Gadgetory

we're back to normal video shoots after a long CES this time and we have some leftover news from CES along with other industry goings-on last week including a CPU cooler for thread Ripper and a m4 that's called the frozen cooler so that's a name we're gonna be talking about that hades canyons some other stuff meltdown my scathing review of Google Fiber that we just posted on the website and a bit more before that this video is brought to you by thermal grizzly makers of the conductor hot liquid metal that we recently used to drop 20 degrees off of our coffee leak temperatures thermal grizzly also makes traditional thermal compounds we use on top of the IHS like cryo not and hydro not pastes learn more at the link below starting with some quick site news and information on articles we've published in the last week for those of you who have ordered the GN mod mat the anti-static mod mat we're are planning to preorder one the pre-orders should start shipping pretty soon we have them on the way to us that'll be about 10 to 12 days from filming and then they'll leave from us immediately and go out to all of you so you should be getting on pretty soon it'll just be going out by normal shipping so depending what country you're in the arrival time will vary but they're almost here so that's pretty exciting as far as other articles on the site we just published something on Google Fiber and our experience with them thus far they are presently challenging AT&T and spectrum aka Time Warner on who can be the most incompetent and god-emperor Google and their thaumaturge have bestowed upon us they're magical boxes that they call fancy fancy tech speak aka a network box that we're just waiting on them to sort that out and get it all working it's been a lot of fun for the last five months though because I think we signed up four or five or service after they finished the street install in August and we had a meeting with them in November to finalize everything that didn't happen and then another one that didn't happen so we're still waiting on fiber several months later even though it's already on the street so if you're interested in reading about that experience it's on website and fun fact after publishing that tweeting it at Google and making some noise about it publicly finally we're getting service so apparently the trick is the same as it is with AT&T and Time Warner it's that if you can make enough noise and you have some following on social media good news they'll help you out if not and you're a small-time customer individual then screw off we don't want to help here so yeah not a great experience with Google Fiber thus far they are not proving to be any better than any of the other ISPs though hopefully the network speeds will make up for the incompetence but we'll see it also come down to the sort of the question you run into of how much control do I really want Google to have over my life you've got YouTube Adsense the world's largest search engine that drives all of your web traffic and then phone if you have an Android phone and Internet so it's getting to a point where 80% of my existence is under Google's domain if I start moving to their Internet as well so it is starting to get to a to a point where it's just introspective like maybe maybe Time Warner is not so bad they suck their internet sucks but you know they told me they'd be here between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m. and dammit they were here between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m. and they installed the service and that I never had to talk to them again and it's been great for five years except for the slow internet but it works and it's reliably bad so it's there it's reliable I know what to expect I don't over expect anything because they've conditioned me to expect nothing good of them so you know it's maybe not such a bad idea to just stick with them anyway that articles on the on the website if you want to read more gave me an opportunity to vent with some creative creative writing that I don't normally get to use as I do with ISPs also we published a keyboard review the Cherry MX 6.0 if you're interested in that Michael Kern's review is on the website and he talked about his feelings with that pretty high on the keyboard as well as far as official news from the show and other hangers-on Fry's and electro is the name of a deep cool cooler now we're not positive if this will ever come to market it seems they were asking us to basically to give them feedback on if we thought it was a good idea and ask the viewers and readers to comment so if if you like this cooler make sure you let deep cool know so they can actually bring it to market because CES has a lot of prototypes but fries in is the name of it that could probably some work it's you know like frying risin I guess maybe not fully thought through electro it's a 120 millimeter cooler it supports thread Ripper it has a full thread Ripper coverage plates OTR for cold plate and it claims to also support a m4 which makes sense as long as it's not colliding with VR M's or anything like that or DRAM or any any others other nearby components should be fine full-coverage six heat pipes apparently it clears ram vertically so that shouldn't be an issue and it also has an exclusive metal fan frame which is just a metal x over the fan I guess that bumps on to the the top of the cold plate for service area so that's the MF 120 GT fan on the fries in electro cooler let them know if you're interested might not ever come to market but it was interesting at least cuz thread if ur coolers are kind of interesting given their performance difference with cold blade sizes another AMD news item this is a bit newer and modus fused drive TM is something that Andy just announced so I'm gonna read what they said in their vlog because it actually sums it up pretty well without too much marketing for for once from any company and it says the short of it fuse drive analyzes the storage hardware available on your system from fastest to slowest so that's DRAM cross point and via me drives hard drives all that stuff and it's supposed to during setup create or combine the discs into a single larger disk which is apparently a bit different from normal caching scheme so that AMD claims that fused Drive lets you use both the SSD and hard drive capacity together as one large boot drive for example combining two drives ie a 512 gigabyte SSD a 512 gigabyte hard drive into one so it has some parallels to obtain from what we've read it seems like a potential and the answer to obtain if anyone needed to answer obtained and it's a paid solution so it's 20 dollars for up to 128 gigabyte I guess combined drive we're not fully clear on that yet and two gigabytes of what they call fuse Ram or $60 for one terabyte and four gigabytes of the so called fuse Ram so not fully sure what to think of it yet we haven't tested it don't know that we will but we've gotten a couple of emails from you all about it so we know there's interest anyway and modus fuse drive you want to look it up and see if it's suitable for your system other items from CES be quiet so they had a new dark rock 4 single tower cooler at the show we didn't get to check out this time but we'll probably be reviewing it the dark rock 4 is accompanied by the dark rock pro 4 and they are a single tower cooler and a duel tower cooler respectively the dark rock pro 4 has two fin stacks it's got two fans one of which is 135 millimeters the other is 120 millimeters and the dark rock non pro 4 is a 135 millimeter silent Wayne's 3 fan and that's it 6 heat pipes on that one 200 watt TDP and apparently now top mounting with 2 screws I think that's my understanding as opposed to the previous awful mounting mechanism of be quiet air coolers it looks like they've they've actually improved that quite a bit so that's very good to hear because be quiet we've we've told them for a long time they've known for a long time it's not like we're the first to tell them they probably figured it out before they shipped the things that the mounting mechanism was the absolute worst part of working with a be quiet cooler now once it's installed you're fine but yeah so they fixed that that's great to hear meltdown and SSDs this was a topic we were speaking with Alain mal ventano about from PC perspective Allen writes some of the best storage reviews in the industry he's one of the only sources I trust reading when it comes to storage reviews because storage reviews are actually really hard to do which is why we don't really do SSD benchmarks they get they get complicated fast so he wrote an article not long ago where he sort of a preliminary test on the change to SSD speeds he's got a couple things actually one is specifically testing some meltdown patches versus SSD speeds and the other one is a white paper that they published and that contains information on SSD performance testing in general including for example large performance swings by updated bios so part of Allan's conclusion and one of his pieces was that simply by updating BIOS if you're not careful and you're either a storage reviewer or you're running benchmarks on your own SSDs before and after be aware that BIOS changes to P States and C states could impact performance more than anything else so just like any other benchmark it's really hard to control a lot of stuff sometimes if you're updating BIOS you don't necessarily know what the manufacturer changed it's possibly changed some power states in there and if they did you could see swings from what Allan was saying of up to 20% in performance for storage and some specific applications AS SSD is one of the applications that Alan tested that proved to have some of the biggest swings in performance if you also ran some kind of application that generated a load on the CPU so it's not a great benchmark for that reason and he's got a whole white paper that talks about it and also some information on the meltdown testing we're for preliminary testing it looks like it's kind of a wash there's some some gain and some loss for performance with the meltdown patches but it didn't look like a huge deal for what Alan was testing there are a lot more storage devices out there a lot more BIOS revisions so there's always room for change but it's a great starting point if you want to read their white paper I believe they've got that published publicly as well and it's definitely worth checking out if you're interested in storage reviews and why they are hard to do right and we tried storage reviews a while ago a long time when as these were pretty new it was okay then but now with the way SSDs have a local cache and things like that they they behave a lot differently with the software you use the test so you get into scenarios where software used for benchmarking could flood cash in a way that's really not realistic and may never be encountered by user data looks a lot worse as a result so yeah we haven't gotten back into it but if you're interested in SSDs he's a good source for that next is I will link that down below as well or in the article accompanying this next is the Hades Canyon nook so this has been talked out of it since CES but we'll throw our information in as well there are two models of the Hades Canyon Intel device that was at the show they are $800 and $1,000 I expected for first quarter of this year and they are named nook 8i 7h BK that's a 100 watt unit or 100 watt TDP anyway and nook 8i 7h n K which is 65 watts the hvk is marketed as supporting VR and it's OC ready due to a larger footprint of the cooling solution and the other one is not 50% graphics improvement allegedly over the skull canyon nook and replaceable lid customizable RGB illumination if that's your thin front panel RGB LEDs there's a vase amount and KB like G CPUs which you get a Vega M GPU with those so it amounts to a Polaris GPU with HBM to memory and we have a specs table on all that that we can keep on the screen for a while if you're curious about the specs for the combined chip HTC had major vive news at their CES press conference primarily announcing the new HTC vive pro and vive pro audio and a wireless adapter the vive pro increases display resolution from 2160 by 1200 to 2880 by 1600 and it still uses dual OLED displays this should help resolve some of the screen door effect problems with VR particularly when reading text but we haven't had a great amount of time to try it out yet speaking of resolving screen door issues the vibe should now be seated more appropriately on your face with better weight distribution this is something we talked with Luke from - tech tips about in one of our recent videos you can go check out where the the weight distribution is a bit better so it shouldn't pull down quite as much when you're wearing it I was a big problem for me especially when using it where during testing if it dips just a little bit you can really get a lot of screen door or just blurriness because your eyes don't line up perfectly if the lines anymore so some of that should be fixed now and in addition to that we tried to talk to five engineers we had two medians with HCC at CES unfortunately no one there really seems or no one we were able to speak to you seem to have engineering knowledge so I don't have much more for you on that but that's the basics of the of the HTC news there's also just quickly if you missed it there's a rollup LG display this is what you'd call a halo product it's just kind of cool it's a an LG 77 inch transparent OLED and you can roll OLED TVs like like a tube like this mat you just roll it up it's slated for launch in two years we'll see if it happens it's mostly a thing to get some noise and interest in LG they were very strict about meetings it was behind closed doors only and you had to book a meeting and not only that the meetings were completely slammed as soon as they announce the product so really not a not a shocker there but we didn't get any footage of it unfortunately it is kind of interesting that as a technology I don't know how applicable it is to any of our users Asus had portable displays at the show this is a bit more interesting we've used these before some of the older ACS portable displays you can plug them in via USB and we've used them with laptops or even the old like ZOTAC portable pcs that uh that we reviewed at ages ago they're kind of cool because it gives you two screens if you're using a laptop for video editing at a show it's a very specific use case but the Zen screen go is one of them it has a four hour battery pack included and a mounting stand it uses USB type-c connects to laptops and Android phones and it works over USB 3 as well and it's got a 7800 milliamp hour battery they also announced the pro art 4k this is another portable display it's a 4k display supposed to be more accurate color 21 0.6 inches OLED for the display two USB type sees and HDR 10 and it weighs 2.2 pounds about a kilogram that's the peak u2 - you see which is kind of interesting for anyone who works a lot and travels then HTS also had some laptops will close out with those so on the topic of ACS company also announced its new laptops including the rog SKT t1 hero the rog G 703 and the Zenbook 13 the SKT t1 laptop is a partnership with eSports team SK Telecom t1 and basically is a normal laptop that's co branded and comes with accessories including a 120 Hertz IPS display a gtx 960 and an intel i7 making for a combination targeted at mobile gaming the g 703 is a 17.3 inch laptop 1080p display 144 hertz g-sync panel with an i7 78 20 HK and a factory overclocked 4.3 gigahertz gz X 1080 that's $3,500 and then the Zenbook 13 and asu's x 507 or last these are more consumer targeted laptops that both use MX 110 graphics so not much else to say about them and available first half of 2018 that pretty much wraps up most of the rest of the CES stuff we saw the show but didn't get to do a standalone video on it there's plenty of other cool stuff there kind of interesting cars there there were interesting automotive and automation technologies but not really our our coverage priorities so as always you can subscribe for more information check out the last 28 or so videos that we made on CES if you're curious about any of that stuff and we'll have some other round ups and back to normal testing soon you go to patreon.com/scishow and X's to helps out directly if you liked our coverage of the show or you can go to store that gamers nexus net to pick up a shirt like this one or one of our mod mats thank you for watching I'll see you all next time