 Have you ever really noticed how sometimes a new product isn't really all that new? This kind of thing has happened before and the funny thing is it's not like people don't notice. Just look at AMD with their pitcairn family of GPUs back in 2012 through 2015. That was three whole generations of basically the same card under different names. And it's not just AMD that pulls this rebranding and rebadging BS. All the big players do it. Nvidia, Intel, you name it. So why does it keep happening? And why is AMD releasing a GPU for the third time again? I think we have got the answer. Origin PC builds custom desktops and high-performance laptops with free lifetime 24x7 tech support and they only use high-end components like Samsung's 970 EVO Pro M.2 SSD. Visit Origin PC today at the link below for a special promo. Okay, so it's not like every product you buy is a straight re-release. Sometimes we get a high-end product in one generation re-badged as a mid-tier one in the next. Like the GeForce GTX 680 being rebranded as the GTX 770 with a mild clock speed bump. And we also usually see a token price reduction to go along with that. Honestly, no problem with that. It's a good way to get rid of old stock and it's good value for the consumer. Win-win. On the other hand, when a product gets positioned the same way that it was during the previous generation, a lot of negative press almost always comes along with it. One need only look at last week's Core i9-9980XE, which Intel billed as two generations higher than the 7980XE that it replaced, even though all they did was tune their existing chip. So then, if that's the case, why does anybody do this? I mean, it's not free to launch a product. It's actually more expensive than you'd probably think. You have to pay for advertising with partner websites. You've got to seed units to OEMs for validation. You've got to jump through all the regulatory hoops involved in getting FCC certification and the like. You've got to get new UPC and EAN codes. And if you've pushed clock speeds higher, you might even need to design and manufacture a new cooler. Furthermore, if you set aside, I don't know, let's be conservative and say, 50 cards to go out to just the popular reviewers at a cost of $200 a pop, that works out to $10,000 all on its own. But believe it or not, that last point is actually where the advantages of rebranding shine through. Now, very few media outlets re-review the same product that they already reviewed. So new software driver features and performance improvements can end up buried under the wave of initial launch reviews. So by making that product new again, well, you create an incentive to cover it again. I mean, we're not the only ones who are eager to cover new releases because our followers want to know about them. This drives traffic for the media outlets channel or site and for that new product. So a hot product release can easily generate millions of views, which if we compare to advertising with a more traditional campaign lasting for a review cycle, yield to savings of several times the cost. So you could have millions of engaged eyeballs that are hyper interested in the product at half the cost of just a million, it's an ad eyeballs. Seems like a no-brainer. Of course, developing a derivative product of something that you already know works is appealing to the bean counters and the investors as well because it involves less risk. Well, the R&D budget is approximately 3 billion and this is the first one. So if anyone would like to buy this, it's 3 billion dollars. I'm pretty sure that that's no lie. There's a lot of R&D tooling and financial dice rolling that makes any brand new product a really risky and therefore potentially costly endeavor. I mean, just ask Intel how their 10 nanometer processors are coming along. You might not even get a product out of it. Now as consumers, we've kind of just taken for granted that new processes just keep happening because even without Moore's law, Apple and Qualcomm have continued to improve generationally and then more to the point, tweaking an existing design can result in not only better clock speeds but also better yields which further lowers cost as long as the performance is still good enough. So that's another reason that it might be ideal to release something even when it wouldn't be financially viable to R&D and all new chip or if whatever's in the pipeline is way behind schedule. So the RX 590 seems to fit that description since this is our third time seeing this GPU and the clocks are a little bit higher than before. So this kind of generational tweaking actually worked out great with AMD's second generation Ryzen CPUs but while Ryzen's refresh had AMD coming into it from a position of relative strength, Polaris refresh again appears to be simply AMD's hand being forced because they know that Nvidia's incoming mid-range GPU demands some kind of answer. On the subject of Nvidia, more reasons for this whole behavior. Nvidia has a method of dominating news cycles in a way that AMD mercifully generally doesn't. So do you remember how it took a while after the launch of their RTX cards for anyone to have NVLink SLI numbers? I've actually had experience with Nvidia going out of their way to make it difficult for reviewers to get multiple cards in time for launch SLI coverage. That way they get a news cycle for the announcement, a news cycle for the unveil, a news cycle for the pre-order, a news cycle for their ridiculous unboxing embargo, another for the performance review, another for SLI, and then finally another one when RTX games actually finally show up. So here's the thing, why are we so mad about this? Well, there's the element of time wasting. I mean, we all, I mean the press in general, reviewed the 7980XE and then we did it again when they called it something new. This makes our lives more boring. We'd rather cover stuff that's actually new, but the more offensive thing about this practice of not naming products properly is that it confuses the customer and it gets worse. We haven't even really touched on the practice of introducing cut down products that reuse an existing product's name. Both Nvidia and AMD have engaged in this utterly deplorable practice in the last couple of product generations with the GTX 1060 3G, which does not have the same grade of GPU as the 6G variant, but just with half the RAM, and AMD's more recent RX 580 2048SP, which isn't an RX 580. It's more like a clock-boosted RX 570. So you might think, well, just don't sweat it Linus, recycle your old numbers and call it a day. But the issue is that we can't do that because A, it would be wrong, and B, it's not always that simple. So on our reviewer's guide for the RX 590, for example, it said in big bold letters AMD moved to 12 nanometer FinFET, which sounds lower than 14 nanometer. Efficiency improvements maybe? No. So just like Intel refusing to provide a proper spec sheet that clarifies that their top tier chip throttles below its base clock in AVX 512 workloads, in fact, to the same level as the predecessor, AMD has put it on reviewers to dig up that the 12 nanometer they're boasting about is just Global Foundry's variation of Samsung's 14 nanometer. There's no transistor shrink, so it's just the same die area for the same compute cores, but with higher clock stability. And that would be fine if they weren't trying to pass it off as a new graphics card. It suggested retail price of 280 bucks is pretty far out there, when 8 gig RX 580s can be seen for 60 to 80 dollars less. Many because they're OC models with core clocks within 150 megahertz or so. So I guess here's what we're saying, some advice, free of charge. If you got nothing and all you want is some fresh coverage of your product, be honest. Call it an RX 580 plus, or RX 480 plus plus, since we're on the subject, and spend that launch budget on something else. Like I get the appeal of using a relaunch to reset your MSRP that was eroded by gradually lower sales and promotions, but I would make the argument that the only people that you're fooling with this new product at a higher price are really being taken advantage of. Now one thing AMD is doing right here is expanding the value proposition with a game bundle for buying an RX 590. But I'm not sure if Resident Evil 2 HD, The Division 2, and Devil May Cry 5 is exactly a blockbuster lineup. So this is the bottom line. After the Core i9-9980XE fiasco, we just want to ask that manufacturers be more transparent about how they position and especially how they price these derivative products. Not only can proper positioning lead to better sales and sentiment, it also leads to a happier PC gaming community. Oh, and by the way, if anyone wanted to know how the RX 590 performs, it's fine. It's a bit faster than the RX 580, which is about what you'd expect. Zoom is an online meeting and collaboration tool that has a ton of cool features. It supports up to a thousand participants. It can display 49 videos on a screen. It supports both HD video and audio so you can see and hear clearly. And it's got some other cool stuff as well. It allows you to record your meetings locally or to the cloud with searchable transcripts. It's got built-in collaboration tools. It lets you meet securely with end-to-end encryption. And it works on your desktop, your laptop, your tablet, and even your mobile phone. You can try it out today with a free account for unlimited one-on-one meetings or pick up their pro account to get unlimited meeting durations and more. We're gonna have a link to Zoom in the video description. Go check them out. So thanks for watching, guys. Dislike if the video sucked, but if it was awesome, hit that like button, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description. Again, be clear, RX 590, not a bad card. Just not new. Also linked in the description is our merch store, which has cool shirts. Nope, no, I'm not wearing the LTT shirt. Well, it has cool shirts. And our community forum, which you should totally join.