Gadgetory

everything just works everything just works everything just works I was being sarcastic a Swiss Army knife and it hopefully has it says screwdriver in it hopefully has extra fiber in it for this this video is brought to you by us and the disappointment PC t-shirt a great way to support gamers Nexus n to commemorate a year of despair as to wear a constant reminder of your disappointment the GN disappointment t-shirt features release dates for major milestones like spectra and meltdown the cts labs report and RAM prices accompanied by an artefact of design that matches the infamous XD failure mode on new video cards the shirts are high-quality fabrics and prints and are available in soft 100% cotton for a comfortable fit or available in a popular try blood visit store gamers nexus net or click the link below to grab one now starting at $19.99 it's not just the worst parts of the year anywhere you may have seen our disappointment PC build last year the 2017 that was the first one and now it's gonna be a regular thing because part of the stuff we deal with on a daily basis is in fact disappointing and that's okay there's a lot of really positive stuff from this year to and we've talked about that for example in our best case is 2018 best CPUs 2018 stuff like that there's plenty of good stuff but it's also fun to reflect on just some of the the most either out there or just totally bad products and events of the year and look back on it now that we're at the end of 2018 and see what we might have in store for 2019 get some perspective as for the script for this one I barely need a script because as you saw on our new shirt in the ad which is on the store on store 2 Kieran's exit now if you don't pick it up we have a timeline almost in concert tour style of all of the Hijaz the most disappointing aspects of 2018 the computer hardware world and so I mean some of those here spectre and meltdown that was a pretty big one cryptocurrency mining was big Final Fantasy 15 s benchmarks were big all of that stuff but the most important thing here is the PC that you saw in the intro this PC is a collection of the most downer moments that we could muster into a single build this is our actual disappointment build or well it was but we had to send the case back because it was that disappointing but we still tested the build as is the most disappointed parts of the year are all in this system there are some unfortunate casualty is like Corsair of course there didn't do anything wrong here we did have to use a cooler of some kind and we didn't have any particularly upsetting 20:18 coolers and we didn't want to unnecessarily stifle the 99 80 XE beyond what it already does to itself so each one hundred I notwithstanding the rest of these things pretty disappointing and we'll walk through the rest of those parts today as for everything leading up to this final ensemble of disappointment let's do a rewind of bad phrasing let's look back at what we dealt with so in January we learned about Spector and meltdown which I've proliferated into more variants since then Spector and meltdown had such an impact on the industry that Intel's at latest 10 nanometer announcements that they disclosed just recently specifically noted in Silicon Harbor mitigations for those vulnerabilities showing that there is some dictation of aspects of CPU design based upon this single event of spectra and meltdown being unveiled and for Intel that was a bit earlier than the rest of us cryptocurrency mining also blew up big this year regardless of your views on mining or cryptocurrencies in general it remains true for several months that new GPUs were difficult to find particularly at reasonable prices and knew their meaning not used we blew the lid open on Final Fantasy 15 s benchmark after that and we saw innumerable flaws in the February launch of the benchmark including a lack of object choline and LOD scaling for hair works elements that heavily affected results these are things that were being rendered miles away that we confirmed with render doc Ansel and other tools but that soon was outdone by the vacuum adds we'll just blow past that one GPP came after that CTS labs their report you should check that video out that we did if you didn't see it the GT 1030 ddr4 launch Ram price is going up and then the silent death of Z 490 at Computex there was also and that was an AMD part by the way there's also a 28 core CPU under a chiller and that doesn't need a reminder and of course the launch of our TX a lot happened this year and we decided to combine some of those most noteworthy elements would into a single PC which has since vaporized because it exceeded the amount of the maximum atomic density of disappointment in one square area so we're left with these two parts which is the 92 XE and 2080 not the TI specifically with the case having gone back because that whole system is being replaced already funded depending so for the system the most critical things here to talk about the r-tx 2080 we deemed more disappointing than the 2080 ti the 2080 ti actually performance wise it does its job it's the new best so it's always hard to argue against the best because even with the prices it's still the best so it's got some high ground there that can hold the 2080 though it launched and it just it was it was disappointing plain and simple it lacked any significant improvement over the 1080 TI and yet the price was almost always higher at launch and that's changed now that the 1080 TI is more or less impossible to purchase but it was one of the bigger let downs of the year the CPU is an Intel I 999 ATX II and we chose that because it barely did anything over the existing 79 80 XE in fact it was barely deserving of a review that's how little chains on this high end part so for enthusiasts the 99 80 XE is worse than the 79 80 XE because if you can deal it you can do liquid metal or something like that it's just better to buy the 79 80 XE and go that route as for the case the case was Walmart's now-famous overpowered PC case the dtw enclosure which there's a lot of content on that we did a full review of the case on its own we'll recap some of that here but the biggest thing is that it's got a total of 4 millimeters of space thereabouts between the front panel and the chassis thereby choking the entire PC into oblivion so that was disappointing as well and we'll talk about each of these elements individually but let's start with the RT X 2080 it is definitely the most iconic launch of at least the second half if not the entire year because there's been nothing NVIDIA has been riding on Pascal for a long time they've done really well to optimize it but everyone was waiting for this launch and we ended up with well you know what we ended up with at this point the RT X 2080 was just a week launch from Nvidia that's all there was to it CEO Jensen Haun seemed off in his presentation struggling to convey why ray-tracing is important and often default into simple phrases like it just works or it's beautiful to the extent that there is a compilation on YouTube of him saying everything just works everything just works everything just works everything just works computer graphics basically works and yet for ray-tracing it just works everything just works global elimination just works ambient occlusion just works for ten hours what NVIDIA has accomplished is a massive technical feat for sure and real-time rate racing is absolutely an admirable goal but you really only get one shot with consumers before they write off an entire already existing technology as quote BS as we've seen in some of the comments that's sort of tragic with our TX based on comments alone a lot of consumers weren't even aware that rate racing is already a thing and so now we see regular comments about how and I'm quoting here rate racing is a scam end quote just for reference we use rate racing in our own intro animation and outro animation it's used daily in CGI films Pixar films things like that it's just that the real-time implementation is key and Nvidia bashed it to a point to even tarnish the idea of rate racing that's how poorly the RDX launch went over and how poorly their education effort was on informing the audience of what rate racing is and what the distinction is versus real-time at the Nvidia editors day for RT X there's actually one of the best technical deep dives that we've had from a company so and video gets huge credit they're the architects the power design team the cooler design team they all did a good job of talking to the product to the editors that would be people like us unfortunately they also spent a lot of time several hours in fact two to three hours talking about these games that would support our TX a huge amount of this presentation was predicated on addressing the obvious concern that Nvidia knew we would all have in the media of ok cool RT X's is cool sure but what supports it what is going to support this thing because if you have all this tech in here but on the software side no one does anything what good is it and vidi is not a dumb company they knew that we would all be pressing that angle and so to address it preemptively and video cued up I don't know how many games but it was a lot of them back to back to back of developers talking about how r-tx just works how it's great to work with how it's easy to implement and how their game will have RTX so don't worry there will be games that support r-tx and then 50 days went past past the launch of the product so you have 50 51 52 days somewhere around there before an r-tx implementation came to be that's a problem all the marketing hype is gone its eradicated and it replaced instead with skepticism from users who are now upset that the product is expensive is not meaningfully except for the TI not the 2080 not meaningfully outperforming the old products and the one that does outperform the oil products is significantly more expensive so you have an upset user base and a delayed launch of a key feature that is literally the namesake of the product RTX so that set everyone up for disappointment the first title that did support RT acts as late as it was was battlefield and it runs barely at 1080p on a 2080 with RT Exxon and all the other settings pretty high or maxed sure they've issued a lot of changes to that one game dice and end video working alongside each other but it's that first impression that really counts Nvidia had its biggest misstep in years with one of the most important launches that it could encounter a misstep on this has been a period where Andy could not respond making it seem like a no-lose situation but Nvidia still managed to lose it took a brand credibility hit that will haunt it at its next major technology unveil even if this doesn't impact the bottom line much today seen as high-end users still only really have one option and everyone else bought 10 80s anyway and that's still Nvidia it does impact the skepticism and openness expressed towards Nvidia's future announcements so this matters this will have a lasting effect everyone was ready for new cards it should have been a clean sweep for Nvidia but they just botched every single aspect of the launch except for again that technical side of the editors day was it was great but there needs to be more than that there's a very off presentation by a normally OnPoint CEO at Nvidia the presentation alone incited skepticism largely by doing weird and sort of shady things but maybe not well it was probably intentional but they did things like comparing r-tx effects against just flat shaded objects without any of the standard global illumination or standard lighting effects applied at all instead of a comparison against modern graphics tricks because all computer graphics involves tricking the user into thinking it's good enough and video compared instead it's r-tx options versus no effort flat shaded 3d objects with no lighting effects with no traditional game tricks to make that scene look believable or i mean you can fake things like caustics you can fake things like again global illumination but instead of doing that Nvidia completely changed the lighting and some of their side-by-side comparisons added in large area lights new lights on the walls defeated the purpose of illustrating how global illumination works and ended up with a demonstration that is basically the equivalent of an infomercial where you have a desaturated photograph of someone who's frowning versus a vibrant photograph of someone who's happy that's what you're looking at it is not a fair comparison and we talked about all this in our initial review and some post announcement follow-up materials that you should definitely check out if you haven't so we'll stop here before repeating everything again the point is and video walked away from its announcement looking like it didn't even know how its own technology worked it looked like it didn't understand what was going on and you have the CEO up on stage who at a loss for words defaults to it's beautiful it just works and the irony of course was that you end up then with things like artifacting but that's all stuff we've talked about so Nvidia walks away looking looking bad this time they're limping a bit the launch made things look even worse it knocked some of the some of the wind out of the sails Nvidia otherwise an unstoppable juggernaut the last few years has been knocked down a few pegs now and the factions standing within the community has taken a hit as a result of this launched the 99 80 XE up next was easily among the next most disappointing parts this year with the 9900 K at least there was real movement in the product stack Intel did something meaningful and different the 99 ad XE however added solder and boosted stock frequencies but that was it until did not make any other changes to the product and ended up making it worse for enthusiasts as a result of soldering it ironically enough so if we're out of the box users those who never make any changes it's a bit of an upgrade over the 790 DX e and at the same price sure it might be better for those people the trouble is that the core to core thermal Delta on the 1990 DX e was tremendous as we saw in early benchmarks that we did and deal it in a 79 AD XE normalized that Delta in ways that significantly improve overclocking Headroom with CPU overclocking and these are advertised strongly as unlocked parts I'll remind you what CPU overclock and you're constrained by the hottest core and running one core 30 degrees hotter than the coldest set of all the other cores limits headroom significantly the 99 ATX II did that whereas the 790 DX II offers an enthusiast and easier product to work with when considering delayed options you just straight shouldn't deal it in 99 ATX II it's too dangerous even ignoring all this it was just plain boring the launch wasn't that exciting the 9900 K launch definitely was a it's it's not like what we're expecting from maybe sunny Cove in terms of excitement or isolate as you may call it the collection of everything but the night I heard Kay was was still a definitive winner in some performance and most performance categories just about all of them but it lost in the pricing segment when comparing strictly to the most obvious choice would be something like a 2700 X or maybe low on thread Ripper so either way 900k it won some it lost some and it advanced the product portfolio for Intel in a meaningful way that was a good launch even though it was plagued with with just I mean when did that even happen plagued with things like principled technologies benchmarks and other controversies which that was October 9th by the way it's on the it's on the shirt there but even that notwithstanding these controversies around the 900k of which there were many that we reported on the product itself has a place in the market the 99 80 XE barely has a place in the market and really shouldn't exist because ultimately it's a relaunch of the same product from one year ago that has solder added to it and it's like it's a little bit faster stock so kind of a letdown there we were hoping for more but that's the nature of everything being delayed hopefully they improve going forward and then we have Walmart system so the dzw series we need to beat this into the ground any further than it already has been but the point here is to reiterate something that we haven't had enough chance to really talk about which is that Walmart was in a very key and interesting strategic position to brain PC gaming hopefully an affordable competitive price to a market that is otherwise completely oblivious to what PC gaming is the target audience for the dtw systems they don't know who we are they know they might not know who Linus tech tips is these are people who who are probably parents of kids who play fortnight or pub G or whose friends do and they want a gaming PC to do the same that's the target audience and keeping that target audience in mind you have an oblivious customer who is going into a store to hopefully pick up a system to make someone happy and the system that Walmart came up with through their partners which would be East sports arena and making the brand overpowered jointly as we understand it in the system that Walmart came up with is just bad the prices have dropped considerably you're welcome but it's still it's still just it's not a good collection of parts they're using an 8 through 10 motherboard with like a 1080 and 8700 single single dim per channel memory set up with the h3 10 motherboard and I don't know the power supply was probably the most redeeming part of the build other than the silicon which Walmart has no no real and what else are they gonna put in there Celeron that would be worse but the disappointing part about the Walmart system was strictly that it was an opportunity to really reach a wider market as PC gaming has this incredible advantage of growing right now PC gaming it kind of it's like a sine wave you get a bit of a growth in between console cycles and then you might have a bit of a dip when the new consoles come out and right now we're at the peak of that wave of growth PC gaming is very healthy especially in the enthusiast space games again like fortnight and pub G are helping tremendously to grow the PC gaming community and this helps all of us it benefits everyone rising tide raises all votes as it maybe so while I just totally botched that is is the unfortunate part because they had an opportunity and they did everything wrong and it's going to turn people away from PC gaming who otherwise might not have really thought too hard about getting into it to begin with you sometimes you just want to buy something and use it you don't need to be an expert on it so that was a bit of a letdown and then finally we had some aha some media examples of disappointment from this year that were in the intro clip but I will leave the host of the hair you can watch that again if you want to pick up on those but yeah that's that's the that's a disappointment build so it's been a fun year though we've really enjoyed working on everything we worked on this year this video is of course fun and different for us we'll do another one but hopefully not till 2020 that's not gonna happen it's gonna be 2019 we'll do another one in about a year from now so keep an eye out for that otherwise keep an eye out for all of our CES coverage coming up soon hopefully we'll have some really interesting and fun stuff to counter all the disappointing stuff for the year that you can look forward to and maybe picking up some some new products after CES we'll see if anything's good though so subscribe to the channel if you haven't already you go to store that gamers nexus net to pick up our disappointment tour shirt which I'll just walk you through it briefly if you didn't notice there's artifacting everywhere so that's kind of key and then we've got the dates and the major disappointing events and we also have artifacting on the front with some video card silhouettes that we made so is of course the reference to a bit of everything from the year just kind of fun you can pick it up on store to kyndra's XS net and we're not gonna I don't know we're we're not gonna sell this one forever because it's labeled 2018 but we've got tri-blend and cotton up there if you're interested in either pick it up thank you for watching as always check out our upcoming content for hopefully some more uplifting stuff although hopefully you got a lot from this one and I'll see you all next time