Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unbox today I'm discussing what I feel with the worst CPU and GPU purchases of 2018 now some of these products should have never existed now somewhere just a bit pointless and others made promises that they didn't fulfill but before we get to that a very quick ad from today's video sponsor Corsair and the new hydro series H 115 I RGB platinum all in one liquid cooler this is course as best ever liquid cooler both in terms of performance and aesthetics the 280 millimeter radiator is cooled by 2 ml Pro RGB 140 millimeter fans capable of spinning and up to 2,000 rpm the cold plate and pump design have been optimized for greater performance while the upgraded RGB lighting on the pump head looks incredible and using the IQ software can be synced up to match your bill for more information please check the link in the video description ok so I'm not gonna mess around let's get right into it with the worst GPU product released this year possibly ever a back in July we got our hands on the ddr4 version of the geforce GT 1030 and boy oh boy what a heap of garbage that thing was it's one thing to try and release a really really crappy product and try to flog it off but it's a completely different thing to pull a bait-and-switch on your customers in video are basically committing fraud in my opinion with the GT 1030 ddr4 and I'm quite surprised more media outlets didn't make a fuss about this one one big youtuber even blamed the consumers claiming that if you're dumb enough to buy a brand-new entry-level graphics card then well it serves you right anyway for those of you who missed the drama and video released to the GT 1030 back in May of 2017 and it was a pretty weak entry-level offering but it was good enough to play titles such as rocket league fortnight and csgo for example at a respectable resolution such as 1080p basically if you're a parent who isn't massively into computers and you want to buy something cheap for a little Billy to play fort now with these buddies then a $70 GT 1030 will fit the bill nicely the problem is as of March 2018 little Billy could end up with a GT 10 D that will average 66 fps and fortnight or one that'll average less than 40 fps and they have the same name they look the same and they're the same price what happened here was in video quietly introduced a ddr4 version in March that had 65% less bandwidth than the original ddr5 model sixteen point eight gigabytes per second of bandwidth down from 48 gigabytes per second so unless you knew what to look out for you'd be none the wiser and even tech-savvy users got caught out as they didn't even know there were two models so didn't bother to check the memory type just assuming they're all gddr5 as they had been for ten months after the initial release oh and before moving on there is something that I would like to just make crystal clear this isn't on invidious board partners they can't create a graphics card that's out of spec out of Nvidia spec I many argued with us that this was on Galax as we used a Galax ddr4 version of the GT 1030 for testing or it would be on anyone else who made a ddr4 version of the GT 1030 but guys that's not how this industry works in video calls all the shots and if you don't comply with their demands you get cut off and for most of these AI bees that would be a death sentence Nvidia created the ddr4 version of the GT 1030 and they are pretty much entirely responsible for screwing over the poorest and often most vulnerable PC gamers from one disgusting anti-consumer act to the next the good guys also play dirty in 2018 now before getting into this one I'll just say that I'm not interested in arguing about which one was worse who was more naughty in videos GT 1030 DDR full version or AMD's rx 580 that's really an Rx 570 I seriously don't have time for fanboys defending either company's actions especially when they've done something this anti-consumer and you honestly just become as much of a problem when you defender these dodgy products at least in my opinion now I have no doubt that in videos GT 1030 affected more people and in my opinion it is a far worse product but the radio rx 580 2048 SP is still garbage it's a rare anti-consumer move by AMD and what we have to let them know that we won't stand for it basically what AMD did here was take the RX 570 GPU and then rebrand it as an RX 580 2048 SP so they're basically calling in irx 570 and rx 580 and well that's just a flat-out lie at least AMD did slightly change the name or at least they added to it but still the prime name very much suggests to buyers that this is an RX 580 and might not be any different to any other rx 580 maybe the seller just added 2048 SP to make it sound more fancy let's be honest how many buyers even know what 2048 SP means and how many of them know that the RX 580 is meant to have 2,304 SPS or stream processors now you could argue these models are only being sold in China but I don't know why you would last I checked Chinese consumers are still people they work for their money and ripping them off is no different to ripping anyone else off also if you hop on eBay and search for new RX 5 80s on the first page you will be met with a 2048 SP model and around the same price as the fully fledged 2,304 SP models granted they are only being sold under Chinese brands but it's still possible to get your hands on one and sellers can get away with calling them RX 5 80s if they choose to and if caught out you don't really have a leg to stand on so we strongly feel that aim they need to be called out on this one and hopefully we won't see this kind of crap again though I did say that after they accidentally called an Rx 460 and rx 560 well maybe AMD can work they're naming schemes out in 2019 fingers crossed next up we have the Intel skylake X refresh one of the biggest snooze fest of 2018 earlier in the year at the Computex trade show the Battle of the cause was in full swing but while Intel was well I think Tim put it there in fantasy land with their 5 gigahertz 28 core a chiller type CPU aimed he was actually showing off well an actual real product that they released I think it was just a month later we still haven't received the 28 core monstrosity from Intel that requires a completely different socket and likely a motherboard that cost more than an ITX graphics card so I guess we have that to look forward to what we did get was a range of new 9th gen high-end desktop processors and apparently they're so good Intel was able to skip the 8th gen models the only problem is they aren't that good and they don't even deserve the 8th gen branding let alone the 9th gen these are just the same old 7th gen Scylla hex parts but with a soldered Tim that actually manages to make them worse at least for extreme users you know the kind of users that they're targeted at the core I $9.99 ATX II for example the 1980 dollar model yeah it's only $20 cheaper than the 79 80 XE but I'll get to that in a moment the 99 80 XE runs so hot when I overclocked it can't actually be overclocked as far as a deal it in 79 80 XE and you can't delete the 99 ad XE without destroying it so that means enthusiastic buying the older 79 80 XE and do what enthusiasts avoids done with Intel CPUs at least for a few years now and that is delayed them all that aside the biggest issue is the pricing Intel still in la-la land when it comes to pricing or maybe it's the consumers as Intel still seems to be moving what they can make anyway anyone willing to properly evaluate their options will seriously question why they would spend so much more on ask I like X refresh CPU when they have what are arguably better options from AMD at much cheaper prices right now the thread route for 2950 X cost $900 us while the 1950s can be had for an unbelievably low $600 us then on the other side of the fence we have Intel's 16 core a 32 thread 99 60 X and that costs 16 hundred and $85 us so just shall I have $1,700 us on that one so in short Intel recycled their CPUs and even their pricing from 2017 and it has to be said back then they weren't really competitive at least in my opinion so the new skylake X refresh parts really are pointless and I'd say worse than that they're actually a really bad Buy okay so I suspect almost all of us certainly the vast majority will agree that invidious ddr4 stunts with the GT 1030 was bad AMD's choice to release an Rx 570 under the RX 580 branding should be frowned upon and Intel skylake X refresh is extremely disappointing and represents a very poor value where I feel quite a few of you will be divided is on this nomination the nvidia geforce r-tx 2070 and 2080 some of the worst GPU purchases of 2018 so let me try and clarify a few things here at the MSRP switch a few models are selling at the 2070 and 2080 aren't bad buys certainly not the most exciting products to be released this year but for the most part they're a little faster than the outgoing pascal parts and are now available at the same price but even so two and a bit years later that's not exactly progress but I suppose with AMD nowhere to be seen it's hard to bash Nvidia for giving us almost nothing extra frankly though we could take them or leave them not really fussed one way or the other personally I would have been just as happy if Nvidia went on selling Pascal and a slightly discounted price the problem I have with these new r-tx GPUs is that initially they sold for at least $100 us over the MSRP and this made the r-tx 2070 for example 20% more expensive than the 1080 at the time 10 80s were dropping in price summers Louis $430 us so there were some serious bargains to be had and yet many people were actively avoiding them as the newer r-tx models came with the promise of phenomenal ray-traced graphics and big performance gains with dl SS problem is if you paid $600 us for an RT x 2070 you were massively overpaying for GT x 1080 light performance this is because ray tracing basically doesn't work on the RT x 2070 it's just nowhere near powerful enough hell barely works on the 28 e TI then you have DL SS which looks to be just as useless at this point and yes I know battlefield 5 performance has been greatly improved since the initial release but as Tim found it's been achieved by downgrading the game's graphics to enable those gains and ray-tracing still has some serious quality issues and let's not forget that the game support list for ray tracing is also extremely underwhelming in the case of battlefield 5 given what we've seen thus far I'd personally rather just disable it enjoy a 50% performance boost playing on an RT X 2070 at 1080p with an average of about 60 fps just can't be compared to playing at 1440p with over 80 fps ray tracing just isn't worth that kind of performance and resolution downgrade of course ray tracing is an optional feature you don't have to use it but this was the key selling point of the new RT X series and without it well you basically just have a fat Pascal GPU not exactly but sort of and yes we know that ray tracing is the future of gaming but having gamers pay a premium to pave the way for a new feature they can't really enjoy now isn't the best way to go about getting it I'm sure it works for NVIDIA though so in short gamers chomping at the bit for a new graphics card in 2018 or sold a false reality with the Arctic's 2070 and unfortunately some paid a serious premium you could certainly argue that the RTS 2080 was even worse as it was well overpriced very much longer period of time and even today it generally costs more than what you were paying for a GTX 1080i prior to the 28 is release so the 2080 is pretty bad value in that sense but I have honed in on the RT X 2017 given the laughably poor support for ray tracing and that was a technology that was used to heavily promote the product and generate sales so 2018 has been a bit of a frustrating year in the PC hardware space though it has also been quite exciting at some points so while some early adopters have been a bit burnt all those going after bragging rights they've been some great value options as well AMD almost got away with a clean rap sheet in 2018 and had they not released the dodgy rx 580 2048 SP graphics card the Chinese market I would really have nothing bad to say about them they're heavily discounted Rison processes along with the RX 580 and 570 the real RX 580 and 570 they've been big hits this year oh and there's also been some insane for everybody's getting about as well I'm sure some of you will disagree with me calling the RT X 2070 and 2080 into question but I feel NVIDIA has taken advantage of gamers with the new RT x-series particularly the 2017-2018 which really offered nothing over the two-year old Pascal parts they're replacing I was a little tempted to include the RT X 20 ATT I found his Edition simply because of the alarmingly high failure rate and for the way in videos handled this situation but I'm still on the fence about that one and while we did have a 28 e card go all space invaders on us and we get to have an issue with a single RT X 20 atti model granted our sample size has only been a few cards but I think overall your chances of getting a dud a pretty low and it really has to be said that the 20 ATT is just a beast it enables an amazing 4k gaming experience one that we've never seen before at least entails that lack solid SLI support of course there's also now the Titan RT X which is probably the worst value GPU to be released this year but we haven't seen that one yet so we don't really know what it's capable of that we have a pretty good idea of what to expect but anyway I'll hold off till we have some solid data then we have Intel score I $9.99 or K which is a terrible value CPU but also a very powerful CPU so I'm a bit torn on that one the 95 watt TDP spec has caused problems and the principal technology report was dirty preorder tactic from Intel and we certainly don't want to see that repeated all that said the 1900 still a beast and technically a better CPU than the rise in seven 2700 x again world's worse in terms of value but technically a better processor that being the case it's not one of the worst CPUs released in 2018 if it was only as fast as the 2700 X or slower than Shah it certainly would have made this list what probably should have made this list were a number of the Z 390 motherboards in particular the budget models we thought the entire point of the Zed 390 chipset was to signify the boards using it when 99 or okay ready and optimized for the eight core CPU in other words they had a capable vrm with adequate cooling with the exception of gigabytes lineup this wasn't the case and all other brands just rehashed their entry levels and 370 boards and improved margins we saw a horrible vrm throttling on all budget boards from MSI asrock and a soos rendering them pretty much useless for the eight core processor anyway that is going to do it for this one if you liked the video well you know what to do if you dislike the video because you bought an Intel AMD or video product this year then you also know what to do and of course if your opinions differ from mine in any way then feel free to let me know about it in the comment section below and finally if you enjoyed this video consider subscribing if you haven't already and if you appreciate the work during our box then can see that supporting us on patreon thanks for watching I'm yo Steve see you next time you