 We did our pre-show today, which means that we shouldn't have any difficulty with audio or video, but every time I say that... Why would you say that? Why did you just say that? Every time I say that, it ends up being a bit of a problem for us, so... Hopefully that's not gonna be the case tonight, but we've repositioned the microphone, so... The funny thing is, normally the complaint is always that the audio is too low, but... During the pre-show, people were saying, No, no, it's too loud! It's like, okay, well... Apparently everyone's volume knob is broken, because... Well, the problem is that everyone's volume knob ranges from everywhere from the bottom all the way to the top. So, someone it's too loud, someone it's too quiet. And there's nothing we can do... Dun-dun-dun. At all. Someone says they were kidding about it being too loud, so... That's really not helpful. Yeah, it's actually, actually not helpful, because we actually have had problems with audio before. So, guys, this is the new time for the livestream. I'm actually gonna go ahead and launch the YouTube video that says, Hey, hey, we're live, so you should probably join and... And not be not watching the livestream. I have a feeling that we're not gonna have a ton of viewers live tonight, just because I think people aren't gonna be used to the new time. And we told everyone, like, super late last night. Yeah. Some people today. Yeah, some people today. And we told everyone last week that it was gonna be moving to Monday, but then there's a very good reason we didn't move it to Monday. And it has to do with, like, gnomes. What are you doing? Uh, echo. It's not on. Echo, echo, echo, echo, echo. I can't even watch, because... What? Yeah. Oh, there's an ad. Oh, this video might have played, I guess? Maybe. Yeah, it must be over. So, yeah, we went with this time slot for a very good reason, and the reason for that is that because of the way that the Earth turns, and because of where the international dateline is, for some people, when we livestream, pretty much no matter what, it's gonna be tomorrow. And so if it's a Monday, and it lands on someone's tomorrow morning, then while we understand that it's not perfect for everyone in Australia and Asia to have it be in the morning, we figured a Saturday morning is probably better, odds-wise, than any other day of the week in the morning. And then the reason that we're still on for Friday night is that it was really challenging for a lot of people to stay up late in Europe when it was on, like, a Monday night, and they had to go to work on a Tuesday, for example. And I know not everyone works 9 to 5 Monday to Friday, but we have to, we had to do something, and it couldn't stay where it was. We tried grabbing highest possible percentages in every field, and this is what we came up with. Yeah, I mean... It kinda had to be 4pm, it kinda had to be during the week, so it was what day during the week, and if we had it, the only day that actually had an advantage was Friday, because all the other days you run into the exact same problems, and then Friday you have that slight advantage of some people being on Saturday, instead of some people being on during school or work at, like, 9am on a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. You know what the irony of it is? Is that probably one of the worst time zones for this slot is hours. Yep. So I had Tim from TimmyTechTV, who's down in Seattle, he works at Microsoft, he has his own YouTube channel, and he was like, Um... Guys... Yeah, it's kinda... He's like, Oh, I'm not gonna be able to watch anymore. Well, my mom tries to be, like, over supportive in every possible thing ever, and is just rah rah about everything, which is awesome, but she's like, Well, I can't really watch it anymore. And I'm like, It's okay, the archive's there. Yeah, don't worry, Mom, it's really alright. She tries to contribute things that we might talk about and stuff, but she, like, I don't know. I love that she watches it, but don't understand at the exact same time, because there's no way she understands, like, three-quarters of what we're talking about. Yeah, I mean, she probably understands when we're talking about, like, Harry Potter. Yep. And then we talk about, like, 7790. And then we got torn apart for talking about Harry Potter, because I gave away a bunch of spoilers and there were viewers that... So we can't talk about the things that she does understand. The things your mom gets, we're not talking about anymore. I'm sorry. Sorry, Slick. You know what? Why don't we start with... Let's start with something pretty easy today. Why are they putting the Star Wars films on a release schedule? Right. Once every summer? Is that it, right? Once every summer? Once every summer. That's insane. That sketches me out, because stuff like Harry Potter was on a release schedule, I believe. Well, release schedule-ish. And Lord of the Rings was definitely on a release schedule. And The Hobbit is on a release schedule. Okay, hold on, hold on, hold on. But all of this was pre-filmed. That's right. Whereas they're setting, like, as far as I know... I can't imagine they've done any degree of planning for episode 10, I guess. It's like, oh yeah, this sounds like a good idea. Or episode 7, rather, pardon me. It's like, oh, so some ex... That's what this reeks of. It's like, what goes wrong with every... Actually, here. We should probably be providing the links. So this was a link on the verge. So we are not the source for this news. So you guys can check it out here. But this really reeks of executives somewhere making a decision that has no basis in reality. This is like... Like, I look at someone like Disney and I go, yeah, they've done so many good things with so many good franchises. I kind of had faith in them. But, I mean, come on, guys. You can't rush the creative process. Like, who are you, EA? No, it's early for my shot at EA. We have to take our weekly shot. Just, oh bam! It's like, how's your nuts feeling from last week? Here, let me give you another one! You wanted a break? No. It's like, we must have a new game... I mean, that's what happens. Like, sports games used to be good. Now what are they? They're rehashes of the same damn thing every time. I mean, is that what this is going to be? It's bad decisions that get made early on in the process that end up turning it into something unsustainable. I want more blades of steel. And, I mean... I mean, okay. And another thing too is, like, look at how long it took to make the original three. Which, quite frankly, they probably shouldn't have taken quite that long. But, look at the outcome. Mark Hamill goes from, like, super hot youngster with really bad hair to, like, ugly old guy with good hair. And it's like, he never won. He could never win. How did he stand a chance of being a heartthrob? Are they going to do the same thing to a whole new generation of stars? Well, no, Pam. Well, no, definitely not. I mean, the only thing... The problem is, they're not going to age. The next thing they have to do to really sort of make me not even bother showing up at the movie is cast Sheila Buff. Oh, God. Don't even... Wasn't that awful in Indiana Jones? Don't even... It's like... Ugh. I mean, with that said, the casting couldn't be much worse than it was for the prequel trilogy. And, I mean, the word on the streets, or the rumors, is that they're bringing together a lot of the original cast to play, you know, parents and all that kind of stuff. They've had problems with some of them. Yeah. Some of them are like, I don't really want to do this. Yeah, but hopefully they can just throw enough money at them that it actually won't matter. It's Disney, so I kind of see that happening. It's Disney, and it's the Star Wars franchise. I mean, just on the basis of the money they're going to be reaping from, you know, a new sort of generation of Mark Hamill action figures. I... Like, if I was one of those guys that's holding out, I'd be asking for sort of a piece of some of the pie in some way, as opposed to a lump sum amount. But then if I'm Disney, I'd be crazy to give them that. So I'm sure it'll all come down to the individual negotiating tables. But I really hope they'll find a way. Because, yeah, I mean, you can bring back a series, but if you bring it back and... Kill it. Yeah. It's Disney. They're doing pretty damn good with their action hero movies. I know, but they're... Okay, tell me something, though. Did they put something like Spider-Man on a We Have to Release a New One Every Year? Like, what if they did that to Batman? Oh, man. I don't know. I honestly don't know. Because they've been doing the cartoon series for so long now. Okay. Star Wars, whatever it's called, I don't even know. I've never seen it. Yeah, I don't know. I saw the animated Clone Wars movie. It was terrible. It was like the worst thing I've ever seen. Was it? Was the cartoon one terrible? I haven't seen either. I don't know. Why don't we... You know what, guys? We're opening up the Twitter boards because let us know. How is the Star Wars animated series? We'd love to hear your feedback. And we're looking for one-word answers here, guys. We don't want an essay. It is Twitter after all. So, you know, terrible, great. I mean, this is an acceptable response. Bam! There's another one! One-two punch. Oh, man. They want to know if Slick's ever going to start his own channel. Would love to have a sort of podcast with you talking about tech stuff. I don't know if I'll do one talking about tech stuff. This is kind of a podcast. And we're talking about tech stuff. We're talking about Star Wars so far, but, you know, lightsabers or tech. Nerdy stuff, I guess. You're wearing a Star Wars shirt. I am wearing a Star Wars shirt. That's not even on purpose today. No, I know. Yeah. That's awesome. Love it. If I ever actually did make my own channel, it would probably be something centered around gaming. One of the big reasons why we haven't done that yet is we haven't found an approach that we find... We have time for. We have time for is a big one. That's like reason A. 100% of reason. This much of the reason. Yeah. And then a little bit of the reason is we want... If we did that, we would want to have a unique angle and we don't know what our unique angle would be. Yeah. I mean... And the other thing is, you know, whatever he starts, I'm going to want to cut a bit. So, you know, I think from his perspective, it's like, what's the point? I'm just not going to start anything. He's going to be like, oh, are you starting something? Ninety... 99%? 99%. And, oh yeah, that's on your own time. So, you know, I'm not going to be paying you hourly for it. So don't worry about it. Let's have a look and see if we've gotten any... There we go. 28. Oh, wow. Okay. Okay, Clark, that's a bit of a strong statement because Star Wars does not suck. Yeah. Certain implementations of Star Wars might suck. Good. Awesome. So good it got cancelled. Oh, and we're talking about Futurama later. Like, we are talking about Futurama. I'm going to bring another spin into that. Wow, James Taylor. You are banned. Can I ban people? I love Star Wars but Star Wars is great. What do you mean get past the childishness? It's like the most formula, dumb kids... It's like a Land Before Time sequel. That's how formula it is. It's like the young apprentice who is rambunctious and then ends up saving the day, so it turns out that her strong will, hot headedness was good. Come on. It's a terrible message. No kids should watch it, no adults should watch it. Um, horrible apparently. Dino didn't watch it, crappy, terrible, terrible, cancelled. Better than episode one for sure. Oh come on, man! Saying it's better than episode one is like saying that it's like, you know, more cleanly shaven than slick. Um, but storyline. You can have a razor, right? Okay, fine, sorry, go ahead. Razors got, you have to buy new ones. Letdown, sucks, horrific, awesome for kids. Storyline. Can we get storyline instead of like maybe the animation sucks, maybe the dialogue is terrible, but like the storyline, because I'm wondering is Disney going to pull anything from that storyline? Like are they going to take anyone from that series and continue them working on the new series? You know, I really wish, okay here. Here's the way this is going to work. Anyone from Disney, if you're watching, this is how you need to do it. Because I'm evidently an expert because I wear a Star Wars shirt. That looks super old. If they are licensing, no, no, it's like ironically retro, see it's intentionally like broken. Wame. Yeah, I know. I'm a hos-, I'm opposing. If they're going to make this work on a one-year release schedule, it has to be expanded universe content. Where they're licensing, they're licensing books. Because otherwise to expect new creative unique awesome, like up to the level of the original movies, Star Wars scripts on a yearly basis, plus execution on a yearly basis. Like brutal. What I'm worried about is what you just said. What are you basing it on? Like what are the stories based on? Yeah, what is the one-year timeline based on? What is any of this based on? Well, because story writing takes so much time before you can actually start production. That's why I'm saying that. And are we going to end up with a situation where it's like you have multiple teams working on it? So it's like it's a graphics card, you know, where you have a team working on the one that's three generations from now. And then by the time that's actually released, they're working on something that's going to be three genera-, like if you have like multiple teams working on it, are we going to have like A, B, and C quality Star Wars movies? Yeah. Happening every three years? I don't know. So, I mean, I guess it depends how much- Many questions. All the questions. And it seems unnecessary. Why do you need so many movies? Most of the money from Star Wars comes from merchandise anyway. I mean, just re-release the original trilogy in 4K and it's like, BWAH! I'd buy it. I'd buy it. Who cares? Yeah. I don't have much money. Still buy it. I'd still buy it. Doesn't matter. You know what they really need to do? Like if Disney was really smart? Go for it. I've got an idea too. Original, not special edition trilogy in 4K. Han shoots first. You know what? He did. Deal with it. In 4K, he shot first. So, I would pay for that. You know the black and gold slider box that everyone had? Yes. They should just re-release that but in Blu-ray. That was the special edition but not the stupid special edition if I recall correctly. Yeah. Because I think that was the one where Han shot first, but then I think it has the extended scene where he walks over Jabba's tail and all that other stuff that they worked. And I didn't mind that one. Yeah. I didn't mind that one, but I still liked my originals better. Just because they're original. Mind you, they're VHS. So, it's like as if I can watch them. Well, the golden black box is VHS. Yeah, I know, but I had an original. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like older original. Okay, so James Taylor has redeemed himself. He means the series not the film. And he probably just said like 10 billion spoilers. For what? Star Wars. Oh, come on. I'm going to get complaint mail. You screw up like every single week. I'm going to get hate mail for Star Wars spoilers. I'm sure it's going to happen. Every week. Spoiler alert. Okay. That's a little bit. Okay, anyway, James is forgiven because he means the series not the film. So yeah, because the animated series is the same name. Yes. So he's got a point. So that's confusing. So it's kind of like Tomb Raider. Yeah, because the new one's just entirely different. And you know what? It's one of those things where it doesn't seem like as much of a problem because obviously if you're looking up an article about Tomb Raider, you know, Tress FX, hair effects or whatever else, then you know what Tomb Raider you're talking about. But when we start to get into games that are going to be like the original release is going to be on the Steam platform. And then like the later release is going to be on the Steam platform. They're just going to be the same name next to each other. How are you supposed to? Well, Tomb Raider 1 had a suffix, did it not? I don't know. I don't think so. I don't think anyone ever used it. I think it did because with Tomb Raider, you know how they started doing that thing where like if you preorder and then enough other people preorder, the whole idea is that you share the fact that you can preorder. If you preorder and enough other people preorder, then you unlock prizes and there's three tiers of prizes. Okay. Tomb Raider was one of those. And I think the first tier was you got like Tomb Raider 1 and 2 for free. Okay. It's like what? I can't remember exactly what it was. Maybe Twitch chat will tell me. Hopefully Twitch chat will tell me. But yeah, so like I think it had a suffix and like Steam can deal with it. They'll have some backend naming convention that's different for them. It might be confusing in your games list. I mean just a year would be okay. Tomb Raider 2013, I'd be down with that. Yeah. By the way, the headphones are SteelSeries in-ear pros. But then what if Metro 2033, like 10, 20 years from now, they release, they re-release Metro? Bwah. Well, that's kind of like what Blood Dragon is. In the future, in 2007. Well, yeah, but this would actually be confusing because Metro 2033 would be the same as Metro 2033, 2033. However, it would work out. Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, because it would actually be that year. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, apparently Star Wars is decent according to Derpherb. What's a good budget processor? What would you buy if you were on a budget today? FX4300 or whatever it is? It's not a bad route to go. To be honest. And it depends what you mean by budget. Yeah, I hate that. Every single time anyone has ever tweeted me with like, I'm on a budget, what do you suggest for X component? Well, it's just like, what does your version of budget mean? Yeah. I usually even ask like, what is your version of a budget? Because some people are like, yeah, I'm on a budget, I only have two and a half grand for a computer. I'm like, okay, that's not a budget in my books. Yeah, that's like. That's not in the usage that most people say budget. I could fit a Titan into that machine with like, a justifiable configuration. Yeah. So. But then people will be like, oh yeah, it's a budget. Because technically, it is a budget. Yeah, it's a budget. You can have a million dollar budget. And it depends what you're trying to do. I mean, if you want to, you know, if by budget processor, you mean you want to play games on onboard graphics, I'll say get an APU. If by budget processor, you mean you want to edit video with as low a budget as possible, I'd say get an FX6300. If by budget processor, you mean, you know, whatever it is that you happen to need. 8350s do quite well at really low end video editing. That's a $200 chip though. Is that budget? I don't know. So you process your motherboard for $300 bucks to me, usually, is about $300 bucks. We've ripped on like, Baron Van Rooij for a little while here. Hi, dude. We've done a video on the ROG 7970, the Matrix. It's on the NCIXCOM channel. First time watching live. Hey, shout out to Portugal. I don't think we've ever gotten a message from Portugal. I don't know. I don't think we're going to have Linus animated adventures. There's a guy from Belgium who said it was the first time he's ever been able to be live. Check this out. 2,300 live viewers. Sweet. Looks like the new time worked in spite of nobody knowing about it at all. Nobody knowing at all. Like me tweeting it twice. I didn't even, yeah, I just left because I had to go see my brother. Yeah. My brother won a champion hockey game. I was like, what's your problem? Because I was like, oh, can you tweet it to me so I can retweet it? I'm like, bathing the baby. I was in the middle of doing it. My dad's just like, come on. I'm like, OK. I guess you couldn't be late for your brother's thing again. That would have been just bad news bears. So Slick missed his brother's StarCraft 2 casting thing because his brother called and his phone didn't go off. And then because of the baby and stuff, my brother was trying to be polite and not knock on the door. So he just kept on calling me. And he was out there for like 45 minutes. It was not. It was not good. And then now it was my brother's championship hockey game. Yeah. I was supposed to go watch it. And then my dad calls me. I'm not going to be late for that. That wasn't my brother waiting outside. Oh, OK. No. Because I was going to say if that happened to Ken, he would not have been impressed. And his brother's actually bigger and stronger and just basically beefier than him. If you look at proportions, he's slightly shorter than me. Not by a lot. He's not actually short. He's just slightly shorter than me. But then he's just like, whoa. He's a volunteer firefighter. But he takes it very seriously. So he has firefighter build. So what Slick could do to me, he could probably do to Slick. He's picked me up and thrown me around before. Yeah. Like that's a thing. Yeah. He would ref in hockey whenever he had to ref one of my games because everyone expected him to be biased. He would be biased against me. So if anything ever happened, I got in a slight scrum with the guy once. And I just feel like this big fist grabbed the back of my jersey. I'm like, oh, this is not good. And I just go flying. And I'm like, oh, no. That was bad. Thanks, bro. I know exactly who did that. And I know exactly who's getting the penalty. Even though I didn't think it was my fault. But I'm still happy he did it because if he gave the other guy the penalty, everyone would have just been like. Oh, the entire other team would have just destroyed you the rest of the night. Oh, it's just because it's your brother. All that crap. So it was actually way better. Oh, they'd have finished every check. Yeah. It would have been like not good. Yeah. It was way better in the end that he gave me a penalty and that he threw me off. Both of those things actually helped. What's your opinion of the Linfield line of processors? They were awesome. They were good value. OK. I have a paper due soon. Watching it. Very nice. Surikizu, worth selling a 690 to get a Titan. I'm thinking about it because of how quiet it is. How much quieter is it than a 690? This is actually a good discussion topic. Too bad we don't have a 690. I've used a 690. I haven't. OK. 690 is a little bit louder. It's noticeably louder. Titan's very quiet. One big thing is are you running multiple screens? But that's not audio. Well, OK. So audio aside, let's tackle the whole question. Because there's the performance delta. Yeah. So for those of you who don't know, GTX 690 is a dual 680 card, essentially. Dual GPU, 4 gigs of RAM, 2 per GPU. That's important later. Sorry, pause for one quick second. Tomb Raider 1 was Lara Croft, Guardian of Light. Shut up. It was not, was it? Apparently, some guy just said that. No, that's a different Tomb Raider. Is it? I thought Guardian of Light's a different one. I don't know. I never played any of them. First Tomb Raider game I ever played, that was on my own system. So I actually played the entire game, which I haven't actually beat yet. Has she a Guardian of Light? All right, guys. So we think we're live again. Frames encoded is going up and frames dropped is not going up. So it looks like changing the router has not helped. Basically, what's happening is while we're streaming, our internet connection is completely, no, it was me, is completely dying for some completely unknown reason that we have. We have to call our ISP. Yeah. It's just kind of getting ridiculous. Yeah. Happens like every week. We've stopped the router. Yeah. There's literally nothing we can do about it. It doesn't happen at all if we're not streaming through Twitch. Yep. So like we do stuff that's just as intensive on the network every single day. Like uploading videos to YouTube. We'll do a huge batch. Internet does not go out. And we'll do multiple at a time, which is nuts. Yeah. So I mean, this is a problem. So anyway, let's get back to our discussion topic because I mean, sure, that's what people want us to do. So 690 versus Titan, less effective memory on the 690 because remember, guys, in SLI, whatever video memory you have per GPU, so if it's four gigs total, that means you have two gigs per GPU. That's all you effectively have, whereas a Titan has six gigs of memory. So when you're running at something like 4K resolution, throw that 690 in the trash because it won't work. Well, it'll work. Unfortunately, we didn't have a 690. But if you check out some of the results from the Titan testing that we did a while ago, you can extrapolate from it where the RAM actually helped a crazy amount. Yes. So it's already helping, even at 1080p and 2560 by 1600, which means it will help that much more when you get up to resolutions like 4K, which is. So Wailer, one of the moderators on the forum, is suggesting that it's possible that our ISP is using QoS to. Or something. Or something to throttle us when they see us hitting the connection really hard the way that we've been doing. Which might throttle enough that kicks off the stream. Because our internet connection isn't dying. A lot of the time, we're still on Skype chat and still seeing Twitch chat, even though the stream is down. And it's just giving us messages that say, frames dropped, dropped, dropped, dropped, dropped. We're actually still connected. Because when we lose our internet connection outright, XSplit completely cuts it off. Right? So XSplit's still on, just telling us we're dropping every frame, which is helpful. But anyway, hopefully 720p will fix the issue. My laptop still doesn't have any internet connectivity. But we're back on. OK, so I give up on this discussion topic because we're just going to have to move on. But in short, if you want to play at higher resolutions tomorrow, get a Titan. If you want to run at higher frame rates today at lower resolutions, then the 690 is still the better solution compared to the Titan. I'm really sorry for the technical difficulties this week, guys. But honestly, this is beyond our control. We've done everything that we can do. Sorry to interject. Is it EA4500? Yeah, it's still in the EA4500. So it's a high-end, powerful router. I really don't think that's the issue. So first time watching in Germany. Hello, Germany. And I'm glad to hear that the new schedule is way better for you guys. Same thing with Italy. First time from there. Good morning from the Philippines. Thank you for waking up early. And I'm sorry that we were not here for a little while. And I'm sure that all these Twitter messages are about that we weren't here. So why don't we move into our next discussion topic? ZTE has caved and is paying royalties to Microsoft on their Android devices. So let's go ahead and fire that bad boy up. There you go, guys. So this is a Daily Tech article. Another one bites the dust. So what are the implications of this? The another one bites the dust thing? No, not another one. That's a song. I was like, why do you what? What? What? I don't know. Microsoft is going around trumping everyone. OK, but why? I mean, what spurred this? Because I'm sure they could have done this a generation or two ago if they felt like it. Well, we talked earlier. Right, but they weren't there. That's the point. It just feels weird. I'm like, come on. Say the thing. I'm trying to grab the doc so I can tweet it out so people can actually get the link for themselves. Huh? Oh, don't worry about that. Talk to them. OK, so Microsoft has Windows 8 phone. And Windows 8, everyone's going on crazy patent wars right now. And Microsoft has tons. And with Windows 8 phone, a few people were like, hey, pay us money for royalties and stuff. So Microsoft kind of got tired of it and was like, fine. You know what? All of you are paying us all the money. Because if you guys are going to be jerks, we're just going to be way bigger jerks than you are. So I mean, we discussed this a little bit last week where Microsoft's bringing in $10-plus often per Android device sold from the manufacturers, regardless of whatever else, more than half of the Android devices. This was before the ZTE capitulation here. Capitulation. Yeah. Well, that's the actual word. I know. I was looking for a simpler one. But that's before they threw in the towel. And so now it's getting to the point where pretty much whatever Android device you buy, you are giving money to Microsoft. And that is the way that it is going to be. Yeah. Yeah. Basically. It's just another one to the other. What's going on with your computer? I keep accident. This button is stupid. Yeah, don't worry about it. I just keep accidentally hitting it because it's on the side. It's so noticeable because it's so loud. His laptop keeps turning off or going into sleep or something because there's a button on the side. Yeah, it's just sleeping. And he just keeps hitting it. So weird. Yeah, they're still going to go after more. They're still going to just start grabbing all the money. They're saying, like, Motorola patents, if anyone was following Motorola patents from back in the day when all that stuff was going on back in the day, like two years ago. Yeah, two years ago. If you're following that at all, you know how big of a deal that was. And people are speculating that the Microsoft patents are worth around a thousand times more. Right. So that was such a huge deal. And this is worth a thousand times more. It's just like, yeah. That's going to sustain them for a while, I suspect. For those of you, I keep seeing these articles. Microsoft's doomed. Microsoft's going down. Microsoft won't exist. Yes, they will. Microsoft will find a way. Yes, they will. Microsoft is going to take over the living room with the next generation Xbox. Yeah, that's my prediction. Microsoft's going to win. I personally won't own one. All right, I might own one, but I won't have it hooked up. So I personally won't use one, but they are going to own it. And that is a huge victory. Never mind if, you know, they can't get their foot in the door mobile wise for a little while longer, however long it takes. The fact that they own all these patents is going to give them enough money that they can do whatever they need to do to get competitive in whatever other space is. It's not like Chrome OS is going to be taking over any time soon. You know, in spite of what people might hope, it's not like Linux is going to be taking over any time soon. It's still so fragmented. Yeah. Yeah, you can make one. Fine. Go ahead. It's okay. Go ahead. You know it's not going to happen. Steam's moving to Linux. Groups like Ubuntu and Mint are making very, very user-friendly versions of those. How long have they been doing that? About a while. Yeah. And they're increasing constantly. So you can just stay over there. I don't know where I was going with that. Their user base is constantly increasing. It's constantly getting easier to use and more things are constantly being adapted to be able to use it. Okay. Like every single Kickstarter that gets launched has a stretch goal for Linux because so many people ask for it. Steam is going to be adapting to Linux. A lot of PC users are no longer happy with the Windows experience with Windows 8. Speaking of the Windows experience with Windows 8, here's another another Daily Tech article that we wanted to bring up today. And that is the rumor, I think the Verge reported on this as well, that the start button will be returning in Windows 8.1, which might be called Windows Blue or whatever it is they're going to call it. But the catch is that it dumps you in the, they're calling it Metro, but I think what they mean to say is modern UI, which is of course very different from Metro. Daily Tech actually got this from the Verge. I just didn't go get the Verge article because I was trying to go really quickly. Okay. Well, it's the Verge's scoop. So Daily Tech picked it up from there. And like honestly, what's the point? Because I don't know how many of you guys have used Windows 8 extensively at this time, but check this out. Okay, this is a Windows 8 notebook. Okay, I'm going to take my mouse cursor. I'm going to move it down to the bottom left. And what you guys, what y'all are going to see is that there's a little preview of something there that says start on it actually. And if I click, it will take me to the modern UI. So if the basic difference here is that Microsoft thinks that the problem is the absence of the start button, then they're really missing the point. It's like there's two little kids and the one kid asks for the sucker. So the big kid takes like the top off and it gives them the bottom. Yeah. It's like there, there's your sucker. It's like, yeah, you have a sucker. It's like, but you like licked that one and took all the candy off it. Like it's not, it's not what I actually wanted. Like the good thing about the start menu is small mouse movements. Think about that small mouse movement. That's what's good about a UI is less motion fewer clicks. And Metro even with the smallest tile sizes here is going to be just just to go from one thing to something six away is going to be all the way across your screen. Who wants to do that? I mean computer users are notoriously lazy. Oh, 100%. If it takes, that's why we use the computer in both places. And you know what? I know the search is supposed to mitigate that somewhat, but I honestly, I don't, I don't feel it like typing to get to a program unless you already remember the name of the program. And I mean, and then with the with the new search like and the search that that sort by control panel versus how have they not patched that? So bad. Where you search for something like, you know, it's so infrequent that I've got something in more than one of those areas. And even when I do, I can just sort through it really easily. Device manager brings up nothing. You have to then go and oh no, I meant a setting called device manager as opposed to the game called device manager. You know what? Now someone should make a device manager simulator simulator. So doesn't actually do it. And it's like it's and like you have to manage like the little yellow exclamation marks that come up from installing new hardware and process and process and like like formatting your new hard drive. So it should have like device and disk manager. So I was like, wait, I know that's within disk manager, but sometimes the new disk doesn't even show up in device manager. So you have to refresh the list before you format it. Brilliant. Device manager. See, this is why this is why Linus. Maybe that's going to come into those the new line of educational games. How to use the device manager. So it's a game. You can reward people on points and like when you get 10 tasks that you've ended the process of, you get an achievement. And the final boss will be a device that Windows Update can't find the drivers for. So you have to search for the PCI vendor ID and the device ID and you have to go to the PCI database and find it and then track down a driver on some obscure like driver repository site that doesn't give you a virus. And then and yeah, exactly. And you have to like dodge the wrong download button and everything. You have to dodge the wrong download button, but they'll be moving because it's a boss fight. 100% And then there won't actually be a driver revision for your OS, but the OS that it works on runs on the same kernel. So you have to modify the text file to add the support for your OS. I was so mad. It took me probably two hours to get some Intel Nick driver working on Windows. I knew I knew this was going to have a root in something. It's like he's going some I was so mad. I was like, come on. It's based on Windows 7. There is no reason this shouldn't work. Oh, oh, well, we're Intel. It's a consumer Nick. Buh-buh-buh. I don't care. Windows home servers are consumer OS. It's called home server. Just because they specifically didn't write in the compatibility for that OS. I really wish that they just write out the ones that they know it doesn't work with as opposed to having to write in the ones that it does work with because that's what happens with older hardware is it doesn't get updated even if it does work like there's old Wi-Fi adapters that will still work with Windows 8 in like compatibility mode or whatever else. Yeah. And then there is that old hardware software where it isn't hard coded what it works on. It just still won't install. Doesn't matter unless you fake it and then it works. Anyway, that was my rant for this half hour segment of the live stream. Not promising there won't be another one. There probably will be. I don't even remember how those friendly old EA's. Oh, back to really three shots of them in one life. So speaking of speaking of horrible things the HTC One. No microphone the microphone. Yeah, I was like, where are you going with this? So are we saying it's horrible? No, no, Kia got a ban in the EU. I would think Nokia would be happy about anyone who's taking market share away from Samsung. It's like really like the lesser of two evils at this point you guys. But I think I think what they're going to turn this into is like, oh we got a ban for you, but we can lift it if you pay us royalties on that microphone you got. Right. So here backstory for those who don't know. Okay. So HTC had problems. I don't know. Seriously. Not bad. I was trying to go really fast. I didn't have like any time. I literally like half an hour. We had a bit of a condensed schedule today because we did go to NCIX today. We went early and then we had to get back early in time to do the live stream so that I can take care of the baby tonight. So it's going to be a long day anyway. So HTC won. Banned in Europe. Nokia laid the hammer down. Microphone technology. Go. So the microphone technology is Nokia's. So Nokia fought it in the courts. It's a great mic. Yeah. So Nokia fought in the courts. It's like this is actually kind of our stuff. You can't just put that in that without asking us at all. And HTC's be like it was our supplier. But that doesn't matter at all because you still used it in your phone. So it's kind of a big patent war just like everything else in technology at all ever at this point in time. I heard they're going after it in the US as well, which would basically give HTC nowhere to sell the one. No, except for China where it has an SD slot. Except in China where they revised the phone. Okay, so get this. So they lose some of the unibodiness of the construction of the phone. So this middle piece from the line here to the lineup here pops off. Dual SIM and a micro SD slot. Bam. I'm just like, okay, where's mine? I mean, I love the one. I actually do. I have an S4. I haven't been able to bring myself to actually start using the S4 yet. I've had it for like a week and a half because I really love the one. I have an Android. I switched blog update coming soon. But if it had a micro SD card, it would just be like, oh, like, oh, perfect. Because I don't need the removable battery. HTC has a history with Nokia. Okay. Or is it Nokia? Who's? It's Nokia, right? Yeah, it's Nokia. Yeah, yeah, okay. Apparently, this is like the 40th time that they've had this type of problem. Okay. It's somewhere in the article. So if you read the, we didn't post the article. We didn't post the article. I think it's on Daily Tech. So if you go to Daily Tech, I think the article is on there. If you read the article, I think it's like the 40th time they've had this style problem. Not with the one, but like in history. So these two companies have a history. So maybe that comes into the thing where you're like lesser of two easels with Samsung. Maybe it doesn't matter because they just hate each other. Because it's just like grudge match time. You got to wonder like how much of the margin they make on phones goes to litigating against each other. So much. Like how much cheaper would a phone be for a consumer if they didn't have to spend a butt ton of money paying licensing fees to each other where it's just like quite frankly, it's for lack of a better word, it's just a big circle jerk at a certain point where it's like, oh, I'll give you money and then you can give me that money and we'll just like, you know, we'll all pat each other on the back. All the lawyers in the world are like, yeah. Yeah, I'm sure the courts are just tired of it. Job preservation. They are. You heard about the thing in the States. What's that? Talk to them. Just because you told me something. I'm trying to get you there. My brain hurts. I had a migraine like not that long ago. What was I going to say? So I think it was in the States. I haven't read way too much about this. So someone's probably going to prove me wrong somewhere. But basically the courts are saying you guys need to stop collaborating. Stop helping each other. Stop cooperating. Close your freaking doors. Don't talk to each other anymore. Like make all your employees sign 80,000 page NDA agreements. Like stop talking to each other. Stop using each other's things because it's just this gigantic ridiculous thing of everyone suing each other. So what they're trying to say now is literally just no. You use your own stuff. Stop suing each other. Stop using each other's things. Oh Steve says that apparently the apparently the sales ban is for the mics for the phones that have already. So so the ones that they've already made are okay. They have to remanufacture new phones for that market with a different microphone. But that will cause delays on an already hot device that everyone and their dog and their dog's other pet are waiting for right now. So okay, maybe not quite as dire as we thought but it certainly won't be won't be won't be bad. Can I address that guys tweet? Yeah, sure. The one below it. The one below it. I hope. This will be short. I'm not going to go on this super long. So there was a leaked video. I have seen it. It's like 20 minutes long. He shows all the settings in the game except like thoroughly scrolls through them except for his video settings. What you need to learn when you're looking at stuff is you need to look at what's not shown. He does not show you the bottom of his video settings. You have to give context. How about the people who haven't watched it like me? What are you talking about? It doesn't Elder Scrolls Online. Yeah, what about it? I just said the leaked video. Yeah, what about it? It doesn't look very good. Look, see I didn't know that. Okay, okay. Sorry, the graphics don't look very good in the video. It you're so fired today. I'm not I don't feel very good. Leave me alone. Okay, so the graphics don't look very good in the video and a lot of people in the comments are like, oh my God, this looks terrible. But then if you look at released footage from tons of other reviewers that are all saying it looks great. So is he playing on a GT 630 or? Well, the thing is there's like it shows some setting is very high some other settings very high. But then if you notice his profiles are custom and he does not scroll down and the scroll bar is small. I'm thinking there is a ton of options and he just choked a whole bunch of them because this whole thing was like, oh, it's terrible and his name in the game was like the worst or something. The worst. So I think he's trying to troll what I would what I'm trying to say is wait. He should have gotten the beta key instead of that guy. That's what you're trying to say, right? No, no, no. Okay, there's B roll that's been released by other reviewers that was like taken with fraps but by Bethesda. So you have to assume and know at that point in time that they are running at the max possible settings. Yes, unlike multiple Titans very possibly. So you're looking at the best possible use case and you're looking at the worst possible use case that this guy could fend angle. So it looks okay by showing you the very very little tiny bit of the top of the video settings. Just wait until open beta is out. Wait till whatever you don't have to buy the game open beta is going to release at some point in time. They've already said that it's going to be open. You're going to be able to play it before you have to buy it. Okay, as long as you jump on for open beta. I mean, wait, it'll be so it all comes back to my strategy, which is to just not pay attention at all. I dropped 250 dollars on Star Citizen. I haven't looked at a single email. They've sent me because I'm just going to drop right in there and I'm going to just go for it. I have any time. Elder Scrolls online could look terrible. Personally, I don't care. I still play Morrowind graphics aren't the biggest problem for me. Morrowind is so brutal. Morrowind looks terrible. I still love it. It's Elder Scrolls games to me. It doesn't matter. It's the gameplay some games. He's going to talk about Elder Scrolls for another five minutes. Sorry, I tried to make this short games like Elder Scrolls. I like the gameplay like the storyline. I like being able to free roam all that kind of stuff certain games like Bioshock and Tomb Raider gain a huge aspect because they look so good. Right. It's the ambiance. Yeah, like the environment is huge different games like that more anyways, I'm going to try and not talk too much about this. Okay, actually talk about something else ever. Okay. So why don't we let's do a little bit of Twitter. Let's do a little bit of Twitter questions. Why did I get a broken PSU delivered to I don't know man bad luck because you ordered a power supply and you're unlucky. Yeah, and your name is full name and your at handle is line this question. What is the new 14 nanometer Intel plant and Intel going to start production? I have no idea what I can tell you guys though is that we just saw an architecture change. So there will be a process shrink at some point. What they normally do is they manufacture simple things like flash NAND or NAND flash. I guess it's the correct order of that. So they manufacture simple things like NAND flash before they start our chipsets for example, before they start manufacturing CPUs there. So probably not for a while, but I guess we'll see apparently it was only in the Netherlands not the whole EU the article I read said I read one that said Netherlands and I asked you and then the article I read said you. Okay. I don't know. Okay. Okay. Well, there you go. We don't mean to misinform y'all but apparently it happens from time to time especially prepping for last year was really you know, what we should really have is we should have a disclaimer at the bottom of the screen like a psychic. We actually have no idea what we're talking about information for entertainment purposes only like a psychic. Yeah, the disclaimer to end all disclaimers, you know, that's the thing that kills me is the people who believe in psychics even though by law they have to have that disclaimer. It's like it's like not believing that cigarettes will put tar in your lungs. It's like it's on the box. It's on the screen. They use it in production and now that we have now that we have HD TVs and we can actually read remember when all the little fine print. Yeah, it used to be actually not possible to read. That was the best and that was actually like a problem and blah blah blah blah. Yeah, now now we can read it. So now there's no excuse for you know, I like miss Clara or whatever her name is. Yeah, there's no there's a psychic like oh I don't miss miss Cleo or something like that. Whatever it doesn't matter. I have a 6870. Oh, this is a good question. My 6870 twin frozer has a non-referenced PCB. So there is no full cover block available. What do you think of VGA only water cooling if you can honestly normally what people end up doing in order to make it work is custom making like the MOSFET and RAM heat sinks. It's not even that hard by like cutting up old, you know, like CPU heat sinks or whatever you got to do. You can buy them. You can buy them but a lot of the time the ones you buy are not good enough. So be really careful. Make sure you have good contact. Make sure you clean the chips appropriately use a really good thermal adhesive. For example, the one that's in my wife's computer. I used not the ones that come on Swift X MC 14s, but I used the ones that I bought aftermarket 3M thermal adhesive. That's balling and that's the only reason they don't come off. Also, don't use little tiny heat sinks unless you're planning to actually aim a fan at the GPU as well. Use beefy heat sinks. Use awesome heat sinks like cut up old CPU heat sinks and make the fins this long. If it's on a VRM component, if you do it properly, it's fine. Otherwise, it's a bit of an issue. Yeah. So it's doable, but it's sketchy and be careful and be thorough. So I got ahead of myself and I kind of thought that his question was about something else. But speaking of non-reference cards, we did a really cool episode of NCIX Tech Tips today. I'm going to eat a pickle off screen because someone sent me a very kindly worded email last week. They asked me not to eat pickles on camera, but I'm hungry and I haven't eaten much today. So you're going to eat pickles off screen but off camera. Yeah. And you're probably going to try and interject in what I'm saying. No, no, I won't. Because you're going to cover it adequately this time or you're fired. My brain hurts. I just had a headache. So what we did was we took a 650 Ti Boost and pitted it against a 650 Ti Boost overclocked edition from MSI and pitted it against a reference card from EVGA 660. So two different GPUs. One is a step behind but overclocked from the factory and one is a step ahead but not overclocked from the factory. And unlike how we do it at Linus Tech Tips where we just overclock everything, this was NCIX Tech Tips. So neither were overclocked by us. There was one that was overclocked from the factory and the one that wasn't. And the one that wasn't was a 660 and the one that was was a 650 Ti Boost. We then played, what was it, Crysis 2, Far Cry 3, and Witcher 2. Actually, anyways, I'm not going to get into that because I'm not sure what I'm supposed to say about that. But yeah, we did those three games and then pitted them against each other and I don't even know what the result was which is one reason why you have to interject because remember you're the only one that has the numbers for this. Okay, well, I'm almost done with my pickle. You're still eating a pickle on stream then. Um, okay. You were chewing when you came on stream. I'm sorry. Alright, so results-wise, it was really interesting because I have a lot of people ask me, which, you know, 660 Ti should I get? And the answer is, unless you're buying the cheapest one, get a 670. Okay, which 650 Ti Boost should I get? The cheapest one or get a 660? Because even though the 650 Ti was overclocked from the factory, our 660, or did I say 660? Even though the- see, this is so confusing. Even though the 650 Ti Boost was overclocked from the factory, our 660 Vanilla Reference Bone Stock card outperformed it by 10% while being only 10 bucks more expensive. So that's a 5% difference in price for a 10% difference in performance. Now, here's something that you guys need to understand about overclocking headroom. Reference cards versus non-reference cards. Sometimes a reference card will have X amount of overclocking headroom over the stock reference clock. And then a non-reference card will have Y amount of overclocking headroom. But it's not like it over clocks three times as much. It doesn't work that way. It's a GPU limitation. So if it over clocks a little bit more, then it might get a slightly higher, you know, factory clock, but that ceiling is still pretty close. So that reference card hasn't been overclocked yet, meaning that, okay, so we got our 650 Ti, like, let's say the gap is like this. And our 650 Ti Boost makes it to here because it has a factory overclock, but there's still a 10% delta. Okay? That doesn't mean that both of these cards can still overclock this much, and the difference will always be like that. This one has had some of its overclocking headroom used up. So it might make it this much further, whereas this has used no overclocking headroom. It can go this much further, but maybe not quite this much further. So the difference in performance, I know this isn't a very good visual, but the point is that you have a certain amount of overclocking headroom. If they use it up at the factory, they used it up at the factory. It's not like you couldn't have taken a reference card and overclocked it to where that factory OC card is. Sometimes there is a binning process, something like an EVGA classified card, something like an ASUS Aries level card, something like an ROG card, Matrix card. They are binning those. They are making sure that those are the most overclockable GPUs. Our Matrix 7970 was a beast. It destroyed everything single GPU that we've seen to date, other than the Titan. Absolute beast. So unless, but these mildly overclocked cards, you know, like a Super Clock or a Super Clock Plus. I would be looking more into other things. If you're getting an aftermarket cooler instead of a reference cooler, like audio levels, you might get better temperatures if you specifically really, really want low temperatures. Looks, stuff like that. So if those are your factors, then OK, by all means, look at a lower tier card that has other features that you appreciate. Maybe you want different connectors on the back. This is something to consider. But if you're thinking gaming performance, buy a better card. That's it. Same thing for dual GPU. Buy a better card, overclock it yourself. Two 650 Ti boosts or a single 670, buy a 670. Single GPU card and buy the best GPU you can afford. So there, that was my lecture on that. There's weird kind of... There's exceptions. There's exceptions to the rule. Yes. Like a 660 Ti Hawk from Power Edition from MSI when that first released. Was a better deal than a 670. But then now things have changed. Now it's been nerfed a little bit. But like, yeah, there's slight exceptions to the rule, but that's usually just kind of how it goes. And there are other exceptions to the rule. So some such as 670 versus 680. A factory overclocked 670 can get pretty darn close to 680 performance. 680 does cost a lot more in a lot of cases. Especially once you get up to the higher tier cards, the rules start to change. So usually the best bang for the buck, well, the best extreme performance bang for the buck is the second one down. So as long as it's based on the same GPU as the high end one, a lot of the time you'll get very similar frequencies. But it'll have some CUDA cores, some SMX units, some stream processors, whatever they happen to be called. It'll have some disabled, so it'll be slightly lower performance. But it'll be darn close as long as you've got enough VRAM. Then it's often better to go with that option versus the higher end card. But I still wouldn't spend $400 on a 660 Ti if that'll get me a 670 no matter what. No matter how OC and Uber it is. The only thing I would worry about at that point is what I'm doing with my build. But if I'm buying a $400 card, I'm hoping I'm water cooling. Yeah, yeah. Okay, water cooling is another one. Because then that won't show the... if I don't like a reference cooler, that won't show the reference cooler. Certain reference coolers, like the Titan, I kind of want to leave that because that reference cooler is just so cool. Because it's so awesome. Like I don't want to change the reference cooler. I almost don't even want to water cool it. I just want to leave it how it is because it looks so good. We should almost maybe cool it with our... what's the deal with the after party this week? I don't know. What's the deal? Because we've got 25 minutes left. Oh, let's do our news items from the forum of the week and let's do our build logs of the week and all that kind of stuff then. Are we going to talk about the forum in general on the after party or... Yeah, let's move that to after party. So let's do our... so community news items. Guys, the Linus Tech Tips forum is awesome. Now? Now. Finally, it's actually awesome. Here, here, okay, you know what, let's do... okay. Are you ready for this? No, I'm not ready for this. Okay. I have a feeling... oh god. Everyone go to linustechtips.com right now. Let's see what happens. Let's see. See, Slick's doing it. Give it into peer pressure. Linustechtips.com. Go, go, go, go, go, go. I think it doesn't care. Will it handle it? So we are at a hosting service now. It is no longer being hosted at NCIX. So bandwidth is no longer as much of a concern. Now, when we first were hosting it at NCIX, bandwidth wasn't the issue. The issue was actually caused by vBulletin's inefficiencies compared to what we're using now, which is IPS. So then, by the time vBulletin started to get a little bit more efficient, NCIX moved a lot of their operation... Okay, well, it crashed, fine. So it looks like it can only handle so much. So... Oh, it's holding. Oh, it made it. Okay. NCIX moved part of their operation to the place where we were hosting it, and they had to throttle our internet connection. So we only had, what, 25 megabit up? So now we have about 800 megabit up, and instead of the homemade server that we were using before... Oh!...1400 users online. Thanks, guys. You guys are awesome. And instead of the... What was I even saying? Jeez! I can't believe that page even refreshed. Damn. Okay, I gotta do a shout-out. Thank you, mod team in general, for helping me over the three days that I didn't sleep. Thank you, Mr. Wizard, for just, like, hauling the forum into existence, because there was no other way that was happening. And thank you, Winspeed, for the current hosting situation. Yeah, one of our moderators is a boss. Without all of those things coming in, like, without all the mods coming in and helping me, without Mr. Wizard, like, just championing the entire thing, without IPS making that converter actually work. Like, there was so many groups that actually made this happen. We didn't want to promise anything, because we weren't sure if all these stars were going to align, especially with all the things that had gone wrong up till now. Yeah, and there was, like, there was a lot of stuff that actually made this possible. So thanks, everybody, that helped me over the last little while actually make this happen. So we're running on an Octocore server with 32 gigs of RAM, with 800 megabit up, and we're on a proper hosting service now. Guys, welcome to the forum. The forum is awesome. It's been super active. Like, I don't know how often you click the view new content button up at the top right. Holy crap. Guys, honestly, I've spent the last three days in the control panel. If you have a question, like, I've started posting. Honestly, I was at the point where I was frustrated with the old forum. I couldn't even use it. I was pretty much only operating through PMs. Yeah, I mean, at this point, I am finding this the most enjoyable forum I've ever been a member of, because I look at any question, and, like, even if I try to ninja and get in there and, like, be the first one to answer, I can't be. And people are friendly, which is one thing that I actually really like. You know what? I'm going to be making a point, and you should, too, and, guys, we all should, of keeping the community friendly. I don't want to see, like, let me Google that for you links. I don't want to see this should be obvious to you. I don't want to see any kind of put-downs, because I want Linus Tech Tips Forum to be the place where people can go and have a friendly discussion, even if they don't understand the topic. And, you know, obviously, obvious troll is obvious is going to happen from time to time. Let the moderation team deal with it. Flag it. They're good guys. Flag it's the problem. We now actually have a report system that works. Before, I know, it just popped up, and I, like, and I moderated something, and it just worked. Yeah, I was like, what? You've got to be kidding me. So before the report system from before, people that reported before, thank you. Yeah, that helps. But the only person doing it was me. So it was really, really hard to keep up with that many reports. And those of you who sent me PMs before, my inbox has been broken for weeks. I'm sorry. Like, I wanted to reply to you. He actually was not able to reply. I typed up replies, like, this long, and I'd click send, and it just... Oh, okay. Oh, that's good. They just disappear. So now the PM system's properly working. Everyone lost their PMs. I'm sorry. If I gave, if I gave Envision Power Services more time, they would have made it work. But we wanted the forum going. I did not give them enough time. They gave me, like, the files, and they were like, this might work for most things, probably maybe. And I was like, all right, we're doing it. Because it worked enough. Attachments kind of broke. PMs don't exist anymore. Signatures kind of broke a little bit. Like, there's a few things that broke. But for the most part, it's working fine. And we have almost 1,800 users online. There is no way the VBulls and forum would have handled it. No way. It couldn't. There's no way. It's not nearly efficient enough. And our old server couldn't. Our old CPU used to max out at 100% CPU load at times during the day. With, like, 300 people. With, like, 300 people on. Whereas now we have 1,700 people on. And I think you said we had 300 people on before, and it was, like, 3% CPU. Yeah, it just doesn't care. It's just so much more efficient. But, guys, yeah, welcome to the forum. Ask your questions. We're trying to create a friendly community. Ask some questions, answer some questions, have some fun. Join the community. It's all good. It's all good things. So, you know, thank you guys for hanging in there with us. Yeah. People are like, okay, I'm going to directly call out a random forum member. Ghost, hello. I don't even know if you watch the forums. He was a huge, massive poster. Like, one of our original, like, huge, I post a ton of people. And his post count started rotting for no reason. Like, VBullton's just a jerk and started taking post count away from him. No idea why. And, like, everything else broke. So he's like, yo, I'm just going to wait and I'll come back later. He's back, so that's awesome. He came back, like, the minute that we launched the new forum. It's like, because we felt bad. We're like, these people are trying to contribute and help us build a community here. And we appreciate it, and we're not giving them a good enough platform. Yeah. And, like, I used Ghost, but he wasn't the only case of that. Yeah. And, like, it's one of those things where it's like, the people in this room here lost sleep over that bad situation. A lot of sleep. So, you know, yeah. Thank you guys for hanging in there with us, and we're proud to deliver you a platform that actually works now. And also proud to see that we have 2,900 live viewers right now. This is one of our biggest live streams ever. So, yeah, thank you guys so much for coming in and hanging out with us. So let's do our community news items. We want the new section of Linus Tech Tips Forum to be, like, awesome. We want it to be up to date, and we want one of the ways that we can help you guys, you know, feel great about contributing to be, that we will call you out on the live stream and let you know that things are, that your posts are awesome and they are appreciated. So we have member Mono here who posted a PCPer article about AMD improving Crossfire performance with a prototype driver. Now, it just so happens that I was sitting right next to Ryan Schraut from PCPer as he was writing this article because I was at an ASUS conference, and he happened to be there as well. That was about Intel's upcoming Haswell CPUs and ASUS motherboards that will go with them and the ecosystem that goes around it. So I was looking over his shoulder. I was like, I'm looking at what you got here, Ryan. What you got here? What you got here, Ryan? And he's like, dude, I'm trying to write an article. I'm like, yeah, yeah, what you got? What you got? And it was actually awesome. This is the first time I've met Ryan in person. Super cool guy. We didn't get much of a chance to hang out because we weren't there very long. But anyway, he was showing me, obviously, I didn't have to rely on YouTube. Anyway, big thanks to Mono for contributing this topic. He was showing me, I didn't have to watch YouTube links. He had it all locally on his computer, which was great. Side by sides of how there was so much more visual tearing in the release driver and then the prototype driver. Guys, this prototype driver is probably six to ten weeks from an actual release. And it's not the beta drivers. It is not the currently downloadable beta drivers. No, it is a prototype. It's a completely different thing. It's not even based on the current 13.5. It's based on an older, like, 12 point something driver, if I recall correctly. I don't know that. Okay, it's based on an old-ass driver. Yeah. I wasn't saying you're wrong. I have no information. Yeah, no. So it's based on an old driver, but it is addressing the frame time differences, which can cause AMD Crossfire solutions to have high frame rates, but choppy actual perceived performance. That's what it's causing right now. And this prototype driver hasn't made it as good as Nvidia's solution yet, because Nvidia has hardware that takes care of this. But it's a software fix that makes it look way better. So it's basically taking games that are already optimized for the card on crappier, older drivers, not crappier, but, you know, older, less optimized drivers, throwing in this frame time smoothing algorithm, and bringing it up to 20% better than a much newer, much more optimized per-game driver. So the future is bright for Crossfire owners. However, his conclusion in the review, which is what I think he was writing when I was standing over him, was, okay, that still doesn't mean I can recommend the 7990, because it comes with a butt ton of games, and this is all good. Eight games or something? But the gaming experience today, what you get for $1,000 today, is not what this prototype driver is. That won't be available for a while. And when the driver comes with the fix, we'll look at it again. But it's not there yet. And I think that's a very fair and honest conclusion. So anyway, it was cool to sort of stand over him and have him explain in person. It's one thing to read a review from a highly technical author. It's another to sit next to them while they're writing the article and have them explain their thought process as every word goes onto the page. So it was very cool. Big shout out to Ryan at PCPer on Twitter. So guys, go say hi to Ryan, because apparently I can just say go to a website and you guys will do it. You guys are awesome. So go say hi to Ryan. Let's flood his Twitter right now. At PCPer. Thanks, Ryan, for hanging out with Linus. Linus thinks you're cool. Cool. Leave off the L. Yeah, leave off the L. Linus thinks you're cool. You can put an apostrophe, though. Yeah. Perfect. All right. So one of the other community news items was actually something we covered already. But I want to give credit where credit is due to our forum contributors. Joe Z is the one who posted this article with this picture showing an HTC One with the removable back that shows micro SD expansion and dual SIM expansion. So that is the Chinese model, and I want one. I didn't realize how big the removable back was. I wonder if this means that super technical people, maybe with special screwdrivers or something... It's a different phone. Different internals....are going to be able to get inside and change the battery. No, no, because it's a unibody back on the North American model. And the battery is still non-removable. And based on the tooling process of this phone, the sandwich construction, there's no way they're getting in there. Fully, okay. Because people like iFixit or whatever they're called, they usually find ways, even when people say it's not removable. Yeah, they can find ways. I really doubt it. It's built so solidly. Yeah, no, I'm not... You might be able to take it apart, but I can't imagine you ever be able to put it back together with the same fit and finish that it has. And that's a thing. Oh, of course. Yeah. Okay, and then our next one is from... Da-da-da-da-da-da. Oh, I'm really excited about this. So you guys know, okay, while I might not be... Oh, Josie again, you're on a roll. ASUS introduces external DAC with 120 decibel sound-to-noise ratio, 600 ohm headphone amp, and swappable op amps. The Essence STU. No, nothing about price. Absolutely nothing about price, which is like... Okay, thanks, ASUS. Because this doesn't tell me how it compares to something like an Essence One or an Essence One Muse Edition. No idea. Because the Essence One is an external DAC with a headphone amp that's capable of driving 600 ohm headphones. A Muse Edition is like a slight improvement on that. This looks like it might be slightly lower end than Essence One. Essence One looks like it had more stuff. Yeah. Like slightly more features. Here, if we just kind of control plus this so you guys can check it out as well. It looks classier in my opinion. Very classy looking. The Essence One has kind of like a weird industrial design that's kind of unusual. This looks like a piece of audio equipment, which is very cool. So, and the thing that... Okay, the thing that... The two things that confuse me about this are that they're calling it audiophile grade, which audiophiles are the only ones who are allowed to call something audiophile grade a lot of the time. Yeah. That's a thing. Well, they called the last one audiophile grade as well. They did. But it also says, so sort of bringing something like the quality of an Essence ST or STX to an external unit, but offers even more premium audio quality plus easy controls and connectivity to notebooks. So what is it? Is it something like an ST, STX, Zents class card in an external box, which has advantages, so reduced interference, as well as the clean signal that is USB, as well as being able to plug it into a notebook? Or is it an even higher end solution? I don't quite know, but I'm really excited to try it out. Yeah, that should be really cool. I hope we get one. I hope we get one. If anyone from ASUS is watching. Speaking of if anyone from BlackBerry is watching, which I said before, we have a contact at BlackBerry now. Zed 10, coming. Q10, coming later. So I am going to be doing a BlackBerry iSwitched. Hopefully, like, people just keep on releasing random phones. Yeah. So you just never get to stop doing iSwitched. They tried to deliver it today. Oh, really? But no one was here. So it'll come on Monday. Zed 10's coming. So once I finish Android, and then once I finish... I'm like, how am I going to do all this? Maybe we should have you do the BlackBerry iSwitched. I'd actually be okay with that. You're a hardcore Android guy. This would be interesting. Guys, hit at SlickPC on Twitter, and let him know what you think. At SlickPC on Twitter, right there. Actually, that's his penis, but... Sort of like the overlay that's covering that. Hit at SlickPC on Twitter, and let him know if you think he should be the one to host the BlackBerry iSwitched. So... Of course, now I'm going to have to do it. But I'm kind of interested in BlackBerry. They might not want you to, so... Which one is the one that has the keyboard on it? That's the Q10. So Q10's coming probably a few weeks later or something? I would rather try that one. You should try both. Sure. So it should be... You have to have the touchscreen BlackBerry X experience and the buttoned BlackBerry X experience. I'll do like 15-15 or something. Something like that would make a ton of sense. And would really educate people not only about the BBX experience, but also which of these two flagship grade phones is actually better for me. Right. So, yeah. Yeah, that'll be interesting. So he's an S3 user. So it'll be like... What will it be like to go from this mature platform, this mature handset... I don't know where to put my phone....to this new platform? And I've been... Like, I've had my S3 for a while now, and I'm very comfortable with my current configuration. Let me tell you. Going from comfort zone to new phone platform... Which is why... Like, I'm excited to try new things, but at the same time I'm like, uh... Oh, all the things that just work. I know my S3. I like really know my S3. All right. So we've got a couple more things. Guys, we want you to post your build logs in the Linus Tech Tips forum, because build logs are fun for people to look at. They are fun for... What? Seriously? This is the case that he used. Oh, this is the case. Oh, okay. So we got a big shout out for Tasty PC TV, Tasty PC TV on YouTube. That's the girl with the duck face that does videos on the YouTube. And I think she... I think her build was black and red, and his build is black and red, too. Okay, so he posted her video. Yeah, I don't... I forget what I was saying. Yeah, we want you guys to post your builds, because people love seeing your builds. People love commenting on builds. I think people love having others comment on their builds. So here we've got quite the GPU lineup here. That looks like a couple of 580s or 680s. He didn't end up using all those. Didn't end up using all those. I didn't read way too into it, because I did not have time. I'm sorry. This week's livestream was crazy, because we had to try and figure everything out. But he gets down into it. Pictures start coming pretty quick. All right. See, I like this. I've done this before. Alternating colors. Mixing and matching the RAM. See how the RAM sticks match the DIMM slot? Nice little touches like that. I like it. Yeah, I totally like that. 100% approve of this. The only time I usually go against that is with super clean, finished RAM. Like original Dominators, and Mushkin Silver Lines. The old ones. Remember when it just said Mushkin on it? Like a full set of that looked so good. That's true. So good. But remember that one with the two Kingston sticks and the two Anion sticks where they had a similar style of spreader, but they were alternate colors, blue and black? Oh, that looks good. See, like that looks really cool. Yeah, for sure. All right. Oh, yeah. Taking apart the graphics card. That must be a Titan. GK110. Yeah. DIMM RAM. DAT RAM. So he works at a computer shop. Okay. I don't know if this was for a customer or not. I just remember he works at a computer shop. He got Corsair Link to work, so... Yeah, so kudos. Yeah. DAT back-mounted SSD. Love that. Yeah, very cool. Very, just very clean. Yeah. AX860, looks like that was colored. Oh, no, unless it's an 860i, in which case it should be red. Yeah. Can't tell. Can't tell from here. Okay. Very nice. It's got red people going directly into it for cooling. Is very possibly the cable... Wait, is that it? STX? Doesn't he need power going to that? Not sure. Yeah, it might come later. He hasn't got everything wired up yet. Right, okay. Very nice sleeved cables. Very nice. See the way he's used angled fittings. Angular fittings here, too. Yeah. Just so it gets down under those cables, like, looks very good. Yeah, makes it look much more clean. I'm too cheap to buy angled fittings personally, but... He definitely planned it out, which is nice. Yeah. Planning makes the build look so much stronger. Yeah. Not the best photography, but it's a nice thing. Yeah. It's a nice thing. It's a nice thing. It makes the build look so much stronger. Yeah. Not the best photography skills I've ever seen, but I don't think we should penalize people based on that. But it could also be like a phone. Yeah, it probably is. Yeah. Based on how much noise there is in the images. Yeah, so don't worry about it. Alpha Cool's uber thick radiator. Look at that thing. That's so... See, that's how big a G1 quarter fitting is there, guys. Love it. Absolutely love it. So here's what the machine looks like... Oh, that looks really good....in its native environment. Very, very nice. Love that microphone setup. That is what... This is the kind of thing that Diesel was using. Where he had like... Diesel had like a pro-grade studio recording microphone that he was using for voice chatting games. It's like screw seeing my third monitor. I don't even care. Yeah. I'm too good for that. Like too late. That's awesome. So yeah, featured build this week. I didn't even catch the name. I'm sorry. Kenny6. Great job. You got featured. Project Banana Phones. Project Banana Phones. All right, I'm going to let you walk through this one. I'm going to have the last piece of my pickle. Go down to... Oh, I have to use this little tiny keyboard. I'm eating my pickle. I'm dizzy. Oh, sorry guys. This might actually take a little bit. Page up, page down. Function, page. Where is it? There we go. That's not working. That's still not working. That's not working. Okay, so he's using R4. I'm going to skip through these pretty quick because it's fairly basic stuff until we kind of get to the second page. He's just showing... Whoa. He strips it and then he paints the back. So it's one page. So it's one page. So it's one page. So it's one page. So it's one page. So it's one page. So it's one page. He strips it and then he paints the back so it's white because it's in R4. Gorgeous. So he's matching the other slots. Nice touch. That's really cool. Yep. Those little touches make all the difference. Very, very cool. And like he had to take the shroud off Everything broke. So that he could get to it properly, right? So it makes sense. So that is great and looks really cool because there's like... You don't see that. What's going on here? I wanted to do it but then I was just lazy and busy. On his back plate. On his back plate. On his back plate. On his back plate. On his back plate. On his back plate. On his back plate. On his back plate. On his back plate. So here's like an in progress shot. The Gapscar is not in there yet. A lot of stuff isn't in there yet. An AMD build. Look at that. Yeah. That's another reason why I wanted to bring it on. I don't think we've had one yet. I don't think we've had one yet. So that's kind of cool to see. It's funny because I got trashed so hard for saying something like the majority of enthusiast gaming builds are Intel. And it's just like, guys, I don't make the rules. People are like, oh, this is Intel fanboy. He said the majority. It's like, no, it's just... The numbers are just kind of there. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. What you want from us. These are people quoting his post. So I got a little bit confused by this, but it's people quoting his post. So you see the same picture like a billion times. I love that. Backmounted SSD. Mind you, the way they do that in the R4 is not my favorite. You have to take the motherboard off. To be able to take it off or put it on. Yeah. Which is kind of weird because you have to screw in from the motherboard side. He's gesturing to the camera. I talk with my hands. Leave me alone. So to make his cables look nice, he used extensions, which is a really good way to go, save money and time because it looks just as good on this angle, except you can see them coming from the power supply. But like where you're mainly looking, it looks just as good from this angle. So this is a slightly in progress shot. You can kind of see the PCI... Ah, crap. Like the back there where he painted it, where it's white, looks great, matches everything else. There's a better shot of that. You can see it with the mouse as opposed to with your hand. I know, that's why I said, oh crap. I'm really not good at using this little tiny keyboard. There you go. White. White with the mouse, not your hand. Where is it? White. Okay, I'm just going to take over. Okay, why don't you talk, but I'll just direct it. Okay, so guys, right there, that's the white... They've definitely seen that. Yeah, okay. You can definitely go down now. Okay. There's a... We've kind of seen that shot already. Yeah. Just kind of some items and stuff. Shots of the hardware. Yeah, he's got his CPU cooler on there. Go down though. Page two. You have to go page two. Stop CPU cooler? Just go to page two. Who even posted a picture with a stock CPU cooler? Okay. He's fired. Oh, there we go. Water block. That's more like it. I told you. Okay. Very nice. So he starts his water cooling installation. So really long runs. One thing I was interested in is if he could flip the radiator over. I know looking at clearance, maybe because of the ports, that it might not fit, but there might be some type of custom modding. Maybe point with the mouse. Yeah. Maybe put the radiator here. Maybe some type of custom modding that he could do to take that bracket off right there. And then he might actually be able to fit the radiator the other way around. The advantage of turning the radiator the other way is also that it enables it to bleed the air bubbles out much more easily because they'll naturally go to the top where the holes will be. Yeah. And then like, so way shorter runs, so it'll look cleaner. And then natural bleeding like he just said. So that's actually, that would be nice. I'm thinking what he did was he put it the other way and it didn't fit. But if he could find some way to take, because that's for hard drive cages. Right. If he could find some way to take that off. Yep. Without like damaging everything. Is it possible that he could add a GPU block in the future? Then this run would make more sense. So then that's even, yep, that's completely true. There we go. Still very clean looking. It looks nice. It's just the runs could be shorter, which is, I don't know. It's not, it's not the biggest deal, but it looks really, yeah, it looks really good. Very attainable build. And so that is, that is a build from Antarctic cache. That is the, that is the strangest, that is the strangest name that I think that I've seen on the forum. Are you sure that was the poster? Check the, cause those are quotes that you're reading. Yep. Antarctic cache. Okay, cool. So there you go. That looks so good. Yeah, I like it. With the colored back on the graphics card. All right. So let's go back to our, back to our regular view of the live stream. And I think that pretty much, oh, it's, it's five 30. Can you, it's like, look, it's like there's light outside and we're done the live stream. Isn't this weird? Yeah, well done. After party is coming later. So I had quite a few people complain that they don't want after party to not be uploaded to YouTube. So I'm thinking after party goes on YouTube with a link in the description of the regular live stream and it'll be an unlisted video, but you can click the link in the description. You can watch after party should you so desire. So that is it for the Linus tech tips live stream for this week. We'll see you guys next week and we'll be back in just a moment with some after party action where it's less structured. I can't imagine it being less structured than what we just did. Same time next week, 4pm. Yeah. This time guys, put it in your calendar. I can't believe how many people ask me every week when the live stream is. It could be first time viewers. You don't know. No, sometimes it's the same guys. I've like seen this happen. And you know what's funny is I've never changed the time once now. This is it. This is the first time. Since I started it. It's been 9pm Friday night. Now we're moving to 4pm Friday afternoon and I think this is going to work. Yeah. I think this is going to work. Look how many people tuned in today. It's a way better time slot. It's a way better time slot. It's unfortunate for the people who can't watch now, but overall it's a way better time slot. We'll see you guys next week. Thanks for tuning in.