one perspective. The other perspective is, this is from NVIDIA's camp, is that the green light program is designed to improve the reliability and the consistency of the experience for GeForce GPUs for gamers. So NVIDIA has an internal philosophy that, and I agree with them 100% on this, that if your video card dies after a year or two, that's not a good thing. And that's going to create a bad customer experience, a bad experience around the GeForce experience. And NVIDIA is deeply concerned with what kind of an experience the customer has, whether they buy a Galaxy card, an EVGA card, a SUSE, whoever, it doesn't matter. From their perspective, they want to make sure no matter who the customer chooses, they get a great experience. So they're evaluating things in this green light program. They're evaluating acoustics, they're evaluating the temperatures, they're evaluating the size of the GPUs, making sure that the customer is going to have a great experience. So from their perspective, they're kind of sitting here going, okay, we did all the work on this. We understand how this chip works down to its very microscopic level. We've done all the testing and determined what is a safe voltage in terms of the heat that it's going to output, whether the cooling design can handle it or whatever else. What is a safe voltage in terms of the longevity of the chip? They have binned the chips at their level, so remember guys, a GK104 GPU is exactly the same GPU, exactly the same thing, whether it's a 660 Ti, a 670 or 680. So what is the difference? The difference is that they actually take these GPUs and they sort them into which ones are validated for 680, 670, 660 Ti operational speeds as well as the number of functional units that are enabled. So Nvidia is basically going, okay, look, we already binned these for you. We told you what voltage is safe to run them at from a reliability and a heat output perspective, and if you want to go ahead and turn them up, that's fine. But the onus is going to be on you to support these things once they're out there in the market because this is not what we designed them to be used for. So who's right? Actually, that's outside the scope of this conversation, but I would love to get your comments on Twitter and have a look at what you guys think about the Greenlight program and whether, okay, you guys are just like, you guys are just not talking about this at all. Okay, please, please, at LinusTech, tweet that direction. Tweet and let me know, what do you think of the Greenlight program? Whose side are you on? Are you with the add-in board partners who are basically going, okay, well, we should be able to take this thing that we bought from you, Nvidia, we should be able to do whatever we want with it, and you should warranty it because, you know, we're your partners. Or do you take the other perspective and go, well, Nvidia kind of has the right to set a warranty term. I mean, they're not telling the partners they can't do it. They're just saying, we're not going to warranty it because you used it outside of the office. It's like if you use your fridge to cool your PC, you're not going to get a warranty for that. It's like a consumer TV. Actually, consumer TV is a great example. Toshiba, I believe, is the only brand that will actually warranty a consumer TV the instant you put it into a commercial environment. So if you use a Sony TV, Samsung TV in your business, in your restaurant, you have TV displayed, you want it up on the wall. The second you put that in there, your warranty is void because it is not valid for commercial use. So it's not like this is an uncommon thing. OK, we finally have some interactions. Let's have a look at what people say. All right. Oh, wow, we've got a lot of responses now. Yay. Way to go, guys. OK, Nicholas, Nvidia side. Riaz, we're not talking about that right now. Jordan, Nvidia is taking a stand. I like it. They aren't limiting us. We still have both options. Now, Jordan, something I would bring up about your point here is that we actually don't have both options. Every partner that I'm aware of that had a SKU that was not warrantiable under green light has pulled that SKU back. So effectively, by pulling the warranty out of them, they have removed those options from the market. Whether they're correct about it or not is sort of the debate we're having here, but we don't really have a choice anymore. So there, something to bear in mind. Nvidia is correct. Nvidia, Nvidia, Nvidia are in the right here. Ryan says, what's going to happen to the existing 660TIs? Well, for the power addition from MSI, which is the example I focused on a lot here, any that were already released are going to be what they are. And so they'll perform a little better. And then the new ones that are redesigned will be under the same name, they'll be the same SKU, and they'll have slightly less overclocking potential. You won't be able to crank up the voltage as much. And that will be that. OK, FAC says Nvidia has the right to control their warranty. Alex, I'm with Nvidia. They shouldn't have to warranty something it's not designed for. So it looks like by and large, you guys are both, are all very much on the green light Nvidia side, which is very interesting because a lot of the time, consumers, and I'm not going to generalize you guys here or anything like that, but a lot of the time consumers are not very quick to side with sort of the multi-billion dollar international company. In this case, I can see it from both perspectives because what Nvidia has effectively done is they've taken something the GPU partners have always taken for granted. They've always been able to do this before. And it's always been one of the ways that they can compete against each other because it's not like Nvidia supports every partner equally. I mean, they try. They do their best. But it's like, you know, if you have like 10 children, there's down to be one that's your favorite or whatever else. So one of the ways that the GPU partners could use to differentiate from each other has been taken away. So I can see why particularly some of the partners that relied on this would be really upset. It's like, should your kids have an ice cream every Saturday? You know what? There's nothing wrong with giving them an ice cream every Saturday if they're being good. Are the kids wrong when they say, well, we're still being good. And the expectation was always that if we were really good, we were going to get ice cream on Saturday. And now you're saying no ice cream anymore. I don't know. I don't know. I don't have I don't have the right answer here. But OK, Nvidia side and videos in the right. Matthew says, say my name. That's creepy, dude. Creepy, creepy, creepy. Oh, wait, you didn't mean it like that. All right. What else we got here? So we've got about another 65 results, which means I can't read all of them. But I am going to do a quick skim here once I get down to. Whoa. We have a lot of a lot of tweets here. Matthew something, something. I don't know. Whatever. Let's just look at them. What a possibility. Change motherboard. Is it going to be to send me videos? Correct. Nvidia is correct. Oh, I think I actually went past it. There we go. On Nvidia side, it's the partners that want to crank up the cards. Scotty, Scotty, you're the first one to side with the partners here. I'm with the partners because they produce brilliant coolers and it just improves the cards performance. You're right. It does improve the cards performance. So here's an interesting take on it. This was I forget who brought this up, but EVGA's 680 was originally permitted to operate this way. And then now they're not able to ship it with the EVBOT anymore. So effectively, Nvidia has created this environment where skews that don't really exist anymore. OK, so the power addition, as we know it for 660TI, doesn't exist. The 680 classified with all the overvolting doesn't exist. But skews that no longer exist have been used to set overclocking records and set an unrealistic expectation with customers. Did they do this intentionally? Did they not? I actually don't know. Nvidia has the right to limit their warranty. I'm on the Nvidia side. I think the Greenlight program is great and I'm all for a good customer experience. But that is one huge way to look at this, is that if Nvidia is effectively improving the reliability in the GeForce experience, then how can we see it as a bad thing? Hard to say. I mean, what if the partners basically said to you guys, if you register your card, we'll give you a BIOS that unlocks all of the overvolting options and you'll forfeit your warranty. Would you guys do something like that? I mean, that might be the solution to all of this. MSI continues producing the power addition exactly the same way that they always have. And then they just kind of go, OK, well, we're going to ship it like this with this BIOS that limits all this stuff so we can maintain our warranty. And then we'll give customers the option to, and I don't know how they'd track it, to be perfectly honest. I mean, it's all hypothetical, but we'll give customers the option to forfeit the warranty. That way it's not on MSI's head what the customer decides to do with that card. And Nvidia won't have to deal with it either. That way you're just taking responsibility for your own overclocking adventures, which is how it used to be, actually. I mean, overclocking used to avoid everyone's warranty back in the day. OK, does AMD have a similar process? AMD, I think, is pretty much they let the partners do what they want at this point. I mean, you look at something like the Devil 13 7999 from PowerColor. I mean, that's a very elaborate design that went into that card. And they also, yeah, they released it. PowerColor managed to release it. So I'm with Nvidia, not warranting misuse. I'll take Nvidia's side. I want to look for anyone else who's on the partner side here. I think we only had one person side with the partners through all of this. Oh, here we go. Here we go. Mikhail says, I think I am more on the partner side because if they buy the cards, they should be able to do what to Nvidia is right to though. OK, unfortunately, I don't really understand that tweet, but thank you, Mikhail, for participating. OK, we're going to move on from this topic now. I see I have a ton more tweets about this, but as you guys can clearly see, it's pretty much impossible for me to read and analyze all of them. But I just wanted to share this whole situation with you, get your guys' thoughts on it, give you my thoughts on it. Let's move on to the next thing. Ultrabooks. So my understanding of an ultrabook was that aside from MacBook Air, which we all know, hopefully we all know, is not an ultrabook. MacBook Air is not an ultrabook, OK? So we're clear. Because the word ultrabook requires an Intel license to use it. It's licensed on a SKU by SKU basis. For those of you who don't know what a SKU is, a SKU refers to, it means stock keeping unit. It's like one sort of set specification of a particular, in this case, notebook. OK, so it's on a SKU by SKU basis. There's no charge from Intel to validate a notebook. The only charge involved is you take your notebook, we're going to pretend this is a notebook, this is going to be my prop for the rest of the night, no matter what I'm talking about. So you take your notebook, you slap a shipping label on it, you send it to Intel, and they analyze it, they look at it in a bunch of different ways, and then they either give you the OK, yes, this is an ultrabook, or they say no, go back to the drawing board, you have to fix this and this and this, and it is not an ultrabook yet, send it back again when it's done. And so anyway, so Apple does not participate in that program, so MacBook Air, in spite of its similarity to something like an ASUS ZenBook, is not an ultrabook. So I would love to see some tweets here, guys, about what you think are the characteristics of an ultrabook. So we're going to go back to the Twitter feed here. 36 new interactions, of course. Of course there are 36 new interactions. You guys are crazy, you guys are awesome. Honestly, in the last week, I've gained about 4,000 followers on Twitter, which is outstanding. And I'm sure not all of you were just in it for the graphics card giveaway. I'm sure most of you were in it so you could participate in the live streams and send me messages and all that kind of good stuff. That's what most of you were up to. Alright, let's see, anyone got an...ultrabooks suck, yeah, okay. Ultrabooks are cool, however. Alright, here we go, here we go. So let's get into what people think of this whole ultrabook thing. Zach says ultrabooks are cool, but I would much rather get a more substantial customizable laptop. My response to Zach is this is the direction things are heading, man. Whether we like it or not, Apple has set this trend with MacBook Pro, MacBook, and MacBook Air that that's the direction notebooks are going. If you look at something like the Razer Blade, if that's not an Apple, aluminum, unibody, sort of inspired design, then I don't know what is. If you look at a Suess ZenBook, if that's not a MacBook Air inspired design, then I don't know what is. But anyway, moving right along. So Joseph, Finn, you're right, Finn is part of it. Ultrabooks are overpriced, Slim and SSD. Ah, Nicholas, okay. So Slim, yes. SSD, not necessarily, but I'll get into that in more detail later. Joel says good quality. Good quality can be quantified in a lot of different ways. So again, don't worry guys, I'm going to talk about this. I'm going to talk about this. Okay, high battery life says Jordan. Fast, small, and light says Derek. Ultrabooks are Intel laptops that are thin and light and good battery life. Joe, I love your picture. This is the second time I've seen you on the Twitter feed. I still need to know if that's actually you though, because that's amazing. That burger is, well, it's literally the size of a man's head. Okay, battery life and thinness. Intel iSeries CPU SSD integrated graphics. Ultrabooks suck, not enough power. Okay Dom, we're sorry. 60 new interactions. Okay, okay, I'm just going to take these 60. If you guys do want to participate in the whole Twitter thing, I need you guys to be on the ball on your tweets, because I can only read so many of them. Slim and powerful, battery life, size and weight. Okay, I'm looking for a few different things here guys that I'm not seeing yet, because there's way more to Ultrabook than I actually understood myself. But we had one of Intel's field guys in today, and he explained all the different aspects of things that Austin, Austin, you can watch the live stream after on the YouTube channel. So I can't redo the whole thing just for you. Ultrabooks are nice, I wouldn't buy one. So yeah, he explained all the different stuff that goes into it, and none of you are getting it, which is awesome, because I feel a little bit better about me not knowing what an Ultrabook was about. Okay, so number one, then form factor. Form factor is huge. So depending on the screen size, the diagonal screen size, Intel has different specs for how thick an Ultrabook is allowed to be to still be an Ultrabook. Okay, so if you have a bigger screen size, you're allowed a little bit more thickness, and it can still be an Ultrabook. Okay, battery life. Honestly, Intel isn't too stringent on battery life. The requirement is five hours, and that means five hours of real five hours, not like five hours of like you put it in Hibernate, and you try not to go too close to it, and it'll last for five hours. No, five hours with Wi-Fi, with using the computer of actual general usage, and Intel validates this stuff. However, the recommended, what we're seeing more commonly, is closer to around eight hours, which is fantastic. Eight hours is long enough that you can realistically use the computer in sort of an all-day type environment, as long as you're putting it to sleep whenever you're not using it, and then waking up when you are using it. Aha, which leads us to another spec. So a lot of you suggested that an SSD is a necessary part of the Ultrabook spec. It is not. An SSD is a great way to meet the Ultrabook spec, because it'll mean that you can have a fitter form factor. If you're using like an M-SATA SSD, it'll mean that your power consumption will be really low. It'll run really cool. It will also enable fast wake-from-sleep times and overall snappy performance. So Intel has a spec that says it can take no longer than seven seconds for an Ultrabook to wake from sleep. Now, when, his name's Ben. We're going to have a couple episodes on the NCIXCOM channel featuring him in the next week or two. So Ben pointed out to me that with an SSD, an Ultrabook can typically, and oh yeah, boot times are probably looked at as well, although it wasn't on the list of things that are analyzed. So the UEFI BIOS went very quickly the first time we booted it up, and it booted up extremely quickly. Then when we put it to sleep and opened it up, it took less than two steam bills, less than two seconds to be fully functional when it was coming up from sleep. So an SSD enables that, however, an SSD isn't the only way to do it. You are allowed, as a laptop manufacturer, to implement a hybrid solution, such as a hard drive with an SSD cache. The SSD cache has to be at least 16 gigs, and with that hybrid solution, you can, honestly, with a hard drive, you just wouldn't be able to meet the spec. Intel doesn't explicitly say you can't use a plain hard drive, but what they do say is you have to adhere to this performance standard, which rules out hard drives. So with a hybrid drive, you can meet that spec while not having the extra expense of going with a straight SSD solution. So something like a Momentus XT or a separate 16 gig on an M-SATA with a separate mechanical hard drive running in the shell, these are solutions that the partners can implement. So, okay, so there's a performance aspect. It has to use a third generation Core i3, i5, or i7 processor. Personally, I wouldn't mind if they locked it down to just i5s and i7s. I mean, at the point where you're looking at low-power i3s, they're not going to deliver that snappiness, that performance. Connectivity. An Ultrabook must have a high-speed connectivity. Now, Intel doesn't specify what that is, but in practical terms, it must have a USB 3 port, and it must have a Thunderbolt port, or both. It has to have at least one, though. One of the other things with respect to connectivity is that I believe business-class Ultrabooks must have an Ethernet port. They can't rely solely on Wi-Fi. Now, all Ultrabooks do have to have Wi-Fi, which makes sense, because none of them really have optical drives. And if you had no Wi-Fi, and this Ultrabook, this portable device that actually you have to plug in every time you use it, that would be stupid. That's an aside at this point. Moving along to some of the other things Ultrabooks must have right. They must have Intel's identity protection technology, and they must have Intel's anti-theft technology. Now, we did a really cool tech tips about Intel anti-theft technology, and I'm going to give you guys... I'm actually going to give those of you who are subscribed to... not subscribed. See, I'm so used to being like a YouTuber. Those of you who are following me on Twitter, I am going to explain one of the most cryptic things that I have ever uploaded to the Internet, ever, today. So this was an image that I uploaded today. This is the crazy Russian. For those of you who asked if that's slick, of course it isn't slick. It's the Russian. Look how Russian he looks. So that's him drawing an evil mustache on yours, truly. So the episode we shot today was really cool because we had me steal Ben's Ultrabook. I mean, I didn't keep it, you know. Although, maybe I should have. Actually, I couldn't have because I stole it. I went to a nearby Starbucks where I could get on the Wi-Fi, and then I gave him a call, and we did kind of like a fake thing. It was kind of fun. We were like, Ben, I stole your Ultrabook, and I'm going to log into your Facebook, and I'm going to message your grandmother. So Ben was like, well, no, Linus, I'm going to use my anti-theft technology, which is built into the Ultrabook at a pre-BIOS level. So there's hardware, and then there's bare metal firmware, then there's BIOS, which is programmable. You can erase and reflash it. Then there's your OS. So it's built in at this level. And what he was able to do, and the subscription to McAfee's service I think cost like 60 bucks a year or something like that. What he was able to do was he was able to tell his Ultrabook, you can tell it a couple things. You can tell it if you go too long without an internet connection, shut off and lock. You can also tell it next time you have network connectivity, shut off, lock. You can't get around this. Reformatting the OS will not help. Reflashing the BIOS will not help once it's locked. So once he locked it, and I was sitting there, I was able to show the screen to the camera and go, okay, there's a message from Ben. Hi, this is Ben. Please return my laptop. And you cannot boot the notebook no matter what you do, which is very, very cool. So that is required as part of the Ultrabook spec. Every Ultrabook must have that feature. So if you pay for the service, then you'll be able to... We were even able to see where the Ultrabook was within about a couple block radius just using the IP address that was registered to it when it was on the Wi-Fi. So very, very, very cool stuff. I'm just going to see if there's anything else that I'm forgetting about the whole Ultrabook concept. I don't think so. I can see if there's any more tweets about Ultrabook. And of course, there's probably like one billion. Change the Ultrabook topic. Okay, I'm sorry. I'm sorry the Ultrabook topic isn't interesting for you. Something about Gangnam Style. Okay, we're not talking about that. Okay, you guys aren't interested in Ultrabook. Fine. Be like that. Fine. Fine. We'll move on to a new topic. Okay, so my next...actually, you know what? Let's do a short Q&A. And then I'll move on to my next topic. So I'm just going to look for some of the stuff. Dom, why do retail shops say one or two gig graphics and not the specs of the card? Because retail shops, you know, big box retail, guys who rely on the ignorance of their customers to make additional margin, don't want to tell you any spec that will be helpful. Because from their perspective, like...okay, this is a two gig graphics card. So from their perspective, would they rather sell you...so this costs like 300 bucks. So would they rather convince you that the cheapo graphics card that they have, you know, like let's say a GT640 or something, that they want to charge 150 bucks for, would they rather convince you that that two gig card is as good as any other two gig card? Absolutely. And because the customers walking into these places don't have the knowledge and the experience to know that the GPU, the memory bus, the amount of memory, the speed of the memory, the type of the memory, all of these things are way, way more important than the amount of memory on a video card. In fact, for any low-end to mid-range card, the amount of memory is actually almost totally meaningless. Because it doesn't have the GPU horsepower to back up that memory anyway. So with that two gig frame, I mean, okay, you could take a GT640, you could put a four gig frame buffer on it. There's no reason you couldn't do it. That card could potentially hold enough texture data in its frame buffer to power like a six monitor gaming setup. But that GPU would only be able to run that setup at one frame per second. So who cares? It can have all the memory it wants. It's totally irrelevant. Because it will be bottlenecked by the GPU power long before the memory amount even matters. 640 could be a 512 meg card. It wouldn't even matter. And the same thing goes for even high-end cards as well. So something like a 60 Ti. Unless you're running Surround, you don't need more than two gigs. If you are running Surround, all of a sudden more memory starts to matter because it has the GPU horsepower to back it up. So it all comes down to resolution as well as how demanding the textures of the game are. If you're running high-res texture packs, now we're talking about a completely different thing. Where memory could be the difference between chugging along at 10 FPS because it has to swap out to the system memory all the time and running at a smooth 30, 40 FPS. So there. Hopefully that addresses the topic of GPU memory once and for all. Let's go ahead and have a look at some of the newer tweets that came in. 81 tweets. Okay. So let's have a look at some of the people who tweeted sort of first here. So these are two minutes. Does that mean you could also hack into the anti-theft thing to lock up someone's computer? I guess in theory. I don't know that that's actually been done yet. Alex is in a good mood. Cool story, Alex. Building a webcam, ultrabook, an ultrabook with AMD's APUs would be great for portable gaming. Fantastic point, Alex Wagner. So I don't know if you guys saw my episode about AMD's, or rather two episodes on my NCIX Tech Tips channel about AMD's APUs. So what we discovered is that as a CPU with dedicated graphics, it's semi-competitive with Core i3. It does okay. Okay, it does okay. But it's not winning any awards. However, if you're using the onboard graphics, it wipes the floor with not only a Core i3, but a Core i5, Core i7, doesn't matter. If you talk onboard graphics versus onboard graphics, APU destroys Intel. So an ultrabook with APU graphics would actually be fantastic for ultraportable gaming. I am super excited though to see what Intel's Haswell brings to the table. Because Haswell is going to be very power efficient, and they are going to be dramatically boosting up the performance of the GPU. Derek says, thank you for saying my name. You're welcome again, Derek. David says, I'd prefer GPS. Me too, but it costs more to implement, so what do you want me to say? I'm sure that they could do it with GPS, it's just that's not the requirement yet. Troy says, Linus, how can I stop my Galaxy S from discharging when I am charging it and using it? Could I buy a different battery, please? Troy, the only thing I can tell you is get maybe a higher powered USB port, if that's what you're charging it off of. There are some motherboards that have super powered, like 3x powered USB ports that will charge things faster. Just make sure you don't totally exceed the amount of current that's supposed to be used to charge that. Join Linus' fan club. What is this? Linus' fan club. That is a bizarre thing, sir. I will create a Facebook profile at some point, but I don't necessarily think I need a fan club per se. That's an awesome security feature. What are your thoughts on Sleekbook? Haven't heard of Sleekbook, unfortunately. What is the high... Kyle, what's your favorite junk food? My favorite junk food? Lindor chocolates. I love Lindor chocolates. I'm the total girl when it comes to Lindor chocolates. Refraize says, did you know that raising a baby costs $80,000? That's sort of an arbitrary number, especially because anyone starting raising a baby now will still be raising a baby 18 years from now, which means that those numbers will be totally irrelevant because of inflation and whatever else. But yeah, that's cool. Michael, VA or PLS? PLS for sure. PLS is actually closer in terms of the technology to IPS than it is to a PVA or MDA. However, I was just made aware today of a new VA. It's going to be called HAVA or something like that. You know what, I'm going to have to look this up. Google.ca, HAVA panel. No, that might not be it. BenQ, AVA, HVA. Shoot, I'm boned. I can't figure it out. BenQ has a new monitor coming that's using a new panel type that is not a PLS. It's not an IPS, but it's similar in technology and they're super excited. It's going to have 100% sRGB color gamut. It's going to have 178 degree viewing angles, so the spec looks very similar to what can be achieved with PLS. But right now, based on what's actually available at this moment, I'm a huge PLS guy. I love PLS. Cullen, don't worry. Nothing happens to your warranty on 660 Ti Power Edition. Nothing happens and the side will still deal with it. When can we expect something something? What do you think of? Yee wants to know, what do you think of the future of LGA 2011 after Ivy Bridge E? Will a new socket be introduced for Haswell E? Right now, I don't think anyone knows. For those of you who don't have the context for this question, LGA 2011 is now two generations behind LGA 1155 in terms of the CPU architecture. It is still using Sandy Bridge-E for, I don't know, enthusiast workstation, whatever E stands for. Sandy Bridge has been one generation behind. Once Haswell launches on LGA 1155, it will be two generations behind. By the time it gets a refresh, it will be two behind. What does that mean? It means that in terms of instruction per clock, it is behind. So single threaded performance is actually lower on LGA 2011 than it is on 1155, in spite of 2011 being the enthusiast platform. Are enthusiasts happy about this? I don't know. Personally, as a 2011 user, I wish I had an Ivy Bridge processor to drop in my system. I wish that I had Haswell E to go into my system. That is the disadvantage of 2011, is we seem to be getting a bit of a short straw in terms of upgrades. However, the advantage of 2011 is that it is getting a much more advanced, a much more robust overall architecture. 2011, when Ivy Bridge gets its refresh. So we had Sandy Bridge and Sandy Bridge E, LGA 2011, LGA 1155. Then we got Ivy Bridge. Then on 1155, this is 1155, we are going to get Haswell. So Intel will have gone through two architectural changes. Then we are going to get Ivy Bridge E, which will be sort of caught up but still a generation behind. However, LGA 1155 will not have more than four cores. Intel has already said this, they won't get more than four cores. 2011 already has six cores. If you are like me, you render a lot of video, six cores is actually more important than a few more instructions per clock. Okay, so once we get Ivy Bridge E, we are going to get anywhere from 10 to 12 cores. These will be high performance cores because there is no need to have a GPU core built in. As for what happens in the future, I hope we will get Haswell, but honestly I kind of doubt it. However, looking back at LGA 1366, so remember 1366 lasted throughout part of 775. 775 was still there on the low end when 1366 was a premium platform. It lasted through 1156 and was still relevant once we moved to 1155 if I recall correctly, although I could be getting them mixed up either way. 1366 lasted for multiple mainstream sockets and there is no reason to believe that LGA 2011 won't last through multiple mainstream sockets. It's got all those pins. Worst case scenario, they might do a chipset refresh or something like that, but they probably won't change the socket. And I guess basically I don't really know. Nick says, can I have a shout out please? Okay, Nick, you are shouted. Riaz wants to know, can you please tell me what should be the maximum temperature for overclocking a video card? For Riaz, there isn't really a maximum temperature. It depends on the card. So unfortunately, it's one of those questions that I know you've tweeted this at me a few times, but I don't really have an answer. Most modern cards are good up to 90, 95 degrees and they're actually designed to run like that. However, you can see what Intel and AMD have been doing with the last couple generations, improving the power efficiency and improving the temperatures that they're probably not trying to have their GPUs run so hot anymore. Thank you, Matt. I'm doing well. And I hope you are doing well as well. Ah, yes, Amir, great question. This is one of the other topics that I wanted to launch into. So we're going to go ahead and do that now. Why is Quad SLI a terrible idea for a gaming machine? And I should clarify, Amir's question is actually not as terrible. So he wants to know, would you recommend two GTX 690s or four GTX 680s for extreme benchmarking? Easy answer, four GTX 680s. The reason for that is they overclock better than 690s, although that's not as true anymore, so you'd have to find ones that overvolt along the lines of that green light topic we were talking about earlier. And just the fact that in terms of thermals, you'll be less limited because you can use better cooling on them by having them separated. Now, forget extreme benchmarking. I have a lot of people ask me about anything beyond two-way SLI. So three-way SLI, four-way SLI. They'll say, hey, is this a good idea? Should I get dual 690s? Should I get quad 680s or triple 680s or whatever else? So a few things. So number one, power consumption is going to go through the roof. Number two, the actual performance you gain from three-way SLI... Oh, shoot. There we go. Three-way SLI Linus. Let's try switching for that here. So the actual performance you gain from three-way SLI from two-way SLI is actually very small. You guys should check out this video that I did a while back. So this was GTX 690 versus three-way 670. And yeah, you should definitely check that out. It's kind of an analysis of the scaling of these GPUs as well. You don't get much in terms of performance. Now, if you go, okay, Linus, I don't care. Money is no object for me. It doesn't matter. I am willing to blow this money on these GPUs. I want to have a great gaming experience. I want the maximum FPS, to which I would reply, wrong. You're wrong. That's not what you want. You do not just want maximum FPS. There is more to gaming. There is more to a high-end system than throwing more graphics cards into it. So I see people... And Dual 690s, I guess, is less ridiculous than triple and quadruple cards for this reason. We've only got seven expansion slots on even your highest-end boards. Something like an ASRock Extreme 11, where they actually managed to implement seven slots on a 2011 board. That's your best-case scenario. If you install three graphics cards, never mind four, where there will be absolutely no slots left. If you install three graphics cards on most motherboards, you'll have no slots left over. Or you'll have a PCI slot or something stupid, due to the way that they do the slot layouts. If you have four graphics cards, you'll have none. So let's assume you have none. Where's your sound card? Where is your raid card? Where is your anything? Your HDMI capture card for streaming your gaming or for casting or whatever else? Most importantly, where is your sound card? Anyone who thinks that sound is not an important aspect of gaming and is willing to compromise on the sound experience, use their onboard sound instead of... or is willing to use that for the pleasure of putting in another graphics card to get another 10%, 15%, maybe 20% performance improvement, is just wrong. You're wrong. Because a huge part of a cinematic experience, whether it's movies or games, a huge part of your immersion is the sound experience. Why do you enjoy the movie theater? Not even today, where we've got digital production and great screens in most movie theaters. Let's go back 10 years ago, when most movie theaters had little pops and circles and artifacts all over the screen. Were you going there to see the movie big? Yes. Were you going there to see the movie on this pristine, crystal clear screen? No. You were going there to get absolutely rocked by their 20.2 surround system with huge subwoofers, because it makes for a more immersive experience. There is more to life than more graphics cards, and more gamers need to realize this. I've actually made a point of retweeting some of the tweets people have sent me. Linus, you talked me into buying a sound card. Holy crap. I can't believe I ever listened to those people who said that a sound card doesn't make a difference. Get a real sound card. Get a proper headset. Get proper speakers. You will thank me. Do not buy more graphics cards. Two graphics cards is pretty much enough. Here's another reason. So people might respond to me, Linus, I need more graphics cards, because I'm going to run six monitors, or I'm going to run three super high resolution displays. Wrong again. The reason for that is that in SLI, the graphics cards actually don't build on each other's memory. If you have two 2GIG graphics cards, you have two gigs of VRAM, effectively. If you have two 3GIG graphics cards, you have three gigs of graphics memory that is actually usable by your system. If you have four 3GIG graphics cards, I know I'm emphasizing this a lot, you have three gigs of addressable graphics memory. Which means that by the time you got to a resolution that would benefit from all these additional graphics cards in any meaningful way, you're going to run out of VRAM. Which brings me back to actually 680 quad SLI versus 690 SLI. That's why 690 SLI, I forgot. 680 quad SLI or triple SLI is terrible because you lose all of your expandability for your system. Fantastic. And then quad SLI with 690s is terrible because you have a 2GIG frame buffer. Way to go with your 2GIG frame buffer, which is not useful for anything higher than about 2560x1600, single display. You're not going to be using a 2GIG frame buffer to get an optimal experience on triple displays. You'd probably be better off going with dual 660 Ti 3GIGs or something like that. Actually, no, that's probably not fair. Dual 680 4GIGs or something along those lines may actually be a better solution than two 690s because of the limited VRAM. So there, that's my lecture on triple SLI, quad SLI, and all those kinds of solutions that for 99.9% of people who aren't trying to do what Amir is talking about, where you're just trying to set a benchmark record, it doesn't make sense. All right, so now that I've done another topic, why don't we do a little bit more conversation? Siddharth, I actually don't know a mechanical keyboard with blue or brown switches that has a backlight. I think Ducky might have something, but it's nothing that I've ever actually used. So I'm sorry, I got nothing. I got nothing. Do-do-do-do-do-do. Huh, this is funny. Alex, great suggestion. Actually, this is planned. Alex writes in, can you do a giveaway where we have to make a nerd rage video and you judge them and pick the best one? I haven't announced this in any way, so this livestream will be the first time anyone's hearing about this, but Corsair is actually sponsoring a contest. I'm going to have five K90 keyboards. So these are like $100 plus mechanical keyboards, backlights, macros, the whole works, cherry red switches. I'm going to have five of them to give away to the five best nerd rage videos. However, don't start working on your video now. I can't emphasize this enough. I'm going to have rules and requirements. There have been fantastic videos that have been submitted for my video response contest in the past that have been disqualified because they didn't listen to the requirements. You're going to have to pay special close attention to what will be the judging requirements, and I don't want to hear any complaining if you don't win because you didn't participate correctly. However, that giveaway is coming. Probably I'll have a video up sometime in the next couple weeks, so that's very exciting. CW, any faults about the Nexus 7? Nexus 7 is a fantastic value. Have you guys heard about the price drop that's coming? It's going to be $199 for the 16 gig, and they're introducing a 32 gig. Holy crap, it makes it the best value ever. It has a Tegra 3 processor, which is actually fast. Well, Tegra 2 was not that fast. GPU-wise, it was pretty good, but CPU-wise, honestly, my Galaxy Tab 10.1 is not generating a great user experience for me these days. Thank you, Caleb. His name was Big Something. What else have we got here? Dale, I get a lot of questions about this. What power supply would you recommend? This is sort of the general question, so I'm going to answer Dale's specific question. When I'm SLI-ing GTX 660 Ti's, I have three 200mm fans, and maybe, of course, they're H100 or 150. Dale, you haven't given me nearly enough information. If I'd read your entire tweet before I started reading it out loud, I probably wouldn't have responded to this question because the information you're giving me is totally useless. I know you have two 660 Ti's, which means you need at least a 700-750 watt power supply. You haven't told me what CPU you have. You haven't told me anything else. Are you running 10 hard drives in here? Are you going to have a whole bunch of different power peripherals running off the back of the USB? Are you going to be overclocking? Fans consume nothing. People who ask me what power supply do I need, and they tell me all the fans they're running in their system, I'm like, all those fans may be two watts out of your power supply. Totally irrelevant. Totally doesn't matter. Same thing with the Corsair H100. It doesn't really consume a significant amount of power. Shoutout to South America! I almost said South Africa. Shoutout to that too, but, you know. Hissu says, why do people mistake earphones for headphones and vice versa? I just wanted to get that point out there because it's annoying. Okay, Hissu. 272 new interactions. You guys are killing me here. You know what? Actually, I'm going to launch into a new topic here. Because 272 interactions is a fantastic point. So we are going to run through the math of why I cannot reply to every Twitter message I get. Since I started running the contest, I have received more than 1,000 Twitter messages per day. Twitter actually has a hard limit of 1,000 tweets that I can send out per day. That means if I sat there and typed at my computer and literally replied to 1,000 messages, I would actually get my account, like I've run into it a few times in the last week, they'll just say, you have reached your tweet limit, you cannot tweet anymore. Aside from that, they split up that 1,000 tweet limit into time chunks throughout the day. So you can only do like 100 at a time and you have to spread it out through the day. I don't even have the option of lying in bed with my laptop and typing like this, or sitting down and hammering them away and trying to get caught up. Because Twitter is going to get after me after I do 100 tweets or so and say, hey, oh, no, it's okay, wait a few hours and then you can tweet some more. So for those of you who are upset that I wasn't able to reply to you or you're tweeting me and I'm not responding to you, you know what? I'm going to do my best. That's all I can do. When I have some time, I'm going to fire up my phone, I'm going to fire up my laptop, I'm going to hammer out some tweets. But beyond that, there's just nothing I can do. The sheer volume of messages I receive. Guys, think about this. Go and read a tweet and then reply to it and then time yourself. Now times 1,000 every day. I have a full-time job. I have these videos. I have a live stream. When I do a live stream, it's going to completely wipe out my place where I was and it's going to absolutely destroy any progress I could have possibly made at catching up because in this live stream alone, I've already received well over 600 tweets. So I'm sorry, guys. I do my best. It's all I can do. It is not mathematically possible for me to reply to the tweets. And that doesn't even get into the point that once I reply to a tweet, that person usually tweets me back, which means that what was 1,000 tweets, once I reply to them, is probably going to turn into more like 1,500 once I have to reply a second time and then maybe even let's say half of those people again reply to me again. So now every 1,000 tweets is actually probably more like 1,700 tweets by the time I'm actually done addressing the person's question. So this is why I think I need a forum. This is why I think I need a way for you guys to interact with each other and not just me because I will die. Speaking of which, Twitter. I mean if you guys want to sort of find anything at LinusTech and throw in your own answers, that would be great. That would actually be immensely helpful for me because I can't reply to them all on my own. All right. What else we got here? TinyTheBoss says, hey Linus, how come you haven't posted a pic of your kid sitting in front of a PC yet? I actually have taken one, but you're right. I haven't posted one yet. I'll see if I can find it. I'm not sure if I know where it is because my wife keeps track of all the baby pictures and all that. Neewer says, what do you think of the GTX 660? Because I'm trying to build a gaming machine that isn't that expensive. GTX 660 is a good option. So is 7870. You should look into both of those. Nick says, I saw the ASUS VG2. You know what? I'm not going to read the tweets. I'm just going to do this. Why am I doing this? Editing looks great. What program does Diesel use? Diesel uses Adobe CS6. So everything you saw done previously by myself or by Slick was done using Vegas Movie Studio or whatever the cheap $100 option is because I'm super cheap. So he's using a real editing software that he brought his own copy of. And that is one of the reasons that the NCIX Tech Tips episodes have had a higher standard of quality. He also knows how to use After Effects, which is like voodoo magic to me. So Phil, great question. There's really nothing that special about a 3960X compared to a 3930K. It used to be that the Extreme Edition was somewhat justifiable because it was unlocked so you could break benchmarking records and if you really wanted the EP of having an Extreme Edition, then that was cool. But a 3930K has a little bit less cache, a little bit lower stock clock speed, and other than that, it actually overclocks exactly the same. So we're talking performance within 1%, 2% of each other once you overclock them both to the max. I've never recommended a 3960X to anyone. People do buy them. I mean, people buy them. It's cool. Yeah, go for it. You want to be extreme? Buy Extreme Edition. But yeah, it's not something that I've ever really recommended. Can you talk about microstuttering? You know what? I can't talk about microstuttering. I don't see it. Microstuttering is one of those things that bothers some people a lot more than it bothers other people. It's like motion blur. Motion blur drives me nuts on monitors. Lots of people can't see it at all. So, Eric, if I had to, would I rather fight one horse-sized duck or a hundred duck-sized horses? I think I could take the horses because I'm a lot taller than them, and if they're the size of a duck, I mean, all they'd really be able to do is kick me in the ankles. I've actually been kicked by a horse before, and before the obvious joke, that explains a lot. Table slapping, you know, that's a knee-slapping joke right there. Before you make that joke, it was a baby horse. Well, not a baby, she was a couple months old. But my family, we lived in the Boondocks, and we had ostriches and pigs and horses and all kinds of crazy stuff. But we had a baby horse, so one of our horses, we bred her, and her baby's name was Trixie. And Trixie and I had a little disagreement once about whether she was going to walk with me or whether she was not going to walk with me, and she was going to go off on her and do her own thing. So I gave her the business. If you guys have horses, you know, you give them a little... you pull down on their halter, you kind of go, look, no. You get them to bring their head down. The head down is a submissive posture for a horse, so you're forcing them a little bit. Okay, no, look, you're going to be submissive. It doesn't matter what you think about this. So when they put their heads up, you know, rear up, that's aggressive. Okay? She surprised me, and she pulled away really quickly. And then she started doing that whole, like, fucking bronco, like, up and down and up and down thing. And she was, you know, going up on her front legs and kicking her back legs out behind her. And she actually nailed me right in the head. So she got me right about here. And I'm lucky there's no scar, because it did bleed. She got me pretty good. Actually, this is one of the two times in my life that I have seen my entire vision just, like, I'm going to simulate it. I've seen my vision just start to... Okay, wow, look, this thing, look, look. Whatever. It starts to go, wow, this thing gets light even if I cover it completely. Okay, whatever. That's the only two times in my life that my vision has actually gone... Okay, come on. Focus. Focus, focus. You got this. That my... There we go. That my vision has gone black. So one of them was when I had blood drawn from me when I was super, super sick, and I just about passed out on top of the nurse. And, accidentally, of course. And then the other time was when I got kicked by this horse. So what happened was I was, like, I was standing on my feet. She kicked me in the head. I blacked out. And then I came to, in time to hit the ground. And luckily I wasn't hurt. But man was I ever mad. So basically she got the old, you know, grab her again, no, pull down, gave her the old smack on the butt, no, you're not allowed to do that. She seemed sort of genuinely sorry about it, but you can never tell with horses. They're a crafty bunch. So yeah, that's my story about fighting horses in the time that I got kicked in the head by a horse. Lyndon, someone's already asked that. Sorry, dude. They're lower grade panels, so they're cheaper. There you go. And the suggestions to use Facebook instead of Twitter in order to get around the limit, it's like, guys, the point is I can't reply to a thousand plus messages a day. Not so much just the physical impossibility of it, but the fact that I just can't do it. It's just not possible. Christian, I have a question. Why will the number pad on my Razor Naga not work? There's a switch on the bottom, Christian. In all likelihood you haven't switched to the wrong thing, so that would be my guess. I could be wrong, though. I mean, there's always the crazy thought you could contact Razor and see if they have any thoughts about it. It's possible it's defective, so they'd be the best ones to talk to about something like that. Nizua wants to know what would I recommend, a Sabertooth Z77 or the new motherboard from MSI, the Big Bang M-Power? Honestly, either of them are great options. So Asus backs it up with a five-year warranty, which is cool, awesome. And then MSI has a three-year warranty, but they're hand-testing every single board in an overclocked scenario. So, I don't know, you decide which of those two things is more important to you, and then go for it. They're both absolutely fantastic options. All right. Brandon, there we go. Fantastic question. When does a motherboard really affect with an A, Brandon, really affect performance? The answer is sort of complicated. So there's a lot of ways that a motherboard can affect performance. So in terms of the features that it delivers. So Asus's implementation of USB 3, for example, as far as I can tell, is superior to what I've seen from other guys. So you get faster performance regardless of which USB 3 device you're using or whatever the case may be. You will get better performance from an Asus board using their ASMedia chipset and their UASP or their Turbo modes. So that's one of the ways a motherboard can affect performance. It can affect performance in terms of just what features it has enabled. So if you want to run dual graphics, SLI, Crossfire, you better get a motherboard that supports it. Otherwise, you won't get that performance because you can't install those things. So there's that. It can affect overclocking, which means if you have a better power delivery system, it runs cooler. You're going to get slightly better overclocking results. BIOS optimization is another way that the motherboard can affect performance and overclocking. So the better they program the BIOS, the better the power delivery is, the better it is. However, it's not the way it used to be. It used to be back in the socket 478 days, back in the socket A days, that you could actually run gaming benchmarks on one motherboard versus another motherboard, and you might see a 10% spread in terms of performance, which these days, totally unheard of. It doesn't happen anymore. At the same speed, at the same frequency. That's what I'm talking about. And that was because of the way that the manufacturers were designing the board. I mean, they were doing so much more work at the BIOS level because they had to optimize for the communication from the FSB, over the FSB between the CPU and the chipset, and then from the chipset to everything else, including the RAM. The second that the integrated memory controller came along with the Athlon 64, the second that the memory controller was taken off the chipset, all of a sudden, there was less differentiation in terms of performance because there was nothing the motherboard manufacturers could really do, besides routing the traces really cleanly to the memory banks, that would affect the way that the performance was going to play out because it was no longer being relayed by anything. There was no tweaking they could do to this chipset. There's just this integrated memory controller still right into the CPU. So there's that. And I mean, even then though, PCI Express, AGP, these were features that could differentiate boards, better implementations of the graphics ports was something, whereas now, especially on the Intel platform, even PCI Express lanes are implemented at the CPU level. So what's not implemented at the CPU level now? There's a few things. So there's USB 3, which is on the Southbridge. There's SATA, which is on the Southbridge. So really, anything that's built into the CPU, there's not much the motherboard manufacturers can do about it, besides helping you tweak more overclocking speed out of it. Everything else. Now, OK, so yeah, onboard graphics was another way that motherboard manufacturers could differentiate. Now that's built onto the CPU too. So really, there's not a whole lot left. They can build in things like SAS functionality, like gigabytes done with the X79 SUP5, things like Thunderbolt, so connectivity, more USB 3 ports, better USB 3 implementations, better sound implementations, such as ASUS has done with the Maximus V formula. These are the ways that these motherboard guys can really differentiate from each other. But in terms of performance, you sit down, you play a game, performance, there's not much of a delta anymore. Oh, dude, do you have to have that Twitter name? I hardly even want to reply to your message. But what reason would make you end your YouTube career? Good question, I guess. I haven't really thought about it. I have zero intention of stopping making videos on YouTube. If anything, I feel rejuvenated these days, because it was a huge milestone for me to hit that 200,000 subscriber milestone. Back when I started doing this, I would look at guys with 50,000 subscribers or 100,000 subscribers, and I'd be like, wow, that is amazing. If I can ever get there, I will be so grateful and I'll be so happy. And I'm there now. I'm looking for the next level. I'm looking for 500,000. I'm looking for a million. It's always about taking it to the next level. It was just really exciting to get to one of those milestones that I'd really set for myself. One of the first milestones that got me really excited was the day that I passed TigerDirectBlog for the number of subscribers as well. They've still got more views by a long shot, but it's fun. It's friendly competition. I have nothing against any of those other YouTube guys. It's kind of fun to play that game. Speaking of that game, one of the things that's also rejuvenated me lately is check this out. Since I hit that 200,000 subscriber mark, not only has it not slowed down... This is SocialBlade. I know this isn't the best one. VidStatsX is sort of better, but this gives me... I'm just used to the interface here. So check this out, guys. Before I hit the 200,000 subscriber mark... You can see here, this is my total number of subscribers in this column. I was averaging 300 subscribers a day. This is an anomaly. I think YouTube was doing a correction. When I hit that mark, all of a sudden, whether it's people spreading the word more, whether it's you guys supporting me and telling your friends to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips, whether it's people who just see that 200,000 number and it feels more credible to them, or whatever has happened over the last little while, I've been absolutely overwhelmed with the additional support. I'm averaging more like a growth rate of 400, 450 per day, which gives me all the encouragement that I need to keep the project going no matter what. So I want to keep talking tech with you guys. I want to keep producing videos. In fact, who knows, maybe sometime in the next few months you might see me even ramp things up to a completely new level. Spoiler alert. Stay tuned. I can't give any more details than that right now, so don't even ask. What do we got? Let's go back to Twitter, shall we? Actually, you know what? No, we're not going to go back to Twitter yet. I'm going to have a look and see if there's any of the other topics that I wanted to cover. So why 4-way SLI is a bad idea? Ah, this! This is something where I actually don't have the answer for you guys, but this is the most confusing thing in the world to me. So we're going to go on a little voyage of discovery here, and I'm going to talk about what exactly is the cost structure of displays. So I'll be back in like two seconds. I just have to go get something. Alright, so the prices of displays. What sort of prompted me to think about this was the fact that one of my buddies pointed out to me that he saw a 40-inch TV that was in the neighborhood of like $400 or $450. $1080p TV. You know what? I'm going to see if I can find it. $1080p and then TV. Sorry, I'm checking on the NCIX website. Here it is. So 40-inch TV. I'm just going to copy this too. Okay, maybe you guys can help me figure this out because frankly I don't get it. So we're going to switch to this view here. We're going to go ahead and we're going to pull up a 40-inch TV. Paste. Okay, here's a 40-inch TV. Toshiba LCD TV. I can tell you right now there's no such thing as a TN panel TV. So this is some kind of a VA or something. It's not a TN panel. It is $400. A 40-inch TV is $400. Okay, so why is it that a 40-inch TV at 1080p resolution, bear with me here guys because I'm going to go on sort of a wild ride here. Why is it that a 40-inch TV at a 1080p resolution costs more than a 1080p LCD VA? So let's look for a VA panel. Okay, so here's a 27-inch. That's an AMVA LED backlight. Okay, it's got LED backlights, whatever. So why does it cost more? I can tell you the answer. It's much larger. Okay. Got it. So larger costs more. Actually, where was I going with this? Something to do with large and pixel density and something, something, something. Right, right, right, right, right. Okay, so a much larger TV costs more. Okay, so now let's scale things back down again and let's look at pixel density. So when we get to pixel density, all of a sudden, the smaller something is, the more it costs because it's more difficult to manufacture. So tell me something. If a bigger device that inherently has lower pixel density and a smaller device, this monitor I showed you guys before, this is like in the same price range. It's on super discount now, but generally speaking, it's a $400. So if these two things cost the same thing, in spite of the same resolution, why is it that this device, which actually is a 10-inch panel, so in terms of the actual size difference, it's like a similar ratio going from like a 40-inch TV to a 27-inch LCD, why is it that this doesn't cost the same even though the pixel density is actually significantly higher? This is also a 1080p panel, if I recall correctly. This is a transformer TF700. So here's my question to you. What is actually affected, how is it that we can produce a 40-inch TV, which is vastly bigger, for the same price as this LCD, and we can't produce... You know what? I had a whole thing in my mind about this, and I've totally lost my train of thought, so I'm going to give up on this topic. But the point is generally, what affects it? Is it size? Is it pixel density? I can't quite figure it out, because it doesn't seem like the cost scales proportionally when we increase the size, and then it doesn't seem like the cost scales proportionally when we decrease the pixel density or increase the pixel density or whatever else the case may be. I mean, did you know that iPad Retina Display replacement IPS panels actually only cost like $100 if you buy them from, I don't know, it's like Laptop Repair or Screen Repair or something.com. I give up on this topic, I'm sorry. It's actually getting kind of late and I'm kind of tired, so we're going to move into something else, and this is something that I really did want to talk about. Paul's Hardware and Awesome Sauce News are two new YouTube channels that you guys should totally subscribe to. If you're not already subscribed to, raise the world. So I'm going to bring up all of these YouTube channels here and raise the world. So this is one of them. So this is Logan's channel from Tech Syndicate. So he's actually growing pretty fast and things are going pretty well over there. Awesome Sauce News is Kyle from that horrible, horrible store in the US. So he's doing his own sort of vloggy style videos. I wish him well, but I think he's only got like 100 subscribers or something like that. See, there he is. Look how sexy he is. And then finally we have actually this one. I haven't seen what Paul's up to, but Paul's Hardware is another channel that you guys probably want to check out. If you enjoy what I'm doing, then you're probably going to enjoy what these guys are doing here. So Paul only has one video. He's already produced only half as many videos as Kyle. So yeah, way to go, way to go, Paul. I hope you're watching. Wow, look at this. 43 dislikes and 0 dislikes. Just for that, I'm going to like the video. So he now has, I don't know, thanks, share it with your friends. I've actually never liked a video on YouTube, to be perfectly honest. I'm not much of a YouTube watcher. I'm just more of a YouTube maker. What other topics do we have? Ah, yes. I've had a lot of people ask me about my new gear that's coming. So if you're not familiar with my new gear conversation, I blew over 10 grand on new gear so I have an FS700 camera coming, which is going to be awesome. We'll be able to shoot video realistically at 240 FPS. If we need something extremely, extremely high speed, it can do up to 960 FPS. And here's like, I have all these ideas in my head of stuff we can do with this. Like, all of a sudden, we'll be able to empirically evaluate the performance in terms of input lag on an LCD monitor. Because all we'll have to do is take a microphone, put it next to a mouse, and go like this. Hit it. So you take a video of the LCD monitor, and I guess you could put the mouse in there as well, and then all you have to do is sync up with the sound it made when you tap the mouse. And you'll have to have the microphone like right next to it. We don't want the delay of the sound causing any ill effects. Actually, you know what? You should probably keep the mouse in the shot so you can really see that point of contact. And we should be able to, in theory, get down to the exact frame at 960 FPS, the exact frame where we touched the mouse. Then we can count how many frames until the monitor responds. And I don't know if this is going to work. Maybe it's totally stupid. Maybe 960 FPS isn't enough, but I'm super excited to try it out. So I'm thinking if we have a CRT on one side and an LCD on the other side, we can just try it and see how much... If we take Asus' 144Hz LCD and put that next to a CRT, how much of a difference is there? Are the CRT diehards missing out by avoiding LCD, or are they still right? Is it still the fastest way to game? So that's something that's super exciting. So my new gear is coming next week. Ah! So I've got HDMI capture cards coming, which means I won't have to use this webcam anymore. I've got a new microphone coming, I've got a new tripod coming, new lights, all kinds of crazy stuff. So I'm not going to look all pale and ghostly like this. Unless I do look pale and ghostly like this, in which case, sorry dudes, that means I just don't know how to use this gear that I blew a bunch of money on. Which would be a very sad thing indeed, very sad thing indeed. 247 new interactions, okay. So we're going to try and do a couple more Q&As, and then I think, oh you know what, before we do more Q&A, let's do the giveaway announcement. And then we'll finish up with a little bit of Q&A. So I received, and I've got my notes here. You know what, I'll just let you guys go through the notes with me. So first I want to say, the winner, and I hope you're watching. My original plan was to have it be so that only someone who was watching could win. But I realized, you know what, that's not really fair. I mean, anyone who does a draw, does a draw and then you get in touch with the person who won. Before I announce the winner, I want to talk a little bit about the format of the contest. The format of the contest was wrong. My original idea was that the first one to complete the task should win. However, I made some mistakes in the task that made it so I couldn't really do it that way. So I required people to format and punctuate the secret phrase, which they had to jump around to different videos and check out and discover, and then unjumble. So the secret phrase, I had them format, I wanted them to format it exactly the way I did. Unfortunately, I formatted it incorrectly. So the secret phrase was, I finished the quest, where's my swag? And I had a period on the word quest and I was missing a question mark on the word swag. What I also didn't realize when I was creating the challenge was that I finished my quest, where's the swag? Would also be a correct way to solve the puzzle. So instead of taking the first person who replied exactly the way that I had it written, which took, I mean, there were over a hundred correct, sort of correct, not what I had in mind, but correct responses, where they added a question mark or they switched around the the and the my, before the one who formatted it the way that I had wanted in my head for it to be formatted. And I didn't think it was fair to do it that way. So what I did is I took all the people that did answer it correctly, I dropped them all in Excel and then generated a random number. And the winner is, can I get a drumroll? Can everybody drumroll please? Bernard Yip. So that's your email address. I'll email you if you're, okay, okay, we have to go, okay, we have to go to Twitter though. So there's some notes here. I'm going to go to Twitter after. Bernard, if you're on Twitter, please message me or email me again. I can have a look at my email on the other screen. Let me know if you're watching. I hope you're watching and I hope you're excited because you are going to be the proud owner of a GeForce GTX 660 Ti. And the shipping's free. Don't worry about it. I'll cover the shipping even though it's expensive. Do you guys have any idea how much it cost me to ship the Duke Nukem NVIDIA prize, which was a GTX 580, I think, 480, something like that, 580, 3D vision monitor, and a copy of Duke Nukem? $500 it cost to ship that to the winner. $500. Unfreaking believable. So anyway, okay, I'm going to have a look at my email over here. In the meantime, so yeah, okay, these were all my notes for everything I wanted to talk about. So I accepted any of those answers. So with or without punctuation and with the the and the my switched around, I did end up requiring the period because there were already so many people that did have the period in there that, yeah, it ended up having to work that way. Now, the way that I'm going to do it next time in order to make it more fair, especially for people in other time zones, I feel for you guys, is I am going to leave it for a couple days, maybe two or three days. I might have a longer treasure hunt so that it's more difficult. But then what I'll do is I'll give you guys a couple days and then I'll have everyone submit and then I will do a random draw and I'll make that very clear from the beginning. I'm sorry that this wasn't better organized. And yeah, so you know, hey, congratulations to the winner. And I don't see an email from him yet, but you know, hopefully he'll get in touch soon. And thank you guys so much for participating. It's just been awesome. And I think that wraps it up for the giveaway. We've got six minutes left, so let's do some more Q&A. And that is the most terrifying thing that I think I've seen today. That is horrible, dude. He says, I think I've made the best t-shirt ever. And by best t-shirt, I think he means the t-shirt that will get him kicked out of places. That's awful. I'm going to go ahead and favorite that. That's terrific. All right, Daniel, talk about non-referenced graphics cards and fully custom liquid cooling. What happened to personal X79 build? Daniel, I had an update on the X79 build not a week ago, so I'm still working on it. I'm hoping to get it done in this calendar year. Talking about non-referenced graphics cards and fully custom liquid cooling, unless you have a manufacturer in mind that has already made a water block for your non-referenced card, if you want to water cool your card, get a reference card. Because it's very difficult these days to water cool a video card without a full cover block. And full cover blocks do not work on non-compatible cards, so it just doesn't work that way. Esteban, what would you recommend? Gigabyte X79 SUP5 Wi-Fi or whatever. Or ASRock X79 Extreme 9. X79 SUP5. That is kind of like asking me what would you recommend? The motherboard that you're using, which is the motherboard I'm using, or some other motherboard. ASRock is not one of my preferred motherboard manufacturers, so I prefer ASUS MSI and Gigabyte, so I would definitely go with the Gigabyte option there. Marcus, if you were to build an LG 1155 PC today, what motherboard and CPU would you choose? You know what? Great question, but there's a lot of different answers. And I'm going to tie this into what one of the other guys here asked. I saw something about talking about ITX gaming. If I was going to build an LG 1155 PC, I would want to take advantage of the fact that it can fit in a very small form factor. So I'd probably go with something like an ASUS P8 Z77i Deluxe. So that's a Z77 ITX board. Then I'd go with something like an external sound card. I don't have it next to me anymore. So you can't use the onboard sound on that. It's terrible. Well, it's not terrible, but it's onboard sound. So I'd use some kind of external USB DAC, and it has a headphone amp and all that kind of stuff. So I'd do that. And then I'd probably go with the 3570K, because I'm assuming this is for a portable gaming machine. And then I'd throw something like a 660 Ti in there. So hey, Bernard, there's my recommendation for what you should do with this card. And then in terms of case, I'd probably go with either that Cooler Master one that I just unboxed, the Elite 120 I think it's called, or I'd go with a Silverstone FT03, which is a sweet, sweet case. The mini one, the mini one, FT03 mini. Joel, what do you like so much about the TJ07? It looks like it's showing its age to me. Something that is timeless and classic doesn't age. A TJ07 ages like a fine wine or like a perfectly cut steak. It is showing its age in terms of features, which I can fix. I can cut cable management holes. I can throw in mounting for whatever it is I need to put in it. But you cannot fix beautiful design. And I love the unibody shape. I love the size, the efficiency of the size. I mean, a Cosmos 2 actually can't fit any more water cooling crap than a TJ07. I mean, maybe a little bit more. But when you look at the difference in size, it's the efficiency of the layout of the internals that makes the TJ07 so appealing. You can fit all this water cooling crap in there, and it's still not that big. Like it's big, but it's not that big. Brian, is there a sound card you can recommend for a balance between gaming and music enjoyment? Honestly, anything from the ASUS line, the Zonar line, is going to be awesome. If you're using headphones, get one with a headphone amp. If you're using speakers, get one that doesn't have a headphone amp, because it doesn't matter. And then as for a balance between gaming and music enjoyment, good sound is good sound. I've always taken that philosophy about it. Maybe to the most extreme of audio files, there will be some difference between a gaming-optimized sound card and a music-optimized sound card. But the reality of it is, if it produces clear sound, deep bass, rich mids, clear highs, if it does all those things, it'll be great for games, it'll be great for movies, and it'll be great for music. Did I say movies or music? Whatever, all three. Alright, one more minute left, so I'm going to take the next tweet, the tweet that's at the top, this is sort of going to be my thing, where I take the top tweet, I'm going to click it. Now, Michael, great question Michael, this is a fantastic question. Why do TVs have 240Hz plus and not monitors? Fantastic question. Michael, TVs are doing this, okay? This is your leg, this is them pulling it. Your 960Hz or 480Hz clear motion, or whatever it is they're doing on the TV, is not a 960Hz panel. It doesn't work that way. You are not actually seeing 960Hz, or let's use your example, so your example is 240Hz, you are not seeing 240Hz image refreshes every second. HDMI is not even remotely capable of carrying that kind of bandwidth. Even the new revised HDMI is not capable of carrying more than 1080p 120 frames per second. That's the one with the faster processors on either end, whatever, 1.4A or something like that, who cares, HDMI sucks. But what they're doing is they are not just refreshing the image. So let's say, here's your motion, okay, so something's moving across the screen like this, these are your frames, okay? So instead of just doing this, so let's say we've got four frames, one, two, three, four, to show you the motion, in between each of those frames, they are flickering the backlight. And that plays a trick on your eye that makes, so if they go two flicks and one frame, two flicks and one frame, two flicks, one frame, it plays a trick with your eye that makes the motion look smoother, but also has sort of a strange effect that makes it look unnaturally smooth to some people. So when you see someone saying this is a 240Hz TV or 480Hz TV, they are referring to the modulation of the backlight, not to the refresh rate of the actual LCD panel. So that's a really important clarification. That's why there were so many 120Hz TVs out there that people were talking about or they wanted to buy, or they were even mistakenly buying with the intention of running 3D vision or something with their graphics card, getting a middleware driver, and they're trying to do this only to realize that their 120Hz TV was only a 60Hz panel. It wasn't even capable of displaying a left and a right image at 60Hz for each eye with 3D glasses. So fantastic question, and thank you very much for asking it. Thank you guys so much for participating, those of you who are here live, and don't forget to subsc... Well, okay, anyone who's here has probably already subscribed to Linus Tech Tips, I think. If you're not already following on Twitter, make sure you follow. I know that I'm not able to address... Look, there's a hundred more interactions now, guys, sorry, there's nothing I can do. I know I'm not able to address all the questions, but I do do my best, I do try, and there's a chance that you'll get through. Think of it kind of like calling into a radio show, there's a chance you'll get through. What I really need is four operators out there filtering these and sending me all the best questions, but I'm just one guy right now. Yeah, thanks so much. Here's to... I wish I had a glass, but I'll settle for this. Here's to 200,000 subscribers, and here's to 200,000 more, and thank you guys for being with me every step of the way, and good night.