Gadgetory

this took us over a year to finally get made to our high quality standards and we learned a lot along the way that we can share with you all in this video the gamers Nexus at medium mod matte took a year of requests from viewers like you feedback and experience for the large mod mats to finally make this is a 32 inch by 16 inch anti-static PC building surface meant to protect your desk and components while building systems deleting CPUs of modern GPUs or working with liquid cooling components the GPO teardown diagram shows common placement of MOSFETs inductors capacitors BIOS chips shunt resistors and more offering some guidance when putting a block on a card for example or shorting the shunt resistors which can be aided further by checking our PCIe wiring diagram to check shunt legs against the 12-volt pins on PCIe connectors we also added mounting hole spacing for common GPUs to help with determining the right screw placement on new cooling blocks something we'll talk about more later as it changed mid development with thanks to torrents at launch a lot of you have asked for a smaller version of the large mod mat that we've been signed for over a year now so we finally got this medium variant made and on the store at store dawkins nexus dotnet and this is what we're gonna talk about today because it's a big experience for us and we've learned a lot along the way of making this product to celebrate the launch of the mod mat we have 25 out of the signed ones that are also numbered so you might get lucky if you buy one of the sign mats and get one that's numbered 1 through 25 we're only doing this for the launch just to kind of celebrate it and they are mixed in there randomly with that first batch so if you buy during the first batch then you may get one of those as for what the mod mat is just like the large mod mat it's a high quality material that's made in a factory that makes stuff for cleanroom so these are serious factories and it's a real proper anti-static material comes with the common ground point the wrist strap all of that stuff and it does connect directly to ground to make sure it gets rid of any charge and then finally there's also a ruler on there for quick measurements if you need a quick reference ruler for doing any of your GPU mods or maybe quick cuts on liquid cooling and tubing so this project started in about January January 23rd of 2018 so over and people of course wanted a smaller version of the mod mat which has been so popular that we still can't keep it in stock even today but we're trying it's it's been wanted for a while now and what this project the medium one started with we didn't know it would take this tremendously long to really get it the way we wanted it but we're very happy with how it turned out it started with an email I just sent to Andrew who did the the design of this as a reminder of what we wanted so we determined we wanted a GPO teardown themes mat which you can see in the mat itself we've got the video card outline it has a component names if you're taking a part of card the first time you might not know what some of those things are so they're labeled and actually this has been in development for so long that we made the video card that's on the mat and the labeling and everything before we made that poster which is been on sale for several months now so the design on that poster if you have one the same video card Anatomy poster we sell in the store you've basically had a preview of the medium mod mat without even knowing it so there's your easter egg so you have that ended up on the poster it was designed for the mod mat and then we also did the dual silhouette then I talked about we've got TV Hall spacing and then at the top corner over here we have the types of screws that are used in the most common types of video cards so you can see the name of the screw and the the type of the bit you're going to need to remove it which is just kind of helpful if again maybe you're not as as used to working with some of the cards or even if you are it just helps to kind of know what things are called so you can buy the correct ones or pre-prepare for the card coming in so anyway that email there were some changes along the way of course but that was January 23rd of 2018 the initial design was sent to our distributor and about mid April of 2018 and then from there we just started iterating on it really quickly so lots of design small changes just to kind of make sure it came out exactly how we wanted it in terms of things like legibility or vibrance and how bright the colors are the large mats have been in use in this office on basically every workbench and work service since we moved in and then use daily and we haven't replaced any of them so durability wise we're pretty happy with it and that was applied here now other things I guess on sort of the to give you some insight as to what manufacturing sort of throws at people this has once again taught us a lot about what the the component manufacturers go through in the space so just like we talked about last time with the large mats one of the biggest benefits for us other than product we're obviously extremely proud of is that we've learned what the manufacturers have to go through when they're getting stuff made and so you start to learn how compromise works and how the timelines work and just sampling we have a pile of samples like these are some of them and we have a whole bunch of others so these are all samples pre-production samples that we got made each one of these plus baby the four others that we have behind the camera represents about a month in time and it's just from changes being made has to be shift obviously back and forth we have to communicate with the factory to get new tooling done things like that for cutting the the mat size just perfectly and over time obviously it adds up that's where we end up with a year of distance from starting the project and having to change things out like where it used to say Polaris and now says Torian because Torian didn't exist when we started designing this mat so its name probably wasn't even final at the time so just to show you what we are where we're coming from this is the final design that you can buy on the store again on store documents excess net and it does come with the common ground point that goes right here and it also comes with a wrist strap as well that's all in the store show you where we came from though you know manufacturers typically don't show you their prototypes because they really only want you to see the final thing but we're fine with showing what we've learned from and part of this so just again we've got Polaris this is one of the first set this might be the first sample so Polaris is right there and that was removed just because it sort of I mean we started when the rx 580 was really big and another RX 5 90s out of course but Pascal their Vega and now we've got Torian on the final version with updated design so like Andrew went through and did this stuff it's pretty cool actually so in the original we just had a block diagram pretty similar to what you would see on line for a GPU and we changed it to have the outlines of the dye and the memory modules and so the end result is you have Vega here this is an actual Vega dye for 64 or 56 and it more or less lines up perfectly and you can see the sort of the component outline which is just sort of neat and then torian's over here at Pascal's over here and those are just big die GPUs they don't have HBM on them so saturation we worked really hard on so we really got this saturation up and were able to keep the durability by working with the factory just back and forth over several samples took a lot of time to get it done but it was really important to us to have a good saturation a good durability on the mat and it took some time but we were able to work with them on the printing process to get it done and then also small stuff like well this is a user request even so you see the snap location was on the top right up here near the grid originally and now we've got it kind of flipped here now we've moved it so it is in the bottom left and the reasoning for this after kind of listening to some of you viewers in our audience and we appreciate your feedback the reasoning for this is I mean if you're over here with all your screws on the silhouette and you've got the snap up here then the wires going to drag across the silhouette and sort of scramble the screws so it made a lot of sense and that was good feedback from our audience and we did incorporate that that's the design then that's the new media mod mat this is on the store already as of this video the large Maps still being sold it's still extremely popular we're still struggling to keep it in stock you have to remember a couple of things we've learned here as we've gone through this process is of course one is time and money are the biggest resources in any kind of development and that's why we as a smaller outfit you can't make like millions of products and just ship them out all the time so we really appreciate your support you're helping a small company do its thing it allows us as I've said before it remain independent from as many advertisers as we can and push our own store stuff instead so it allows us to just can you say and whatever I want to say on camera about companies like I don't know Walmart so just a recent example there that's still fresh in our minds but yeah other issues that have come up you're always dealing with timelines so working with the other side of the world means that sort of dealing with timezone changes and and then of working with like Lunar New Year for example can sort of interrupt the production process and and it's often a bigger impact than you might think this affects the entire industry and working on the mat taught us that when Andy launched for example Radeon seven in the middle of lunar new actually at just the beginning of it it can impact things like how quickly can you get more products made to hit the shelves because it's a you know it's a vacation time and so that's something we've sort of learned more directly through working on products we've learned about also the the sampling timelines each one of these again like a month and time to get it made and to come back here and then provide feedback and then get another one made and because we started this in January of 2018 we also towards the end of the year started encountering concerns with tariffs does the tariff increase that might or might not happen again from the perspective of 2018 does that affect us and it did because shipping costs went up a lot because people were panicking trying to get everything out of the port before any change happened to the tariffs so there was a lot of stuff we encountered it's been a great learning experience and again the end result is a product that we're very proud of so if you want to pick it up it's on store dock gamers Nexus dotnet it comes with the common ground point the wrist strap in the manual just like the large one does it's just that it's a bit smaller now so if four feet by two feet and freedom units was too large for you there's now a 32 inch by 16 inch in freedom units mat for you and I'll put the metric on the store so because I can't do the conversion in my head check that out thank you for watching thank you again for supporting us and those of you who bought the first round of or the large match and provided thoughts on like where the the snap placement should go that's of course extremely helpful feedback we appreciate it we did take it to heart and act on it for future products so much appreciated there thanks for watching subscribe for more I'll see you all next time