 Welcome to the WAN show everyone. Those of you who are able to join us, there are apparently some site problems with Twitch.tv right now. But if not beta.twitch.tv. Not beta. See, sometimes beta is better than non-beta. Well, because beta could potentially have a solid update that they just haven't finished testing yet, which doesn't have as many bugs. Whereas the site that they've been running all this time. Is somehow broken. Is somehow broken. Speaking of beta, guys, don't forget that we are sponsored by Razer comms. So you can click this bit.ly link right here to download Razer comms and check it out. It's voice chat software that is optimized for gaming as opposed to optimized for talking to your grandmother like Skype. Should be noted that the IP exploit is gone in Skype now as of the latest beta. So I mean, if we're gonna compare beta software, I guess we have to factor in that someone else's beta software, which is also beta, could be beta-ly fixed in a way that the other one was never broken, but anyway. So comms isn't perfect. It is in beta right now, but guys do check it out. It has an overlay for in-game that is non-intrusive and doesn't kill you the same way that other ones do. And unlike clients such as Mumble or Teamspeak, you don't have to have a dedicated server. In fact, you don't have to know a bloody thing about setting up almost anything. Yeah, it's about as automatic as anything I've encountered. So without further ado, let's do a quick overview of what's gonna be going on today. So JJ is our special guest. He'll be joining us in probably actually not that long because we're quite late today. We're very sorry about that. JJ from ASUS, if anyone's wondering who JJ is. Yeah, JJ from ASUS will be joining us on Razor comms. What else we got lined up for today? We've got pressure cooker rundowns on someone's house. We've got USB 3.0 getting a lot faster. Did you get my joke today? No. What was your joke? I said it was lightning speed. Lightning speed, oh yes, yes. I did get that, but then I forgot to actually say anything about it when we were filming that link. So I'm sorry. That's okay. EA? Yeah, EA. Just EA, that is all. AMD has released their 13.8 beta driver. Speaking of things that are in beta, but could potentially make things a whole lot better. It pretty much addresses sort of the problems with frame sort of dips and spikes and the problem with frame time. So frame latency has been sort of addressed. More on that later, but without further ado, this thing. So I took that opportunity to take a couple of bites of food because I'm hungry and. The obligatory slick has to mute his phone. Yeah, I don't think you've actually managed to mute your phone before a show ever. Like maybe once, I'm not sure. There we go, fixed. All right. Well, why don't we start with an easy topic before we introduce our special guest and let's go with the. You said easy topic, so I automatically assumed EA. Yeah, why don't we go back for EA early in the show. So this is an article from polygon.com. Former EACEO, okay. So it's not actually quite EA. Right. Because he's not with EA anymore. But when you're a former CEO, you still have a huge attachment. And the things you say, I mean, if you say something like chasing console graphics, like console grade graphics on mobile is a mistake because, and he goes on to say that investing in better graphics without figuring out what differentiating gameplay you're going to have without thinking of how gameplay rewards players is a road to ruin. Prettier games cost more to make better games satisfy consumers. So to imagine that this is something that he didn't know very recently when he was still at EA would be ridiculous. With that said, I agree with him. But I think his former company is a perfect example of like what changes in a typical NHL or Madden release. Usually just the graphics. Graphics. I've heard that recently they've added a few things. They change rosters, give them credit, give them credit where credit is due. That's more NHL though. Not like the NHL organization, not EA. Because they have a partnership. So NHL is like, here's the new roster, put this in your game. Right, but EA does it. Trying to play devil's advocate, give them any credit you can. Yeah, yeah, I'm trying to give them all the possible credit that could possibly be given to EA for doing anything whatsoever. But yeah. Audio? No, no, I don't think anything's wrong. Someone said. Audio is fine. Saw two people say, see we want audio, audio. Okay. Echo? Yeah, I don't know. A bunch of people say it's fine. Yeah, so anyway, that's our EA News of the Week. We were actually discussing earlier this week, maybe what we should do is we should have an actual dedicated show for just EA News of the Week because it takes up a lot of time on the WAN show that we could spend talking about more important things. And the thing is, it's very consistent. It's almost like a segment. Like we have build logs, EA News, the rest of it. Yeah. Guest caller. Yeah. We could just segment it into its own show. We could, we need like a little intro for it. It should be like, I don't know, just like a huge. EA ball rolling down a hill and the hill is actually a stock thing. And then it's like thumbs up. Yeah, and it hits the thumbs up marker as it comes down. Yeah, that could actually work. That would be outstanding. So I think without further ado, we should welcome our special guest, JJ from Asus. Yeah, let's get him to call in here. All right, so we're firing up Razor comms. Getting, here we go. Chat with friend. And starting the voice call. In the meantime, I'm gonna go ahead and add his little picture here, which is awesome by the way. Yeah, there he is. That's the guy. You are live, sir. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. That is fantastic. It has been, we have actually never had you as a guest before. So we have had so much demand. Why don't you start by introducing yourself to the members of our audience who don't know who you are in spite of your phenomenal internet celebrity. And then we'll go from there. Wow, that's a lot to say. Well, first off, just thanks for having me on the show. I appreciate it guys. It's very cool of you. So for you guys that might know or might not know, I pretty much, I work for Asus. So specifically what I do is I handle their technical marketing. And what that pretty much falls into is covering their core component series of products. So at the end of the day, what that essentially means is things like the motherboards, the GPUs, server and workstation products, storage, multimedia, networking. It's been a lot of different product over the entire time that I've been with the company, which has now been about five years. And now really my focus has started to shift to pretty much focus in on just kind of the GPUs and to the motherboard line. And actually fairly soon, I'll actually be transitioning into a little bit of a different world within the company as well. But I'll still definitely be working with a lot of the community where a lot of my passion lies in in terms of providing great information and great insight into what I think that we're doing in terms of our products. So hopefully that gives you a little bit more insight into who I am. The last point I guess I'll make is one that I think I find interesting about myself, which is I don't come from a marketing background. Classically, the people in my position usually major in some form of marketing and college and things along those lines. My background's actually in engineering consultation system integration. So it's much more kind of hands-on real world usage than it would historically be for somebody in my per se position. Well, that makes a lot of sense because the way that you've typically approached marketing, at least working behind the scenes with us. So to give the viewers some perspective, JJ and I have probably only been in direct communication for the last, I don't know, maybe a year and a half, maybe two years. Sound about right? That sounds about right. Yeah, and basically the way that he approaches marketing is not a marketing approach. So rather than worry too much about, I think a great example would be something like HTC, where they take their new camera technology and they branded UltraPixel. And that's more of a marketing thing. Whereas when you actually get on the phone with someone technical and they go and they actually explain, well, the way that the light hits the pixels, the larger size pixels are able to capture more light and they're able to resolve more detail in a lower light situation compared to having more megapixels is more better and that mistaken mentality that every competitor is sort of still stuck in. So JJ takes a very realistic approach to ASUS products and maybe you can explain to us why ASUS? Because I'm sure you've had other offers. Yeah, actually, I guess for a lot of people, it's interesting why I've ended up being here. And now being with actually the company for almost five years, I guess that's a really good question to ask. And actually I came from a background where I guess from a financial perspective, actually I was even quote unquote making more money and I had even more control over a lot of different variables and things along those lines. But for me personally, it was a question of being closer to something that I'm extremely passionate about. I think most of the people that are really interested in technology and especially the PC DIY space, it's something that it's kind of part of the ethos of who you are and what you're interested in and having the opportunity to work for a component vendor, especially a component vendor like ASUS. When I had the chance to move back to the Bay Area and I found that there was an opening for that, I said that that's what I want to do. You know, is to be able to work for a company that I thought was making great product and product that I had worked with from the very beginning, from my very first system build that I had done to when I was doing private consultation and integration, just kind of made me have a bigger level of affinity and passionate interest for it. And I said, if I can get that much closer to it, never thinking that I was ultimately going to have the opportunity to work directly with our R&D team or our management product development team at being able to influence product designs, be able to work with, you know, technical media and users themselves and collecting all that to be able to bring out, I think, you know, really awesome and innovative product. I didn't think that was what was it going to turn into, but that's what it did turn into and I'm thankful for it. And I'm very lucky and most people probably wouldn't say this of their management staff, but I'm actually very thankful to our management staff that said, hey, we're willing to take a risk on somebody that essentially has no marketing experience at all, but has true passion and insight and an understanding of the product. To put that out there to a community of users that, in reality, have a lot of the time been not treated well, right? A lot of the time companies treat these users with a lack of understanding and appreciation. And they were willing to say, let's put somebody in there that himself is an enthusiast and somebody that's passionate about the hardware. So that's why I continue to stay here because I feel that from a top to bottom perspective, you know, we're committed to putting out great product. It doesn't mean that every single time we're going to make something that's perfect. And that's the reality, you know, doing things that are new and different and interesting doesn't mean that you get it right every single time, but you know, you have to put the effort at trying something new and different to keep refining to make things better. Well, to be perfectly honest, I mean, I think a great example of that would be the first ROG board was frankly not very good. Whereas here we are, six generations or seven generations, depending on how you want to count it in. And there's not really much debate that however much it may cost or, you know, whatever other factors there may be, it's hard to get a better motherboard. Well, I thank you for that. And I think that ultimately that comes through the time, the work and the effort that we put into it. You know, like you said, we haven't had a huge amount of opportunity to have face-to-face contact, but we were really excited when we got the chance to invite you out to like our Z87 technical summit, which in itself is very different than I think a lot of the presentations that motherboard vendors give. And it's interesting because you made a comment on the last one, we were talking about a user was asking about overclock ability on different motherboards. And one of the things that we were adamant to show there at the show was fundamentally that, excuse me, at the technical summit was, hey, everything from our Z87-A $130, $140 motherboard was offering the same overclocking capability as our flagship Maximus Xtreme board, right? And that's something that we didn't want to share away from, right? And that's not something normally, traditionally a company is going to come out and tell you, right? Saying that you're getting the same level of performance from your high-end product versus your entry level product, right? But where our focus has been is that shouldn't be a point of differential between a product and what it's offering you. That should be a non-negotiable in terms of the expectation of performance, right? It should be like you've discussed, what's the usability, right? Do you care about audio? Do you care about having integrated high performance wireless, right? Do you want more expansion? Do you need supplemental storage? Those should be the dictating factors at why you pick one board over another board or the segmentational form factor considerations, right? Do I want to build a cool small form factor steam box? Do I want to build a really cool XMB, small media server, right? Or do I want to build a box that I just want to play with and I want to run Linux distros on, right? It might be any one of those variations, but ultimately that's why you should be picking your platform, not because you think that one is going to be somehow more reliable or more stable or better overclocking. There's going to always be a couple of little pieces of information that change things across the board, but we're very happy about the position that we've put our product in and we're happy that you guys yourselves as well as users have responded to that. Now, this sort of ties into a couple of the things and I think you were going to talk about a product here on the stream today that our users are going to be pretty excited about and might come, might be in line with what you were saying about steam box and small form factor and all that cool stuff. But I want to talk about sort of the philosophy of treating the users as enthusiasts. There's a few things that Intel's done and feel free to not say anything that you feel like you're not allowed to say, but there's a few things that Intel's done over the last few years that have felt like they went from catering to the enthusiast to not catering to the enthusiast. You look back even five years ago and Intel was going as far as to cherry pick review samples in order to impress the enthusiast. And on the one hand, you could say, it's great that Intel doesn't do that anymore, but on the other hand, you could also say, is it because they don't feel it's ethical or is it because they actually don't give two shakes of a rat's bum anymore about what the enthusiast thinks about the new processor because they're more concerned with the power efficiency or the, you know, yeah, power efficiency and the onboard graphics and those kinds of things. And the other thing is, sort of the other evidence for this is what is Intel's enthusiast platform anymore? LGA 2011 lacks a great deal of functionality compared to the mainstream LGA 1150. It has no quick sync, it has no thunderbolt, it has no official support for higher speed memory, no smart response technology, it has more SATA 3, more USB 3. From the motherboard side, what do you make of all this and how does Asus try to be different from that? So there's a lot of questions in there. So we'll try to answer my guess in the order that came in. So I guess the first one in relation to enthusiasts, you know, I think that a lot of this is relative to kind of how you perceive things. You know, I've been in the game long enough to know what it was like when you had to, you know, move every single jumper on a board and manually set IRQ settings just to be able to get an add-in card to work correctly, right? You know, when you had to manually switch jumpers just to be able to shift the front side bus of operation, right? So if you look at the way that I think Intel actually has support the enthusiast, and by enthusiast, let's relate this to overclocking specifically, because I think sometimes people use the enthusiast term to be really broad sweeping, right? To cover a lot of different things. But I think right here, we're talking about overclocking. And it's never been easier to overclock a platform than right now. And that's inherently through a huge amount of the effort that Intel has put into the architectural designs of these CPU parts. Now, some people might not like that the segmentation has gotten more narrow, right? In terms that the CPU might have been adjusted to only certain CPU samples have overclocking capability versus a larger amount. But if we take a look at the fundamental ease of the experience, it's unquestionably the easiest that it's ever been for somebody to come in and be able to overclock a system to a high degree and be able to have a whole nother level of performance available to them. So me personally, I don't view it that way. I think that the focus has become more specific and more targeted to really serving a set of SKUs to an audience that exists and knowing that segmentation and not really over designing a product for a majority of a market that might not utilize it, right? Would it really make sense to design 10 case SKUs? I don't think so, because in reality, most of those case SKUs are going into systems that are never gonna be overclocked. I mean, right now- No, it's probably a good balance right now where it used to be, actually, this is a good point because that was around five years ago. They had Extreme Edition, which was $1,000, and then everything else was not really overclocking optimized in any way. Yeah, no, I think you're right. So I think it's a pretty good balance. I mean, I think I'd love to maybe see one more K part, and maybe a little bit more price aggressive point. So maybe something like $125 K part, just to make it kind of really fun. Maybe like a dual core? Yeah, something like that, just to make it interesting for somebody to play around with a little bit more. But overall, I'm okay with the positioning. I mean, if we take a look, we've got pretty good price diversity at about the $225 to $250 price point, all the way up to $1,000 of overclocked parts. Now, on the chipset side, I think that comes to an architectural focus. The X79 platform is a beast of a platform when you're talking about the amount of cores, the cache, PCIe lanes and memory bandwidth that it has. But it's also such a complex platform that it's not a platform that you can spin a dime on every year and re-transition. So with that, you're going to sometimes have to have certain things that change from year to year more quickly on other cycles that won't always change. But that's where we come in as a motherboard vendor, and we can figure out ways to enrich the chipset and give you more value, right? Whether that's adding in those supplemental SATA controllers, adding in USB3, adding in improved sound or integrated wireless technologies, whatever it might be. That's our job to make it worth your while to say that when you invest in a platform, you're not just investing just to get that specific specification, but you're investing to get other functions and features. Like Z87, right? It's got a ton of different stuff, but we implemented support for like NFC because we saw NFC was becoming more popular with mobile peripherals, right? Whether it's like smartphones or tablets, right? So we said, hey, let's make it that much better that if you're also going to buy a new chipset, you're probably one of those people that's also buying a latest generation smartphone. So wouldn't you like to be able to maybe quick log on your system or like launch 10 programs in the swipe, you know, or something like that. So, you know, I think, you know, keep in mind that there is going to be a transitional refresh for X79, but when it comes down to it, it's about usage model, right? You know, when you talk about storage, yes, the Z, okay, we're going to geek out a little bit here, but on Z87, the PCH might have six SATA 6G ports natively, but the aggregated throughput that it offers is only going to be about 1.3 to 1.6 gigabytes. That means that if even you took barely three high performance SATA 6G SSDs and you rated them, you would sequentially max the throughput out on the PCH, even though there's six SATA 6G ports. So that is a very good point. In fact, we have an upcoming video where we're taking four SSDs and we're going to find out when we hit that internal bottleneck and how hard we hit it as in sort of, in terms of pure numbers. Four drives already puts you over that saturation point, so you can't even take advantage of them readily. And the people that really want that level of class of performance, guess what? What are you doing? You're buying a high performance, you know, LSI or high point or adaptive or Intel RAID controller because you want that load balancing, you want the better throughput, you want the better performance, you want all that good stuff. And if you're doing that, you're going to need a Z, or you're going to need an X79 because you're going to need a PCI Express 4X or PCI Express 8X slot. Got it. That actually has 4X worth of bandwidth or 8X worth of bandwidth. Maybe talk a little bit about- Exactly, you want all those lanes. Yeah, you nailed it on the head. That's what you hit. And that's what it comes down to is we just need to balance out realizing that there are different usage models for different platforms. And it gets back to where we talked about picking the board, pick the board based on what you're going to do with your system. I'm sure you guys get inundated with questions like this, just like I get questions. You know, people say, what should I buy? What should I build? And the first thing you always end up asking, what are you going to do with your system? So here's something I'd like to get your take on because I think I've made my feelings on PCIe lane splitters pretty clear in the past. I think they're ridiculous because basically you're adding latency. And in terms of, if we're going to talk about something like, okay, you can add as many SATA 6 ports to a board as you want, but if the total maximum throughput at some other point in the chain is limited to about what you could do on three of them, if you were actually using them all at the same time, how much good does something like a PCIe lane splitter do if it's not actually increasing the bandwidth available to your graphics cards further on up the chain? I think, you know, once again, this is about usage model because when you use a multiplexing chip, let's say like a PLX or what in the past might've been like an NF200, it's not always about just graphics, right? So an example might be like our Z87 Deluxe board, it's got a PLX on there, but the board doesn't support three-way and four-way SLI. Why? Because that PLX is there for concurrent PCIe controller utilization. What that just means, frankly and easily, is that if I'm going to put the board in SLI and Crossfire, but also want to use the two NICs that we've put on there simultaneously, plus my supplemental SATA 6G controller and my wifi all at the same time, I need more lanes than what the CPU can provide. So sometimes it's not just a question about giving me more lanes just for pure graphics, it might be what's once again the usage model in my system and the person that buys the Deluxe board is going to need to have more PCIe lanes available to them than they would be if they bought like the Z87-A because maybe that person doesn't need 811AC, they don't need Bluetooth, they're not going to run a discrete sound card. So it kind of varies in that. And also to your question on the latency or other things like that, that's also the obligation to be intelligent as a board vendor on how you implement the PLX. You know, we've talked about this like on a board with like the Maximus where we've set it up that under any configuration, even if you go four lanes, that top PCI Express slot is always mapped directly to the CPU. So you actually never introduce latency to the primary graphics card. So there's always ways for a vendor to figure out what's the best way versus the easiest way to implement something. And that's what, you know, at least we feel that we take more time and effort to do is to kind of figure out how do we really make the best usage implementation for this, for the community that wants to build on that. Cause at the end of the day, you're going to have somebody that wants to, for whatever reason, run for GPUs on a Z87 system, even though you could natively run those GPUs also on an X79 box. Because like you said, maybe they want the additional USB 3 ports or whatever it is. And that's interesting to talk about because a lot of people look at a motherboard and go, oh, there's all those slots. I can fill all of them with anything I want. There'll be no problems. I see that all the time on the forum. I see that all the time on every forum. It's kind of depressing, but it's a thing. And I mean, JJ's point is very good because, just because you have your supplemental SATA controller, you have your wireless AC, you have your graphics cards, if you're using some kind of a splitter, then the odds of you actually hammering all of those devices all at the same time, I guess is probably pretty slim. So just because the bandwidth on this side of the splitter doesn't actually match how much virtual bandwidth there is on this side, you'll probably never realize it as long as you're not. Again, so I think JJ's way of wording that was outstanding, if you're for whatever reason, putting four graphics cards on a Z87 platform, that's exactly it. For whatever reason, it's the correct platform for the correct usage model. And that's what we all need to remember. And I think that some manufacturers approach these PCI Express lane splitters as a marketing bullet point. 100%, yeah. I definitely agree with that. Where, and I think Nvidia treats it that way a little bit as well, where they require PCI Express 8X functionality, but then they were the ones who started this business with NF200, where they're creating sort of an artificial spec that's not really real because it's not about the actual throughput that can be delivered to and from the graphics cards. It's about just playing that game of how many PCI Express slots this motherboard has, even if it's really not intended to be used that way. Yeah, I mean, it's really tricky. A lot of these things ultimately come down to getting the right information. And this is where I give you a lot of respect because you've been one of the best people that I've worked with in terms of just taking the time to listen to information. Ultimately, you're gonna bring your experience, your insight, your passion into the information that you put out to your viewers and your readers, but it still takes somebody that's big at saying, hey, I don't realize I know everything. And let me get as much information as I can before I put an opinion out there to try to find the right balance of it. Because especially within this industry, there's a lot of stuff that gets put out there that's just flat out wrong. And this is permutates in the industry, it permutates in these forums, it permutates in all these little crevices and corners of the internet. And before you know it, you got people talking the things that are totally wrong or incorrect or not factual. And it ends up just being this kind of like regurgitating cycle of insanity. It drives me crazy. On information. Because there isn't even any consistency to the wrongness. I mean, you'll find a thread where people will be saying, you know, analog or onboard audio is just as good as discrete audio. And then in the same thread, you'll have someone saying, oh, but if you want to, you know, use a digital output, make sure you get a great sound card. To which I'm sitting there going, oh, no, you're wrong. And then you're wrong and you're both wrong together, but separately. To defend the people though, in a lot of points in time, if you're not super entwined with everything, it's hard to find the right answer. So you go and look for, find the wrong answer and then perpetuate it. And then it just becomes a giant problem. You're 100% right. And that's why, like I said, I gave props to Linus because, you know, this is- You can have props too, Slick. This is my, in my position, this is what I'm supposed to do, is I'm supposed to help, you know, the reviewers understand more about our product. Because if we know more about the product, you know, we should be able to convey that. Now, sadly, the truth is not every company has somebody like myself that's close and really passionate about the hardware to inform correctly. So that- Burn, burn. So that's kind of one thing that happens. But then second to that, you know, is that, to be honest, it's really the obligation I feel of the reviewers to step up to the plate and realize that you guys have a commitment to your audience to say, we have to respect them and ensure the information that we put out there is right and accurate, and not just what's easy. And that could help to mitigate some of this bad information flow. It's never gonna stop, right? Because there's a lot of marketing, there's a lot of information that gets put out there. But, you know, everybody needs to do their part. You know, the users have to research better, the reviewers have to take more time and effort, and vendors need to be better at putting out the right information. All right, so JJ, if you've watched the WAN Show before, you might be familiar with this already, but I'm gonna go ahead and explain it anyway. So we do segments that we call Twitter Blitz, where the objective is to answer the question as quickly as humanly possible. And I have actually been in the background asking for our Twitter followers to use hashtag AskJJ. So I'm only gonna take the ones from the people who were already paying attention to Twitter here. And I would like you to blitz through some of these for them. So this one I really liked. Is the Tough Series motherboards close to the enthusiast? Or, okay, the grammar is terrible. Yossi, dude, it's okay. I understand, I'm gonna rephrase it. I got it. Tough Series, okay, JJ's got it. You can read it there. Okay, so long story short, the overall quality is very, very close to that of the ROG. Technically, ROG is gonna have a little bit higher end components. But in terms of the overall quality, functionality, overclockability, they're gonna pretty much be identical. The main difference is gonna be ROG will have a specialized set of features that's more targeted for improved audio, networking, and some esoteric overclocking options. And what I mean by esoteric is for the guys that wanna get into the nitty and gritty. This is not for the normal people that are interested in saying, I want 4.6, 4.7, 4.8. This is for the people that I care about adjusting tertiary level DRAM timings. I wanna be able to modify PLL voltages because I care about making my voltage for my CPU 0.2 millivolts slightly reduced. But I want the options to try to figure that out and I'm willing to spend two more hours to get there. So that's really where the differential is. But in terms of the, you're not getting an inferior product. Okay, great answer. Any new sound cards on the way? Oh yeah, definitely. If you checked out actually in the show notes, I'm actually testing right now our Zonar Essence STU USB. So this is gonna actually be kind of like the Zonar STX, but it will be a USB edition of this sound card. So I've been really, really happy with it. I'm really excited about it. And that's gonna be not too far away. It'll be probably maybe towards the end of this quarter that it'll be coming out. It's pretty bad ass. So I'm pretty excited about that. I've also been testing out a smaller kind of in between model. You've had the Zonar U3. We're coming out with the Zonar U7, which is kind of in between this and then a Zonar Essence STU. So we'll have kind of those two models. And then- So the stack will be then Zonar U3 for that super compact external sound, which by the way, for those of you who aren't familiar with the Zonar U3, it's a great option for laptop users. Both Slick and I give it a wholehearted two thumbs up. And have used it quite a bit. And have used it quite a bit. We've used it not only to improve audio quality where necessary, but also to improve compatibility. Because sometimes the onboard audio solutions have problems that go beyond that they sound like butt and it's like they operate like butt. So using the U3 is great. And then at the very, very high end, there's the Essence One, which is like a $700 DAC and amp. Well, there's two. Yeah, there's the Musis Edition, which is the really high end one. And then there's the standard Essence One. They're both the same. And I can't- So then now there's two coming in between. I can't talk about it, but let's just say there'll be something that passes even the Essence One Musis Edition. Oh, all right. Well, there you go guys. You heard it here on the WAN show first. Going from two models for external sound cards to four. Well, okay. So three models, if you want to count Musis and Essence One as two separate ones, but up to six sometime in the sort of next little bit here. That's exciting. Yeah. All right, let's do our next one. What's up with that ROG Air slash Watercool GTX graphics card? Oh man, everybody's been asking me about that thing. So the Poseidon, I've actually been doing testing on it. I right now have a prototype sample. It's pretty awesome. I can't go into too much details about it because we're trying to keep it a little bit, kind of behind the scenes. Come on, man. It's a great card. It's cool. Everything works. I mean, I think the thing that's going to be coolest is that flexibility, right? You've got just like our formula series motherboard, you can run it passively or you can run it underwater. So it's your choice. So you got that great flexibility of doing either or. So if you first going to start off in an air-cooled rig, but you think maybe six months down the road, you're going to maybe upgrade into water cooling, it's a really nice option. You know, it's not the first time it's been done. I remember Cooler Master of all people had a GTX 8800, there, see, it's so long ago. 8800 GTX, 8800 Ultra Cooler that had like this weird solution where it was actually just a reference cooler and then it just had like a heat pipe that wasn't sealed anymore that was connected to like some weird like fittings on the top of it. So you guys obviously looked at products like that in the past. What did you do to make Poseidon different? Well, we've actually had products like this in the past. We have to go way back, but if users that are diehard Asus followers, they'll remember Asus's graphics card series that were underneath the magic line. We actually did, we had models that actually were water-cooled models as well. But for this generation, I really think that the big thing is, and the hard thing anytime you create a dual design is making sure that it works under both, right? Is that it's easy to make it work great if it's just water cooling, but it's not so easy if you also want it to work really well in terms of the air performance for pass generation or under an air cool. So, we've probably been working on the design for almost a year, about the same length of time that it took us to develop that 10 millimeter heat pipe that you took a look at on that big fat GTX 780 DC2 card. So it's just, that's really the hard stuff is we go through maybe about six to seven sometimes prototype samples, revising the design, trying to find a balance. It's tricky work, but you know, that's what makes a good product stand out, right? Is attention to detail, right? Next Twitter, oh, sorry, go ahead, Slate. And that matters going through different prototype stages because a lot of companies will just be like, oh, it costs a lot to make another one. So that one works good though. And it does cost a lot to make another one. It does, it costs a ton, yeah. Okay, great question from Dave here. ASUS has kind of got their hands in everything at this point, but if you were to pick something that they haven't done yet, what would you like to see it be? I think, okay, I'm gonna rephrase this. What isn't being done right right now that you think ASUS could walk in and improve? You know, that's a tough part because I think in the areas that we haven't grown into, I think that there is really good product. Like we get a lot of people that ask us, hey, how come you're not making, you know, coolers or power supplies, you know, things like that. And, you know, we work extensively with every top tier partner that's in the industry on this and we feel that they're making outstanding product. And we actually provide a lot of feedback to them. You know, we give them our insight and our analysis. So in a lot of ways, we're part of that development process already with them. So we might not be the company that's putting it out there, but have we had information that is pivotal at creating that product refined? Yeah, I mean, when you're the number one branded GPU manufacturer in the world, number one board vendor in the world, you carry a lot of weight when it comes to putting in feedback on a lot of points. So, you know, for me personally, to be honest, I'd much rather see us continue to specialize on special product groups. So once again, I can't go too much into it, but for instance, when you talk about a motherboard, right? Why would a motherboard have to be based on an Intel or an AMD chipset? Why couldn't it maybe be based on an SOC chipset? Why would it have to be targeted even running a Windows operating system, right? You know, or other examples might be, well, what about having a motherboard that's actually entirely independent of an operating system, but works purely on a hardware input level? So you could have it switch feedback and inputs from let's say audio and video sources, but still have flexibility to have hardware level processing that you could bring in from your CPU or from a GPU associated to those inputs. So there's a lot of interesting things that our team is continuing to look at for the longterm because we're passionate about the do it yourself experience. So I think while everybody thinks that sometimes everything has already been done, we definitely have the perspective that there's a lot more cool stuff that can be worked on and achieved even in the product groups that are out there right now, at least that we're working in. I already know, oh, okay, Slick, go ahead, and then I'll move on to the next question. It's interesting because not all that long ago, I don't remember who it was. I think it was, for some reason I'm thinking IBM, but a big guy in a big company said that there wasn't any innovation left or there wouldn't be soon, and that people were just gonna have to improve on things that we already have. And while it's still improving on things that we already have, if you're making massive fundamental changes to current product lines, I see that still as innovation. Absolutely, I mean, sometimes innovation can even be looking back at an older strategy and going, well, maybe we weren't so wrong back then and bringing it back. I mean, I think for the longest time, the motherboard has gotten more and more tightly integrated, whereas a manufacturer like ASUS that goes beyond the motherboard and goes, well, no, I mean, we're making great onboard sound, but we still think that someone needs a Zonar Fibos or in essence, STX. You look at more specialized hardware, like something like a Red Rocket, which is specifically designed for accelerating working with 4K, well, specifically red footage. Yep. Maybe something like what you're saying, where there's actually things that we can add to our PCs that are PCs, some more like supplementary processors. So going back to like the co-processor days. Yep. And stuff like virtual. I think that's, sorry. Oh no, no, no, I think you're on it. And I think the only thing I was just gonna touch with that is I think that we're in a very unique position to understand the opportunity to continue to grow really well, because we're really the only component vendor that has our foot in so many spaces, right? Where we have an awesome networking division, we're making tablets, we're making cell phones, we're making monitors, we're making motherboards, we're making sound cards, we're in all these different spaces. And so we have this real big kind of cross contamination of all these technological kind of integration. I'm quoting you on that. Cross contamination. Well, that's what it is, it contaminates, you know, it's the technology kind of gets in there and it festers and it makes you go, well, why can't you have this feature, this function from this device into this other device? You know, I don't view it as being negative, I view it as like contaminate me some more, you know? Oh, wow. That's fantastic. All right, let's see if I got maybe one more, one more. No, I don't think that one's that interesting. What was that? What was that? Well, which one do you want? Which one do you want? Oh, no, I was just wondering, which one was that that interesting? Oh, well, okay, here, here, I'll let you tackle it if you want. Someone asks with the MSI gaming series boards, rivaling ROG on performance, because as you yourself said, there's not much segmentation left anymore in terms of something like CPU frequency. So let's read it that way. Will ROG prices drop to more affordable levels? You know, that's a really good question and I think that's our responsibility to help people realize why ROG historically has been on the premium in terms of pricing. And I think if you look at the work that we've put into the product, it's because that we've never banked on just being the feature set relative to overclocking. You know, I've spent considerable time with you actually detailing this out, where if you look at ROG, it's really been the four leader at a huge amount of our design innovation. If you think about it kind of like an F1 formula concept, the first digital power solutions for motherboards were implemented on ROG, or the first time that we integrated Intel NICs was on ROG or our advanced fan expert technology having, you know, three pin and four print control, temperature target modifiable control, that was all on ROG series motherboards. But when you try something new and it's entirely different, guess what, it costs you more time, effort and money. And that has to ultimately come into the cost of the product. And I think ROG users can I have realized that they've realized that they have gotten the best technology that we've been able to put out on the market at those times. So that's one important thing, but I think even more importantly, ROG technologies have trickled into a huge amount of our main products. By virtue, while they're not an ROG board, right? When you bought like a pro series motherboard or you bought a saber tooth board, guess what? You got fan expert two, you got a digital power design, you got the UEFI features, you got the fan expert two, you got the USB BIOS flashback technology, right? All those things that start on ROG board. So by virtue, we're actually giving you ROG technologies in our other boards that are at a lower cost. And we're also always trying to look at how can we balance the pricing? And that's for like this generation why we came out with the hero board, right? That was targeted at being much more price aggressive than even our formula board in the past. So, you know, I think that's one thing you pay for what you get really. And I think for us, we've always been adamant that we're going to justify the price that you pay by putting in the work and effort to give you stuff that's really awesome. I mean, the sound design alone, right? Supreme effects, even if you have a competitor like MSI that copies our sound design, while it might not be the same, we're going to still go to that next generation and say, it's not just about Supreme effects, let's add in sonic radar, right? And perfect voice, because we want to give you that much more value. So, you know, that's our job at the end of the day, we have to keep pushing the envelope and we have to have a diverse product stack that's going to give you a huge amount of value for what you're paying. So, you know, at the end of the day, competition is good for everybody. It forces you to either be innovative or, you know, you end up losing out to a competitor. And I think that we're going to continue to up our game. Okay, I think that was a great answer. I'm going to add a couple of things. So, Jamie, to say to sort of directly, yes, you can get ROG boards or technologies for cheaper, you can wait a generation. In fact, I think the best way that JJ explained how the VRM design on the latest generation ROG boards is amazing, but don't worry, the other ones are good, was he said, oh, well, they're using the same one as last gen's ROG. And I was like, oh, okay, it's probably fine then. And then the other thing is will ROG prices drop? Well, they are. Hero board, as JJ already just said, you know what, you weren't able to get it at launch for LGA 1150, but it's coming. And formula already happened. There never used to be a formula. That came along after the Xtreme tier board. So, all these things are happening, but basically there. If you want to pay the premium for the R&D that made that board possible, that will ultimately make those other boards later and further generations possible, then you got to pay. I think that's fair. Yeah, I mean, I think it's like that way in a lot of technology, right? I mean, if you look at the companies that usually lead the industry in a lot of things, usually you don't get innovative product that tends to be lower in cost. It's just the nature of the beast, right? I mean, things that are really well designed or have really new functions or features tend to cost time and effort and development costs, but you're 100%, right? In terms of, we still at the end of the day have to try to make a product that is reasonable in terms of the price points. But there's also, everybody's relative to what price they think is also high and low, right? Like when you guys are probably monitoring, everybody might think that 4K monitor is only accessible to them at $750, but the small videographer that is doing content creation might think, man, you know what? $3,000 compared to $10,000 is a really good value for me. Which it wasn't that long ago. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of this is also relative and that's why it's important to just have a diverse pulse, excuse me, a diverse product stack, right? And that's actually great because the context that you're giving is very meaningful right there because to put this in perspective, the $3,000 4K monitor is actually not that big of a piece of the puzzle that would be involved in switching Linus Media Group over to 4K production. So we would need anywhere from around 4,000 to around $10,000 worth of gear for our $8,000 camera in order to even shoot in 4K. So by that point, when we spend another three grand on a monitor to monitor in 4K and to work with 4K footage, I mean- That's not even including server infrastructure, drives. Drives are gonna be huge because 4K footage is massive. Yeah. And we already fill up our massive server. I know, the NAS is almost full. I know. I'm gonna have to like buy drives or better yet get on the phone with someone and tell them I need drives. By NAS, he means like his 4U rack, not really just like your little 4-bay NAS. It's huge and it's getting full. Here's a question. JJ, this is totally unrelated to anything. What's the sort of the weirdest thing that you run personally? Because I think Slick's point about my NAS is kind of, like that's probably the weirdest thing I have where it's like this 4U Norco. So it's like a super cheap 4U case with 24 hotswap bays in the front. I managed to get my hands on a 10 gigabit switch. So it has, and then I have like direct attached copper cables and like these weird esoteric cards that I got for 250 bucks each. And it's running some like a Rika card that's like a billion generations old, but still super fast. It's like a 24 port card. And it's like just the randomest, stupidest thing ever. Do you have anything like that, that really you geeked out over? I don't know, man. Every system that I have, I've got seven systems at home and they're all kind of like, you know, my kids, right? So I don't know. I guess the most specialized system I have is probably for my Blu-ray. I'm a really, really big video guy. And so I still buy all my stuff just because the quality on streaming or on demand content is just too subpar for me. It's just too compressed, too granulated. And I wanna see stuff as close as it is to the quality of what it was been produced at. So it's kind of like a poor man's kaleidoscope system. If you guys, what kaleidoscope is, it's this really high-end kind of professional Blu-ray storage system that like George Lucas and people that have a lot of money can afford. So I've got a similar setup where I've ripped them all and then digitally stream that out to my home entertainment system that I have set up. So that's probably the most kind of- How much storage do you have in there? I have right now eight terabytes of storage in that system. Very nice, very nice. What are you using to run that? Are you running on onboard RAID or? No, yeah, I have that right now with an actual Arica professional controller card. See, that's not that different from my crazy thing. And he was like, he was like, sort of, you know, seemed like he did, weren't gonna have anything, but that's awesome, love it. All right, let me see. Oh, sorry, yeah, I think it came through, sorry. Yeah, that should be, that's eight, two terabytes. Ah, so 16 terabytes. Yes, yep. Okay. That's more like it. Oh, that's great. I was like, okay, that's an okay amount of storage. Yeah, that's okay. No, no, now we're talking. That's about right. What drives are you running? What do you think of the red drive? It's not a bad drive. I think it's a good drive. It's not a bad drive. I mean, I mean, for its intended purpose, it does what it's supposed to. I mean, it's very funny when you ask, I guess, a question like that, because the first thing that pops in my head is like WS motherboards. There's so many users that right now run products, but they run them in kind of pseudo ways for misintended purposes. You know, there's a lot of people that perceive that anything that they buy is designed for 24 hour operation, and they don't realize that it's not. There's a reason why somebody like Western Digital produces a drive that says that it's rated for 24 hour operation, because it's designed to handle that type of workload or those type of temperatures. So I'm always a fan, to be honest, of segment series product. It doesn't mean that it's going to be everybody's cup of tea, but that's okay, because it was designed for a specific usage and specific models. So that just, once again, comes down to, I think like the topic that we talked about at the very beginning of the show, picking the right parts for what it is that you're actually doing. If you're not going to be running a type of configuration that needs that, you don't need it. All right, so there are a few new products coming that you wanted to talk about on the show. Why don't we transition into that before we do a little bit more Q&A? Yeah, sure, whatever. I mean, for me, it's, you know, I think a lot of people have heard about these. I'm actually, I'm more interested in answering the questions of people, you know. I think they can always find out about those products. So what I would probably say is, if you just want to note on a couple of them, and if anybody's got questions about them, I'd be more than happy to answer them. All right, well, there was someone asking about Mini ITX, so I think we have to talk about the impact. Sure, so I know when you came out to the Z87 technical summit that we have, that was one of the boards that we worked on, because we had a huge amount of people always asking us about, when are you guys going to make an ROG Mini ITX board? And so I'm very, very happy to say that in probably about a week and a half, we're going to be releasing the Maximus 6 Impact board, and probably within next week, we'll be releasing the Maximus 6 Impact board. We'll be seeing the Z87-I Deluxe, so that's the mainstream's version. So one I call the Red Beast, and the other one I call the Golden Beast, because of their corresponding colors. But they're awesome boards. I mean, if you're looking for pretty much just the most kind of balls to the wall Mini ITX board that's got everything on it, those two boards are going to do it. That's exactly what I've been waiting for, actually, is that like little extended PCB thing, because my brother won a Prodigy at the LandCover after party thing. So he's been wondering what to do, and I've just been like, hold up, just wait. It's coming. Yeah, that's actually what I've been spending time on. If you guys, if anybody here follows our ASUS, like Instagram or like Facebook, they went into my cubicle and they took a picture of the seven headphones that I have right now at my desk, where I've been testing out the SupremeFX isolated audio design for the little Impact board. So yeah, it's awesome because I mean, it's really no compromise, right? You get the awesome audio on board, you still get the expansion capabilities for throwing in the GPU, you get the 8211 AC, you got the Bluetooth, it even supports the new small form factor M.2 flash SSDs. This is why I've never gone Mini ITX, because I need two PCI Express slots, period, damn it. I need a video card and I need a sound card. I can live without a RAID card, I can live without a 10 gigabit NIC or whatever other stuff, cannot live without those two things, and this is the solution. Yeah, no, I mean, I think the thing is that we've worked really, really hard on trying to make a board that we felt was unquestionably a board that you felt you weren't going to compromise on, right? Yes, you were going to maybe lose out on a couple of slots, but in relation to the rest of the expansion, the feature set, it's all there. I mean, each board has got four fan headers that are all uniquely controllable. I mean, that's crazy that on a little Mini ITX board, you've got four fan headers that are fully controllable, three pin, four pin, you can manually set fan curves. So even if you throw it in something like you said, like a Prodigy, you could stuff it and be able to control everything on there. So I'm really juiced about those boards. I'm right now doing actually the overclocking test on them and everything's going through smooth. So I hope users are going to be really excited about them. We've worked really hard on them. All right, I've got an excellent ask JJ question over here because this is something I've been curious about myself. Yeah. What is the possibility of an ROG motherboard that's dual socketed like the SRX or SR2? How do you see those pro... How do those products fit into the market? That's a really good question. We've been doing dual socketed boards for a long time, but in our WS series, and we haven't really done it on the ROG line because with ROG, there's an expectation of performance and functionality. To be honest, I don't really like commenting on competitors more so because I feel that a product should speak for itself, not the marketer. Well, let's comment on the need for performance, dual socket boards for gamers. But no, I want to make a point on why we haven't done something like specifically the SRX and the EVGA. ROG boards, we take a huge amount of effort on the resources in the longterm. So if you consider something like, let's say like the Rampage 4 Extreme, right now it's got 20 UEFI updates that have come out since that board's launched. That's a huge amount of longterm support to make sure that the board is smooth, responsive, works the way it's supposed to. The SRX, don't take my word for it. Look at the community, look at the responses. They will tell you that that board has had a lot of inconsistency issues on how it's worked in terms of things like the option ROM support, putting in just expansion cards and things along those lines. We wouldn't release a board like the SRX unless we felt confident that it could work the way that a normal user wants to make it work. So drop in any card into it, have it work and have it be functional. The main thing though is that since it's not an overclockable platform and so many people associate ROG with overclocking, that's kind of the limiting factor. Since Xeons are locked architectural parts, we'd rather say we're gonna put out something like a Xe9PE, which is a beast of a board that we have right now. So if you want something that works stable, solid, it's got tons of memory, 14 SATA ports and dual CPU support, it's there. It just won't be under the ROG line. So here's a question for you. If you could have your way, would you pressure Intel in any way or would you, does it bother you as an enthusiast that Intel doesn't enable dual socket operation on the Xtreme Edition there? Because that's something that bothers me personally. I believe an Xtreme Edition should be an unfettered chip. That's actually a pretty good question. I think we would like to see that. I wouldn't mind seeing a CPU that would support that. There are a couple of other variables that kind of play into that in terms of the lithography, even though technically the Xeon parts are very, very, very close to the overall architectural design of a standard consumer grade part. There's still a couple of other things to weave in there, but sure, I would like to see that. I think it'd be pretty awesome. I mean, you'd have to consider of course, what would be the sell through, but it's crazy. One of our partners actually in Canada, CRTech, who does a high-end system workstations for companies like Ferrari, like Porsche and things like that, they actually buy like our ROG boards, water cool overclock them and use them as actually rendering systems. So they'll like go crazy. They'll be configuring like five gigahertz overclock systems. Because if you think about it, if they can cut down their render times by 20%, right? And they can offer- We're talking hours. Yeah, they can offer a competitive bid versus another company, that's a big value to them. So I could look at the opportunity of saying, wow, could I take something like a dual core Xeon system, which is already eight cores, 16 threads, 20 megs of cash, and then add another 30% by overclocking it. That's just an insane beast of a system, right? So sure, would the enthusiasts be love to see it? Yeah, but I don't know that it's necessarily gonna happen. I don't know that it's gonna happen either. To me, it's so disappointing because it feels like Extreme Edition has become just a case badge. You look at something like the difference between 3960X and 3930K and they go, well, there's three megs of cash and yeah. To add a bit, my dad is planning on doing that insane build that I've talked to you about a bit, but not the stream. It's gonna be nuts. I'm not gonna go way too far into it though. But as a person who's really into computers, but hasn't had a lot of time to look into them recently, my dad, he was looking at the motherboards that we were looking through and going, okay, so this is all workstation stuff because I'm planning a 2011 platform for him. And he goes, I just want two CPUs. Like, can I just get two CPUs? And I was like, uh. Because I think the true enthusiasts out there might not be willing to spend $1,000 on an Extreme Edition versus a 3930K or a 4930K or whatever generation it happens to be. But I think that those hardcore enthusiasts would spend two grand if it meant they could put two of them in. Yep, because he's gonna be running stuff like Boink and really, really heavy applications that are running all the time. If he can run two CPUs, water cool them so they don't get too hot and just power through everything, that's exactly what he wants. So that makes me sad. And still make it very gamer-friendly and all that other kind of stuff. You know, there's one point that I guess I would just make to that is that there's always somebody that has a need, even if it exists. And the only reason why I say that is because it's just like the GPU wars, right? Where you get somebody that says, nobody needs a Titan, nobody needs a 780. My 570 runs every game at 1080p at maximum settings. You sound like the ultimate keyboard warrior right now. I love it. And that's fine. Everybody has their usage model that works entirely okay for them. And that's okay. If you don't think you need to upgrade, you don't need to upgrade. But it's all relative to your system, right? I mean, if you're that user that does have three monitors and you play in 3D vision, well, guess what? You need multiple GPUs and you need high-end multiple GPUs. So it really just comes down to what do you do on your system is gonna define the part that you need. And that's what it comes down to. So Raider Express PCIe SSD. This is something that you wanted to talk about. There it is. Why is it only PCIe v2 is a question that I think you can probably handle pretty easily for that one. But then I just want you to talk about it in general. What makes this product special? Yeah, actually Raider Express has been a pretty cool product. We've worked a really long time on it. You got to see it, of course, at CES. I guess to answer the question quickly, it's a PCI Express interconnect by two, predominantly because of the cost. If we were to go to a higher end interconnect, it's just gonna increase the cost considerably. It's more expensive. So we didn't want to release a product that would have been that much more expensive and have people just be like, there's no way that I'm gonna buy that. So that's that one. In terms of the coolness of it though, I think it's a really flexible part. I mean, there's still a lot of people out there that are on chipsets like X48 or P45, P35, even the guys that are holding over like on 920s and X58 where you don't have native SATA 6G support, right? So something like a Raider Express is a perfect way of being able to drop something in, get really high speed performance. It's simple, it's plug and play. But there's a lot of really cool supplemental software. Like it comes included with RAM disk software. So you can go ahead and set up that. And that can also help to offset the rights to the SSD so it can extend the lifespan of it. You get SSD caching support that's also included with that. So that if you need to be able to have high capacity but improve performance, you also have that functionality. And there's some really cool supplemental software that's also tied into it. So it's going to be coming out probably in about, I think maybe about like a week or two weeks or so, but it's a pretty awesome little drive, you know, but is it going to be for everybody? No, I mean, if you're probably like on Z87 right now and running to, you know, high performance SSDs, like, you know, Neutron GTXs or something like that, you know, that's probably a great fit for you already. So you're not necessarily going to be the person that would be targeting a Raider Express. Okay, I think that covers it pretty well. This is a question that has kind of a sad answer, I suspect, but I've seen quite a few people ask it. I don't have the particular tweet up right now. Why not more AMD motherboards? I think we all sort of know what's coming. Wow, that's a question because I mean, we're the biggest AMD board partner in the world. So we make a whole lot of them. I mean, right there on my list, right? I said that I'm testing the next FM2 Plus motherboards already that we're developing. We're working on some really cool boards for Kabini and Kaviri, you know, and at the end of the day, it just comes down to market share. Do we have more Intel boards than AMD motherboards? Yes, and that just comes down to that there are more consumers that are purchasing Intel platforms than there are AMD platforms, but are we committed to AMD? 100%. You know, we make crosshair, we make our ROG line for AMD, we make our saber tooth line for AMD, we've got micro ATX, we're gonna be doing even thin, mini ITX for AMD, some really cool stuff there. Oh, that's exciting. I can definitely tell you, man, do not worry about our focus on AMD. We're 100% committed to continue to work with them. And to be honest, actually, I think that APUs are really starting to hit their stride. And while I can't go into some of the next generation stuff, because of course it's under NDA, I'm very impressed with where the architecture is now starting to move itself in terms of the functionality and the capabilities. And I think it's gonna get that much cooler. All right, I've got a question from Winspeed. I think, wow, we've been at this about an hour. So maybe we'll make this the second last question. Why are the new Z87 boards gold? Why not black, silver, or white, or almost any color other than gold? Because from the feedback I've seen, it's very mixed, very polarizing, that gold color. Yeah, that's a good question. Long story short, I mean, it just came down to a decision. Some people might think that this is a very marketing-oriented answer, but I firmly believe and I'm passionate about the fact that I think that we make better motherboards than anybody else. And our R&D and our PM and our marketing team all felt that same way. So when the decision came to new color scheme, we said, let's go ahead and just do it. Let's set the tone as being we're the gold standard in motherboards. And we did that from an aesthetic perspective. So that's the reason why that we went ahead and selected gold. We felt why not represent ourselves as what we think is the best out there? And to a lot of people that said that they don't think it goes with stuff, I disagree. A natural compliment to gold is black. And I think when you came out to the technical summit, I think that the initial look of it sometimes can be a little bit stark because you look so different than something else. But once you put it inside of a chassis and you realize that it complements anything that goes black with it, it actually works quite well. I don't know if you've gotten the chance to check out, I don't know, did you go to Vancouver? I did go to Vancouver. So did you get to check out the murder box project that we worked on? I did check out Charles's, I'm gonna actually, MK2, let me see if I can bring it up. I think that for me unquestionably sets the tone to say, if you don't think that black and gold can look good, or you don't think a gold motherboard can look good, then I don't know what to tell you. Because I think that that is one of the most quintessentially amazing looking systems that I've ever seen. And myself, I've tried out tons of different chassis, you know, Corsair Carbide, BitFenix Ghost, some NDXT chassis. I've done a lot of different configurations and I think it's actually really easy to find a mix that works really well with the gold look. Okay, I'm gonna pull up a video. Oh, here, send me that link, Slick. I'm just gonna pull this up so that the viewers can check it out and have a look. It's just gonna be in the bottom of the dock. Oh, bottom of the dock, okay. So here's the one that JJ was talking about here, you guys. Let's go ahead and flip that over there. There it is. I saw this in person. Charles is some kind of wizard because that's what it takes to build something like this. Absolutely gorgeous. And there's an Asus motherboard, look at that. I saw that in person and it was actually kind of awesome because I haven't seen a ton of properly themed out builds coming with the gold motherboard. But seeing that at LandCover was very cool and I liked how he tied in the sleeving with it as well. It was really nice. Okay, so let's go ahead and, you know what? Why don't we find, okay, let's not do a Q&A thing here. Let's just find a regular topic and let's have JJ kind of join us for it. Ah, yes, AMD releases 13.8 beta driver. So I'm gonna intro the topic really quick here. So, ajoy39 from the forum posts the link to the PCPer article, which is excellent, by the way, you guys. You should definitely read it. Ryan Schraut does a fantastic job of explaining frame rating and frame latency and all of these things. It's definitely worth the read. In fact, Ryan will be joining us as a guest sometime in the next few weeks here, along with Marcus Brownlee. We're gonna have TinyTomLogan joining us and I'm sure I'm forgetting something really important right now. Oh boy, crap, who is it? Okay, well, there's someone else who's gonna be joining us soon as well. So, there you go. AMD has released the driver update that promised to address, particularly in dual GPU configurations, issues where certain frames would take a very long time to display, which caused visible, visible- I'm sorry, sorry, somebody said I was eating a chicken gyro and something else, I'm sorry. Please continue. Anyway, are you eating a chicken gyro right now? No, no, I wouldn't mind a chicken gyro. Why aren't you eating a chicken gyro right now? Yeah, you don't even have to be on a video feed like us. You can be eating whatever you want. Well, dude, I wanna give my unfettered attention to you and your viewers, man, because you guys rock, so. All right, so anyway, AMD is looking to address the stuttering or hitching that you'd sometimes observe, particularly in crossfire configurations as well. As I don't know if you guys have ever noticed this, but when you pan the camera really quickly in game, sometimes you'll see, and it's not always caused by lack of V-sync, but tearing that just looks absolutely disgusting, where the top of the image doesn't quite match up with the bottom of the image, and then which doesn't match up kind of over here, and it looks really ugly. So the new drivers here, JJ, I'm sure you've, I'm sure you've been reading up on this and following it pretty closely. What's your take? We've been working extensively with AMD on this for almost the last six months as a partner with them. So I'm very happy to finally see this driver actually come out. I've been working on the alpha versions of it for way too long. So I can definitely tell you, if you are a crossfire user, go to AMD.com, download it yesterday, and get it in 12 under system, because you're not gonna regret it. So that's what it comes down to. If you just, you're a gamer, you're on AMD, you're in crossfire, get these drivers, enough said. Now, oh, sorry, go ahead. That's really exciting because it's been a long time where if anyone ever asks about dual cards, especially if they're talking about AMD, everyone just, no, don't do it, buy a higher card, which might still be a talking point and might still be the answer, but at least there's a saving grace for the people that already have them and somewhat of a reason for people that wanna buy new ones. So tell me, JJ, for you personally, and I know this might be a bit of an awkward question, but if you were going to grab two graphics cards for a gaming rig that you wanted to play, let's say single monitor but high resolution games on, which route do you go right now? Oh, sorry, hold on. I have to respond to Ejudge97. JJ cannot possibly be involved in as much as he claims to be. I know he doesn't sleep. So there you go, I think that answers it. I think Linus knows how much of my waking day I spend on this stuff, and that's a lot of it. But anyways, I'm sorry, to clarify your question, what was it again? If you had, bearing in mind that this beta driver's here now where Nvidia has a hardware solution that they've had implemented for a couple generations now, if you were to go dual graphics, do you go for the hardware implementation or are you willing to look at AMD and Nvidia as on completely equal footing at this point? Oh, okay, okay, I got you. Well, in my analysis, in the time that I've been spending, Nvidia definitely has done a fantastic job with what's called their frame metering technology, which they have built on a hardware level. But the work that AMD has done with this frame pacing design has actually put them on very, very good footing in terms of the frame latency, not only at the initial output of the display driver, which is what something like a FRAPS would capture versus the F-cap system, which is going to capture it at the display output end, which you see on the screen. So when we comparatively look at what really matters, which is the results as you as a gamer and the experience that you have, as long as the game has been passion is correctly supported, then you're going to get a fairly parity experience. Now, I think that AMD needs to continue to work on this, to improve upon this, and we're definitely committed to working with our community of users and them to keep pushing on this. Nvidia, I think, has a little bit of an edge right now, just because they've been spending more time to optimize the driver set for better multi-GPU configuration. So, especially like I was testing out our 4K monitor, that unquestionably was a smoother overall experience with multiple Nvidia-based GPUs. That's a very good point, because guys, the new beta driver from AMD does not address multi-display configurations. And PCPer actually also found that it didn't improve things much with GPU configurations beyond two-way crossfire. So ASUS's 4K display actually relies on sort of iFINITY technology in order to achieve 4K 60 hertz by having two virtual tiled displays that make up one single 4K display. Now, obviously there's no seam between them anymore because there's no bezel, but if you were a 4K gamer, probably you're going to go Nvidia at this point. Yeah, definitely the Nvidia experience is very, it's actually quite good. I mean, I was doing even GTX 760s on 4K. I mean, it depends on the game that you're playing, of course, in terms of the IQ settings, but even that configuration was actually smooth and it was responsive for the different titles that I was trying out. So they've got a little bit of an edge there, but everybody's got work to do. Even STMicro, who's an actual firmware company, has to help to patch some things, because right now Nvidia doesn't have certain hardware implemented. Well, not hardware, but the design of the card doesn't allow for certain output sequencing for the initialization of, let's say, a post, a screen on a 4K panel. So it's weird, you'll turn on your system and when it actually goes into the display, you won't actually see an image. It'll just go straight into Windows. So there's things, like you said, when you're on the cutting edge, it's not really the cutting edge, it's the bleeding edge. And when you're on the bleeding edge, you're going to bleed a little bit and that's the nature of the beast. But when you get the rewards, it's awesome, right? Yeah, people often tell me that they're jealous of sort of the opportunity that I have to work with the latest hardware that's not even out. And what I usually say is that it's totally not worth it to work with hardware that's not out unless it's like your job, because there's no such thing as Googling an issue. No. Because no one else has one yet. So. Okay, Sam, okay, last topic. Thank you for joining us for so long, JJ. You've been awesome. I love it, no problem, man. I'm gonna bring you in for one more. Samsung Denies Phone Test Trick. So this is an article from the BBC submitted by ETRJ. All right. This is kind of awesome. I mean, as us PC guys that have been doing this kind of forever, this whole scandal is just like, oh, I'm excited. It's been done. How done has this been? But Samsung has denied claims that it deliberately designed its Galaxy S4 chip to perform better in tests used by reviewers than in real life situations. So JJ, have you heard much about this so far? I've heard just a very small amount. Okay, so I'll talk to the viewers about it as well as to you, and you can give me your take on all this. So Samsung is saying that on their Octa-Core chip, that it is due to, oh crap, what are they calling it? Ah, crap. Anyway, the point is that what they're doing is in order to prevent users experiencing a fault, they are throttling the GPU frequency below what is their claimed GPU frequency that it runs at. Then what's happening is in certain applications, for example, mobile GPU benchmarking software, it is actually running at a higher frequency than it does in actual games. So what they say is under ordinary conditions, the Galaxy S4 has been designed to allow maximum GPU frequency of 533 megahertz. However, the maximum GPU frequency is lowered to 480 megahertz for certain gaming apps that may cause an overload of power and overload when they are used for a prolonged period of time in full screen mode, to which I kind of say, well, bollocks to that because I've never heard of any benchmark that isn't designed to push the system as hard if not harder than an actual game. So if you bought this phone, how do you feel? You know, that's a good question. I think there's a lot of complex aspects in there while you might be correct in terms that sometimes benchmarks have higher load dependencies. Games have different algorithmic structures and how they have loading policies associated with them. Because of that, it can be very tricky to try to figure out how you could code policies. We actually, as a motherboard vendor, have to face the same thing. A lot of users don't realize that something like, let's say the C states affect the way that the CPU actually will have its turbo respond. So the turbo performance can actually be held longer or lower and that can actually vary the actual performance. It can even impact things like your hard drive performance. And that's all up to the motherboard vendor to tune in what type of C state parameters they want and for how long they want to hold them and for under what conditions they want to hold them and even actually what applications they sometimes might want to be able to do it. And this is actually going to even get more interesting. I can't go into too much, but there's going to be some two architecture textual changes from Intel that will allow for some very interesting things relative to per core tuning. That will continue to kind of allow for optimizations relative to applications and how they're running. At the end of the day, I think this just comes down to, as long as they're not breaking information that they're detailing to the consumer saying, hey, I'm giving you X result and the consumer is actually getting a different result. I think it's entirely up to them to define and design the product how they feel it's going to provide the best performance. As long as they're not breaking a promise to the consumer relative to what their promise as far as performance, I think it's okay. I mean, everybody's going to have their own way that is I do customize and set things up. And as reviewers, if that makes it harder for you guys in terms of trying to find a way to consistently benchmark a product, that shouldn't stop a company from trying different alternatives to tweak into other designs. I guess the thing that bothers me is like, when you see Nvidia and AMD throttling the graphics cards in applications like Furmark, Furmark is stupid. Furmark should probably have never even existed from a benchmarking standpoint, because while it's interesting to find out the total power draw that you can get from a graphics card and benchmarkers love that stuff, it's no secret that it was able to damage cards because they just weren't designed to be run like that. And the way that enthusiasts were using it, maybe Furmark wasn't a bad tool, but in the hands of enthusiasts who are used to, you know, running something for 24 hours or 48 hours to ensure it's stable, I mean, graphics cards were not meant to be run like that, particularly consumer grade ones, because it comes down to that thing you said before about is it rated for 24 operation? If it's not, then you probably shouldn't be using it that way. But it looks like what Samsung's saying is that it runs at 533 megahertz as advertised in S browser, gallery, camera, video player, and certain benchmarking apps, which also demand substantial performance. And I'm kind of looking at it going, well, what? So your game doesn't demand substantial performance, but it demands so much that you're throttling it down, but then the gallery's fine. As a consumer, this is kind of sketchy because it would be nicer, like JJ said, you can, things will change, things will be different in different applications, how things are created, but I don't care as a consumer, I wanna know how well it's gonna perform. If it's gonna perform well in your two applications and a benchmark, I do not care. I'm not gonna lag out in S gallery or whatever they wanna call their next. Yeah, that's a really good point that you bring up. Real world benchmarks actually matter a lot. That's why we do real world benchmarks in all of our testing and show tons of different real world benchmarks running games. So maybe consumers have to pay attention to different numbers. Yeah. Instead of just looking at synthetics. That's a really good point, but I think it's sometimes hard for you guys as reviewers, right, because sometimes there might not always be applications that you can consistently and reliably execute to give you quantifiable numbers. But at the same time too, a lot of these applications, who the heck can really understand them unless you're a dyed in the wool enthusiast that knows all this information. If I tell a user, hey, this graphics card got 3,673 and Vantage, what the heck does that mean to me? I don't know what the heck that means. As a reviewer, somebody that runs it, I know exactly what performance metric that means. But to a gamer, I wanna know how many frames a second, can I play whatever game it is that I wanna play? Dude, I just bought Company Heroes, man. Is it gonna be smooth or is it not gonna be smooth? That's what you wanna know. So that's, I think, just the jobs of ultimately these companies to figure out a way to get more effective real world information to the user on what is relevant to them and not always have this reliance. I mean, you could argue you're 100% right that you don't want anybody tuning these things to have these cheating edges, I guess, in benchmarks just to win a benchmark, right? But this is all like a self-feeding mechanism, right? If we keep putting the focus and the onus on benchmarks, then you are gonna kind of expect these things. If you put the focus on being what people are interested in, that's where the focus will be on ultimately. And it feels like, just like you were saying, a big part of the problem is that the tools don't exist to properly get real world results on these platforms. And it really does feel like Android and iOS, so the mobile devices are basically where PC was, like back in 2003 or 2001, when 3DMark ruled the roost and people really put a lot of stock in what that number spat out about their system. And then it was revealed that AMD was cheating or it's ATI at the time. ATI was cheating or Nvidia was cheating or whoever was optimizing. And gradually it moved away to the point where now on the desktop, we're looking at advanced external capture setups that are actually trying to demonstrate exactly how many frames your eye is actually seeing. And it just feels like the mobile guys, whether it's the developers or whether it's the reviewers, have a bit of growing up to do and a bit of learning to do from PC. Yeah, well, I mean, that's what I tell anybody. A lot of people that always say they want to break into this interest. Even when we get people that apply for the company, it was funny. I saw there was a person who was like, how can I get a job at ASUS? It's funny because you got a lot of people that are always attracted about the hotness for what we call our SBG products, which is like tablets and notebooks and things like that, right? But the truth is that if you have a really deep, good understanding on core components, you have a much, much better understanding of actually a lot of the integrated technologies like tablets and this thing. So you're right that definitely, there's a lot that people could learn by being a little bit more hands-on with their technology and informing themselves. So that's just the nature of the beast. We're in a technical industry and these are the things that everybody has to watch out as consumers and as reviewers. And everybody's got to be on their toes and hopefully put their right foot forward and be honest and transparent. So it's not always as easy as everybody would like it to be, but I guess that's what separates the guys from the good, from the guys that are not that good. All right, well, I think we can, based on how many people are tuned into the show today, I think it's pretty safe to say that we have one of the guys who is good, who was featured today. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been absolutely awesome. We've ran totally over time, but only because we've had way too much fun here. And I will leave it up to the audience, but I think there's a pretty good chance that we're gonna be extending an invitation to you at some point to join us again in the future. This has been absolutely awesome. Thanks, JJ. Not a problem. Thank you guys so much, not only to yourself for inviting me on the show. I really appreciate it. Sorry if I ran a little bit long. I tend to kind of do that sometimes. We kind of factored that in, man. And thank you just for all you guys that were just patient and listening to everything. I respect everybody's opinion and I appreciate you guys that take the time to give it to us, so thank you. All right, guys, don't forget, you can follow Asus at AsusUSA, which happens to read exactly the same forward as it does backwards, as one clever Twitter follower pointed out to me. So USA Asus, well, AsusUSA is the same as, yeah, anyway. So guys, you can follow Asus on Twitter there. You can also subscribe on YouTube, AsusROG, and make sure that you don't miss any updates from JJ and the team. Thanks, man. Yeah, I would also say, I think I talked to you about it too. If you guys see any posts from me in the forums, you can watch out for me, and you'll know that it's me if it's AsusIlluminati. All right? All right, sounds great. All right, guys, take care, man. Take care. All right, so I'm gonna remove his little icon here and turn off Razer comms. So guys, we remember our live guests are brought to you by Razer comms. If you haven't tried Razer comms for gaming yet, you can download it at the bit.ly link right here. It helps us out a great deal. If you do download Razer comms, then check it out because not only is it going to be pretty, well, depending what you're using, I mean, some people have pretty elaborate setups, but it can be an improvement for your voice communication with your crew, and it's easy to get going. And it also, like I said, helps us out a great deal, because they are powering the WAN show these days. So, shall we move on into some more topics here? Because we actually have a lot of topics this week. Quite a few, yeah. And we're gonna have to kind of blow through them pretty fast here. So, USB 3.1 spec has been finalized. Horns in on Thunderbolt's turf with 10 gigabit per second speeds. This is an Ars Technica article. And SuperSpeed Plus is what they're calling it. Just, and like there's another one on the way. Like there's 3.2 on the way, I heard rumors of, and like Thunderbolt's moving forward. And I've talked about this before when they started coining like SuperPhone and all that kind of stuff. We're gonna run out of, like we're gonna have to expand the English language to allow for more technological devices. We've already done that. Yes. I mean, Uber's not an English word. And all the English people use it. Yep, that's true. Scookum? So maybe we can just, yeah, we can just grab things from other languages. We'll need all the languages. So it'll be like USB SuperUberScoocumOnage, like not even real words. It'll be like Pwnage. Yeah, for sure. Acronyms, words, everything all mixed in together to one string that will be the name of your device. Then with like a plus on the end. Definitely, why not? Plus elite edition. What? And then, nice. I can't wait till I can get elite edition USBs. I know, right? They better come in red. They should totally come in red. ROG edition. Red and gold. That is what Asus needs to do next. I hope JJ is still watching because it's not enough to have gold edition boards and red edition boards. Like striping? Yeah. Or like military camo. Oh man. With red and gold. That'd be awesome. Anyway, 10 gigabit per second is as fast as current gen Thunderbolt, but Thunderbolt's gonna be bumping to 20 gigabits per second very, very, very soon. But it still lacks some of the features of Thunderbolt. So for example, it doesn't daisy chain. So you can't just plug in a bunch of devices to one port. And it doesn't carry a display signal, although at 10 gigabit per second, it probably could. But remember guys, that there's more to it than just the total throughput and just the connector. There's protocols involved as well. So for example, again, I was gonna mention this, whether JJ was our guest or not, but on certain Asus motherboards, some of the USB3 controllers that they're using support a different mode called UASP, which runs a different protocol over the USB3 connector. And it requires a supported chipset and a supported device on the other end, but actually optimizes it for small file transactions. So if you were running like an OS or you were working off of an external drive for something like editing video, it is faster than regular USB3. And when we tested it, it actually showed really, really good performance improvements. If you wanna see that, that's an old NCI Extectives video that we did a while back. And it's really good in the right application. And it was even faster than Thunderbolt in certain applications. And that was USB3 five gigabit, not 10 gigabit. So it's more complicated than that folks, which I guess is bad news. Okay, we already talked about the focus, right? Yes. I think we brought it up, but I don't really think we actually talked about it. Oh, okay. Well, I already- It's like it shocks your brain, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then that's about it. We'll let you know how it goes. Oh, I've got a comms message from JJ. He's back. Hold on. On a side note, new Thunderbolt does support daisy chain and concurrent video display 4K and data transfer. So new Thunderbolt is going to have even more feature advantages over USB3, in addition to just the sheer throughput advantage that will be available to it. More feature advantages than it already has, which is interesting. Extreme tech article. One sec, just to jump back to focus, the headset. Oh yeah, the shock brain shocking headset. DARPA is already using it to train snipers. But they're not using that particular device. They're using their, of course, but like that technology to train snipers. So the technology is actually legit. But whether this gaming grade device is actually gonna work or is gonna work meaningfully, or is, the FCC approved it, so in theory it's safe. But with that said, it's easier to get something approved in the US than it is in Canada, and I'm not aware of any Canadian approvals that are done on it, so. How are you getting it? It's shipped directly here, so yeah, yeah. Anyway. So you can still buy it, but. The BMW i3. Cheap, mass-produced carbon fiber cars. Finally coming. This is fascinating because BMW was able to save, it looks like, oh crap, I forget, it's in my notes. Ah yes, they saved 250 to 350 kilograms, or 550 to 770 pounds, by using carbon fiber instead of steel for the construction of many of the large panels of this vehicle. That means that the i3 is going to be one of the, well, it's basically gonna be an electric car that is not super expensive, by BMW standards. Yeah, I was just gonna say, so, $40,000? I think it's 40 to 50. Yeah. Yeah, less than $50,000 is what they're saying about it. Not super expensive. So $49.99, $49.999, or whatever, however you would say that. But it's going to be not super expensive compared to anything else, and it's not going to be super heavy compared to other electric vehicles, because the weight savings that they're gaining is going to be made up for by all the batteries that they have to check in it. But they're quoting a 100-mile range, and it's gonna be available in the US in the second wave starting in 2014. BMW, actually, you guys should check out the article, because there's some interesting background on carbon fiber, but pretty much, they're taking a page out of the old automakers' books, where instead of just having steel pieces manufactured for them and then bringing them in to assemble cars, BMW has actually invested heavily in the production process of carbon fiber. So they're going to be involved as vertically as possible in every component of the car, which I think is really cool. And it's not like this hasn't been done before fundamentally, but it hasn't been done before on a car that makes any amount of sense. Like a practical person that actually is buying a car to drive it actively. Right. Like to work. Yeah. So it's kind of interesting still, instead of it coming on some insane sports car that two people will buy. Yeah. With that said, the Tesla is doing all right. Yeah. Yeah, but again, that's a more premium, and less practical. It's not an SUV, where it's actually got cargo space and all that kind of stuff. And it's like $120,000 for the base model? Yeah, so we're talking about a very different experience here. Not that I don't love Tesla. Like, Tesla's freaking awesome, but to be able to acquire one is a little bit difficult. You know what, I totally forgot, JJ's a car guy, he's messaging me now, because I think he would have wanted to talk about that topic. But he brought up- I think JJ would talk about all the topics. That's true. We should have just done a six hour stream and had JJ. You know what, I don't think the audience would have even minded, because we've got fewer viewers now that he's gone. So at any rate, he makes a point that the jet of VW on diesel does 80 miles per gallon currently, and if later could be even better, and is already very reasonable on cost, plus there are no issues overall with the infrastructure, I wish diesel was more popular in North America. My first car was actually a 91 Volkswagen Jetta diesel. And when that car died, it had about 450,000 kilometers on it, or something stupid like that, like it lasted a really long time with no major work. When that car died, I was looking at everything from at the time phenomenally expensive hybrids to your standard like super civic, and I was just floored by how crappy they were on gas, and how much more I was gonna be paying for fuel. Jetta diesels are a fairly legendary car though. Oh, they're awesome. Yeah, they're pretty ridiculous. So awesome. In a good way. All right, so this sounds more like a drug cartel than what it actually is. The NFC ring to control your, okay, no, to control your smartphone. Actually, up till that point, it sounds pretty good. Yeah, yeah. Hits Kickstarter goal in only three days. Now I'm not much of an NFC dork, but what do you see this doing? Why is this practical? I worry because I tend to lose things. Okay. But if you don't tend to, and like rings especially, cause they'll annoy me and I take them off and put them somewhere and then never find them again. So something like this wouldn't work for me specifically, but I'm still really interested in it because someone who can wear a ring and not take it off could use it for really interesting applications. You have an open side and a closed side. Yeah. So the open side is your open lock, which is, can be pretty easily accessible. I can't see your hand, but sure. If you just kind of, well, that's pretty blatant and I'm hitting the laptop so they can't see my hand. But anyways, you can hit things with it quite easily and get through them, but then the closed side is on the inside of your palms. You'd have to very intentionally try to open it. So if you have your house or a shed or your phone or whatever locked with the closed side, you're not gonna mistakenly unlock it. And then the open side, you can have for really, really simple things that you still might wanna have a lock on. It's cool. And I think I'm not surprised that it hit its goal in three days. And I'm happy it hit its goal in three days because we're gonna see stuff like this more and more and more. What I saw that was really interesting was I saw a video on YouTube that someone NFC tagged his own hand. He injected an NFC tag into his own hand. That's cool. The whole thing's on video. It's nuts. And he was using it like his hand to unlock things and turn things on. That was insane. He could use his hand to turn me on. Because that is where I see a lot of stuff going. Maybe I don't wanna inject something into my hand, but you'll be able to just naturally do things instead of wearing stuff. You know what would be so cool? Holy crap. Okay. Think about this. Like NFC enabled pillow. So you lay down on it and you have an NFC tag in your head and your lights go off. Whoa. That'd be awesome. The door just rang. The doorbell rang? Yeah. Oh, okay. Well, I guess I'll handle the next topic in the meantime. I already let, okay. There's like a chant of bring JJ back in the Twitch chat. And I already let JJ know that the audience is already asking when he's gonna join us again. So don't worry guys. It's pretty much a done deal. We will bring JJ to join us again. Who knows? Maybe next time I'll be able to convince him to come up here and join us in person instead of calling in, which would be phenomenally cool. This is a really neat project, but whatever, Slick's not here and this is kind of his topic, but I'm just gonna do it anyway. So this guy modified, this is on Android headlines, this article, modified a Galaxy Note 2 to carry 288 gigs of storage and an 8,500 milliamp hour battery. This is one of the craziest mods that I've ever seen that also is not, it shouldn't have been that unobvious, I guess. I'm surprised someone didn't do it before, but it just took someone with the right amount of craziness to go ahead and do it. So check this out. Right here is a massive aftermarket battery that you'd probably normally find in something like an add-on, like an aftermarket back that would sort of actually be molded for it and would cover it and would contain something like that. It obviously doesn't fit 100% properly with a stock backplate. So you can see even this one has been modded in order to make it fit. And then this right here is a ribbon cable adapter from the micro SD slot to a full-sized SD slot that contains a 256 gigabyte SD card. Now, to be clear, guys, a 256 gig SD card, you could buy yourself a new phone for what you're gonna spend on that SD card, but if you do ultimately want the ultimate super phone that lasts for days and days and days and has enough storage to hold your, like, the bulk of your music and video collection, that this looks like kind of the way to do it. And it's, I believe it was, the original post was on XDA developers, so you should go and check this out. Remember, guys, we do post the document when I finally get around to it on the forum, so you can check out all of the links to everything we discuss. Is there anything you had to add about that one? I think it's cool because we were looking at the Edge last week, and something that was brought up multiple times was that it's bleeding Edge and finally has some stuff that's actually different, and they're trying to be differentiate themselves because you see so many phones that are identical. The Edge paired with this shows people want extreme phones now. You know, why doesn't anyone put a full-size SD slot in a phone? Why not? People want crazy features. And why isn't it in a tablet? Like, that, actually, that one to me is, okay. So it all comes back to micro USB for me. The thing that pisses me off about micro USB is it's a garbage connector. It's not durable at all. We had another one break today on our USB 3 hub. Yeah, I'm super mad. So we had yet another micro USB connector break. Why do we have to miniaturize things when it's completely unnecessary? Many be on almost every even modern smartphone with the exception of maybe like HTC One. Many be probably could have worked. And it's a much more robust connector. On your Galaxy S3, there's no way a many be connector wouldn't have worked there. Absolutely it would have. And so to me, something like micro SD is like, or micro SIM, or what is the new one? Nano SIM. I think the upcoming Droid X is gonna use, or Moto X is gonna use it. Why? Was there not room for an SD card in something like... SIM, I don't care. For something like a Nexus 7. Yeah, SIM and the functionality hasn't changed. But like an SD card where you get greater capacities and greater speed, which is one of the problems that Android and that Google has with allowing people to use expansion cards is that they're so slow and unreliable and crappy. Well, if they weren't micro SD, they wouldn't be quite as bad and you wouldn't have quite the same slowdown issues when running apps and all that kind of stuff that you do with those micro SD cards if you just put in a little bit more space and put a full size SD in it. And I think people would be willing if there was a like tiny, tiny expansion of the actual size of the phone. Because I don't know the last time I saw people actually care when people are like, oh, it's 0.2 nanometers thinner. Everyone goes and puts a bloody case on it anyway. Yeah, like just give it a little bit more space and put a better thing in there. I've been asking for it for a long time. So six cops showed up and inconveniently for the police, the lady who lives there, this was submitted by UK Curtis 1995 on the forum. The article we're linking to is from the Atlantic Wire. So inconveniently for the cops, the lady who lives there happens to be a pretty decent writer. I actually clicked through to her write up about it. So Michelle Catalano was looking for information online about pressure cookers. Her husband in the same timeframe was Googling backpacks. And there were some questions that the cops had about things that their son had been looking up as well. But ultimately they had six cops show up while she wasn't home while her husband was there, introduced themselves as police, asked to be let in, searched the home because they had, and they basically asked out, right, do you have any bombs here? Why are you researching pressure cookers? Why are you looking up how pressure cooker bombs work? To which the husband replied, and this guy's awesome because I don't think I would have had the balls to say this to the cops. Well, after the Boston bombings, didn't you look it up? Weren't you curious? And two of them answered yes. Two of them were like, yeah. I was kind of curious too. So it's kind of like, like they left and everything was sort of fine and hunky dory. But what the cops said was they do about a hundred of these calls a week and 99% of them are nothing. And it just makes you kind of go like, this is how closely we're being monitored at this point? And another thing to add in- Heaven forbid you want to make like stew and like go to school. Part of the problem is that she worked at a workplace and had done searches about pressure bombs there. A lot of people, I've seen this come up quite a bit, is there's additional stuff and they were tipped off by a workplace, not just a wiretap. They had like a submission from a workplace saying that she had been fired or she quit or something. I don't remember everything. And she had done searches for backpack bombs and pressure hookers at work on a work laptop. Yeah. Adds a little bit. That does add a little, in fact, she has an addendum to her article that includes that. It was also, I think it was, I think it was actually her husband's work where he was looking things up. Something like, yeah. But at any rate, even then, the fact that there, I mean, I would kind of go, okay, me to a lesser extent because I'm not that anonymous. But if I'm just average Joe with a job and a wife and a family, you know, just nothing out of the ordinary, I would go, who's actually monitoring what I'm doing closely enough that they bother to know where I work and they bother to know where I live and they are actually putting two and two together that like at my office and my home, I'm looking at things that might be related and I might be a terrorist. Yeah. I mean, that is just. I totally, I'm on your side. I just wanted to clarify that there was other sides of the story, that's all. Because, yeah. Yeah. I mean, to me, that almost doesn't really help. That almost makes it worse. Exactly. So this is an interesting net neutrality topic. Google Fiber, so in their terms of service, they've said that they don't want you hosting servers for Google Fiber. So I did find a number of articles about it. I got a number of different perspectives on it. And I think this was one of the worst bits of journalism I've ever seen out of The Verge. They blew this completely out of proportion. This coming last week when you suggested everyone go there instead of the forum. I know, I know, I know, I know. And I love The Verge still, but this was very sensationalist was the way they presented this. In fact, everyone's getting, I think, I'm gonna play devil's advocate a bit here. Everyone, I think, is getting a little bit sensationalist because the net neutrality concept is a couple of things. And it's that service providers shouldn't be able to control how you use the service that they're providing to you. Particularly, they shouldn't be able to dictate how you're using it in a way that is anti-competitive with other services. So for example, if someone like Comcast were to say, okay, well, we're your cable provider. We're also your internet provider. And we're gonna make it so that your internet connection is shoddy when you're using services like Netflix, whereas we're gonna leave the pipes wide open for our own cable TV service. That is a net neutrality issue. I personally don't think that Google coming out and saying, I'm gonna go and find the exact wording here. I don't think Google's saying, you should not host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection. Use of your Google Fiber account to provide a large number of people with internet access or use of your Google Fiber account to provide commercial services to third parties is not permitted. I paraphrased a little bit there. The first line, be not able to run servers, I think is gonna be overlooked a lot. I know you have this in your notes and I agree with you. The second lines, commercial services and allowing a large number of people to access the internet. I think that's more what they're actually focused on is if you wanna run something like a big application online, if you wanna run Twitter out of your house. Just to give a totally blown out of proportion example, but if you wanna run Twitter out of your house, I think they're saying, okay, no. Right, or if you wanted to start up your own video on demand streaming service, because let's face it, if someone was running a video on demand streaming service out of their home internet connection, I can tell you right now, it ain't legit. No. And that's not legal content that's being streamed. And that is not the intended use of Google Fiber. But I think if you're running, like if you wanna run your own Cod server, Minecraft server or something like that, or Teamspeak server, like pretty sure that's okay. They've said, multiplayer gaming isn't gonna be a problem. Even though their terms of service do actually prohibit the running of a server, my ISP prohibits running a server. I use Shaw here in the lower mainland. You're not supposed to run a server off of a residential connection. I've had a file server running off of it. I even do nightly backups. So like nightly synchronizations, that's gonna look an awful lot like server activity from their side. There's no way they're fooled that I'm not using my internet connection for that. But they turn a blind eye because I'm not running a video on demand service. I'm not the next internet startup that's starting the new Pinterest or whatever on. It's in beta and it's meant to be a consumer grade thing. And so basically what they're saying is to prevent the use, so to prevent it being, your usage shouldn't be detrimental to the other users on the service. And if everyone was pinning their connection at a gigabit up, a gigabit down at all times because they're doing whatever they're doing, that's detrimental to the point where it's not reasonable, I think, for a consumer grade connection. Yeah. With the flip side being that Google was very outspoken about the other providers and net neutrality and all that. But I just don't feel this is a net neutrality issue because it's not a competitive advantage that they're going for here. Yeah. But at the same time, I have to fight for the other side too. Whereas if you're paying for something, I think you should be able to use it all. On the other hand, you look at, again, this is back to JJ's point about if something is rated for 24 seven operation. When you buy a residential grade connection, they're not guaranteeing you 99.9% uptime. They're not guaranteeing you the ability to run that connection 24 seven pegged all day. We already know that there's provisioning. But then there's that you should have to deal with that though. Okay. That should be your service going offline. That should be your service being throttled. Oh, I see. So you're saying don't limit someone's ability to run. To do it. To do it. But if there's problems with it, that's their fault. They're not buying a business plan. They're not paying for a business plan. They're not paying for that super high end thing. They're running something kind of not designed for that. And if it fails, that's their problem. Okay, fair enough. All right, let's move on to our next topic because this one I think is gonna be pretty quick. I actually can't, it's inexplicable to me that this was so widely reported on. I think this was on, it was on, okay. So the links here are to the Eve community as well as to Huffington Post. This was submitted by Half Sandwich. But I think BBC had it as well. The Verge had it as well. So $20,000 of real world money ships were lost in what has been confirmed by Eve's developers to be the largest spaceship battle of all time in Eve over some base or something. And it's been some like months long campaign. You played Eve. How big of a deal is this? Technically I'm subscribed right now. You're still subscribed? I got too anticipated for Star Citizen. No way, you're back on Eve? Wow. How do you have time for this? I haven't been working you hard enough. I don't really actually. I've played for, I've been subscribed for like a week. I've played for like two hours. Okay. So like. Oh wow, you're back into Eve. Yeah. I want spaceships. I'm tired of waiting for Star Citizen. We don't have Alpha yet. Once we have Alpha. It's coming in like 20 days. By the time your month long Eve subscription is over. Well no, it's pretty lined up actually. You said 20 days, I've been on for seven days. It's a month long. So you're gonna, whatever. Talk about the space battle. It's cool and it's so widely reported on because it's $20,000 in a video game. People that aren't interested in video games went, holy cow, people lost $20,000 in a video game. They actually, reading most of the comments on The Verge, they went, holy cow. Why do you care? People spent $20,000 on a video game. Well they didn't spend $20,000 on a video game. Right. But that's probably perception. That's actually a very good point, is you should explain how these sensationalist headlines actually didn't necessarily have much to do with how much the spaceships actually cost like on your credit card. They're translating money in the game to things called plexes. This is how they're doing the calculation. You can buy a plex outside of the game with your credit card. Wanna shove over. It's game time. That's what you're buying. That's good. When you're buying a plex is you're buying game time. You can then sell that item, the plex, in game on the market for X amount of money. There's websites you can go to that estimate the average cost of a plex at a certain point in time. So what they do is they translate that amount of isk, which is in game money, and then that's your real life money. But how many people are actually buying these plexes? It's a lot. Is you can't just translate that to real life money because buying a ship in the game with isk, you can't translate isk into dollars. You can translate dollars into isk. Isk, isk, isk. It's kinda, you're missing like an N, but. You can translate dollars into isk, but not isk into dollars, unless you're an illegal operation selling isk. Right. It doesn't actually work. You're playing the game, you're gathering money, like in every MMO, as far as I know. You're gathering some type of resource, and then you're spending it on things. When you lose those things, that will always translate to some amount of money in a really funky math kinda way. Okay. But it's not real. All right, next topic. Moscow Subway uses devices to read Sims on phones. So this is one that, especially after the whole like jawbone technology to play ads in your head thing, also going on in Russia. How friggin' insane is this? So this is from RFRL.org, and basically what they're saying about it is it's not, again, the headline on our forum was a little bit sensationalist, Ichando, talking to you. Because what they're going to be able to read is the SIM card. From about five meters away. And what Moscow's saying is that it is illegal to track a person without permission from the authorities. However, okay. So this is from, yeah, so, okay. That was their head of police is saying it's illegal to track a person without permission from the authorities, but when you are the authorities, I don't know, okay. It's Russia. Yeah. And there is, but there was no law against tracking the property of a company, such as a SIM card. So is this where that whole you don't own your SIM card loophole becomes very ugly? That's so brutal. Wow. So the idea is, oh, well, it could be used to track stolen phones or missing persons. What's a missing person? Someone you're tracking and you can't find. That's right. That's so brutal. I hadn't read that line. That's incredible. It's the very last line of the actual article. It's kind of hidden in there. That's the lawmakers going, oh, we found a loophole in our own thing. Let's exploit it. So basically we can't look for you unless we have permission from us. Maybe there's someone else they need permission from, but come on, let's face it. Unless we have permission from someone who we work very closely with, we can't track you, but we can track that thing that you carry around. Which is like always gonna be attached to you. And what's a missing person? I don't know. Someone who we can't find. Yeah. Oh man, that's brutal. So yeah, that's like super la disappoint, I think for anyone living in Russia who wants to take the subway at any point in time. 300 gig disks. So Steven shares this with me on Twitter. Usually, guys, please post your news items in the news section of the Linus Tech Tips forum, because I usually am not sort of together enough to share things with myself on Twitter and get things. Whoa, XKCD's time comment comes to an end after more than 3,000 panels. What? That's not cool. I didn't even see that before. Huh. That's sad. Sorry, that's hidden by the, it's up here. There you go, that one. Anyway, this one's on the verge. So Sony and Panasonic team up to create 300 gig disks of the future. And I think the real question here from my perspective is why do we need a 300 gig disk of the future? They say it could be ready in 2015. It would be extremely high capacity. They're joint, Sony and Panasonic are jointly developing it. High capacity disk to store things like high definition film with large amounts of data around. What's the value of this? I was actually kind of interested, because under that, there's a note that says, this is awesome. I thought that was you. What? In the notes for the forum. You know what, I bet that was JJ who put it in. I bet I'm about to get another message on comms, because he's a high definition uncompressed aficionado. And at 300 gigs, you could actually be able to have very high bit rate movies. And if they can deliver it by 2014, then for the people who want that, I mean, it's not like Google Fiber is gonna be everywhere. No, no, no. By that point in time and unlimited internet connections, even in first world developed countries or whatever you wanna call them are not necessarily a thing. And like JJ said earlier, it's gonna be choked. Yeah, it'll be throttled at some point. It'll be throttled somewhere. It won't be a side bit rate, all that kind of stuff. It makes sense for people like JJ. Yeah, he's typing already, there he is. It makes sense for people like JJ, that's awesome. But it doesn't make sense for that many people. So I'm interesting that they're trying so hard to get this going. I think it'll be somewhat niche. However, it should be noted that optical media still has advantages compared to other media. Like for example, for the longest time, you've had people, so many people have come up to me and come up with the awesome idea that you should buy albums on a USB thumb drive instead of on a CD. And the problem with that was in about 10 years, almost any flash-based device, if you haven't provided any power to it, will degrade. It's a known thing, it's a problem. Whereas a physical media that is stamped, unless it is subject to some kind of extreme stress such as direct sunlight for an extended period of time or just horrendous conditions, is going to last a much, much longer amount of time. So is there still space for optical media? For me personally, I give zero cares because a Netflix stream already looks as good to me as I will ever care about. I'm not a film, I don't geek out over film. I don't geek out over image quality except in games. However, there'll be a use case for it. There'll always be at least one person. And if there's at least one person that you can notice, there's tons more behind that person. So there will be people that buy this, like I'm assuming JJ. Yeah, okay, there you go. He finished typing his message, which is very long, which is unlike him. I love me my Blu-ray. Also from a long-term archive perspective, I like to have a reliable medium for taking content and backing it up. I do archiving of my photography on Blu-ray, but 4K with uncompressed audio is what it is all about. Although with Blu-ray disc XL and better compression, we could probably get away with very high quality 4K and 24-bit audio. So that sounds like an argument both for and against to 300-gigabyte format. Maybe we do need more on optical, but we maybe don't need 300-gigabyte anytime soon. But hey, you look at how long it takes a standard to become everywhere. Just because it's available in 2014 doesn't mean that it's mainstream at that point. And what's that disc called, the memory disc? I think LG makes the drive. M-disc. M-disc. Once they get M-disc that big. Asus has an upcoming drive that supports M-disc, actually. OK, cool. So M-disc is that permanent archival media. Once they get a disc that big in that standard. Someone will be interested. That's awesome. That's cool, in my opinion. Because right now, I personally think compared to DVD, or even Blu-ray in some cases, although I haven't priced it out recently, because Blu-ray discs used to be quite expensive, you were better off just buying hard drives and putting them on a shelf. In terms of archiving your data. So, all right. Last news article of the week. Before we move on to build blogs of the week and wrap things up, Nvidia prototypes their own VR headset. So this is really cool. The article is from TechHive, and it was posted on the forum by No Name 7931. And what Nvidia has done is they have used a very, very interesting array of micro displays with a very unique lens setup to create something that achieves stereo 3D, as well as like a virtual reality. So a display that's sitting right next to your eye, pretty much. It's about this far away, but looks like it's much further away. So without the same kinds of crazy optics and huge headgear that Oculus Rift is doing, they've created something that is less than a cent, or about a centimeter thick, and sits on your eyes and allows you to see in 3D. And this prototype is actually, you guys have to check out the video. The Nvidia video right here, down by the end of the TechHive article, near eye light field displays is outstanding. So it covers some of the limitations of the technology, which is that the display image will be quite blurry, particularly with the resolutions that we have available and the fact that it's a weird random prototype, where they took apart some head-mounted display and Frankensteined it together with some other thing. I don't remember where I was going with this, but it's very cool. And it could be an indication of where we're heading in the future. Oculus, I mean, you look at how much attention they're getting, they weren't gonna be the only one forever. No, and it's good to have competition. Oculus is pushing really hard, doesn't matter. Still good to have competition. One thing that's gonna be interesting, and I know Nvidia is gonna have huge marketing muscle behind it, but everyone's developing for Oculus. Nvidia is just an assumption, very possibly gonna have a proprietary platform, but- That would make me really sad. I hope that Oculus gains enough traction before Nvidia comes in. Cause I mean, the thing with stereo 3D and why Nvidia got away with it there is that the other solutions were terrible. The existing ones were just terrible. So they were able to come in and say, yeah, we have the only good solution. So boom, boom, boom, lock all the doors. This is a closed play area, guys. Whereas if Oculus is already great, then Nvidia might have to play nice. Yeah, cause it worries me for the, I almost just said ATI users, AMD users that if it's locked down, won't be able to actually use it. So it becomes kind of interesting. And then if they can't use it, how many people are gonna be developing for it? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Speaking of locked down, and it's not for AMD users, Project Shield from Nvidia, the gaming where you're actually streaming your desktop GPUs power to your Nvidia Shield portable device. No, no, we're not gonna show them the actual demo yet. I'm just gonna hold it up. So we've been working, we don't have an Nvidia Shield device yet, but we've been working on what we call the ghetto shield, which we'll be talking about in much more detail in the after party. But basically it's a phone mount that goes to an Xbox 360 controller that uses an app that you can just download for free for your phone to stream a game from your desktop PC in a way that we think is pretty cool. So we'll talk more about that later. And you can build one of these, assuming you already have a phone and an Xbox controller for about $3. If you don't know where to buy like things for cheaper. Phone, Xbox controller, some glue. Some old side panels and glue. So more on that later. Let's do builds of the week. Awesome, okay. So there is a link in there. Is there a link? There almost wasn't. Oh, well that was close. All right, let's download this bad boy. I hope Google docs, I think I say this every single week, hope Google docs gets better support for viewing it in the browser. I know that's the PowerPoint files are the one thing where it's just kind of assy. Breaks a little bit. Yeah, and not assy like plump and juicy assy, like saggy and wrinkled assy. That needed description. Yeah. Definitely needed description. I'm pretty sure that needed to be said. Oh yeah. Oh, this is annoying. It's, I'm trying to download it and it's just being assy. Again, the wrinkled assy. The bad one this time. Yeah. All right. No, it was always the bad one. It's just sort of how bad it manages to be. You know, we were this close to not having any technical difficulties on the stream this week. Except for being like half and over. Well, it's okay. Except for, but that was mostly to do with the fact that it takes B-roll twice as long to get here as it does me from the studio. And the blue screen. And B-roll had the camera. Oh, right. That and the stream. Blue screen and we don't have the mic anymore. I knew it was gonna blue screen though. I was sure. Like that black magic intensity. I've almost gotten to the point where I can go, yeah, when I do this, it's gonna blue screen, but I have to do this because otherwise it's not gonna work at all. Okay. Well, I am sort of at a loss here. So let's just go ahead and do this. All right. Badda bing, badda boom. So we start with Bertha 2.0, which is probably one of the most interesting prodigy builds I've ever seen by DGPC. Oh, it looks so terrible because of the low color depth. Blah. It looks really cool. Yeah, in person. Trust us. Go to the forum thread. It will be posted in the build. Oh. Oh. Dang it, Google Docs. It's coming. You're killing me here. Oh, here it goes, here it goes, here it goes. All right. Sweet. Give us one second. He's gonna be able to open it because all the downloads went all at once, which is pretty cool. Sweet. From current slide. Next. Yes. There we go. Now it looks good. There we go. So handles at the top, still usable, but there's a rad mounted on the top. That's gorgeous. I love that. And he didn't have to use any external loops or anything because he just cut through the top of the case. Very nice. I've done that before. Actually, it works. It's great. Yeah. He used a Coolant's kit though. Would you not have used a Coolant's kit? I don't know. It's just, it's one of those things where you don't see a really well done build very often that uses Coolant's external mounted things. It looks nice though. It does. No, it worked. It worked in this case. Yeah. But it was just, it's just one of those funny things where you don't see that that often. Yeah, no, you're definitely right. Just, I think it worked really well in this because it looks like it's an extension of the case. I love the front grill. This looks outstanding. Yeah. Again, you can't see other angles because I only do one picture. Color scheme's great. We should probably start doing like two pictures at least. Two pictures? I've been trying to find a half a medium. I did two pictures once and there was some flag for it, but maybe we'll just do two anyways. Then we have Metallic Acids ROG5GENE-TJ08-E by Metallic Acid. And this thing is freaking incredible. Like this one, you have to go see all the pictures because what's crazy about this one is that you see these illuminated glowing white pieces here, the shroud that's the custom shroud for the graphics card, sort of some of these other pieces like down here in the bottom of the case. He's got multicolor LEDs in there. So you can actually change the color scheme of the system, which I think is just so cool. And it works so well with the rest of his color scheme, the colors that he has available, at least the colors that he's taking pictures of. Yeah. He got this idea from the sectioned off, like not sound card, but sound section of that motherboard. Oh, so from Asus' red line concept where they segment off the part of the PCB. That's very pretty. So he took the red line concept and decided that it looked really good and to apply it to the rest of his build, which is a really good idea. Sometimes you need something new when you're modding because everything's been done. And that was a really, really good idea to just take what they did and take it so much further. It's just an amazing place. All right, well, I think that pretty much wraps it up for the WAN Show for this week, guys. We'll see you again next week. Same bat time, same bat channel, except sometimes not quite the same bat time. We do our best and we're very sorry we ran late today. But yeah, thanks again to our special guest, JJ from Asus. I think he was absolutely awesome. And the after party will be shortly. Will be shortly? Whatever, man. First of all, best regards to JJ's