Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unbox it's time for the June Q&A we've got plenty of questions lined up so I think we should probably just get into them okay first question will we see a drop in RAM prices after the 8 billion dollar scandal about price fixing I'll let you handle that one Tim yeah I've sort of been vaguely following this one I think that eight billion dollar figure at the MoMA is only really a theoretical maximum amount for what they can find them so it's not clear what amount they'll actually be fined and even if they'll be found guilty at all and I'm you know usually these things there's appeals and all that sort of process so hopefully they'll scare many factors into increasing supply for especially consumer DRM and make prices go down but you know it's always hard to save these sort of things especially when it comes to energy trust stuff yeah we'll just have to wait and see all right I'll read this next question out and we'll get Tim to answer again because it's again about the the eight billion dollar fine for the DRAM price-fixing since your answer the last one you can handle this one as well basically the question goes who will the money go to and will this impact those that have already bought memory at a higher price so they give the GTX 970 as an example there so will they be refunded money assumes what they're asking them yeah and I think generally with these sort of price fixing things in government investigations it doesn't go back to the consumers it definitely goes straight to the government so the government I think in this case the Chinese government will be getting a nice payday there usually if you want to get your money back you have to like class-action sue them which I was the case with the 970 yeah people got together and sued them then NVIDIA was forced to give the money back so yeah I think there is a class action suit happening for the DRAM stuff but definitely this investigation will have nothing to do with people getting their money back yeah unfortunately it always ends up being more trouble that's worth for the general consumer okay so you have a question here on broken components have you ever encountered a PC component damage slash broken due to static electricity do you take precautions against this happening yourself seems to me opinions are split on the merits of static protection especially on the wristbands what do you reckon uh well we we don't really have much hardware that gets broken anyway and definitely nothing that I could say was judo static electricity yeah yeah so I would say well we don't we don't take any precautions so it's fair to say it's really not practical when you're showing a motherboard on camera we're holding something or a stick of memories just doesn't really work that well it doesn't really make sense for what we're doing because we haven't paid for the hardware and in my opinion you have you'd be very unlucky would you say yeah very um yeah so I don't think it's a big deal having said that if you'd paid me to build a computer for you and it was your hardware that I was dealing with then yes we would take some safety precautions just out of respect for your stuff but for my own stuff I'm willing to take the risk because it's just yeah a lot easier to do our job that's a good question here on the expectations on future tech in general et gddr5 on newer platforms is ddr5 near and will it affect the state of risings compatibility promises what would you like to see from future hardware CPUs GPS also storage chassis all that sort of thing hmm okay I'll start with that one I don't think we're expecting mainstream support for ddr5 for quite a few years yet so it's exciting stuff but it's probably going to be a few years before we're really benchmarking with it and seeing it used regularly so it'll be great for rise and I think it'll probably help solve a lot of problems there and I think compatibility be quite good because rise it'll be established and it won't be like the whole starting from scratch with ddr4 as what we really want to see I think at the moment it's fair to say we really want to see new GPU technology so we're sort of hanging out for that from Nvidia and AMD so I think that'll be exciting in particular next year and well hopefully that ends up arriving before before ddr5 does because like says that'll be a few years away we should have some new GPUs in that time oh and as for storage and cases that stuff doesn't really excite us too much on the channel high speed storage is always great but it's often hard to show the advantage of that for gamers so don't get too excited about that in cases don't really excite us too much either so again it's really the GPUs and cpu's we're keen to benchmark any new GPS or CPUs that come our way okay next question pretty simple one here why don't we review our audio cards so those sound cards basically I have no personal interest or really expertise in audio and sound cards so don't really care to be testing them out and I think the main reason I haven't got into the more excited about them is because I think most of you guys feel the same way as well I'd say most of our audience doesn't really care about reviews on sound cards and probably most of you guys don't use them and it seems to be a split thing people either swear by having a sound card or just say that's rubbish waste of money I'm happy with on board they're certainly good but you have to want to knit you we have to have a one for what I suppose or one need yeah a bit of an itch thing these days over thought I would have thought so so okay next question that same as many game developers have been hesitant to fully embrace DirectX 12 even threes into its release is this due to the requirement for Windows 10 or the overwhelming amount of people who dislike that OS and a store on Windows 7 if so do you think DirectX 12 will ever be made backwards compatible for 7 and Windows 7 sorry and how about future DirectX releases yeah I'm not sure there's overwhelming dislike for Windows 10 both of us use it and finally that's fine and you know according to the steam highway survey more than half of all game is running Windows 10 and only 35 percent of gamers actually have a DirectX 12 compatible GPU but aren't running Windows 10 ok it's probably pretty interesting that made that decision but that's for them I guess but the actual reason we aren't seeing more dx12 games it's much more complex to code for dx12 cuz it's much closer to the metal you need have a lot more expertise to use the API compared to DirectX 11 so I don't really think the you know restriction of Windows 10 is holding developers back it's just it's more complex and a lot of engines that are currently being used is still sort of similar to the DirectX 11 era so yeah I think once we start seeing more game engines getting refreshed we'll start to see more DirectX 12 as we're porting it back to Windows 7 I don't think Microsoft has any incentive at all to do that definitely won't happen so probably what happened and all future direct exes as well I think will be you know restricted to whatever is the latest generation OS so ya can't see Microsoft doing that okay next question do you think with the nanometer advancements of AMD will there be a grand shift in market share consumer and enterprise yeah it's not really AMD that are specifically making the process advancements that's more TSM saying I think specifically Global Foundries for AMD but if only you know if they can get good gains out of seven nanometer Intel if they continue to struggle with their 10 nanometer and lower until definitely struggle to compete on you know performance and power consumption with their new chips so that could bring about a shift in market share in both segments for AMD in their favor but you know it's it's hard to say what'll happen there with both those countries you know Intel could come out and suddenly have a working 10 nanometer and they'll be competition again and Amy's also doing other cool stuff you know with multi die technology so yeah I think that it'll definitely even up in terms of market share but will there be a big shift it's always hard to say I have to say short term I think it's definitely going to be advantage AMD by the sounds of it yeah but beyond that yes alright this is a good question for you Steve does GPU power really matter these days for gaming considering you can lower the settings and have a decent gameplay experience even with the GTX 1050 okay well yeah I don't think anything's really change that you've always been at a lower the quality settings so that's not something new although not a game developer I imagine they basically have a look at the hardware that's available at the time of releasing their game and through the development process and they'll make that game designed for that hardware so you're ultra type quality settings will be for your GT X 1080 T eyes to ten eighties in Vegas 60 for the high quality settings will work on your mid-range cards the 1060 DRX 580 and then you sort of medium to lower settings will work on your GT x 1050 as you've said so nothing really different there there's just games are designed to scale across a wide range of PC hardware all right next question what's better for a college student in dorms a gaming laptop or desktop it's my first time getting a PC and getting a dorm congratulations I'm not sure which is better for the situation yeah I mean I haven't used a lot of gaming laptops are white gaming laptops but if you're on a budget gaming desktops they're almost always more cost effective in terms of you know getting performance for your dollar and of course you can upgrade them so you can choose to you know put in a really budget especially AMD CPU and then you know continue to upgrade that as you go and you can make them pretty compact as well with so yeah your mini systems so unless you want to specifically play multiple games in multiple locations like you know in your dorm and then in your lecture theater when you're not paying attention I think the desktop is is the way better choice absolutely yeah it's pretty simple that one if you need the gaming system to be portable yeah and it has to move around with you whether you want to use it on the train or whatever then you have to get a laptop but if the laptop is pretty much gonna sit in your dorm room just to play games on then you're far better off with a desktop PC yep so it's really simple all right what does Tim and Steve do to wind down after a long day unboxing the benchmark good question I personally usually go to bed okay yeah yeah getting a bit too old for it now I am when I've finished up I usually go spend some talk my family I've got two young girls so go play with them and then I go to bed yeah I just I don't have kids so I'm unlucky good idea yeah no one to bother me when I'm finished my benchmarking so I just sit around watch TV play some games build some logo yeah build some Lego all that fun stuff so yeah then I go to bed probably a bit later than you cuz your old man who's got a hard life okay next question I like this one did the dislikes on the joke 20/80 video affect the channel at all well oh yeah we'll find out in a few days for sure once we get the detailed stats from YouTube but the not really at this point I think the YouTube algorithm doesn't really take into account likes and dislikes all that much compared to at least a few other metrics that we know of so we probably did lose a you subscribers who didn't get the joke video and we've been annoyed at our clickbait but you know overall we had a fairly normal day in terms of you know subscribers and we got good traffic on the video so it's where I was where concern obviously it's always disappointing to get a video that has the most dislikes ever but really in terms of our traffic and everything I don't think I'll have too much of an impact no I'm not too concerned about it it didn't come off probably as well as we were hoping it would but it probably came off as well as we thought it might yeah we knew they were gonna be lots of dislikes yeah yeah we knew it probably wouldn't be that well-received but the patreon members were really pushing us to do it and we thought it was funny I had fun making the video and I thought it was quite funny and I also thought that for and I think this is probably true for our core audience most of our subscribers the thumbnail probably gave away that it wasn't a serious video and the title even the original title was quite silly even just ten seconds into the video and ten seconds in when you know I said welcome back to Hardware fabricated out of thin air I thought that was probably going to set a few people off and then I think it was probably only about thirty seconds after that I said we got all this information from a booth babe that whispered it in Tim's here I thought by that point it would have been crystal clear but apparently not so anyway we had fun making it don't really regret it still it's not a lot of dislikes but it's still got a lot of likes so yeah you probably when you do a video out for a bit of fun you're always going to upset a few people that sort of seem to upset all the people that love the rumors that really wanted legit info from us sorry guys it's not something we're gonna make a habit of yeah yeah okay this is this is a really interesting question I think every time there's a new arm process from Qualcomm or Apple massive performance gains advertised how do they manage to make so much progress in a few months are these performance claims fabricated with special benchmarks why aren't x86 based processes development on pace anywhere near that of arm processes so yeah really interesting question there's a couple of reasons for it and I don't really think it's due to special benchmarks or cheating or anything like that it's just simply down to ARM processors are a lot more simple compared to x86 in terms of their architecture and there's a lot of performance tricks in x86 has been developed over the years that haven't yet made the transition to arm even now things like boost clocks are not really a thing with ARM processors so with each new ARM processor they're sort of adding in some of these things from x86 and the lessons learned with other architectures to sort of improve performance and and on top of that you know arm processes are benefiting a lot from new process technologies that are specific to low-power chips so things that wouldn't be suitable for you know Intel AMD you know high-power CPUs things like Samsung 10 nanometer for example so they're often accessing those new nodes and on top of that they're adding an extra tricks each time making the CPU cores wider and doing all that sort of thing x86 is probably a bit closer to being tapped out in terms of in terms of its like performance tricks and different things they can do it's mostly just you know clock speeds and cause at this point so yeah that's why I think x86 is a bit slower and we seem to see you know 30 percent each generation with arm which is certainly very impressive hmm all right another question here what games you guys play in your spare time if any yeah when we have some time yeah if any there keywords there well I used to play a lot of Starcraft 2 which I know quite a few of you are aware of now and I really enjoyed that game playing that quite seriously but I haven't opened up Starcraft 2 now for at least six months I've been playing the odd game here and there I played a little bit of fortnight had a lot of fun with that that's a pretty cool game but you never really got a handle on how to play that one really well I've I'm gonna play battlefield 5 when that comes out I've been playing a little bit of overwatch lately I always enjoy overwatch I keep coming back to that one so I've got into it a bit more recently than I have so in the past but yeah that's a good one but sadly between benchmarks and whatnot and doing the channel is not a lot of time for gaming as we sort of alluded to at the start of this question so yeah what about YouTube yeah I'm I'm enjoy like the multiplayer games like Starcraft and not as much into like 49 overwatch I play a bit but more into you sort of battlefield so definitely battlefield 5 comes Arial we're getting some matches together yeah things like stars battlefront - all that sort of games that play there is but sort of like the single-player games like your role playing games just sort of Assassin's Creed type games okay so yeah I tend to just smash some of those out it's a lot of fun just to sit there and play some single-player games just to decompress after some work so yeah it's not bad but again you know not that much time to do it so now squeezing in here and there yeah that's good to take a bit of a break and have a bit of a gaming session but gone are the days of the the 10-hour gaming session I said like a weekend day for free or something that okay we're gonna hit pause on the Q&A for now we've had a good amount of questions answered there I think and we'll pick this up again probably tomorrow depends on when to answer this I'll get to me to edit it and yeah we'll see how he goes but anyway don't forget to hit like subscribe do all that stuff and we will see you again another QA really soon