transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Okay, here we go, ha ha, here we go. And this says, Ab, nope. Sorry. It's just one of those days.

Speaker 2:
[00:08] Adam's somewhere, Adam's just screaming right now.

Speaker 1:
[00:11] You know what, Adam, this is what happens when you leave me in charge. This is just gonna teach you a lesson.

Speaker 2:
[00:17] She's up on goofballs over there, guys.

Speaker 1:
[00:19] Yep. Okay, here we go. In this episode of The Full Nerd, we talk about flash storage pricing. If RAM pricing is going down, and AMD's 9950X3D2.

Speaker 2:
[00:37] Okay, let's go.

Speaker 1:
[00:44] Welcome, everybody, to The Full Nerd. I am your fill-in for your fill-in host, Alaina. And joining me today are co-host Brad Chacos.

Speaker 3:
[00:54] Hello, Internet. Welcome to episode 395.

Speaker 1:
[00:57] Oh, yeah, there's that. Thanks, Brad. Glad you got my back. And of course, our favorite co-worker, among all our favorite co-workers, Mike Crider.

Speaker 4:
[01:09] Howdy, howdy. Nice to be here.

Speaker 1:
[01:12] And of course, controlling the verticals and horizontals and keeping mostly in check today is one Will Smith.

Speaker 2:
[01:20] Hi, hello. Any technical errors or delusions of the stream are purely in your imagination and not a thing that actually happened. So hi, good morning. Hello.

Speaker 3:
[01:31] Yay.

Speaker 1:
[01:33] So we have quite the episode today because I'm gonna go right into it. I'm not gonna, I don't have any spare topics for today. I think this is what happens when I don't bring the beard home for like when I'm co-hosting or like, sorry, fill in hosting.

Speaker 3:
[01:47] Don't pontificate enough without a beard.

Speaker 2:
[01:48] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[01:48] Exactly. I can't gather my thoughts and they're just coming out as the chaotic squirrels that they are just running over a place, shittering wildly. But Mike spent a lot of time in the last week or so doing some investigative work. So he's been looking at flash storage prices and also later in the show, we'll talk about his ram pricing coverage. But Mike, like, why don't we start by talking about what you discovered with what's going on with flash storage. So the USB sticks and just SSDs and the, I think the incredible pain that we're seeing around that right now.

Speaker 4:
[02:24] Yeah. The long story short is just that everything's terrible all the time.

Speaker 1:
[02:29] What a lead up and what a finish.

Speaker 4:
[02:31] So there's a bit of backstory here. For this story, Brad was looking through our archives like, all right, people are hurting for storage prices. Let's see if we can find some good advice to bring up to front and maybe find something timely. He did, except that it's no longer timely because in just a few months from when the original author wrote this guy on adding storage to your laptop in an affordable way, all the prices went up for flash drives, for standard USB drives, for micro SD cards, all the easy ways to add storage to a system without breaking out a screwdriver, it's all more expensive. I looked at everything from 64 gigabytes, 128 gigabytes, 512, and 1 terabyte, for several different formats, and roughly you can expect to pay twice as much as just a year ago, going by Amazon prices and camel, camel, camel. There's a little variation in there, but every single one that I looked at is more expensive by a considerable margin, some of them by double or more.

Speaker 3:
[03:35] It kind of makes sense because this all does use the same underlying like band chips, that flash chips that SSDs do and everything else. It's just something I had never really thought of until I started poking through that old article. Hadn't seen any coverage from it. I'm like, hopefully people can go get an SD card and pick up 250 gigs that way or something like that, and they've all doubled too. Do you have any sense for whether even with these being more expensive now, do you think they're still reasonably affordable enough to be a worthwhile alternative if you need more storage space?

Speaker 4:
[04:13] That depends on what you need and what you need it for. I think if you're looking for something like an SD card for a really nice camera or video setup, you're going to pay a painful amount of money to get that. No matter what you're looking for, if you just need something to do, the oldie sneaker net to run files around the office or around your house, that should be fine. You'll be paying $30 instead of $15, which isn't great, but it's not ruinous. So yeah, if you need something more serious, you're going to be paying a lot more, which is just the general trend for the entire industry. It's not as bad as straight up consumer grade RAM or flash storage drives, internal drives. It's still bad though.

Speaker 2:
[05:02] Oh, go ahead, Alaina.

Speaker 1:
[05:04] I was going to say, so my question is, when you're looking at camel camel camel, because you can see the trend lines on charts, right? What did those look like in terms of how fast you are shooting up and if it seems like the trend is still going in this direction or if it actually shows any leveling off a little bit?

Speaker 4:
[05:23] Well, I decided arbitrarily to pick exactly one year ago. If you go back on the same chart to two or three years, you can see these do spike up in similar ways, but on much shorter timeframes. I think those are just shortages of a particular model that's just gone out of stock. The way that Amazon and most of the other big retailers work now is that you're not shopping at Amazon, you're shopping at ABC, Electronic Supply, a shop on Amazon. And so when, for whatever reason, the ebbs and flows, when that particular model is out of stock and people want it, the price shoots up. But that short increase in price usually levels out within a month. That is not happening anymore. It's just across the entire industry, across these broad product categories, the prices are going up because the supplies are no longer being replenished at the same rate that they used to be, because all of that manufacturing capacity is going into RAM storage for industrial purposes.

Speaker 2:
[06:29] It's shocking to me that something that is such a commodity has... When video cards got expensive because Bitcoin mining was happening, that made sense to me. This just feels like... Do we have a sense that people are going to start manufacturing more DRAM and more Flash? Or is this just the way it's going to be until AI stuff bombs out?

Speaker 4:
[06:52] Well, that leads to the next story. The short answer is, yes, people are trying to expand capacity. It isn't fast enough to account for the current demand that we've got. And it takes a long, long time to create any new manufacturing capacity in this. Which is something that has been disincentivized in the last few years, as people expanded and found they had too much capacity before the AI boom. So we're just in a really bad spot, and we will be for at least a year, possibly longer.

Speaker 3:
[07:25] It feels like the fabs feel like this is sort of a bubble or bubble-ish. It even TSMC isn't rushing to add capacity. Like Micron I think is opening a new one somewhere they've announced. SK Hynix, Samsung, they're not rushing to add capacity because the RAM cycle goes through boom bus cycles non-stop, and they're just like, I'm not pouring those billions of dollars into it. So it just feels like a true choke point right now.

Speaker 4:
[07:53] That's an excellent segue because as one of the analysts in the next story said, the last real bus cycle was around 2002, 2003. Funnily enough, right before ChatGPT hit the mainstream. And so, yeah, the big three are definitely kind of gun shy when it comes to adding large amounts of capacity due to large increases in demand. And why wouldn't they be? They are raking in money right now. This is broadly a good thing for them, at least in the short term.

Speaker 2:
[08:24] Yeah, it almost seems like they found a way, like they've gotten, the RAM cartels have gotten in trouble for collusion in the past, kind of famously. And it almost seems like somebody else spiking demand for them lets them arbitrarily increase prices in a way that won't get them in trouble with regulators in the US or the EU. And they're taking full advantage of that.

Speaker 4:
[08:47] We still have regulators in the US? This is news to me.

Speaker 2:
[08:49] Well, okay, so, you know, theoretically we have regulators here. But yes, so they're adding more factory capacity that's actually happening now?

Speaker 4:
[09:04] They're not putting shovels in the ground to add more capacity. There are Chinese firms that are trying to boost their output because of the opportunity in the market. Like, we know that companies like, I can't remember exactly which ones, but such as Dell, Asus and HP are looking at some of the firms that used to supply exclusively the Chinese domestic market. They're saying, hey, we are desperate for cheap ram and storage. Please help us. We can pay you way more than you used to be making. So the companies that are hurting in the same way that consumers are hurting, are trying to solve the problem. It is just very difficult and very slow.

Speaker 2:
[09:39] Because I saw a report come across the table yesterday that basically said, hey, PC sales are as flat as they've ever been in the last 20 years. Presumably, because of these pressures, right?

Speaker 4:
[09:53] We actually had a spike early this year because all the news came in and people were buying in anticipation of higher prices, which have come. But yes, they appear to be flattening out and presumably will go down very soon.

Speaker 1:
[10:06] For consumer, but all of this boom is really happening on the enterprise side. So what's happening is that the, what is it? Seesaw is just tipping in favor of supplying all the business side of things and we're getting squeezed because of that. To your point about how much the profits are, there was a related article on Tom's hardware that I saw, I think yesterday that's wild. The headline just sums it up pretty well, which is every SK Hynix employee could receive $477,000 bonuses this year, almost $900,000 bonuses next year, 30, sorry, not even 3500, 35,000 workers reportedly set to benefit from share of 169 billion projected operating profit. And I think this is like only 10% of the share.

Speaker 2:
[11:04] I love it when a company's profit share isn't set up for a sudden spike in revenue. Like, when the same thing happened when Fortnite went, suddenly was the biggest video game in the world. Everybody at Epic was buying a new house every like three months. And yeah, it's good for people who work at SK Inex.

Speaker 3:
[11:24] That's not a bad little holiday bonus to pick up half a million dollars.

Speaker 2:
[11:29] I would be, look, I would happily take a half million dollar bonus. That's fine by me.

Speaker 1:
[11:35] Yeah, it's wild too, because that's cash. It's not even like stock options or something where you have it in hand, theoretically.

Speaker 3:
[11:43] But the good news for us is that in some markets like China and Germany recently, we've seen RAM prices go down and soften. So that means this is all going to end soon, right, Mike?

Speaker 4:
[11:52] Well, you think that's good news. It's certainly news. So over the last couple of weeks, we've seen headlines from, I'm not going to name any names, but there have been headlines that say, hey, prices for RAM here went down, not by a lot, but maybe this is finally starting to turn around. And I had the impression that that was not true, just because we've been hearing for several months that, hey, this is a long-term problem. This is not going to change anytime soon. Expect it to continue. And so I did the investigation, and PC Part Picker actually has a great tool to let you track the prices across a bunch of different retailers, notably not including Amazon, but it's so broad and can break down into different currencies, so you can really get a great look at the trends across the market. And yeah, you can see a huge spike at the end of 2025, continuing into 2026. However, in certain markets, specifically Europe and China, the prices have either flattened out or in some places gone down by a maximum of about five to seven percent, which is the opposite of what we have been hearing about, you know, the ram-pocalypse about this is terrible and will continue to be terrible.

Speaker 1:
[13:09] So...

Speaker 2:
[13:10] What are the bellwethers? Are you looking at specific types of, like DDR5, 6000, 32 gig kits, or like, what do you look, are you just kind of looking across the whole market?

Speaker 4:
[13:19] I looked across the entire market while I was looking at it. I picked DDR5 4800 for my example in the article, just because I figured, and it's a 2 x 16 gigabyte dim set up, that I just thought, this is what I would have picked for like a regular gaming PC build a year ago. And it has gone up by approximately 400% in most markets. But in some of them in the last six weeks to two months, it has flattened out or gone down, which is surprising and encouraging. And my immediate thought was, all right, this is a short-term supply and demand adjustment. This is resellers who are trying to make as much profit as possible, seeing suddenly that they can't actually sell that to people, and they're bumping back down to see what the market will bear. Importantly, I did not say this when I reached out to analysts for comment, but out of the three that I got comment back from, two of them said, yeah, this is a short-term supply demand adjustment. This is not a reversal of a trend that we are seeing. We expect supplies coming out of manufacturers to continue to be low for at least one year, possibly three years.

Speaker 2:
[14:34] And are they thinking that the prices are ever going to, like, do they think the prices will ever go back down again once the supply and demand works itself out? Or is this like gas, where when gas prices go up, they never really come down again?

Speaker 4:
[14:47] This has been such an unprecedented rapid increase. We're talking about less than six months.

Speaker 2:
[14:54] Yeah.

Speaker 4:
[14:55] I don't think there's any way to really nail that down. We can say that within three years, we will have corrected our capacity just based on, you know, the general market forces. Whether the prices will return to what they were, to an affordable level of, hey, just go buy some RAM to make your computer better, I don't think anybody can really nail that down just yet.

Speaker 3:
[15:20] When I was at CES earlier this year, I met with several memory makers. None of them would really commit to too much of anything on the record, obviously, but some of the more candid ones were saying, like realistically, like they know CEOs are saying, hopefully by 2027, it will be better. But realistically, it would be at least 2028. If the AI bubble doesn't pop with how slow they're being to spool up fabs, it's realistically possibly next decade. So it's a real interesting question because all the RAMs go in to the AI centers. So if that pops, it'd be bad for the economy, but it'd be good for the PC. But then you couldn't actually, all the RAM that they're making now isn't the kind of RAM you can use in your computers anyway. So if this all pops, it's not like they can do during COVID. Okay, you can buy hospital toilet paper now. You can't buy consumer RAM at an HPN.

Speaker 2:
[16:15] I want 64 gigs of RAM. It's probably cheaper to buy an ECC2 motherboard than 64 gigs of DDR5 right now.

Speaker 3:
[16:25] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[16:28] That's wild. So did you all see the thing, the video from the guy who's turned his backyard shed into a level 100 clean room to make his own RAM?

Speaker 3:
[16:40] I haven't opened a tab, but I haven't seen it yet. That looks so interesting.

Speaker 2:
[16:43] It's like, so a friend of mine who works in a fab that used to make memory sent it to me and was like, hey, you should check this out. It's really funny. He's done the thing that we always said was impossible, but he's got the scary chemicals. He's doing the hydrofluoric acid washes and the whole deal all in his backyard. I'm glad it's not in my neighborhood, but I'm wildly curious to see how it's going, how he does it.

Speaker 3:
[17:09] So I want to watch that video so bad. In a past life, before I did this for a living, I worked in a factory, making industrial sapphire products for like the military and aeronautics and stuff like this computing. And I was actually trained to work in a class 100, even a class 10 clean room. So I'm real curious to see how he does this in the tent, his backyard, actually. That's one of the more fascinating points to me.

Speaker 2:
[17:33] Yeah, it's like, yeah, anyway, the video is worth watching. I'll post it in the comments after the show's back up. It was wild.

Speaker 3:
[17:44] DIY RAM, though. What a time to be alive.

Speaker 2:
[17:47] I mean, I can't imagine it's going to run at like, you're not going to get DDR5 6000, you're going to get like DDR5 1300 or something there, but at least it runs. Should we talk about that other thing? The Intel HU DIMMs, while we're talking about RAM prices? This is the other solution, which seems bad, but maybe is the, you know, at least you can put it in your machine.

Speaker 1:
[18:08] I mean, at least you don't have to spin up your own clean room.

Speaker 2:
[18:10] Yeah, it is easier than spinning up your own clean room, I guess.

Speaker 3:
[18:13] I haven't seen this, so I'm actually really interested to hear about it.

Speaker 2:
[18:16] Yeah, so the TLDR is that they're called HU DIMMs, I think, and it's basically half the number of RAM chips on a stick, but you also cut the bandwidth per stick in half. So basically, a dual channel HU DIMM set up with 32 gigs of RAM is going to have the same throughput as a single stick of a normal DIMM with the same transfer rate. It seems like this is the 2026 equivalent to IBM putting eight SIM sockets in all of their PCs when the earthquake hit Taiwan and knocked out all the RAM manufacturing in the mid 90s, right? Like the PC manufacturers were doing wild stuff to get eight megabytes of RAM in a machine back then. And this is the same, it seems like the same situation, is you're giving up the benefits of dual channel, basically, to get more RAM, which makes sense in, I guess, if you're doing business computing or you're doing work that doesn't require a lot of performance, and is it memory bandwidth limited, and you just need a buttload of cheap RAM, maybe this makes sense, but it seems like a bridge too far for me, almost.

Speaker 3:
[19:31] Yeah, have they released any performance estimates out of that? Is it just literally, you got to have the two in there and it'll perform like one?

Speaker 2:
[19:37] It's literally, it's 32-bit instead of 64-bit, I think is the per transfer cycle. So it's like the theoretical decrease is half, and the effective bandwidth decrease will be half. I want to say it was one of the motherboard manufacturers was working with Intel to do it. I don't remember which one. I want to say, let's see, I'm scrolling up desperately here.

Speaker 1:
[19:59] But I mean, while you do that, I was just going to comment that this feels like, one, I have a lot of trepidation, like just seeing this play out. And two, like we always say, when something like this comes out, it just makes things way more complicated for consumers. I guess it gives us job security, but I don't love that. I'd rather it be way more simple.

Speaker 4:
[20:21] Well, I mean, it's simple enough to explain. You can get 32 of slower RAM or you can get 16 of faster RAM. And I assume the pricing will just about even out.

Speaker 1:
[20:30] No, what I mean is that when someone's at a store, like they're looking at the options, it's not going to be as apparent to them if they're not familiar with this like we are. What is actually happening when they buy this one versus that one, which is one of the reasons why we don't love things like graphics cards that have different memory bandwidth, like specifications, right? Because people aren't necessarily keeping track of these things that we take for granted that we are always taking to account, but maybe someone who's more of like, quote, a normie would not necessarily pay attention when they're looking at specs.

Speaker 4:
[21:03] Right.

Speaker 2:
[21:04] So this is an ASRock Intel thing, and it remains to be seen. I think your motherboard has to support it, but that part is a little bit unclear to me.

Speaker 3:
[21:15] Are these for laptops as well or just desktops right now?

Speaker 2:
[21:17] Looks like just desktops. Yes, looks like.

Speaker 1:
[21:20] Well, I think the link that you sent, there's one where they mentioned something about so dim, so it sounds like they might be considering this.

Speaker 3:
[21:32] Just kind of contextualizing this in my head. Like, I agree with Will, this kind of sucks. It sucks that we're at this desperate measure. But like all the analysts are saying, like, we could see the end of the death of $500 laptops this year. Like, maybe they'll come back in the future. Who knows supply and demand? But this year it'll be rough. But if they can figure out ways like this to maybe get prices down, I don't know if that'll necessarily be cheaper, this particular thing. But if you could get prices down or shove those into entry level business laptops, like Dell's latitude line. Okay, if you get a Core i3, you get this half dim with it. And then you save the full chips for the ones that actually need it. Like, I don't like it, but I don't hate it either. Dell depends how it all kind of works out, I guess.

Speaker 1:
[22:16] I think for me, it's going to depend on the performance numbers, right? Because if it's a reasonable enough, like, you know, shave, and the price is, goes down accordingly, I don't love it, but okay. But if it's just a huge sacrifice, and the prices don't budge much, I don't love that.

Speaker 3:
[22:37] Yeah, I agree. I agree.

Speaker 2:
[22:39] I think, I mean, the performance, I think Brad's point for the kind of, like, commodity computers, for lack of a better term, right? The thing that your school system and your business and your enterprises buy, by the truckload, like, this feels okay. I think, I think it's okay. I just worry, like, I would rather this just be a SODIMM standard, honestly. The fact that they're making regular size DIMMs that work with this is a little bit worrisome to me.

Speaker 3:
[23:07] That's the reason that was my question. I agree with you.

Speaker 2:
[23:09] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[23:10] Like, yes, looks like on this ASRock announcement page, it does say here, besides ASRock motherboards, Deskmini can also support one sub-channel module in H SODIMM DDR form factor, giving all-around support for this new technology. So it does sound like that's an intention for at least ASRock to be supporting it.

Speaker 4:
[23:31] Yeah, I was just looking at that. That sounds like you're trying to lift something really heavy and not succeeding. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[23:37] Makes me think of who-dat, like they say down in New Orleans.

Speaker 2:
[23:39] Yeah, that's what I, yeah, knock, knock, who-dim, yeah. I don't know, so no relief on RAM, basically, is what I'm hearing from everybody. We're just hosed.

Speaker 4:
[23:50] I mean, unless the AI bubble pops, and as I keep saying, if that happens, we're going to have a lot more to worry about.

Speaker 2:
[23:57] But RAM will be cheap.

Speaker 3:
[23:59] Let me ask you a question about these, let me ask you questions about these who-dims actually. So let's say you're buying a $600 laptop, like for your parents, for your kids, for whatever, you just like I buy $600 laptops because I have a big badass desktop. Would you rather have 16 gigabytes at half speed in that basic laptop or would you rather have 8 gigabytes?

Speaker 1:
[24:22] Without performance numbers, I really can't answer that question yet. You know what I mean? Because I feel like when they start doing this, it really starts making the use case so much more applicable. Because before, we were just having so much performance thrown at us that you could just buy whatever and it would work pretty much for whatever as well. But it's like now when you ask that question, you're thinking, well, is this going to be more of like a Chromebook application? Is this going to be someone who still has one app that's going to need a certain kind of performance that would actually pull in this question of how is the RAM configuration done? Is it someone who's going to be holding this short term, long term? You know what I mean? Is it going to be somebody that's going to have their needs grow over time or won't? And so that's why, like I was just saying to Mike, it's like, man, this just makes it so much more complicated, helping people navigate those waters.

Speaker 2:
[25:18] I think the question isn't would you rather have 8 or 16? I think it's would you rather have $300 more expensive laptop with 8 gigs of RAM or a $300 less expensive laptop with 8 gigs of RAM, right?

Speaker 3:
[25:30] I realize after I asked, since there's the two slots, they'll wind up being the same speed, essentially.

Speaker 2:
[25:36] Yeah. I mean, essentially, what you're saying is, hey, we're going to go back to DDR4 speeds, which is probably fine. I have a couple of DDR4 machines that are fantastic still, so maybe it's okay and we're like, yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 3:
[25:52] I'm thinking I'm doing this on my work laptop right now, and this thing's four-year-old middling kind of crappy thing, and if it had half speed RAM in there, I would never notice, and I think it would be the same for 50% of enterprise deployments. So if they can figure out a way to do that and save the real things for people who need it, I think it's great.

Speaker 4:
[26:11] Yeah, I'd say for the vast majority of people who just want a computer that works, and we don't want to have to think about it, they would be okay with that, even if you took the time to explain it to them. The question, I'm in a similar situation to Brad. I buy little, light, and not especially powerful laptops because I've got a big powerful desktop. All I need to do on a laptop is write. So I would prefer more RAM that's lower just so I can have more tabs open. But if a parent comes in and talks to me and says, hey, my kid's going off to college, what laptop should I buy? Well, now I've got to have a 20-minute conversation, pros and cons, do they want to do gaming? What's their major? It's a lot more complicated than it was a year ago.

Speaker 2:
[26:55] Yeah, that's 100 percent true.

Speaker 1:
[26:57] I think the other thing for me too, for this kind of side strategies, I guess we're seeing or responses.

Speaker 4:
[27:04] Coping mechanisms.

Speaker 1:
[27:06] Coping mechanisms, thank you, that's the phrase I was looking for. I think that depending on how much we see on the efficiency side, because there's been more talk about how do we make our software more efficient, better, not as buggy. I'm using Microsoft here as a little bit of a cue, I think before, I think a lot of companies were just going, they were hardware and software, they're just going in this air. It's like we got all this performance, we don't have to really think about optimization as much. We'll just throw everything and see what sticks. I think now they're realizing like, hey, we're not going to have this luxury per se. I've just always been able to just throw more powerful performance, performing hardware at it. Maybe we can squeeze more out of it. The Neo is a great example of this. Apple control is pretty much everything, so they're able to get that much higher level optimization, and now they're able to present this beautiful, honestly, laptop that feels much more premium at $600. How long they'll be able to hold that price, who knows? But we're seeing that on that side of the fence versus ours, where it's just like everything's on fire, the dumpsters are just everywhere.

Speaker 3:
[28:13] I was testing, I've been using the Mac. Pardon me, I've been using the Mac. Geez, that word is disgusting. Macbook named me Neo for a couple of weeks. Geez, too many M's and N's in there. A really interesting thing happened to me last night that has never happened on a Windows laptop, and I think it's funny because they have the continuity, I think they call it, where you can associate your iPhone with your Mac. My kid called me last night. My phone started ringing in the living room, and my Mac started ringing in the office. I'm like, I don't know if I like this. I do like this, but I don't know if I like this.

Speaker 2:
[28:46] It's my favorite thing is that no matter which device you're on, you can answer your calls, you can get your text messages. It's incredibly convenient. But I mean, the downside of that machine is that you're putting a lot of SSD ware on because it's churning that eight gigs of RAM out to the SSD constantly. And in a world where SSD prices are going up, it seems a little scary. You're not saving yourself a whole lot on an eight gig system. I'm glad you're stoked about the machine though. It seems pretty, it's a neat little laptop. I keep eyeballing them.

Speaker 3:
[29:17] It's nice for the price. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[29:21] Anything else on RAM, Alaina?

Speaker 1:
[29:24] No. I mean, when I first saw the report, I was hoping for good news, and then Mike came in with reality, and I thought, okay, well, that's reasonable, I guess. But I don't love it.

Speaker 2:
[29:37] I mean, we have seen a lot of data center cancellations, which implies that there should be less RAM needed, but it seems like we're not seeing the impact of that yet.

Speaker 4:
[29:46] So yeah, I looked into that too. And I think a lot of that is a correction of the the investment side of things that is not really our our ballpark. But yeah, people, the investors are feeling a little overexposed, especially in response to things like like OpenAI closing down its video generation product. Like, all right, this can't do everything we wanted to. Disney, here's your billion dollars back. We've got it from lots of other places. So yeah, it's the bubble is still inflating. Whether it pops or not is the big question. And I think either we see a return, if not to normalcy, then to something that's much more what we would consider to be normal for technology, or we go in the complete opposite direction. And maybe five years from now, people don't even think about buying laptops because they start at $3,000. Everybody just does everything on their phones and plugs it into a monitor when they need that.

Speaker 2:
[30:43] Oh, the Moto X, whatever that thing was.

Speaker 4:
[30:46] Ahead of its time.

Speaker 2:
[30:48] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[30:48] Samsung's DeX as well, right?

Speaker 4:
[30:51] DeX is still around.

Speaker 1:
[30:52] I forget what it's called.

Speaker 2:
[30:54] That seems real.

Speaker 4:
[30:54] This was their proto voice thing. The DeX is their quasi-desktop. That's actually pretty good. I use it on my phone every once in a while.

Speaker 1:
[31:03] Really?

Speaker 2:
[31:04] The ARM processors have the juice to do it now. They didn't when they first started doing these things, I guess, right?

Speaker 4:
[31:10] Yes.

Speaker 1:
[31:11] That is a good point. I know we're going on a little bit of a tangent here, but I actually do wonder, especially with aluminum OS supposed to be coming out, that's supposed to replace Chrome OS so that it can cross between mobile desktop application. I wonder if something like this whole AI hardware crisis is going to spur more of that because a lot of people are already carrying $1,000 hardware in their pockets, and so it's not that they really need more performance, they just need a different form factor sometimes. Because my biggest gripe with mobile is that a lot of times, websites do not still render properly or as fully on a mobile browser, even if you put it into show as desktop mode, that it will only behave properly if you have actually Chrome OS running, or Linux, or Mac OS, or Windows, and that aggravates me because I actually would love to travel lighter. I would love to only have to bring a phone, or even a backup phone, so that way if I need to have a desktop interface, I've got it in that form factor without having to carry all the bulk of a full laptop and all that. Because I can bring a little portable keyboard if I need to and all that.

Speaker 2:
[32:23] The iPad Pro problem, Alaina. It should run Mac OS anyway, different podcast.

Speaker 1:
[32:32] I love that you are very consistent in how you always bring that up as something that you're like, ah, still want this, not going.

Speaker 2:
[32:39] Please. They're getting closer, man. They have a Mac OS running on the phone processor now. It's like they're just dancing all around it to taunt me.

Speaker 1:
[32:48] You know what, Will? I will say I think you're probably more likely going to see what you want in the world than I will because what I want is the return of the eight inch Windows tablet.

Speaker 2:
[32:59] Oh, Alaina, I have such bad news for you. I'm so sorry.

Speaker 1:
[33:04] Right now, I'm still eking out an existence with this, I think it's like a Dell Venture or Vostro, whatever it's called, eight.

Speaker 3:
[33:12] Vostro, I haven't even thought about that in seven years.

Speaker 1:
[33:15] This thing is like, please give me the sweet release of retirement woman. I'm like, no, you got to hang in there. It's like when Windows 10 goes down, I'm going down. I'm like, no, we're putting Linux on you. It's like, no.

Speaker 3:
[33:28] I'm tired, boss.

Speaker 4:
[33:29] I actually owned one of the eight inch ThinkPad like Windows machines. It was some kind of arm in there. And I think it came with Windows 8. I tried to upgrade it to Windows 10. It wanted to. It was like, you need to upgrade your operating system. It's free. It's like, no, it cannot. It physically cannot hold this operating system on 32 gigs.

Speaker 2:
[33:50] Look.

Speaker 1:
[33:51] Dude, this thing has like four gigs of RAM. This thing is really just begging for a retirement.

Speaker 2:
[33:57] What was the old Google tablet, those seven inch Google tablets that they launched with like 2010 or 2011?

Speaker 4:
[34:03] Nexus was the brand back then.

Speaker 3:
[34:05] I still have one from my grandma.

Speaker 2:
[34:07] Those things were unbelievable. They were fabulous. And in terms of the thing you could use to... That kind of space has disappeared, kind of, right? The iPad Mini still exists, but they're premium priced. Okay, you have your wide boy $3,000 phone. I can't afford one of those, Mike. And then the e-readers, I keep seeing these e-readers, they're like magnet on to the back of your phone, but there's no kind of in-between small content consumption device. That seven inch space was good, and we lost something when we lost it, is all I'm gonna say. So I'm with Alaina. Bring back the Windows tablet.

Speaker 1:
[34:46] I honestly think it has to do with the fact that phones got so big. The screens are so big on some of these phones. I envy all of you with your pants with large pockets. That's all I'm gonna say.

Speaker 2:
[34:58] Just get into cargo pants again. Bring them back.

Speaker 1:
[35:01] Carpenter jeans came back for a reason again.

Speaker 3:
[35:03] Jinko jeans. Let's go.

Speaker 2:
[35:05] Oh man. I never had a pair of Jinko jeans.

Speaker 1:
[35:10] Speaking of big, let's talk about big chips.

Speaker 2:
[35:13] But before we do that.

Speaker 1:
[35:14] Big chips with lots of 3D vCache. First, we have to do an ad break, don't we?

Speaker 2:
[35:18] Yeah. So we'll be right back.

Speaker 1:
[35:19] We're back from our sponsor.

Speaker 2:
[35:22] Maybe. Did we go? I'm going to do another one just to be safe. I can't hear the audio. Okay, we're back. And we're back.

Speaker 1:
[35:35] We're back.

Speaker 3:
[35:35] I picked a message from our sponsor.

Speaker 2:
[35:36] I don't know why I'm not hearing the audio, but I don't hear the audio on any of the transitions, which is making this challenging.

Speaker 1:
[35:42] Oh boy.

Speaker 2:
[35:43] Hi, hello.

Speaker 1:
[35:43] We have, I guess the remote hamsters are maybe not hamsters, but they're gerbils. Do we have to feed them differently? Do we have to care for them differently?

Speaker 2:
[35:51] They're doing stuff, but who knows what it is and if it's what we want.

Speaker 1:
[35:54] All right.

Speaker 2:
[35:55] Okay, so I, you got the double whoosh on the chat. Sorry about that. Whoosh, whoosh. Whoosh, whoosh. I am getting ready to share some screen. I don't know exactly what's gonna happen here when I do this.

Speaker 1:
[36:09] Yeah. So while you do that, we'll just give a little bit of a background on this that, so review information went live today for the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2, which is a bit of a mouthful, but I managed to say it this time without stumbling. And we actually got one in as well. It was not sent to a lot of reviewers. I think my take is that because this is a very specific part for a very specific kind of use case, that AMD was looking for people who would actually have a need for this kind of thing for how they cover content. But we happened to get one as well, so we have some preliminary numbers. Adam got it kind of last moment, so he's just been jamming super hard to get a baseline. And the summary of it is, it's kind of what we thought it would be, which is pretty much what AMD indicated it would be, which is that, yo, we heard you like 3D vCache, so we put some on another chiplet for you, but that's going to be for your content creation work, not going to be so much for your games, and the numbers bear that out. So right now, I believe we have the blender benchmark up.

Speaker 2:
[37:23] So I'm going to bring that up right now, actually.

Speaker 1:
[37:26] Oh, okay.

Speaker 3:
[37:27] Before we get too far into this, I just want to say that the comparison chips are on Adam's standard test bench. Adam got this in. The 9950X3D2, we weren't sampled that from AMD either, but Falcon Northwest was able to send us a box with it in it. So thanks, Kel. Thanks, Falcon Northwest. So the 9950X3D2 results are in a different system, but everything is set up pretty much as well as you can to make them as comparable as possible. They have the same speed memory and stuff like that.

Speaker 2:
[37:59] I think it's the same chipset. Same. I think he used the same RAM, same chipset, same video card, maybe same SSD. I'm not sure about that.

Speaker 3:
[38:06] Very close.

Speaker 2:
[38:07] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[38:08] The only minor difference I think Adam wanted us to know is that the Falcon Northwest machine is a bit smaller as a form factor. So there could be some very minor performance differences because of whatever thermal differences there are between his test bench and that machine. So that's also something to keep in mind.

Speaker 2:
[38:29] Kelt also does some custom work on the cooler plate, I think to get full coverage and right placement and all that stuff on his cooler and the Falcon machines. But anyway.

Speaker 1:
[38:39] It's not a comment on their cooling. It's just that it's not a one for one. So when you are looking at numbers, there is a little bit of that variability that's going to influence the results. But we've got...

Speaker 2:
[38:52] No, no, no. I mean, but we have numbers. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[38:54] We have numbers. So Blender, I believe, is on the screen now. And as you can see, the X3D2 version of the 9950X3D has a slight bump in performance for this particular one. I'm blanking suddenly. This is a rendering benchmark, if I remember right.

Speaker 2:
[39:13] Yeah, this is a render. There's three benchmarks in here. There's three different renders, basically.

Speaker 1:
[39:18] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[39:19] And this one, a lot bigger bar is better on this one.

Speaker 1:
[39:23] Correct. So, I mean, you can see too that it is a bit of a win for Intel, that it's Ultra 7, which is technically, if you were to kind of try to do a one for one comparison, one tier below, is still kind of holding its own pretty well in this content creation task. So, everybody out there who's been, you know, championing Intel as doing very well for itself. Oh, no. Did we lose Brad? Well, he'll be back.

Speaker 2:
[39:53] Nobody knows.

Speaker 1:
[39:53] Okay. Nobody knows.

Speaker 2:
[39:56] No, no, nobody knows we lost Brad, because all they can see is the benchmark right now.

Speaker 1:
[40:00] Oh, okay. I cannot see Brad currently. So do you want to go to the next slide?

Speaker 2:
[40:07] Yeah, I was going to say this is a really multi-threaded benchmark. So you can obviously see that with the difference between the 8 and the 16 core CPUs from AMD. The interesting thing about the 270K plus is in almost everything, it was faster than the 285 or as fast as the 285K when Adam tested that a couple weeks ago. So this is Photoshop 27.2, which is pretty single-threaded. It's lightly multi-threaded, I guess is what Gordon would have said. And you see that in the clock speeds here, the clock speed wins on this one.

Speaker 1:
[40:37] Yes. So this is the Puget Bench?

Speaker 2:
[40:41] This is in Puget Bench, yeah. And this is the latest version of Puget Bench, I think. 1.0.5 maybe.

Speaker 1:
[40:50] So you do see that the higher clock speed does have a slight advantage, right? Because even the two chips with only one chiplet with the 3DV cache slightly edge out, or at least the 9850X3D edges out. So for our listeners, I always forget to make this clear to them. Sorry. So on the last slide, pretty much 9950X3D2 was top, and then it would just successfully went down the chart, so that you could see the roll-off in performance. And then when we got to the 9850X3D, there was just a huge drop in performance, because as Will was just saying, not as many cores, not as many lanes, I guess, for lack of a better term, for the data to be spread through. Here in Photoshop, it's 9950X3D2 has a slightly lower score than the 9850X3D, and then the 9950X3D part is actually below both of those two. Again, I think, as Will was saying, do slightly lower clock speeds.

Speaker 2:
[41:52] Yeah, and Photoshop's hardly multi-threaded is the other thing that's... Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[41:57] Yeah. Core Ultra 7 270K plus trails behind them in this particular task.

Speaker 2:
[42:05] Yeah. I don't think we have to super dig into all of these because there's a bunch of benchmarks to get through.

Speaker 1:
[42:10] No, there's a bunch of benchmarks to get through, but I just want to lay that foundation so that people know what we're looking at for multi-core versus single-core. We have Geekbench up on the screen right now, which is a little bit of a tongue-in-cheek joke from Gordon. Yeah. So if you care about Geekbench scores.

Speaker 2:
[42:28] Did he like Geekbench? I never talked to him about Geekbench.

Speaker 1:
[42:31] He had very conflicted feelings about Geekbench.

Speaker 2:
[42:34] Did he like it when it gave you worse numbers on iOS than other OSs or was it? Yeah. Anyway, this seems like it's clock dependent at this. It's a single-core Geekbench. Yeah, yeah. Obviously, clock dependent. Cinebench, real benchmark, though.

Speaker 1:
[42:52] Yes, real benchmark, single thread. Intel takes the lead here. Story, again, is very similar to what we see among the AMD chips as with Photoshop. So the 9850X3D actually has a slight edge over its beefier top-tier siblings.

Speaker 2:
[43:17] Let's see. Hold on. Oh, and hold on. I'm zooping through, sorry. They weren't in the right order. Okay, so here's Geekbench multi-core. Multi-core numbers, the 9850X3D2 kind of runs away a little bit. It's not, like the percentage differences here are not fantastic. I kind of feel like our benchmarks maybe aren't set up to measure this level of multi-threadedness. Or the performance gains are nominal, right? This is the multi-core Geekbench. And then, let's see, we can go back over here to Premiere, which is more multi-threaded. I don't know why the 9850X3D didn't get, didn't render a score here. We definitely will have to talk to Adam about that.

Speaker 1:
[43:58] Yeah, so this happens sometimes just for people wondering why it has a zero score. It's because sometimes when we have these really tight testing windows and we can't get the machines to cooperate with us, we end up having just to go with the numbers we have. It's not necessarily a reflection of performance overall. It's just that sometimes gremlins get into the testing process and you don't always have time to work them out.

Speaker 2:
[44:20] I want to say Adam said that there was some sort of problem with this version of Puget Bench, with the new version of the benchmark and the way it runs on lower than 12 core machines or something, but I can't remember. And yeah, Intel took this.

Speaker 1:
[44:35] Yes. So, on this one, on that last one though, for audio listeners, the 9950X3D2 does take a slight lead over its only one shiplet 3D cache counterpart. But I mean, honestly, I would say, as you were saying, well, like some of, like going through the nitty-gritty of every single one of these benchmarks would take a lot of time. And I think the summary for it is just that there is a slight advantage with this chip and content creation. But at the same time, the uplift is small enough that you could also just see it as a potential margin of error difference, depending on the particular program you're using. So it's not so you're getting that much more from it, depending on your use case.

Speaker 2:
[45:25] When we had Wendell on a few weeks ago, and I'm going to move this in a bench number on because this is the last of the content creation benchmarks. But when we had Wendell on a few weeks ago, he was talking about this being interesting from a data center perspective for folks that run game servers and things like that at scale. Because the Vcache helps in those types of instances and the threads, they're mostly single and dual-threaded processes, so you can run 16 or 8 of those on a machine and get the benefit of the Vcache across the entire stack rather than having these weird heterogeneous architectures in the server context.

Speaker 1:
[46:06] Yeah, and I think that also brings up a really important point, too, that do we have gaming benchmarks that we're showing as well?

Speaker 2:
[46:12] Yeah, we do. So I can pop those up now.

Speaker 1:
[46:15] Yeah. Because I think that's an important part of this dialogue. And again, I think for our audience, like everyone who's listening, for everybody here, again, as Adam likes to say, which I forgot to say during the intro because I was just whiffing it constantly today, is that we've been said, it's been said that we are a level-headed podcast, right, about like how we talk about enthusiast hardware. I think a lot of you in the audience are very similar in temperament. So I think among us, none of us were expecting this story of it being like, oh, it's going to be amazing across the board. You're going to get like 15, 20, 30% gains on this. To me, the story is, and just to plug the newsletter here, when I talked about this ship in the newsletter, I think last last week, two weeks ago, is that for me, this is more of a technological, almost proof of concept, like, hey, you asked for it. Here it is. This is what it can do. This is what it looks like right now. And I think it's way more interesting in that story, which is like, to your point, is that we are creating more options. We are, or sorry, we're getting more options from these hardware vendors. We are seeing technology still progress. And to me, that's important. I really don't know how many people will buy this, but as Mike, you were pointing out, the cost difference between this and an entry-level Threadripper chip is quite large still.

Speaker 4:
[47:37] Yeah, I think it's $700 bumping up to the cheapest Threadripper chip, and that's just the chip. That's not the only thing you need to upgrade to get up to that level.

Speaker 2:
[47:46] That's wild.

Speaker 4:
[47:47] Yeah, maybe this could be a more budget-oriented option if you're looking to make a workstation, not necessarily for gaming, and you could do gaming on it too for fun.

Speaker 2:
[47:57] Well, and the Threadrippers, the clocks are typically much, much lower. So this is why Wendell was talking about video game servers, is because clock speeds matter on video game servers a lot. And a Threadripper seems like a good idea for a game server, but you're going to have low tick rates, which competitive players don't want. Anyway, we got game benchmarks here. We got Cyberpunk. This is the ray tracing overdrive, which is the path tracing mode at 1080p, which is new release, Cyberpunk 2077. Everybody loves to use it as a benchmark. And you can see them game numbers are exactly the same as the 9950X3D. That's shocking to me.

Speaker 1:
[48:39] Pretty much. Very, very close.

Speaker 2:
[48:41] This is why...

Speaker 1:
[48:42] Like, hair shy, but not that much of a difference.

Speaker 2:
[48:45] My guess is this is why, when everybody was like, hey, AMD, why don't you make these... Why don't you make one of these chips with dual Vcash, 3D Vcash? They were like, no, it doesn't make any difference. And my guess is that this is probably why. Here's F1 2024. Slightly slower. Slightly slower. Not great. This is probably also why they only sampled these to fairly limited and like prosumer enthusiast places. This is 1080P Cyberpunk 27 Ultra with RT-OF. The first one was path tracing. This is the no ray tracing. And it's again slower than the 9950X3D by a little bit, and fairly slower, quite a bit slower than the 9850X3D. I was to say, to me, this feels like a, hey, you want to have games and you want to have... The thing we, I don't have a sense of it, because I haven't had time to spend it with the machine, I haven't had a chance to talk to Adam about it yet, is if it solves the 9950X3D problem with games like Helldivers, where the game freaks out and doesn't know where to put the cores, and you end up with weird thread timing between the two, between threads that are running on different cores, and my guess is that that still exists, because going from 3DV cache chip across the CCDs, across the infinity fabric is still going to be slow.

Speaker 4:
[50:15] And I should point out that when AMD announced this, they did not say, hey, this is the ultimate gaming chip. They were very careful not to do that, and I think everybody agreed that that was the right call. It was like, no, this is for media production. This is for AI research. This is for, they almost went out of their way to not mention gaming in any part of it. The only thing they talked about were, we introduced these as great gaming chips. Now we're doing this as well.

Speaker 2:
[50:46] We talked to Kelt a couple of years ago for a video where we talked about building a workstation type machine for game development. And the TLDR on that was that we ended up, he built a Threadripper machine, was like, I don't think a Threadripper machine is necessarily right for this if we want to actually play games on it rather than just build games. And this feels like a similar situation to me. Although this is a better game machine than the Threadripper would be for sure because of the higher clock speeds. Okay, so that's games.

Speaker 4:
[51:15] So it makes sense for an incredibly niche, like middle slice between these two markets, is that what I'm hearing?

Speaker 2:
[51:20] I think so, yeah. Like, if you're, so if you're doing, if you're like an artist working on games and you do, you're a level designer and have to bake light maps and stuff like that, which even in games with full ray tracing, you're still making light maps for Switch versions and console versions and stuff like that, that's a really intensely multi-threaded time-consuming process. So running those calculations on the Threadripper machine was incredible because you had 64 full fat cores, big cores. On, at the same time, if you're playing games, if at the end of the day when you turn off Unreal and you want to get out and have your time playing Fortnite or whatever game it is, you need something that has pretty good clock speeds, and that's why we're seeing the 9850X3D show a commanding lead here is because it has high clock speeds and the 3DV cache and it's the best of both worlds, but it's only eight cores. So those workstation tasks that are heavily multi-threaded are going to suffer, and not surprising. These results are not surprising at all. This isn't the one chip to rule them all, I think is the TLDR.

Speaker 1:
[52:26] Yeah. Actually, to that point, I want to call out a comment from chat from Evotech1 who said, I just don't see how anyone could have expected any better from a technical point of view. There was no real way it was going to give real performance increases for gaming, super niche chip. I would say that among us here, like those of us who are talking, those of you who are listening, I think all of us probably have that perspective. I think in some ways, the three of us right now are just speaking to the broader internet that when I wrote my article or my newsletter those couple of weeks ago, I waded into comments on Reddit and other places. There is a decent number of people who are like, why is this chip going to exist? It's going to be terrible for gaming. Nobody needs it. It's going to be so expensive. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think maybe it's just a trauma, knee-jerk reaction. I don't know what you want to call it. That we are almost getting ahead of it to say like, no, it's not necessarily a waste of sand. You have to look at it from the perspective it's being launched. I think maybe another reason why it wasn't seeded to a lot of people is that I don't think they're going to produce a lot of this chip either. I don't necessarily think it's going to be a high volume for release.

Speaker 2:
[53:43] This kind of dual 3DV cache chip doesn't make sense until they get the Infinity Fabric speeds up, right? Like this is the fundamental, the architecture challenge that they have is that their CCD to CCD communication is relatively slow compared to intra-chip comms from the CCD to the Vcache that's glued on the top. This is the problem that they're going to face. This is going to continue to be an issue until they either make the CCD chiplets have more cores or they speed up those interconnects. I've got power benchmarks up if we want to hit those briefly. But this is the 10-minute Cinebench loop, and the lines are different lengths because basically this stops after the 10-minute mark. It just runs 10 minutes worth of loops and completes the loop. So you can see that the 9950X3D2 finished one more loop. I don't actually know why it did a fifth run here, but it did, or sixth run here, but it did. But it draws a fair amount more power than either the 9950X3D or the 270K.

Speaker 1:
[54:50] So for audio listeners, 9950X3D is hovering around 350 watts. The 270K plus is hovering around like 375, I want to estimate.

Speaker 2:
[55:01] 380, it looks like, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[55:02] Yeah. And then the 9950X3D2 is just a little over 400, so maybe like 405, 410. It's a little hard for me to tell from the chart because it's more like 50 watt increments.

Speaker 2:
[55:14] Yeah, it looks like 410 on the big screen here.

Speaker 1:
[55:17] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[55:18] Here's Cinebench one thread, single thread, one loop. And this one is interesting because the 270K is just showing zero watts all the way across. I think that this is probably a bug on Adam's chart, if I had to guess. That seems a little low for the 270K.

Speaker 1:
[55:32] Just a little. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[55:34] But it's interesting because the perf on the other two chips is basically the same. They're both hovering around 170 with some spikes.

Speaker 1:
[55:42] Yeah. It's interesting to me to see the 9950X3D spike at the beginning there.

Speaker 2:
[55:46] Yeah. My guess is that the other one does too, and it's just covering up that line because it looks like it's being drawn behind it. There's almost always an initial spike on the Cinebench single threaded as it boosts up and then drops down.

Speaker 1:
[55:57] Sure. It just looks a little higher.

Speaker 2:
[55:59] Yeah. Maybe.

Speaker 1:
[56:00] You can see the overlap.

Speaker 2:
[56:01] Maybe. I don't have the raw spreadsheets, unfortunately, so I can't look. And then idle draw is the 270K plus wins this one with about 75 to 80, sorry, 90 to 95, it looks like, yeah. The 9950X3D single Vcache triplet is about 120 and the X3D2 is like, say 135 maybe. Average would be like this. With some big spikes, yeah.

Speaker 1:
[56:30] Yeah, like spiking all the way up to almost like 175-ish, it looks like.

Speaker 2:
[56:35] This is a challenge. Doing this test is challenging, because sometimes Windows decides to do stuff in the background that spikes. You can kill all the other processes, so it's not like Steam or something's running in the background and downloading an update for a game, but Windows will still decide to do something and spike the usage in the time. So I would care more about the average on this one than those spikes.

Speaker 1:
[56:56] Yeah. Again, nothing too shocking here. Nothing shocking at all. Honestly, the biggest shocking thing of all of this is the fact that AMD actually decided to do it.

Speaker 2:
[57:09] Yeah. 100%. It's shocking.

Speaker 1:
[57:12] We have them on record from CES 2023, Gordon doing an interview with AMD and asking the question that everyone wanted to know. Like, hey, when are you doing a dual version of 3D vCache on a chip, like on both triplets, right? And they basically said the same thing that they said now, which is, well, it doesn't really give that much of a boost to gaming. And, you know, it's, they implied it was going to raise costs. So at the time, they were like, yeah, it doesn't seem worth it. So I actually am kind of wondering why they turned around and revisited it. Like, have there been improvements in technology? Do they think, are they projecting that they can really push this in a certain direction? I would be interested to know that. And unfortunately, Adam isn't able to join us today. And so I wonder if he actually has some of that information potentially.

Speaker 2:
[58:04] I mean, I think that they're, I think the thing you're seeing is the shift on AMD from the enthusiast performance leader to maybe a more mainstream position, and they're diversifying their product lines more as a result. And some of that means, sometimes that means making more SKUs at lower price, you know, filling in all those gaps between the SKUs. And sometimes it means making a really expensive Halo product that maybe doesn't make any sense at all for like 99% of users, but hits a couple of niche uses really, really well.

Speaker 4:
[58:40] I'd be interested to see, I mean, if it's, I don't have enough technical software knowledge to know if this is possible. Could you write drivers and game engines in such a way to take advantage of that extra Vcash on that other chiplet?

Speaker 2:
[58:52] Probably not.

Speaker 4:
[58:53] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[58:55] Yeah. Generally speaking, the problem with the dual, the chiplet design on the AMD stuff is that the chiplet to chiplet communication is slow. So you're not going to, if you have a thread in a game that requires a conversation across that infinity fabric, there's a multi 20,000 cycle or 40,000 cycle or something stall to go across those buses and you end up in a situation where the threads running on one chiplet end up waiting for the threads on the other chiplet and it makes the whole thing go to hell basically. Sorry, beep, Adam. Sorry, we replaced Brad with the Artemis Eclipse shot thanks to NASA for that image. NASA pictures are public domain and I didn't have a good way to put three people up here.

Speaker 1:
[59:50] Somebody just said, I was wondering why people in the chat were saying that he got shadow realm and I was like, what?

Speaker 2:
[59:56] When you think of Brad, just start humming Black Hole Sun and he'll be right there in his heart.

Speaker 1:
[60:01] Oh no.

Speaker 2:
[60:03] No, also it's my favorite picture from the people who went beyond the moon by a huge margin. I use it as a placeholder in OBS so I can move it around and get everybody lined up right.

Speaker 1:
[60:13] That makes sense. License free things are very important.

Speaker 2:
[60:19] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[60:20] So I think summary is cool that it exists. Not a huge surprise how it has emerged from the ether. And apparently, according to chat, this is the reason why the 5800X3D's return is the real goat move here, apparently.

Speaker 2:
[60:41] With the 5800X3D?

Speaker 1:
[60:43] You didn't hear this rumor?

Speaker 4:
[60:43] They're bringing it back.

Speaker 1:
[60:44] What? That's the rumor.

Speaker 2:
[60:46] DDR4 is back. AM4 lives on.

Speaker 1:
[60:49] It continues to live on. It'll never get to retire.

Speaker 2:
[60:53] Somebody's going to be some stuff.

Speaker 4:
[60:54] We have not verified that, but in the current market, it makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 1:
[60:59] It is not verified yet. Mike, you want to talk about it because you wrote the new story about it. Oh, gosh.

Speaker 4:
[61:03] There's been so much that happened since then. I got you.

Speaker 1:
[61:06] I got you. It's cool. I got you. Fill in if I missed something. So just real quick, Will, to catch you up. There is a rumor that AMD is going to release the 5800X3D again, as almost like an anniversary celebration re-release to celebrate AM4. What's not known yet is if this is going to be in a specific market only, and if it's only going to be a limited run. But yeah, I had feelings about this. I don't know if I like this zombified resurrection, necromancy crap when it comes to chips that I feel like deserve their retirement.

Speaker 2:
[61:47] I mean, Mike, my daughter's computer has a 5600 in it, and at some point, I was going to have to upgrade that. But maybe I'll just get her a 5800X3D and call it a day. That sounds fabulous.

Speaker 4:
[61:59] They were releasing new 5000 series X3D ships just last year, right? Correct me if I'm wrong.

Speaker 2:
[62:03] They were only limited markets. It was like Brazil and the Global South, I think, right?

Speaker 4:
[62:10] And the image that this link is based on was in Chinese, so it could just be for the Chinese market if that's what they're hoping to do. I kind of hope it goes broader because the people need ships, man, and you can't go out and buy a 5800X3D right now.

Speaker 2:
[62:26] No, actually, I looked at it a few months ago to see what the AM4 situation was, and it's a little dry on the high end stuff these days. The low end, there's still stuff around. You can get sub 50s, 60s and stuff like that. But...

Speaker 1:
[62:41] Used or new?

Speaker 2:
[62:44] I was looking at an Amazon probably, so I don't actually know it could have been used.

Speaker 1:
[62:48] Oh, you don't know?

Speaker 4:
[62:48] When I looked it up when I wrote the story, I could find 5600X, not 3D chips on Amazon, new, and it looked like they were at the prices you would expect, but you couldn't find X3D chips from that generation.

Speaker 2:
[63:01] Yeah. Yeah, that's wild.

Speaker 1:
[63:06] That's fair.

Speaker 2:
[63:07] Should we take another quick ad break?

Speaker 1:
[63:10] Yeah, we should take a little break and then come back for questions.

Speaker 2:
[63:13] That sounds good. Be right back. And we're back.

Speaker 4:
[63:20] So quick. I know.

Speaker 2:
[63:22] That was a fantastic ad though. I really enjoyed that one.

Speaker 1:
[63:24] Yeah. So I think let's, we have, I noticed.

Speaker 2:
[63:29] I double transitioned. Sorry, that's my bad. Pick that up again, Alaina. We have some super chats. We're back.

Speaker 1:
[63:36] We have some super chats. Let's get to them. Skeet Sayer is letting us know their thoughts and also sponsor the show a bit. So thank you for all of your super chats. I will take the first one, I guess, which was a comment when we were talking about the RAM pricing deep dive that Mike did, and the comment was, I guess, question was, which government will be the first to charge the RAM companies for collusion again for the fourth time?

Speaker 2:
[64:05] I think they're clean on this one. I don't think this is their fault. I think they're taking advantage of it, but making hay while the sun shines.

Speaker 1:
[64:15] True. I actually do wonder, though, if we will see any shenanigans happen in terms of prolonging a potential high.

Speaker 2:
[64:27] Well, that's a whole different thing.

Speaker 1:
[64:31] That would be different than this current situation, but I do think that part maybe is a fair question to at least wonder at the moment.

Speaker 4:
[64:38] I'd say in terms of regulation, the more likely thing to happen is like governments trying to force a legislative way out of this crisis. For the sake of consumers, for companies that are otherwise getting destroyed. But like Will said, I don't think collusion is necessary for everybody to make tons and tons of money here, so why would they risk it?

Speaker 1:
[65:00] No. But either way, we're getting squeezed and that's no fun. Next question, also from Skeet Sayre. So sorry, the first one was five Canadian dollars. Thank you very much for that. This one is two Canadian dollars. If RAM is more than a GPU, who wants DIY?

Speaker 2:
[65:23] That's the question.

Speaker 4:
[65:27] I am seeing, watching the prices like we do, just to try and find deals to put on the site. We are seeing some decent bundles. I mean, it's not like prices were a year ago, but you can save a couple of hundred bucks if you're willing to chase down a Micro Center or a Costco kind of thing and get all your motherboard RAM processor at the same time. It's not great, but it's better than it would otherwise be.

Speaker 2:
[65:51] I've been helping a couple of people build systems lately, and I would 100% advocate for buying a bundle. Like there's no, you're going to get a better deal on the RAM with the bundles and the rest of the stuff. Like, it's much harder to do a RAM upgrade right now than it is to actually build a whole new machine in a lot of cases. And you get reasonable, more reasonable prices on the RAM than when you buy a pair with a CPU and a motherboard, thanks to Intel and or AMD.

Speaker 4:
[66:18] Yeah, and if you're looking to build, I would say look at the pre-builds right now. Sometimes you can find one that's like a couple of months behind the curve and get a much better deal than you would just for building yourself. And once you have that, hey, you can swap out parts whenever you want whenever if the prices go down. It's a strange situation where the pre-builds are unambiguously better in terms of value, but they often are.

Speaker 2:
[66:42] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[66:43] You do have to screen them though, because it's kind of like Black Fighter sales to a degree, where it's like some pre-builds do not give the same value as other pre-builds. You have to look over the specs carefully and look at the price that's being asked for them.

Speaker 2:
[66:57] It's funny. Adam and I talked about doing a video ages ago where we just go to Micro Center and walk down the pre-built line and thumbs up or thumbs down the different machines because there is a wild variation in what you get. We saw some really questionable configuration choices in there. Then we also saw some stuff that was like machines I would totally run and be stoked about. As always, buyer beware.

Speaker 1:
[67:23] Next super chat from Skeet Sayre, five Canadian dollars. Comment of NVIDIA has ruined white color admin jobs, first SAP and now ServiceNow. I will not explain how damaging that is.

Speaker 2:
[67:39] It's more of a comment than a question, Alaina.

Speaker 1:
[67:41] It is comment. That's what I said, it's a comment. But I was just going to say, I live in the Bay Area, like Will does too. And I do see regular comments from people saying like, hey, I just got laid off, which is a little depressing.

Speaker 2:
[67:54] This is a sign of our times.

Speaker 1:
[67:56] Yeep. Another $5 Canadian dollars from Skeet Sayre, another comment saying, AI data centers are not good for the economy, ask the people that live in West Virginia. I don't know, I know we have an international audience and to kind of like tangentially comment on that. There has been a decent spate of news in the past week to two weeks of people doing some wild things related to data centers, like shooting at people or otherwise trying to incite violence, which I do not recommend. I want to be very clear. But yeah, it would be crazy out there.

Speaker 2:
[68:32] I don't advocate for shooting or throwing Molotov cocktails at data centers or anything like that, but I do advocate for going to your city council meetings. If somebody is trying to build a data center in your backyard, this is the one opportunity where NIMBYing is okay in my book.

Speaker 4:
[68:48] Yeah, I brought it up in the Big Ram article. The idea of a data center near you is not terrible. The problem is they're building them out beyond the energy capacity, and a lot of them are doing it, skirting local rules for zoning, for environmental impact. And it's hurting personally, like my power bill, because a lot of them are being built here in Pennsylvania, because there's tons of cheap land. What there isn't is tons of electrical grid capacity. So it's creating a lot of problems for that. And the data centers don't come with lots of jobs. Like you don't need a lot of boots on the ground to keep a data center running.

Speaker 2:
[69:24] It's funny the difference between a data center and a fab. Like the fab, when we were walking around the Intel fab, there were literally hundreds and hundreds of people there all the time, right? Like thousands of people on site 24 hours a day. Those are good, high paying jobs. The data center, you have a handful of people in there pulling hard drives and swapping out hardware all the time, but it's not an army of full time employees like it is at some of the other type of computer related industry stuff.

Speaker 4:
[69:52] I think I read earlier today, there was one, I want to say in Virginia, but I won't swear to it, they got a $77 million tax rebate to build this data center a year or two later and exactly one permanent job was added to it. Everything else was contract or seasonal or however they classify that. It is not a great thing for almost any community that these are being built into or at least that they're being over built into.

Speaker 2:
[70:20] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[70:23] Another $2 Canadian super chat, sorry, $2 Canadian. Oh my gosh, my brain. $2 Canadian from Skeetsayer question. Maybe more of a rhetorical question. Is it okay when Micron kills crucial for greed?

Speaker 2:
[70:43] I don't think they killed them for greed. I think they killed them because they don't need them anymore, which is a different thing exactly. But anyway.

Speaker 1:
[70:49] Tomato, tomato, I think perhaps in this situation.

Speaker 4:
[70:52] Well, it's okay in the sense that companies have permission to basically act like animals, to follow profit over anything else. We've just kind of decided that as a society, we ignore that. So yeah, it's already going a bit of a rant there.

Speaker 2:
[71:13] Jeez, Mike. So ranty.

Speaker 1:
[71:16] And then final super chat from Skeet Sayer. Thank you very much. Another $2 Canadian. This comment. Oh my God, that is insane. I think it was a comment on the power chart. My 99100X3D does, I'm guessing maybe they meant doesn't pass 115 watts. So I mean, so it's a profile. How we test is probably going to be a little bit different too than how someone might run on their system.

Speaker 2:
[71:49] Yeah, we don't we don't tune the biases at all for power consumption. It's all it's basically stock numbers for the benchmark benchmark runs.

Speaker 1:
[72:02] Oh, and we just got another super chat from Weebenator.

Speaker 2:
[72:10] Weebenator?

Speaker 1:
[72:11] Oh, Weebenator. Oh, maybe 2666. Two Canadian dollars. Thank you very much. No comment.

Speaker 2:
[72:19] Yeah, good, good, good clippy avatar though. Should we take some audience questions? Do we have other questions?

Speaker 1:
[72:27] I do have actual questions from Discord. So if you have any questions, get them into our Discord server, or if you could resurface them in chat, because unfortunately, I haven't been able to really monitor it as closely as I normally do. I'm going to pull one from Discord. The first one was something I can answer very quickly, and I think they actually answered it for themselves. But in case you're curious, Scribefix wanted to know which brand was it that the refurb portable monitors for sale on eBay? Like what brand was it? And it's Acer. So Acer has a refurbished storefront on eBay, and periodically they'll do sales. I managed to see one where I think it was $35, was it?

Speaker 2:
[73:12] Yeah, I got it.

Speaker 1:
[73:12] $40, it's quite low.

Speaker 2:
[73:14] They had like 15 inch 1080p, a whole bunch of different models, and it seemed like the one you get was kind of potluck, but it would be the right specs. So it would be HDMI and USBC for $35 refurbished. They have a visa mount, a two-hole visa mount on the back, which I was shocked by. Yeah, and was pleasantly surprised. They pop in and out. I set up an eBay alert for them, and they come and go very quickly, it seems.

Speaker 4:
[73:42] Acer has a shocking amount of really good deals on their official eBay store, where they put a lot of their refurbished stuff, like great for laptops that are a year to two years old, that look like they're in great shape. They all come with, I think it's two-year warranties that are through Allstate, but that's still a whole lot more than you'd get from any other refurbished electronics.

Speaker 1:
[74:03] Actually, every time we've been in a downturn when it comes to being able to get laptops, and specifically affordably, I always tell people like, hey, if your needs aren't high and you argue you don't mind doing refurbish, check those out first. See what you can get through a refurbish, especially through official refurbish from the company themselves. So Acer is a good source for that. Sometimes you can get them to Lenovo as well, Dell sometimes. Another source of that too is that if you live in College Town or New York College Town, some college campuses will have a surplus store where they sell their old technology. Depending on the campus, sometimes you can get some really decent deals on not too old hardware. Other campuses, you go look at their offerings, you're like, wow, you really ran that into the ground. Good job on your budgeting and making the most of your stuff, but also, well, that's not going to work for me so much. But some of that, you can get quite cheap. So that's another solution if you need to spin up a homebrew Chrome OS, or sorry, Chromebook type situation for somebody you know or even for yourself, or you want to play with Linux because you're following DVD on the regular now.

Speaker 2:
[75:24] This one I got from the Acer store, but it has an Aopen logo on it, so.

Speaker 4:
[75:28] Yeah, that's a sub-brand of Acer.

Speaker 2:
[75:30] Yeah, but it works. I plugged it in a couple of times. It has HGMI in.

Speaker 1:
[75:34] Did you buy another one?

Speaker 2:
[75:35] No, this is the same one. It was like 35 bucks.

Speaker 1:
[75:36] Okay. So, that's the answer to that if you're looking for it. I love this question from sadtire. What's the performance ceiling to qualify as a potato PC in 2026?

Speaker 4:
[76:01] You know, I was doing a little testing earlier yesterday because I've been obsessed with this game demo, Dead as Disco, over the weekend. I was like, hey, this is a good thing to test out specifically for performance that isn't just a straight FPS measure. Like some of the stuff you were doing for Doom and a couple of other games for the MicroStutterWheel, because it's got a lot of effects going on, but it's not just giant environments, and you'd have to have smooth performance, really low latency to get, because it's a rhythm game. It's Arkham Combat with rhythm thrown in there. So do it to the beat.

Speaker 2:
[76:38] What game is this?

Speaker 4:
[76:39] This is Dead as Disco.

Speaker 1:
[76:42] It's like brawling, but rhythm brawling?

Speaker 4:
[76:45] Yes, it's like Arkham Asylum Combat, the kind of combat we saw for a few years. But you do it to the beat of the song that is playing in the background. Oh, it is so much fun. But anyway, I was like, hey, this looks great on my ridiculous 7800X3D and 5070Ti desktop. Let me throw it on the Lenovo Legion Go, see if I can do that. Let me throw it on my laptop. Let me try and run it through those crazy bootstrap steam things on my phone. It took a little coaxing on the Legion Go. It wasn't because it's a small indie dev team. But all I really had to do was bump down the resolution once and then put it up to 120 and turn on the VSync. I was going, it was like I hadn't missed a step, if you'll pardon the pun. It was great. The laptop from four years ago, not so much. Obviously on the phone, I was amazed it would even boot up. But I'd say potato PCs, if you find the right integrated graphics, you'd be shocked at what you can get out of it just for fun. And I think that's been a trend that's been going up for a long time that is suddenly much more relevant.

Speaker 2:
[78:02] Yeah, I talked to a friend yesterday who plays games on a 1080 Ti, and it's the greatest video card of all time I think is what we decided. But by today's standards, a little bit of a potato, but still totally playable. I think today the cutoff for potato for me is the three gigabyte of RAM cards, like the 1063 gigs, I think there was a 2063 gig, I can't remember. I feel like they finally moved beyond that with the 3060s, but yeah. That's where you start having problems. I'd rather have it integrated with more RAM than a three gig discrete card at this point, I think.

Speaker 4:
[78:41] And right now you can find gaming laptop deals at $1,000 that start with a 3050. So things are grim.

Speaker 1:
[78:52] It's funny because my first instinct when somebody asks me, well, what do you classify as this? My first response is always, well, in what scenario?

Speaker 2:
[79:01] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[79:01] Right. Are we talking about absolute potato PC where you can barely even get it to run two tabs at the same time? Are we talking about potato PC where you can barely get it to play an indie game, or potato PC if you're trying to get it to play a triple A game from X number of years ago, or versus today? I think for me, potato PC, my definition of potato PC is that I go for the absolute most bottom, like bare minimum. And if that's the case, actually the hardware is pretty old at this point. You could probably go back at least seven or eight years. And to me, that's your potato PC line at the low end. It'll run a few tabs, but it's not really going to be doing much more than that. My little Windows tablet I mentioned earlier in the show is definitely older than that. It is just begging for sweet release at this point.

Speaker 2:
[79:55] We put Linux on some really old laptops. I think it's 2017, 2018 era, or sorry, 2015 era Mac. 2015 era MacBook is what I did. Adam has an even older Lenovo than that. And like, eight gig RAM system's pretty usable for normal computing stuff, as long as you don't go crazy with tabs. So, on Linux at least, maybe not Windows 11.

Speaker 1:
[80:17] That's the thing. It also depends what operating system you use, right? Because Chrome OS, I can run that, or Chrome OS Flex, I can run that on like, I think the same era of laptop that you guys are doing your experiment on, because I have like a ThinkPad from like 2013, that I put Chrome OS Flex on, and it runs super smooth, even with a hard disk drive still in there.

Speaker 4:
[80:37] Oh, wow.

Speaker 1:
[80:38] Yeah. I mean, it's not as fast as I had put an SSD in there, but it's still actually pretty smooth. And I'm assuming Linux would feel similar. But yeah, that thing running Windows, it's going to be like chugging along.

Speaker 4:
[80:55] Yeah, if there's a nice thing about the current crisis that we're in, it's that we've made so much performance in just the raw capability of the hardware in the last 10 years, that if you're in a situation where you're strapped for cash, you're having hard times, and you've only got $200 to go find a computer to use, you can probably find one. You might have to get comfortable with Linux, but that's not the end of the world. And it's free.

Speaker 2:
[81:21] I'm going to tell you, the flea market, there's a couple of vendors there that have refurbished laptops. They're clearly buying old laptops from schools and businesses and stuff like that, and then cleaning them off, putting clean OSs on there and reselling them. That table has seen a lot of traffic the last few times I've been to the flea market.

Speaker 1:
[81:42] Oh, speaking of, that's another tip I guess I should mention, and people brought it up in the chat as well, that electronic flea markets are another way to look for decent used hardware. Obviously, that is not going to give you a warranty or guarantee of operation, but that is another option.

Speaker 2:
[82:00] There's not as many of those around the country either. They're a little rare, but they are starting to be more like computer swap meets and stuff like that.

Speaker 1:
[82:11] A couple more questions, and then we'll get out of here. A friend of the show, Star Screamers, wants to know, is the 9950X3D2 good for live streaming plus gaming? For example, just goofing out on Discord, gaming plus streaming simultaneously?

Speaker 4:
[82:27] I was interested in that too. From what I understand, the streaming programs can't really take advantage of the vCache, is that right? So they wouldn't be able to do it in conjunction with a game on the same machine and really see any boosts?

Speaker 2:
[82:41] It's probably, yeah, like OBS is mostly, there's a little bit of CPU for the compositing, but it's mostly GPU, so you're not going to benefit from the 3D vCache at all, really. The challenge with all of those is that the way that those dual CCD chips work with games is that typically you turn off one of the CCDs, you turn off the non-vCache one so that your threads don't bounce from CPU to CPU because Windows doesn't know not to do that really, and so you're probably going to have a worse, you might have a worse experience with that. This is why most professional streamers have their stream on a separate machine than the game that they're playing, is just so you don't have that overhead, you don't have to fool with that. It's the cost of throwing up a thousand, well, what would have been an $800 machine a year ago, and it's now probably a $1,200 machine to run that second PC or to knock your last gaming PC down, keep demoting it one level until it's the stream machine. It's easier to just do that than it is to bother with the other.

Speaker 1:
[83:48] Okay, and then last question before we get out of here for lunchtime, at least for us West Coast folks. Ivan R., friend of the show Ivan R on Discord wants to know, what's better for your back, a $1,000 office chair or 30 minutes of exercise?

Speaker 2:
[84:05] Why not both?

Speaker 4:
[84:07] Well, speaking as somebody who has back problems, I wouldn't spend $1,000 on the office chair, I'd spend $1,000 on a standing desk, but that's just me. I have had back problems for, gosh, 13 years now, and the thing that helps me most is having the option to stand or sit, and when I'm not doing a video like this, I use a big yoga ball.

Speaker 1:
[84:34] That is actually quite large.

Speaker 2:
[84:35] That is a big yoga ball.

Speaker 1:
[84:36] You're kidding.

Speaker 4:
[84:37] Well, I use it as a chair all the time, and sit here on this very big desk, and that was like 50 bucks, so get a nice desk and one of those, and I have a timer here, and I spend an hour standing and an hour sitting, and that's what's helped me. I'm not a doctor, I can only give you my own experience.

Speaker 2:
[84:55] Also, you don't have to spend $1,000 to get a pretty nice standing desk these days, or a convertible. The Ikea ones are really reasonable and quite good, and I think there's even better options than that now even.

Speaker 4:
[85:05] Yeah, just don't go for the $100 ones that are on Amazon. We did that as a test on PCWorld. I wanted to see what the cheapest ones were like, and they will fall apart.

Speaker 2:
[85:13] Tilty.

Speaker 1:
[85:14] They work, but they're just very wobbly, from my experience.

Speaker 4:
[85:18] I would not put anything more than a laptop on those things.

Speaker 2:
[85:22] I bought $1,000, or I got a $1,000 desk chair when I started working from home, and I realized I was going to spend like 12 hours a day sitting in that chair. I don't think you have to spend $1,000 on a task chair. We talk about this on the TechPod Affair amount. But there are a lot of companies that do chair refurbs. There's a whole community dedicated to finding good ones on Reddit. I can't remember what the community is actually at this point, but you can get a refurbed, what would be $1,000 refurbed task chair, like an Aeron or a Reaction or a Steelcase Gesture, one of those, for $300, $400 often, especially as the economy gets worse and businesses start to go under. And as a result, you can have a really nice task chair for way less than you would pay for it new. And the benefits of having that are huge. Like don't sit in $150 gaming chairs if you value your long-term health.

Speaker 1:
[86:21] Yeah, I, again, also prefacing this that I do not have a medical background. But from what I've seen, I feel like if you are having back pain, you need to identify why, because your solution is going to be different, right? So if it's like a nerve issue, that's going to be different how you want to do your desk set up. If it is, and I think commonly for a lot of people, it's actually a muscle strength issue, right? Like if you have a weaker core, that can actually end up sending, my understanding of is like can send more work to your lower back. So if you strengthen your core, I don't mean just doing crunches in your abs, but the whole torso section, like strengthening that, that can help with back pain. So yes, that's a long answer to like, yes, exercise is helpful, but it also it's like what exercises you're doing to strengthen that area.

Speaker 4:
[87:14] That's what the ball is for, to keep you moving around in those intercostal muscles working while sitting at the desk.

Speaker 1:
[87:20] Yeah, and same thing, like also varying your position. So sitting and standing, mixing that into your day. If you're a person who has the kind of work or at least periods of time where you can even set up like a little walking pad at a standing desk so that you're moving, so that you also aren't just like forcing your muscles to hold the position constantly. Like varying it up for a lot of people is a good answer. But again, I would just encourage everyone to kind of figure out why you're having pain if you're having pain, and just make sure you tailor it to that because what works for one person might not work for you just because the root cause is different.

Speaker 2:
[87:57] The other thing about the good chairs is that it's the work boot theory, the Terry Pratchett work boot theory where the good chairs tend to last a lot longer, so you pay more but you're putting fewer chairs in the landfill as they get wobbly or squeaky or loud or the padding breaks or you've ripped the arm off or whatever. So, yeah, but yeah.

Speaker 4:
[88:17] Yeah, read Terry Pratchett too. It won't help your back, but they're good books.

Speaker 2:
[88:20] Yeah, books are fine.

Speaker 1:
[88:20] Yeah. I will say though that when I was going through Reddit a couple of years ago, maybe a few years ago at this point, one overwhelmingly common recommendation was Staples Heiken chair or I think it's called the Dexley is like their wider version. They're pretty inexpensive. They're like $100 on sale, $130, depending on how good the sale is. That's a fine chair if you are mostly sitting in it just a handful of hours a day, like you have a nice chair at work and you go to the office and then you come home and then you're just sitting there for gaming or whatnot. A couple of friends of mine ended up getting those chairs. They do like them fine, but they are primarily office workers. If you're working from home, I would take more of Will's advice. But if you aren't working that often in that chair at home, then you can also look into more affordable options up front if you don't have a ton of money. I feel like a lot of people listening to our show are willing to sink money into things that matter to them, so maybe not necessarily a recommendation you need, but you can keep that one under your hat for anyone else you might be advising.

Speaker 2:
[89:28] Last year was the year of the OLED monitor, maybe this year is the year of the chair. If you're not buying a new computer, just treat your butt, give yourself what you need.

Speaker 1:
[89:38] Yeah. For standing desk, I always recommend at least a dual motor model, smoother. Usually, it feels a little less like, oh my God, what's happening to all my equipment as it's going up and down.

Speaker 2:
[89:51] The smooth movement up and down is good. The wobbliness, I've shifted to up and down, and my nose is just a little bit. I'm moving it just a little bit, but it's a little wobblier than I would. I don't notice it when I'm just working, but it's definitely noticeable when I'm on camera, which is like a unique me problem, maybe not a normal person problem.

Speaker 4:
[90:12] Yeah. I have a triple monitor setup, a big giant gaming desktop, and on a pretty typical mid-range standing desk, after a few years, even that steel frame started to bend. I transitioned into one with four legs that more evenly supports it up and down. It has like a 500-pound capacity, so yeah. Wow.

Speaker 2:
[90:33] You can lay on that thing and write it up and down.

Speaker 4:
[90:36] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[90:37] That's fancy.

Speaker 1:
[90:39] I will say, since we're talking about office liquidation type sales, standing desks are another thing to look for because a lot of those models can be rated much higher and much more sturdy. We had an office downsize several years ago, and our office manager was like, yeah, you want a standing desk, come take it. Those things are solid, man.

Speaker 2:
[90:59] Yeah, they're heavy. I helped them move some a few months ago, and I'm just like, wow, these are beefy.

Speaker 1:
[91:06] They're chunky.

Speaker 2:
[91:07] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[91:07] Chunky, chunky. All right. I think that does it for us for this week. Thank you all for listening. As always, subscribe to us on our many audio feeds. If you would like to hear us on the go, that includes Spotify, Apple Podcasts, I think, Podcasts, all the major providers, of course, including Deezer, Will, because make sure that we got on there. We also now have, I think, the video version of the podcast available on Spotify. So if that's the thing that you want to do there, it is available now. We also have a newsletter related to the show. It's actually written by me at the moment, and it is released every Friday, and you can sign up for it at pcworld.com/newsletters with an S forward slash sign up. We also have a couple of tiny URL, short URLs, but they never seem quite short enough because Will likes to put all the letters and characters in there. And I write a little missive every week. Last week, I was just pontificating, if you will, on what will continue to keep the PC open and free. I also do a quick, usually try to be a little funny, recap of the show. And I also offer a bunch of links that I found interesting during the week. So you sign up there. We also have a bunch of other newsletters that I think are super interesting. I particularly love my co-worker, Sam's Try This Newsletter. It's like cool little tips and tricks for how to get more out of PC or just when you're tooling around on your PC, what you can do with it. And is there any upcoming?

Speaker 2:
[93:00] But you have the audio version of the newsletter too. Don't forget that.

Speaker 1:
[93:03] No, I don't know what you're talking about. That was a one weird aberration, a time blip that made that come into existence.

Speaker 2:
[93:11] All the people are clamoring for it. You just continue to deny them, Alaina.

Speaker 1:
[93:16] Like I said in my write up, I said, I usually say no, tomorrow I will say no, today the answer is not no. Anything coming up with the DVD? Do you know anything special?

Speaker 2:
[93:32] We're doing, we're trying the old slow computers, the beater laptops.

Speaker 1:
[93:39] I should join this experiment with you all, in my wheelhouse.

Speaker 2:
[93:42] Look, you're in the wheelhouse. I'm not gonna, I'm gonna go ahead and tell you, I'm not gonna last super long on this. It is, like I spend good money to not have to deal with old computers. But yeah, I, generally speaking, it's going much better than I expected. Like I wouldn't, I wouldn't, the place I'm at is I think if I had like a nine or ten year old laptop, which I do probably in the pile over there, I'd probably be able to make this work. But the 12 year old laptop is just one bridge too far for me. So yeah.

Speaker 1:
[94:16] We found your potato line.

Speaker 2:
[94:18] Yeah, that's my potato line. Everybody has a different potato line.

Speaker 1:
[94:21] That's true. All right. I will take us out of here in just a second, but last minute, last moment, Super Chat from the show Skeet Sayre, another five Canadian dollars. Thank you so much. And just to comment here, I have everything from Flight 6 to SimRig's PC has been my jam since 1981. Awesome.

Speaker 2:
[94:42] Wow.

Speaker 1:
[94:43] It's a long time.

Speaker 2:
[94:44] Ten years more than me.

Speaker 1:
[94:47] I don't actually want to think about how long ago the 1981 was, so on that note, no.

Speaker 2:
[94:53] Yeah, you ready for me to play us out?

Speaker 1:
[94:56] But I want to say thank you to everyone first because I'm forgetting my host duties. So thank you to Brad who, in case everyone was wondering why he disappeared, apparently his work laptop, which is a Windows PC, decided to take a massive crash, like full BSOD hung up on trying to repair the system. So he was not able to return to us because other systems are unfortunately not set up for the streaming. So we lost him. But thanks, Brad. Thank you, Mike, for joining us.

Speaker 4:
[95:27] I was happy to come on. I had a lot to talk about this week.

Speaker 1:
[95:31] And Will, take us out of here. It's lunchtime. I'm ready.

Speaker 2:
[95:35] See you all next week. Take care of yourself. Alex always just say a bunch of things, but I'm just going to say, we'll see you all next week. Bye, everybody.