Hi all!
Vega: FE was not sampled to most media, but we knew there was a lot to be learned from this exciting -- for better or for worse -- new launch from AMD. We purchased a Vega: FE and ordered it to the lab as quickly as possible. It's been a few 20-22-hour days, with Andrew also putting in significant hours on video, and we were able to pull off a detailed review of Vega: FE. Speaking genuinely here, this is why I love working in PC hardware and reviewing products. This was an exciting pro...
2017-07-02 06:53:21 +0000 UTC
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Supporters,
Thanks for your continued encouragement of what we do! Computex was great this year -- it seems that we managed to cover more types of hardware and get deeper coverage than last year, plus added some vlog coverage. The power component discussion on all the boards was new for us.
This week, we'll be posting a final review of the GE-series laptops from MSI, the review of the EVGA 1080 Ti SC2 Hybrid, and will be working on some other content pieces prior to the big X299/Intel co...
2017-06-11 19:25:51 +0000 UTC
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Hi, Patreon backers!
I was speaking with many of you on our Patreon Discord earlier, but wanted to send out a message to everyone: We appreciate your direct support, as it enables us to remain fully independent and continue posting critical coverage of manufacturers. Being critical is always risky, particularly in an industry where "influencers" now vastly outnumber technical reviewers. Some manufacturers are growing too used to this "influencer" approach, and no longer know how to deal with c...
2017-05-26 08:18:54 +0000 UTC
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Big spoiler for our Patreon supporters! You'll see this a day in advance of publication.
The attached is our new chart. I have truncated the legend so as not to spoil the results. The legend shows different video card coolers (check the ASUS Strix review, posting tomorrow, for that information). What you're looking at is thermal performance of each card when outputting a 40dBA noise. We have "normalized" for noise, so to speak, and this helps better differentiate cooler supremacy in a competit...
2017-05-09 02:10:11 +0000 UTC
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The image attached to this post isn't the stock configuration of EVGA's new 1080 Ti SC2 -- it's our special take on it. The card is riddled with holes and, from what EVGA says, that should help with cooling. We decided to look into that claim by plugging the holes.
The results have thus far been interesting! There's a lot more to do, but the testing is coming along. We're hoping to air our 1080 Ti SC2 review on Wednesday or Thursday, with a Titan Xp tear-down going up Tuesday. Lots of other st...
2017-04-25 03:28:29 +0000 UTC
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Hey, everyone!
We have some upcoming content that we're really excited about producing. After working for several months on VR benchmarking methodology, we've gotten a system that works fairly fluidly (from a production standpoint), and now all that's left is understanding the data that is spit out. There's still more work to do, but our first VR benchmark piece is interesting if only because it features the R7 1700 vs. i7-7700K (stock and overclocked for each CPU). Most VR benchmarks we've se...
2017-04-06 07:10:12 +0000 UTC
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Hi, everyone!
Following our huge Ryzen Revisit effort (lots of behind-the-scenes work on that), we decided to spend some time to catch up on other obligations. That Ryzen Revisit content took the better part of a week for us, and I've had the "Get GN Store Live" item on my to-do list the entire time. Working with our new shirt printing company, we've finally gotten the shirt samples (and they turned out great -- shirt quality is high), DNS pointing, and other needs sorted for the merch store.<...
2017-04-04 18:33:22 +0000 UTC
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Hi all,
I know that a lot of you are backers of our video content first and foremost, and so I wanted to call attention to some of our article-only content that got published this week. We just recently covered Fair Repair laws in the US -- which we believe are critical to ongoing consumer protection and ownership of electronics -- and covered the Internet privacy votes.
If you are interested in any of these, the links are below:
Right to Repair
2017-03-27 21:23:18 +0000 UTC
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Hey, everyone!
We've picked up a lot of shirt-tier backers lately. It's gotten to the point that I can no longer keep up by manually shipping all the shirts, so we've now hired a company to handle the shirt printing and shipping/sales for us. This is the same group that does merch for Paul, Kyle, and formerly Tek Syndicate (now doing merch for Level1 Techs). We know they're good, and we're excited to add a few new options. Anyone who is a $14+ backer will be messaged once we have this new stor...
2017-03-14 19:15:15 +0000 UTC
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We have picked up a lot of new Patreon backers in the past week! Thanks for your ongoing support, everyone. Given the new interest in helping GN and the big boost in shirt-tier backers, I wanted to give the community an opportunity to pick the next shirt designs.
Here are some options:
#1: "#STEVEISM by Paul & Kyle" shirt
Anvil soft T-shirt (on Gray)
#2: ...
2017-02-22 20:46:35 +0000 UTC
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Hey everyone,
As Patreon backers, you get a brief i nside-look at what's coming up in the immediate future.
We're currently working on publishing a Watch Dogs 2 standalone CPU benchmark, following-up Patrick's CPU optimization guide in Watch Dogs 2. This is our way of getting mileage out of our extensive testing rounds we've lately been going through with all the CPUs (in preparation for Kaby Lake, then Ryzen), and we're able to do an extra day of work to really figure out how the game's...
2017-02-08 19:51:41 +0000 UTC
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For our Patreon backers, you have the privilege of getting some insight as to what content is coming up shortly. We're excited to announce our CPU revisit series, following on the popularity of the GPU revisit series (which has another episode coming up next month).
This first CPU revisit is for the Intel i5-2500K. We'll likely next look at the 3570K, 2600K, and probably FX-8370 or 8350 CPUs. This is all in prep for Zen and Kaby Lake taking over the CPU market from previous generations.
...
2017-01-19 17:21:06 +0000 UTC
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We are expecting big news coming out of CES for the three major architecture topics listed in this post's headline: Kaby Lake, Zen, and Vega should all see some sort of unveil, detailing, or launch.
The GN team will be at CES for live coverage. This means that, as we've done every year, we'll have a team of 4 people (Keegan [video], Jim [photo/reporting], Patrick [reporting], & me) on-site for coverage. The plan is to split up and cover most sectors of the industry, spanning cases, PSUs, S...
2016-12-31 23:38:36 +0000 UTC
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Thanks to all our Patrons, I was able to work with Andrew to shoot a side video on our in-house automated backup and compression routines that we built recently. This was a HUGE challenge for the site -- we were producing something like half a TB per month of data, and that meant burning through drives at an expensive pace.
And, of course, it sucks to delete that content; those shots take time (and money -- I'm paying Andrew, of course) to produce, so to just delete them after the final cut is...
2016-12-21 21:30:42 +0000 UTC
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Thanks for helping us reach our $450 goal, everyone!
With your support, we can financially justify spinning-off another recurring segment for the YouTube audience. Like Ask GN, this will primarily be a video-targeted series, but we will (probably) produce brief text summaries for the website, too. The goal is to produce some additional video content to continue supplementing our top-tier article coverage.
Anyway, the goal for this new content series is to hop on Skype calls with industry...
2016-12-10 23:10:58 +0000 UTC
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For the first time ever, GN will be working with an Alphacool product! We're excited to see how the Alphacool Eiswolf GPX-Pro performs on the bench. Thanks to GN viewer 'Eric,' we're able to put this cooling system to the test. This would not be possible without you, Eric, so thanks for the loaner!
The product is a completely contained cooling solution for GPUs. This one is built for the GTX 1080, so we'll stick it on our FE card and see how it performs versus our in-house solutions, how it ha...
2016-12-07 03:06:28 +0000 UTC
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Hey folks!
We have a new Discord server live, to replace the existing Steam chat group. You can join this server by connecting your Discord account to your Patreon account. Please find the link below for instructions on this:
https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/212052266
We're excited about the move. This will allow for us to better separate chat channels, and to ultimately mov...
2016-11-25 22:20:03 +0000 UTC
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Hey folks,
We've decided to add a new Patreon goal for a public access VBIOS downloads section. This is something that I've personally wanted to do for a long time, but we need funding to support and build the platform. Our objective is to provide the following:
- A rip of the VBIOS found on every video card we test, including press versions of VBIOS (unless we are under NDA not to share, in which case that overrides -- but we've not encountered that yet).
- Download is available p...
2016-11-14 06:26:04 +0000 UTC
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We have two follow-up articles planned for the EVGA VRM fracas regarding the 10-series cards. The first is this one, the second will be post-testing.
It was difficult trying to figure out the best way to collect direct VRM data without interfering with the components' abilities to transfer heat to the thermal pad, and then to the heatsink. Consulting thermal engineers has given us the right path: We're using a new set of flat thermocouples with self-adhesive 'tape' of sorts, and which can sust...
2016-11-10 15:17:49 +0000 UTC
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Hey Patrons / supporters!
Part of helping us make content means that you'll occasionally get an inside look at the challenges we face in content production. I currently have a couple dozen data points for CPU coolers. We're working with the new Kraken series (all three), the previous Kraken series, the Corsair H100iV2 cooler, and the Predator 280 XLC cooler. I've also just added an air cooler to the mix.
Processing and thinking about all this data, it turns out, is the hard part. I...
2016-10-27 16:13:42 +0000 UTC
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We've had a long history of covering Star Citizen. I first reached-out to Chris Roberts' team in 2012, right around when the Kickstarter campaign hit ~$800,000, and I remember distinctly thinking that I'd "missed the boat" on coverage. In this industry, there's normally a short window to cover something before the world moves on to the next coverage topic. Star Citizen continued to grow, and has grown in size more than 100x since that first contact with the team.
The game has also grown tremen...
2016-09-25 02:43:23 +0000 UTC
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I'm writing from a hotel room in Orange County, where we recently visited the UCI eSports arena opening (hosted by iBUYPOWER, Logitech, ASUS), but before that, toured MSI, Cloud Imperium Games, Rosewill, Thermaltake, and we've got a few more. On Monday, we'll be visiting EVGA and likely iBUYPOWER's pack/test/ship facility.
But it doesn't seem the trips end, either. In the past month, I've been home about ten days. It's been nonstop trips to London, PAX, and now California. In another week or t...
2016-09-25 02:12:26 +0000 UTC
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Check here: http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2603-new-gn-series-tldr-with-heatpipes-cpu-heatsink
For those unaware, Andrew, one of our two main video producers, is also a 3D animator. Five months ago, I set a goal of "creating more work" for Andrew so that we could level the pipeline. The idea was to increase his workflow (to saturate more hours per week, e.g. cre...
2016-09-15 00:40:16 +0000 UTC
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Hey Patrons!
This post is only for you.
I've been spending the last day cataloging and detailing our testing methodology on our internal servers. Text instruction files, detailed settings configurations, video walkthroughs of the tests -- all important stuff, and I've been either personally running the tests or individually showing each technician how to do it. Because our techs are part-time, this is an insane amount of work each time; I've got to spend hours bringing everyone up to spe...
2016-08-25 15:13:38 +0000 UTC
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Some of you may be familiar with "Actually Hardcore Overclocking," a YouTube channel run by "buildzoid." Buildzoid happens to be extremely knowledgeable about overclocking, VRMs, and board components, and so we've recruited AHOC to collaborate with us on at least one upcoming video. Be sure to check back for that regularly! It will be a good opportunity to learn more about video card overclocking at a lower level than we normally explore.
As for other goings on, we're actively looking into acq...
2016-08-08 03:11:31 +0000 UTC
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Thank you so much for the support this month!
2016-07-31 23:59:00 +0000 UTC
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We learned a lot with the GTX 1060 Hybrid project. That's the whole goal of these -- with a high-end card, like the 1080, we might expect some performance gains or greater OC headroom. For the lower-end stuff, we're really just trying to learn more about the product itself; that starts with a tear-down, analysis of components, and re-build with some new components.
In the process, though, we did learn that the overclock stability was greatly increased with liquid -- or just better coolin...
2016-07-26 02:19:26 +0000 UTC
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I've been having a lot of fun with these more DIY-themed projects lately. The Hybrid builds were a start -- but we're probably going to do more. They're interesting from a creation standpoint: Putting together such content doesn't capitalize my time, but gives Andrew a good amount of editing work -- and that means more content total, since I don't bottleneck his process for those videos.
I'm looking to expand outside of just GPU mods. Right now, we're in the process of upgrading our render...
2016-07-07 00:03:06 +0000 UTC
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http://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/2496-amd-rx-480-8gb-review-and-benchmark-vs-gtx-970-1070?showall=1
Hey everyone!
We're working on a follow-up for our above-linked RX 480 review! Today, we hope to put together an RX 480 4GB vs. 8GB comparison to determine if an extra 4GB is worth it. Once completed, we'll be working on an RX 480 Cross...
2016-07-04 15:13:12 +0000 UTC
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Thank you so much for the support this month!
2016-06-30 23:59:00 +0000 UTC
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