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everyone welcome back to another hardware news recap for the past week we have a couple of big news items this week including discussion on Nvidia's GeForce Partner Program some coffee Lake functionality on z170 and z2 70 previous motherboards and a couple of other cool things along with a mini review of a noble chair that we got in the mail 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 hydronaut pastes learn more at the link below the big news item for this past week was from Hart OCP from site owner Kyle Bennett who broke a story about discussions on board vendors pertaining to an Nvidia branding initiative inure and video branding initiative and the report makes several strong points including one that will just quote for you the crux of the issue with the NVIDIA GPU comes down to a single requirement in order to be part of the GeForce Partner Program in order to have access to the partner program its partners must have its gaming brand aligned exclusively with GeForce Bennett stated I have read documents with this requirement spelled out on it and video will tell you that it is 100% up to its partner company to be part of the GPP and from the documents I've read if it chooses not to be part of the program it will lose the benefits of GPP which include high effort engineering engagements early attack engagement at launch partner status game bundling sales rebate programs at social media and PR support marketing reports marketing development funds and further stating MDF is likely to stand out in the list of lost benefits if the company is not a GPB partner the concern raised in the Hart OCP story primarily pertains to gaming brands so that would not be the AIB partner as a company but their products sold for graphics devices so following the example that Kyle Bennett set will point to ROG there's no indication of any kind that are oh geez typically is involved with this but it's an example he raised so we will further that an example of a gaming brand would be for example the ROG ares series or ROG Strix ROG Mars whatever other series they have those would be the brands so in theory from what Bennett's story states the potential restriction would be that these brands are locked to nvidia gpus and could not be applied toward AMD GPUs and that's the primary concern of the story so this would obviously not apply to single party vendors if you are a manufacturer who makes components only for Nvidia there's really no impact here because the theory of it all is that this is a partner program which which primarily by Kyle's writing would restrict access to information if you sold a same branded component for AMD devices as foreign video devices that's sort of what the story lays out and the write up will be listed in our news sources article that we'll post below as always if you want to read more on that so hard OCP and it's off record contacts have raised concern about legality of the program they've also insinuated potential anti-competitive practices for the nvidia GPB which was just detailed in greater depth in Nvidia's own blog a couple of days ago and we haven't been able to open dialogue with any of our contacts about this story on or off record so at this time we can provide no additional information what you have is basically hard OCP story at this time a few months ago we reported on a story about coffee lake becoming functional sort of on one of the older motherboards so anon is e 370 board and this was done by an overclocker who managed to more or less hack something together today there's news on an overclocker managing to get coffee lake cpus basically fully functional on the z 100 series of motherboards including an i3 eighth generation cpu at the time previously when we reported the initial attempts at this nothing much could really be done other than a boot and some basic validation but now the overclock net post by route moto goes on to state that quote coffee lake is now completely working on 100 and 200 series motherboards so far core i3 8100 has been tested working completely on the 100 series boards and the user goes on to credit contributions from various team members on the project the team posted a guide on how to do this on the win raid forum if you're interested there are four primary steps to the process of getting coffee like working on previous boards first you need a UEFI BIOS update err you need an Intel binary modification program a V BIOS and BSF package and the ami UEFI mm tool which is another software utility the guide also provides instructions on which binaries and batch files need to be modified or changed to allow insertion of the coffee like micro code to further allow bootable eighth-generation cpus on one hundred 200 series boards it's not guaranteed to work but it's worth a shot for anyone who has an old board and is trying to figure out how to make it work with the new CPUs maybe save some money a few sites pointed out an Intel oddity on the graphics bench website this week it's a CPU named the i7 86 70 which graphics bench claims to have 12 threads and 6 cores there's no guarantee that this is an accurate specifications listing and it would be sort of out of character for Intel to create an i7 CPU with the second digit being a 6 as is the case with 86 70 parts in the last few generations with a 6 in that specific location in the name have been Core i5 CPUs so we have some indication that the 86 70 is real but it's not fully clear on the specs at this time either way if we assume that any of this information is correct it looked like the CPU is at 3.1 gigahertz base clock with 6 cores and 12 threads likely selling at a price one would assume between an 80 600 K and an 80 709 KS CPU there have also been a lot of slides for Rison of debated legitimacy over the past week so this is kind of following up in the same rumor segment the 86 70 is more or less a rumor and this stuff is - but there are a lot of slides out now for an alleged rise in 2000 series launched and the newest rumor indicates a thread Ripper follow-up potentially sooner than we'd expect aiming at 2018 if the slides are to be believed and the rumor indicates that this hypothetical threader her part would be a part of the rise in 2000 series architecture and changes to that architecture one thing we can say with certainty is that the major rise in 2000 series announcements will be happening soon about a month from now sometime shortly after PAX East so keep an eye out for all of that for some quick game news thats related to hardware if anyone has forgotten steam is owned by valve and valve used to be a game developer so recent news is that Gabe Newell hosted a discussion at valves offices and was quoted by PC gamer as saying the following of its new game quote artifact is the first of several games that are going to be coming from us so that's sort of good news hooray the house is going to start shipping games again it's a very jovial from Newell there interestingly it will also commented that valve is sort of jealous of Nintendo for their ability to produce hardware and software for their games and this was primarily pointed out as being worthy of envy because when as Newell said when my Emoto wants to design a new game he can look at the input options and the mechanics options and then designed the two around each other which is something that Valve has wanted to do for a while now rather than be bound to existing input modes like mice and keyboards so this goes on to a further and bigger discussion of their HTC vive headset which is valve developed and coincides with previous statements from valve that they are working on at least a couple of major VR titles coming out sometime soon TM maybe with half-life 3 or one of the other games that never came out for those curious artifact appears to be a card game that's got some vague similarities to hearthstone and that's the one they're primarily discussing right now but Newell did pretty heavily indicate that valve is attempting to return to game development in a bigger way this one's sort of interesting and it might might please some of you because it includes the harm of crypto miners that you've all been very vocal about The Associated Press ran a story that a crypto mining company located an Iceland had 600 computers stolen in a robbery given that this is coming from The Associated Press there's not a whole lot of technical understandings much of anything as it is more of a mainstream press outfit so we don't know what the word computer means in this context we don't know if that's 600 video cards or if that's 600 combinations of motherboard CPU RAM that then had multiple video cards attached to them either way the thing that matters is that the equipment was worth an estimated two million dollars and was stolen and rekha Vic in Iceland the police commissioner locally noted that the theft appears to be a highly organised crime and one that occurred or began in December but they hadn't disclosed until recently because they were trying to find the thieves so another source indicated that the police are looking at power consumption across the country to try and identify a likely source for new mining operation though tracking fenced sales would be a bit harder one would assume unless they've got all the stereo numbers written down but either way if you're in Iceland and you recently came across millions of dollars of components probably don't hook it up to the grid because they're looking for you next one NZXT has a new x 70 to 360 millimeter cooler and a new 120 millimeter cooler from a non asia tech supplier for once NZXT t's new coolers coming up are again 360 for the 72 which is part of the X 62 and 52 family and 120 for the m22 whose supplier we haven't yet identified but it's the same om as for raid max if you've seen their coolers the X 72 uses a Sutekh cooling hardware that would be the generation 5 pump as far as we're aware which is the same as the X 62 is presently using and the m22 again will detail once we know more about it and just as a bit of a downer we have some memory pricing news for you at the beginning of 2018 there were reports suggesting that meant prices should start declining sometime relatively soon in a new report from digit times prices are speculated to rise sorry five to ten percent in the first half of 2018 with increased demand from data center and smartphone market segments additionally Goldman Sachs reinforced the suspected DRAM price trended a note to investors and the company also noted that supply appears to remain constrained and that 32-gigabyte server modules being priced at 310 to $315 are up from about $300 back in January overall this echo is the most recent DRAM exchange forecast which expects DRAM supplies to remain tight with strong demand as well as expecting to UM revenue to increase by more than 30 percent in 2018 reaching 96 billion dollars all the big players that would be Samsung Hynix and micron are planning on ramping up DRAM output for 2018 and 2019 with 2017 being a historic year for DRAM prices and growth an infusion of new memory supply to the market could offset the high prices to an extent but not the high demand for perspective our writer who worked on this particular story Eric Hamilton purchased a g.skill Trident Z 16 gigabyte ddr4 kit 3200 megahertz in March of 2016 two years ago now for $99 the same kit today is sold for 211 dollars so a good investment if you're looking to sell additionally we did publish a brief history on Ram prices recently from 2011 to 2018 if you're interested in more examples of this and the trajectory of the market we have a content piece for you on the channel and finally just sort of a mini review from us we're not sure what we're planning to do with chairs but gaming chairs are certainly one of the more important parts of a set up it's just hard to cover them if you have requests let us know what we'll do for now though as we recently after CES got a chair from noble in the mail as a review sample and it's a noble icon chair I believe it's a $370 chair and recently not long ago we purchased a office chair that was about the same price so what about comparing the to the icon is not too dissimilar from a lot of the other gaming chairs on the market presently most of the chairs right now use either the same or a very similar supplier for things like the arm rests the 4-dimensional they all call it arm adjustment functionality and the base and the chair materials aren't too different either so for an example verdaguer HyperX corsair thermaltake all those chairs for the suppliers of the components I just listed are more or less the same the noble chair does have a couple of familiar components on it just like those do overall its we're a bit mixed on it so after using it for a few weeks now certainly the body position is better for me in terms of posture than my previous office chair which was a bit too wide but I would like to see some of these gaming chairs start doing slightly more padded if not fully padded arm rests most of them use a harder plastic which if you're working for weight more hours a day then you should be really starts to feel kind of bad on your elbows so I'd like to see that with some of these chairs I'm a mod it and just add some kind of foam to it but beyond that the chair itself was exceptionally easy to assemble which is something that I absolutely hate with buying any chairs when they take forever to build it is the same basic assembly process as the verdict your chairs we've had except that has a few more screws pre-installed once you're using it the comfort is extremely subjective but it's better than our office chair we purchased that I can't recall a name of and it's really not that different from the verdict your SL mm tray that we have so if you like those Nobles kind of in the same bracket in terms of how it feels to use it is a vinyl or a fake leather chair you can get a real leather version if you're really serious about I guess racing style seating the pillow material they selected for it is great as a foam it is pretty comfortable actually the pillow positioning is a bit odd because the lower pillow doesn't have a means to lock into place anywhere so you more or less just kind of like wedge it into the back of the chair and leave it there and then every time you get up or sit down you have to relocate it or just give up and sit on top of the pillow so that could be improved but the pillow itself is actually pretty good compared to some of the verdaguer ones we've used which are mostly annoying because of the fake leather wrap around all of them so yeah I'm not too sure what we can do with chair related content it is an important and extremely important part of the set up but it's one that we're looking for your feedback on what do you want to see if we made a video about gaming chairs gaming chairs versus perhaps standard office chairs what would you want to see in the lineup and what would you like compared or remarks about between them as far as the noble chair the icon overall I certainly prefer it's we'll call it ergonomics and body position to my previous chairs it's definitely a bit better for for the way I mean the way I sit there forever it's better for my back I do really want to see cushioned arm dress so that's big for me and it seems like no one makes it so I would say mostly positive with some pretty major criticisms that apply to basically all gaming chairs on the market so noble if you're watching the way to really stand out from your competitors is be the only chair company that makes gaming chairs that chooses a different supplier and I know that's probably pretty hard but hopefully you can do it because I'd like to see someone differ from the rest of the pack making the same chair so that's it for this one as always you can subscribe for more go to patreon.com/scishow to do a comment let us know what you want to see for charity do like one video and that's it so let me know because I want it to be kind of a an end-all be-all for us so we can focus on the other content story i Kara's axis dotnet to back order one of our mod mats they will begin shipping the second round by end of this month or early April so pretty soon our first round sold out basically instantly so backward or now if you want one thanks for watching I'll see you all next time you