Gadgetory

what's up guys Jays $0.02 here and I'm gonna do something I haven't really done before and I'm gonna do sort of a year-end recap when it comes to the tech anyways when it comes to the PC genre the PC space because I've done these end of your kind of recaps with my channel but this has been a very interesting year 2018 is one of those years that probably go down in the record books as one of the worst for PC gamers and let me explain why in this video why I say it's the worst although we saw some great innovative tech come out there's some reasons why I think this year is gonna go down in history is one of the worst so hear me out on this I got new merch it's available now Cod me calm /jc sense we got zip up hoodies we got tri-blend we got a new logo I digress since 2012 it's at the wrist logo you guys been asking for that anyway well guys little bit uh we all kinda stuff zip up hoodies beanies polos don't take my word for it cuz obviously I can't do this edie so just look in the description below and you guys will find the link Thanks alright so 2018 I'm probably gonna talk about this a little bit out of order and I'm probably gonna be a bit more scatterbrained it's just a talking head video so do me a favor feel free to minimize this you aren't being inconvenienced by this on your screen I wouldn't want to cause your pixels to do any extra work to render this face okay so 2018 man where to start alright let's go and start with GPUs because if we're talking about PC enthusiasts graphics card they get all the glory right everyone cares about the graphics cards they brag about their graphics cards and this and that well this has been the most expensive year for graphics cards ever there's quite a few reasons for that one lack of competition that's no surprise we've all talked about it before we talked about the dangers of lack of competition years ago a couple years ago we were making videos on this all of us Paul Kyle Linus myself Hardware connects all of us talked about the dangers of having no competition why although we may have preferences and my personal preference obviously is Nvidia I love the performance from Nvidia many of you have a preference of AMD which is perfectly fine but the problem is when you have no competition in that space it affects everybody now the problem is we started off the year with the incredibly spiking price of crypto currencies we had Bitcoin within the last year reaching what $20,000 per coin and people looked at as a quick easy way to get rid they ran out and they bought up the GPUs and stuff not necessary because of Bitcoin because Bitcoin had moved over to ASIC mining where that really you know surpassed what GPUs could do but because of aetherium aetherium was looked at as the next coin that was going to break the market in terms of changing things with digital currencies and stuff so and it did a fantastic job at leveraging the gddr5 found in graphics cards because it was a very memory intensive type of mining so GPUs of all shapes and sizes were getting sold out across the board when Bitcoin was using GPUs the rx4 80 was the card that became extremely difficult to find because that was the sweet spot per like hash rate versus price and it was a complete moneymaker but etherium didn't care what kind of card you had you just had to have the G DDR and as long as you had that you could create these crazy render farms and his mining farms and make stupid amounts of money and everyone was buying into that because aetherium was climbing at a very sharp rate making it look like the next Bitcoin so we saw one hundred two hundred three hundred percent price increases when it came to GPUs and the problem is although the manufacturers claimed they weren't selling direct we had plenty of people involved in the industry telling us that that was a bold-faced lie that they were indeed selling direct to the render farms because they could increase the price versus what they were selling them to their merch or their merchants fixed pricing because he I understand when they sell these GPUs and stuff they have a price a wholesale price but they could up that wholesale price sell direct and make a ton of money which meant the supply chain completely dried up when you finally were seeing graphics cards making their way to new wake Amazon at the time NC NCIX is that it and NCIX yeah I want someone NC is like the TV show yeah I guess that's besides the point when they finally made it to market they were so jacked up in price the man you were paying over a thousand dollars for a GTX 1080 you were paying fifteen hundred plus dollars for a 1080 Ti the problem is people were buying them by the hundreds and you would see these tweets when people driving around all the micro centers and going in there one after another with various people like entire clans of people whining graphics cards at a time and then they would brag about their photos of 200 cards sitting in their living room haha look what we got that was a problem because the card was no longer available for retail availability a supply and demand made the prices go up ridiculously I'm sure someone here watching knows and was probably trying to buy a card during that era which made it seem like man I finally saved six months or a year to build my system and I've got everything I need except a graphics card even the used card market was extremely inflated but the problem with that is we also didn't have competition in the space so once it started to normalize and come back down we then had new graphics card launches coming up unfortunately nothing from AMD this year well we did have the rx 590 which is just a slight increase in improvement and a bit of an architecture change when it came to the RX 580 but a single 590 is not going to change the market last year showed us Vega which unfortunately there were no updates to Vega this year and that mostly being because the project manager for that Rajat Kotori moved to Intel because Intel wants to get into the space and compete against Nvidia but we're far off from that where I can see anything from that in terms of retail availability to probably 2020 at the soonest and that's if it doesn't get pushed back so you have Nvidia left to just kind of control the market all they wanted which is why we've now seen the most expensive GPUs come from Nvidia yet that being obviously the RT X line so this is the 2080 ti the card that when it launched everyone was like oh my god $1200 what is happening here with an MSRP of $1000 that's a bargain-basement right well of course the AI bees or the board partners didn't want to be you know basically outshined by Nvidia so they come out with their custom boards which cost them more to make which means they cost more than $1200 in most cases so now you had the TI n of graphics cards which used to be around the six hundred and fifty dollar range now costing double that well double that once again with now the Titan launch that although they say it's not a gaming card has the exact same technologies that are in here which is a gaming card with just a little bit more memory at the price of $2,500 we haven't seen a mid to mid to your card yet these cards were teased back in September officially came out in October here we are now rolling into January and we still haven't a 60 series card or a 50 series which usually debuted within a month or two after the main launches why they haven't done that no idea probably competition and stuff but you could probably expect those cards to range somewhere in the three or four hundred dollar range where they normally would reside in the 200 to 250 dollar range so as you can see we have a bit of a conundrum here with GPUs and pricing where it sucks this year because it's just too damn expensive now moving on to CPUs it's been an interesting year because although the GPU markets been a big stagnated and then Nvidia waited like almost 20 months to release this card you know the the Turing GPU the CPU stuffs been moving very quickly the problem is it's still extremely divided in terms of performance and cost it's all over the place because we are finally seeing Intel habits caged rat a little bit I'm showing an i3 here when it never opened oh I guess I did open it whatever I digress AMD launched its Xen architecture 2016 and we saw some amazing IPC improvements where it caught up to Intel for the most part but it still was lacking behind in single core performance or just overall because of its lackluster speeds and I say lackluster I mean by that Intel has really worked hard on getting the ins the IPC's of course where they are but also getting the clock speed up where now we have CPUs launching here in 2018 with boost clocks at 5 gigahertz something just a couple of years ago we thought the silicon wasn't even gonna be capable of it now we've got mainstream CPUs with more cores and sitting at 5 gigahertz which is amazing the problem is AMD is having a hard time scraping past 4 gigahertz at least with Zen and Zen Plus Zen plus was able to get us about 4.2 4.3 on a couple cores but Zen 2 which again isn't coming out until 2019 is looking at giving us that 5 gigahertz number which means more competition in this space now AM D Rison probably should be on the list of things that were great for 2018 because more gamers could get CPUs get great IPC's get multi-core performance of course they had their SMT or simultaneous multi-threading the same thing as hyper threading and we saw them catch up great when it comes to Intel the problem is Intel came out with the exact same type of philosophy and line up eight cores sixteen threads but as they increased the thread count and as they increase the clock speeds instead of competing with AMD they then just continued to raise the price where the ninety nine hundred K which is their current mainstream flagship CPU is costing about five hundred and fifty dollars if you look at AMD right now you could actually get a thread Ripper CPU for that price now yes there's a lot of debate on which is better for which application thread Ripper versus mainstream Intel versus X 299 the great thing is we have competition there and we have choice unfortunately for new builders that choice is very confusing where it used to be very cut and dry you want a good bargain CPU get value performance per dollar you want with AMD if you wanted just the most performance you could possibly get at any price then you went with Intel but that doesn't hold true as well today as it used to so if you can't tell there's a common thread here that 2018 sort of sucked because of pricing speaking of pricing I didn't even talk about memory yet that's been going on for a couple of years now with the suspected price fixing coming from the couple or what two or three manufacturers in the entire world that make Ram and apparently there was some coercion coercion collusion they were working together at price fixing causing the price to go up fortunately that's been investigated it's been proven known I guess there's like litigation happening and apparently lawsuits now happening out in China where the price fixing has been uncovered and that's why we're seeing prices of ram start to come down so we're overpriced GPUs we have rising prices of Intel CPUs and obviously the super inflated pricing of both used and new GPUs because as people started going why don't want our TX cards are too expensive I'm just gonna buy used card the used market went hey people want Pascal and pascal's going away so we're gonna raise the use price of Pascal it's supply and demand it's just markets it's a it's kind of a shitty situation but 2019 should hopefully be a whole lot better because we've got hopefully Navi coming out which we've been waiting for from AMD which is supposed to compete directly with what we're seeing here with RT X it's supposed the rumors have it that there's going to be a new GPU from AMD coming out early in the year probably q1 q2 that's supposed to give you RTX 2070 performance which don't forget is a $500 graphics card from Nvidia at $250 so if you can actually get our TX 2070 performance at $250 RTX aside you can't turn on our TX for the 2070 in my opinion it's no good you can't even do it with the 2080 Ti and 1080p while I guess you can now with the updates but it hasn't been optimized enough the 2070 is not going to give you a good gaming experience with RT X so if you can get that level though of rasterization performance or just standard dx11 performance that 250 bucks that's what we need we have no major mid-range or low range from Nvidia that's where AMD has always resided and I would love for them to come out with a card and a product stack that can compete with Nvidia across the board because then prices will have to come down and if they don't then NVIDIA is the one that will kind of suffer because NVIDIA spent 1 billion dollars to belt developing this technology over the last 10 years and they're trying to get that money back as quick as possible that's why pricing is so high but we're also gonna see rise in to rise in to the next generation Rises and not just then Plus architecture which is supposed to as I said bring us near that 5 gigahertz number which is gonna put the IPC on par with Intel as well as the clock speed which means Intel will either have to adjust or lose market share that's how you bring pricing down market share has to shift but AMD stock prices over the last year have skyrocketed versus where they were even two years ago in fact Jerry and I on Tech Talk made a joke a couple years back about you should buy a nice table because it was $1.00 but now it's way more than that and if we had actually taken our own advice back in like 2016 we probably be rich today because it's gone up like 15 or 20 times that since then obviously Lisa sue who was the interim CEO has done a fantastic job I think she's permanent CEO now she has righted that ship and she has up righted it and clearly they are on a collision course with am hope they're not in a collision course with AMD they're on a collision course with Intel and NVIDIA which is exactly what we need so I'm hoping that Zen to really changes things in 2019 and that navi and whatever their next-generation GPU is is going to give us the performance that we're hoping for at the price point that we need it and I'm also hoping Intel does something with the GPUs because it will only force AMD to get better and in mid needs to start to feel a little bit of the pinch in their own wallet so guys that's just my list as to why 2018 sorta sucked when it comes to PC early in 2019 we're gonna see a lot of this new stuff teased and shown off at CES especially from AMD we will be checking it out we'll be going to the AMD booth and very excited about that and seeing what they've got to show but if you guys think there's something that should be added to this list as to why 2018 such won't you guys do me a favor and leave a comment down below I think the best one will deserve a pin so guys thanks for watching and hopefully you didn't leave my face on your screen the whole time I hope you just minimized it and went on about your business because this is not worth looking at for 15 minutes or however long we talked alright guys thanks for watching and as always we'll see you in the next one it's overpriced but it's already not gonna lie in my mouth typically in the past so if you can't tell though wow I coughed up a hairball