Gadgetory

this is our first ever video format GN roadmap update and what we're talking about today is updates to our testing methodology plus target launch dates for those so we have some internal guidance on when we're planning to use new testing methods for CPUs for GPUs things like that we go in through some of that today along with what those tests are and when you can expect to see them also talking about some updates to case test methodology updates to live streams overclocking streams special guests quality checks for GN all kinds of stuff so this is this is very much a GN fan video if you like our content you'll want to see this one to get an update on what's coming up before that this video is brought to you by be quiet and it's straight power 11 series power supplies the straight power 11 PSU is shipped from 450 Watts up to a thousand watts accommodating most of the gaming PC build requirements you'd encounter and focuses on delivering a higher quality power supply that doesn't sacrifice on efficiency or stability noise is also a heavy point for the straight power 11 using a 135 millimeters silent wins three fan that can spin as low as 200 rpm for quieter low load operation learn more at the link in the description below I'm gonna steal a line from Jay here and say this is basically going to be a talking head video so if you want to have away and listened go for it so growing a business is hard and GM's done very well I've been running it since roughly 2007-2008 I so I think officially we started 2007 but didn't really actually get doing stuff until 2008 website format entirely for a long time didn't get serious in YouTube until many years after that so as we have grown we've obviously had to shift focus constantly and this means that lose we've lost track of a lot of timelines on things we've wanted to deliver all kinds of content and have fallen behind on some of it in in exchange though you've gotten a video every single day for the most part we've missed a couple every now and then but mostly video every day we still publish articles so we're obviously net positive here but I would very much like to regain control of our schedule and so for the past couple of probably past two months now I've had an internal roadmap we haven't talked publicly about it and we stuck to it pretty damn well and before I woke I posted a public when I wanted to make sure we had the ability to stick to it so I'm very confident in the dates we have here today and just a couple of examples of things that we had fallen behind on that we've gotten back up to speed with the r9 290x revisit that we did I don't know maybe a month or two ago now was something that I had originally promised maybe like one to two years before that and it just it just disappeared just fell through we had so many other things you have to realize that like behind the camera there's a shelf called things that need to be reviewed and we have to add another shelf and we're just it's there's there's a lot of obligations so anyway we eventually got back to the 290x having the office has really enabled us to start kind of steam rolling through some of the content that we've wanted to do for ages I'm still behind on a couple of other deliverables that I promised and some of them we finally have on the roadmap so thank you for your patience but let's go through a couple of these things today I feel like going forward my my hope is that now that we've kind of gotten comfortable in the space we've added to the team so Josh one of our team members is relatively new maybe I don't know six months now or something like that and he's helped a ton with video editing production so we're really starting to to catch up here number one thing that's important you're probably going to see in the next couple of days so CPU workstation bench overhaul we've never really done workstation testing we've done a couple of premiere tasks we always do blender but we haven't explored it too much and we're still not going crazy with it but we have over the past couple of months patrick has been silently working on building an entirely new test methodology test suite for us for CPUs and I worked with him on this but he's done all the implementation work and we validated the numbers things like that so it took us a few months to kind of push through and figure out what tests we want going forward what we're getting rid of and I'm feeling pretty good about it now so the workstation bench over morick station bench coming into existence I should say is for CPUs only part of our CP reviews and this is built on top of a lot of requests from you all so thank you for sending those in we do listen sometimes it takes us six months it might take us a year to add your request and that's because the way we do our content and this isn't the only way you can do content of course there are lots of channels to do it differently but the way we do ours is we build a lot of data we work off of kind of one methodology for one type of testing for a long time we trust that methodology and we don't really get rid of it until there's a substantial change maybe a Windows Update for example has been a common reason there's a there might be a reason that we no longer trust the data maybe we we started noticing like hey this sip six great example we might start noticing after the last update this game performs 50 percent better what the what happened and that actually happened by the way we had to at one point we did scraps of six and we had to rerun everything and it sucked but and actually to happen to get a few days a couple weeks ago so anyway we stick with them for a long time but that's why it takes us so long to come up with a new one and and we might take a while to add your request but we've added several of them so the workstation benchmarks we're very excited about I've gone through all the numbers Patrick's done a lot of work on it we've both worked to validate each other's work and make sure that everything looks accurate that's obviously the number one concern that's why things take quite a while for us because we're sort of just I mean I'm personally overly paranoid about making sure we have good data you can't always hit that mark but we're pretty good about hitting the mark so anyway tests add a GCC compile so we've had the new compiler collection to the testing those of you who have wanted programming benchmarks and air quotes they're programming we have added a compile benchmark for you so thank you for the suggestion it was an excellent idea and we have it in the tests we're very happy about that all of this is still in Windows I know a lot of you work in Linux I'm sorry we just we don't have a fluid way to work that into the bench in right now so forgive me on that we're work with me there but we've added compile testing in Windows we're using a flag in it that allows the maximum threads to be spawned as allowed by the CPU so we see some really interesting scaling with things like Rison with h EDT Intel and so forth and that's one of our new tests we also Adobe Premiere has been consistently added now we've done premiere tests in the past but we have always dropped the ball on it where we'll do it for like the 31 75 X thread Ripper we did those we might have done it for like one of the I 9s before that I think the 79 80 X E but we were never consistent and it's because of a lot of while issues with the project files were may be inconsistent where they would crash and that would happen enough where the renders just we couldn't get them done in a timely fashion for review so we fixed that we have a very streamlined adobe premiere set of benchmarks now including 1080p 60 show floor coverage so that's a realistic use case it's all a roll and b-roll and we have shot on the UX 180 we also have a charts benchmark it's getting scrapped but it's still really used in for interesting data and we'll show you why in the workstation benchmark video and then we have a and charts benchmark is just it's literally just all of our charged with the animations and everything it's it's really intensive and then we also have a final one that's a 4k 68 roll and b-roll shot and they are currently all h.264 if there's popular demand we might add age to 65 it's it's really slow I don't know if it scales linearly with h.264 but we do have h.264 and then we've added Adobe Photoshop consistently 7-zip compression and decompression really interesting data for that one especially decompression it behaves differently from compression in terms of the the CPU hierarchy so that's really cool and then we've also added v-ray and I think there's a couple of other ones that I am presently forgetting but yeah really fun workstation benchmarks coming up target release date for that we're looking at hopefully April 16th or 17th so that's gonna be this week and definitely look forward to that after that we have Ajit GP sorry CPU GaN CPU benchmark overhaul we've been running the same games for a long time now in CPUs it's time to change that and that is getting updated target date for publication before end of April so most the tests are done at this point I need to personally go through them and and validate and make sure just just like look at the charts make sure they look accurate and see if we need to rerun anything and once we feel good about that we'll finish the script you know and get that up so that has now 15 total combinations of games it's not that many games we're still sticking with the approach of just I mean the size of the operation and and the amount of stuff we try to do and very content stuff like that we just we try to restrict the games to ones that we think provide a pretty wide view of what the gaming landscape looks like so we have RTS we have grand campaign we have turn-based strategy we have first-person shooter style games and they're racing games so we've kind of got one of everything in there and we we try to pick most of the api's as well so we have dx11 dx12 for sure so we don't go too crazy on them but there's 15 total combinations which is more than we normally do occasionally we'll drop games as we go so a little bit of behind the scenes knowledge for you part of the secret is that because of how games update these days you there's really no offline gaming anymore if the most part because of how they update throughout a lifecycle of our bench we will drop games as we go if it gets to a point we're like oh I don't know 6 updated and now the numbers are no longer accurate to gameplay and when we run a new CPU for that might be a worse cpu objectively than an old one we've run it's performing better and that's because of the update if that happens we drop the game and we don't bring it back until we can rerun all to get all the CPUs on that bench so that's part of the secret for why we start with a lot of combinations cuz we do drop them as the bench ages because we keep our data for as long as possible and and that's part of that so 15 total combinations by combinations I mean we're doing two resolutions at 1080p 1440 and one of those games only tests on one resolutions sip 6 because doesn't matter turn time case testing methodology updates this one is tricky I'm hopeful that we can get the first update live like public by end of April and this is we've had two things we're adding here one of them is we're adding noise normalize testing this is a very popular part of our CPU cooler reviews it's well liked it's a popular part of our GPU cooler reviews and what we do is we we set it so that there is a fixed the noise level for every device that goes through the bench CPU coolers and GBS are the best examples GPU coolers and when we set a fixed noise levels typically about 40 DB it's gonna be different for cases and what that does is it allows us to eliminate some of the concerns so if we test two CPU coolers seeping cooler a a CPU cooler B let's actually it's just picked some real ones EVGA c LC series has like 2000 2500 rpm fans that there's 2500 rpm fans on the CL c 240 that's ridiculous I don't I don't remember the exact noise level off top my head but it's it's well over 50 DBA and that gets loud I think it's a one of the coolers for sure as approaching 60 and so the problem there is a CLC 240 now is going to look like one of the best products on the bench it'll look better than two 80s and technically it is from flat-out performance but in reality it's you might have something that's a little bit warmer but not that much and is operating at like 40 DB a and then the EVGA SCLC 240 might be more than two times perceived to the human ear noise level higher that's not fair so it's not it's not fair to the quieter one to say the louder one's better because duh like that's how it works so that's why we have noise normalized testing where we set a fixed noise level we test it at that noise level and everyone's leveled for the same efficiency how well do you push air through radiator and how well do you move liquid at a given noise level level playing field how does everyone do it's a great testing methodology we're really happy with it especially for GPU coolers it's hard to do for cases and we'll talk about the reasons why in that video but there are a lot of challenges with this we've gotten it worked out reasonably well for cases we're still kind of going through the numbers right now running new tests on new cases or well old cases that were retesting so anyway we're I'm sure of how that will work out but we will have data for it nonetheless and hopefully this is a reliable testing metric for cases that we can keep going forward because that bench has been the same for a while now our last change was to add blender change before that was to add firestrike and that's on top of the torture testing so we already have and I I think this is fair to say the most thermally comprehensive testing for cases but we want to do more I know you all requested so no noise normalizes next you've also very frequently requested normalized fan solution testing where we take a case and we have a set of maybe three fans let me put those in like every single case they have to fit all of them otherwise it's no good they have to go in the same spots or it's no good and and do the test and see who's got the best like design if you if you normalize for the fan that's hard like really difficult because you start anything up with scenarios where just it's not fair like the age 500 be mesh great example in order to fit one fan to all cases we need a 120 or 140 you start using cases that come with two hundreds the reason people buy them is because they come with two hundreds and you replace the fans if it performs worse now that's it's really not fair it's not realistic and it's not a great test but there are a lot of cases where that is a fair thing to do the fractal mesh the five cases are a good example of this where they come pretty bare-bones and there are plenty of other mid-tower competitors that NZXT age 500 is an interesting one because if you change the stock configuration as we showed in our review you can actually make the performance a lot worse this is the same for the Q 500 l as well by the way but anyway we're adding that in it might be a one-off test piece it might be permanent methodology it'll depend on on how the cases look and if they are if it's like it may well come out where the test results are me on camera saying look this is why we haven't done this and let me just address the request here's the data here's why it doesn't really make sense or it could be like this is awesome we have some really cool tests and we can add to cases so we'll see how that goes target date for that end of April for at least one of those two things and then GN storage overhaul and compression server build this will be short end of April is the goal for this we have a dual slot duo like 79 socket server sort of that we've been working on and it's going to be used for video file compression we're doing a video on it just kind of for fun so you'll see that end of April that'll be more of an internal change than an external one but we will have a content piece on it PC build live stream and OC live stream so we do have a PC build stream we're doing in the next couple of weeks OC streams we're in talks with Joe step on Z again computed hardware who's who was our special guest overclocker but liquid nitrogen with him last time we're hoping to hit a first week of May for a live stream with him and if he can't do it he's in Florida so if he can't do it because of logistics then we'll reschedule and I'll do something that week instead so we'll have a stream a couple of them in the next few weeks it's just a matter of is anyone there with me on the stream Patrick's likely joining me for the stream of the PC build and we're probably going to open whatever fan mail we have left in the box while we do that stream so that's all first we can may hopefully and we might end up before it if we're ahead of schedule getting back into closed-loop liquid cooler agree view is we already started this we do this with the H 159 Platinum it's been a while since we've done CLC reviews we have a big chart of them and it's just it's time to update so we started this one already but we're adding the Alpha cool unit the Ice Bear is it extreme the name escapes me right now but we're adding that new alpha cool unit and we're also testing our first Swift AK product we've ever tested by the second week of May for CLC reviews more quality checks added for GN the target date for this to really start happening as June so the way this the pipeline works videos get finished and I watch the whole video and in that process will often make chain there are issues we've run into where depending on where I watch it there might be something on on the YouTube side of things after processing we've had really weird issues in the past that it's theirs I can't replicate them it's happened twice well upload a video and then just like one clip is missing audio is just gone and then in the render file it's there so we have no idea what hat it's only happened twice it's a low percent one of the times the video was published and it was actually the principal technologies video was taken down within like 30 minutes was one of the hardest decisions related to content that I made that year because like oh my god this is a huge piece and I have to delete it and everyone's gonna think that it's like some threat from PT so anyway that was an issue so quality checks happening I currently checked the videos when they're done and make changes or require or a request that the video editors make changes and that's kind of it but this pipeline has become really burdensome for me because my time is limited I'm the biggest bottleneck in the operation and I would like to resolve that as much as is realistic and part of what we're going to do is I am requesting the video editors to look over each other's work more going forward as well so not just we've kind of learned that instead of the person who made the video going back over it for quality checking to have the other person do it and vice versa because then it makes sense you're not sitting there looking at like the same damn thing for the whole day and then then you have to look over it again you're gonna miss the things that you missed the first time because your brains filling in the gaps kind of like if you're typing and you leave out a word and you do a proofread you might not even notice it you need someone else to do that pass so that's one of the changes we're doing it's an internal change Keegan has been the longest standing active person working with GN working for GN and in June when he has some more availability he's not full-time but in June he's going to be more full-time and that will be a big move so he'll be in part of a quality checking role and his job will be look through the video make sure it meets our guidelines for accuracy to whatever degree he's knowledgeable in and primarily his job will be make sure it meets the editing guidelines we don't have any uncovered Clips that need to be covered we don't have any like poorly scaled hardware news screen grabs or something or once it's uploaded to YouTube make sure the processing looks good stuff like that so that'll be part of his job mine will be more on the accuracy side but he'll do a bit of that and then that'll be good just for improving the quality of the content it can always be better it's it's like I think it is fair to say the content quality is pretty high but there are definitely things like one of the recent news videos where it was just the resolution was terrible on the screen grabs and that wasn't on us ultimately it was captured at 8k but it was on us because we didn't catch it when we uploaded it to YouTube it got killed and in the in the processing I guess and when we reload it it was fine but it was too late because it's public so we're trying to prevent that type of thing going forward a new product launch Gyan new product launch similar to the mod matt in that it's very custom I wish I could tell you what it is right now but I need to I need to quality check it first before I make an announcement on this one so we're really excited about it this thing has the the product has taken us about a year to get done a lot of kind of like the medium mod Matt took us about that same time period I think it's it's a lot of samples and working with the factories we had to customize this product a lot more than expected so the factory did some unique tooling work for us we'll talk about this more later but anyway it's a new GM product we're hoping to launch this one in May it should be it's it's already shipped from the factory it is coming to us now so we're hoping for May and again this is kind of like in terms of being a custom product it's it's mod matte level it's it's not like we took a shirt and printed on it we have those really cool custom shirts too but this was still even more work those were their like custom sewing shirts and stuffs it's more work than that so we're very excited about it I am I'm nervous in my excitement because with the new product like this you always are you know these are big orders this one in particular is the the biggest order I've ever placed because the minimum order quantity was very high it's the most amount of money I've ever in my life spent in a single transaction it's a little scary but I'm very excited about it and that will come out in May is our goal for the new product newbie role set this is our set we have another set kind of right there and that is the live-streaming set you've seen it before likely in our live streams and we've done some builds there too the SGI system with patrick that was done there it's just it's better for two people but we have kind of a dead corner in the room it's over there not that that necessarily means anything but there's there's a corner over there that doesn't really get used it's got a tall table and two chairs and I've sat at it like twice I don't only use the table in the kitchen when we like sit down to eat or something so that corner is just not really used and I kind of realized at this table that table to end up with just stuff on them all the time from projects we have and it would better enable the video team it's it's two things here to take shots when these tables are filled on a special table only for them that I never fill with stuff and two it's good for for the video team because it gives them a new location that's different and aesthetic then both of these are like workshop style industrial style sets with a lot of electronics so we're doing something a bit different in the other corner this is partly a creative move I've allowed the video team to take control of this project it's one of the first times I've done that where I basically I said okay Josh and Andrew you guys are in charge figure out what goes in the corner send me links within a budget I'll buy it and then we'll build it together so the first time I've really done that I'm excited about it they they count with a great plan and I'm hopeful that this is a move that will allow the people who work here to have some more creativity take some more unique shots you know prevent things from becoming stale so that's part of that move that target is this week we're gonna build that this week and you'll start seeing it probably next week maybe we need some shots obviously first no let's see next one helping our distributor move into his space for a GN product fulfillment so our distributor is the person who ships all of our store merch so the store documents Nexus dotnet website that has shirts it's got the mod mats the mouse pads I'll just plug a few things while I'm here beer glass is all that stuff there's one guy who does that and he's a good friend of mine and we did a video before of helping him build out a house that he works out of it worked out of as of last week builded up to a point where he could do more efficient product fulfillment and he mostly just does it for us but he's expanding trying to add new clients so this is really cool it's it's to small businesses that both started in a house were friends and start working together and now he's also moving out of his moving into an office so we both had the same path it's really cool to see that he is moving and we are helping him move in in the next week or two we might have a video on that there's already a video on the patreon behind-the-scenes section so if you want to see what the new warehouse looks like it's not mine it's not like jion's warehouse this is our distributors warehouse he's paying for it but but we are occupying a significant space of it and so it's kind of cool and we'll help him move in moving back to two to four patreon behind-the-scenes videos we have been inconsistent in the past couple of months with these but we've gotten consistent again in the last three or four weeks now so we just I just today uploaded it behind the scenes video of that warehouse I uploaded one 10 days ago with Patrick on a do like 79 system build I uploaded one a week before that so we're finally getting back into things with the patreon behind-the-scenes videos you can go to patreon.com/scishow would like to get access to our discord with all of the other people like you in it or access to our behind the scenes videos so thank you for bearing with me we've gotten consistent on it again it's just been a lot of growing pains and we've as we've gotten some help from Josh and others it's it's really started picking back up only a couple more here growing the side channel so there's another channel we have called GN Steve which is names because I wasn't sure what to do with it and other than being used for patreon behind the scenes stuff that's unlisted unless you're a backer and sometimes we'll set one public every now and then but other than that I've been uploading some viking videos to it so downhill mountain biking is a big thing in my life it's or local mountain biking if I can't go downhill on a weekend that is what allows me to continue working hard helps keep motivated stuff like that so doing some videos over there of that and of the bikes I've done custom bike builds much like custom PC builds so that channel is something that we're growing it's not gonna just be biking right now it is but like I have a video review I'm going to do of snowflakes that you know the cat from the house of snowflakes water fountain high water and so she will star in that video but that'll be on the GN Steve side channel so definitely subscribe to that if you're interested in less technical well not like electronics tech content but bike tech or biking or I don't know cats and that stuff will go over there so GN Steve is the side channel for that we are focusing hard this year on growing that one I'm not diverting time from G n so I'm basically taking like six hours a week and working on that channel and that's my time budget if I can't do it in at that time then I have to figure out something else like bring it on some of the help internally for GN to that one but anyway that is the current plan so we're posting we I I guess really posting every Sunday for that one clearing the review shelf needs to happen there's a lot of stuff on there we're working through a bunch of products right now it'll take us a little while but we're going to clear it off and then start getting back into into other content so I just I want to get all those obligations out of the way lots more planned so have to get organized and tackle all that stuff and then rebuilding the website in the forum I almost have this done every time we do a website update I do it on December 24th 25th and 26th and I work on the 25th to really get the new server and the website dialed because I know that's the day when the fewest people are accessing the website historically so close so close to getting it done and it just it was like almost ready to go live there were a few more things I was unhappy with and so then we hit CES and that was it like schedules ruined so I'm there's a slope point in the year every year for about two weeks in December that's my time to work on updating the website and we're update methodology or whatever and we missed the window we almost got there but this is something I'm taking really seriously at this point so the websites what started us YouTube is a much bigger part of our business now at the merch store is a big part of our business but the website has has remained a place to post scripts to post written reviews and the post Eric's news roundups things like that I would like to get it back into full operation it's not been as much of a focus the last six months or so as I would have liked because YouTube's grown so much for us but we need it there one for a safety net because YouTube is scary - I really like written content personally I like writing it and I like reading it and so I would like the website to kind of be in full operation it can do a lot more than it is and the other thing too is if you kind of look at the market a lot of technical writers have left they've gone to companies Intel mostly Andy to some extent and with this exodus of writers there's a big a big demand that's being filled by fewer sites so we would like to meet that demand to the extent that we can we can't fill the shoes of a lot of these people but we can fill some of the shoes and they might be the wrong size but we'll fill them nonetheless so the ho is to get the website really back up and running the forum we it kind of hurt but we had the forum for you it was the first thing I made was the forum since like two thousand seven or eight we had it for over a decade and then I deactivated it last year because the spam was getting so bad and we didn't have moderators and I wasn't checking it because the website is is such a band-aid mess the way it's held together because over a decade old that it was just it was difficult to maintain so I disabled the forum because the spam was getting bad and we've rebuilt it I have like an internal version of the new forum that works better and it's very similar to the Linus tech tips forum it's the same back end just in our style the website has had a template rebuild but it's stuck I'll do it but I just need time so end of July is my hopeful target for that one all these other dates I've given you are very realistic that one is the biggest question mark I'm gonna try hard to that date I really hope we do would like to add a a graphene engine as well so we can generate the charts in the site and not do pngs anymore to just I mean just to make the charts better so anyway I know there's a long video this is really only meant for people who really like our content and want to know what we're up to you you really like our stuff and for that we are eternally grateful thank you and for people who have donated money to us have purchased from our store anyone who's supported us in any way watching the content you know commenting even something as simple as retweeting or buying merch from us paying on patreon to help us we are just trying to keep you in the loop so that's a road map for the next couple of months all the way through July couple small things will be at Commonwealth small things this is not a small thing we got coffee tax the biggest thing actually the next couple of months will be a copy tags so just got back from China Taiwan for the the trip so we did Taiwan first then we did China back to Taiwan and then we left we did that for all those factory tours and I have more still that we can publish but it started feeling too much like this coverage how so he went back to testing content we're going back to Taiwan and China in late May early June for Computex and I'm gonna go with Keegan over to Shenzhen the other guys will stay in Taiwan Keegan I'll make a video there that we have planned it's gonna be really fun that video and we're making some more stuff like while we're traveling of the locale and I'm really excited about that so it's just it's fun and it's interesting and it's all electronics related so anyway we have a lot of stuff LTX after that and there's gonna be the next two big ones so yeah thank you for bearing with me through this for those of you who watch this far I don't I'm not gonna recap this you got the idea there's a lot of cool stuff coming up I greatly appreciate your patience and support I know we've missed some deadlines in the years as everyone does but we are finally getting a handle back on things again I mean you you have to realize like just how hard it is to manage time of other people especially and try and hit all these these targets so we got in there get in there I'm still doing like I don't know 70 to 100 hours a week depending on the week for realistic range so time management not the only problem physical allowance of time is the other problem we're working on it thank you for watching subscribe for more I'm sure you are if you watched this boring video if you want to support us directly go to store that gamers Nexus dotnet and consider purchasing at one of our shirts or if you feel like spending a bit more on something custom that we've made we do have the mod mats in both medium and a large and they'll be back shipping in about 10 days if you backorder those they'll go out about 10 days thanks for watching I'll see you all next time