 If you're listening to this on YouTube, this episode is one week delayed. Up-to-date tech show but friendly episodes are on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts. Welcome to Tech Show But Friendly, Hardware Sugar's podcast, and I'm your host Anton. Starting out today's podcast with news from Computech, so that's the big computer show happening in time one, and there's a bunch of news coming out. All of their usual YouTubers are there. My thing with these big computer shows is that a lot of the time, some new product gets announced, gets hyped, and you never see it. But this time around, a lot of the items do seem to be moving along commercially. Like, these are products that we're actually going to see soon on our store shelves. And a lot of them are pretty interesting, starting off with more fractal design wooden cases. This is not a new look for fractal design, so they came out last year with the fractal design North, which are also wooden cases. Unfortunately, they never reached our shores. We do have a supplier for fractal design, but I don't know for whatever reason, we just didn't get any of the North cases. The latest wooden case that fractal design is featuring at Computex is an ITX case called Terra. And the design looks pretty good. It has been getting good reviews or at least good impressions from the people who have seen it. Hopefully we can get the Terra or even the North on our shelves sometime soon. But again, yeah, that's what's frustrating. We're really limited to what our suppliers can provide for us here. There was also a case being featured. I forget which manufacturer, but it was basically there was no internal cooling to the case. And the case itself served as a passive cooler to cool the components inside. So not something that you would probably see on a regular basis, but interesting as a proof of concept. Interesting for people who really hate noise and don't want any moving parts inside their computer. Interesting showcase for the tech, which is required to come up with this kind of large passive cooler. Newsflash, I just looked it up. The company behind the passive case is StreaCom, and they are marketing it as a gaming case. So not some pipichugin case, you know, it can only handle office builds, but supposedly it can handle 600 watts of heat. So interesting to take a look at that. Speaking of heat and cooling, Lee and Lee has new fans and the inevitable progression has come to fans. Now they come with this place so you can have different numbers appearing on the fans, whether they're your internal temperature for the GPU or the CPU or the RPMs of your fans or whatever kind of data you have. Lee and Lee has brought the obsession with this place, which started with the AIO. And then we had Deepcool putting it on an air cooler and the exterior of the case. Finally, individual fans will have this place as well, thanks to Lee and Lee. Still on cooling, Noctua has unveiled their latest version of the venerable NHD15. And you know, I've often remarked how it doesn't seem like there's progression in CPU air coolers if you just take a look at the exterior. But over time, the companies Deepcool, Noctua have really figured out how to get better performance, better cooling from these tower type air coolers. Some of that is ensuring that the cooler makes contact with the specific spots of the CPU which generate the most heat because those do change depending on the generation of the chip. So chip design doesn't remain static. And so air cooler design doesn't remain static as well. But aside from that, I think Noctua has introduced a bunch of changes. And it's about time because the original NHD15 is kind of old. But even if it's old, it's still a mainstay in a lot of builds. And it's still very reliable, even with the latest CPUs. And what I respect about Noctua is they're not in it for the money. They're not, they don't do cash grabs where, okay, let's just come out with a V2 every year, V3 next year, V4 next next year. They really only reproduce a product when they feel that the improvement in the product warrants an introduction of a new product. Speaking of new cooling technology, Linus has a very interesting video up also from Computex regarding a new product which is basically a very thin layer which can be applied on any computer component. Although the thinking is that it will be integrated eventually into components such as CPUs, SSDs, and it basically provides, again, passive cooling. I don't know if passive is the best way to describe it because there is a physical process which is pushing air, even though it's just a thin layer of product and there are no moving parts. So there's no fans or anything. There is a physical process occurring which pushes air over whatever surface this particular product has been applied to. It's really interesting because now we can have, theoretically, we could have CPUs that don't require big coolers. Laptops would be much more efficient because you don't have to pack in fans. The company's long-term goal is to eliminate fans inside computers because all of the cooling would be done through their product. Again, there's a lot of physics involved in it and how it works. So it's an really interesting video on the LTT channel now with the title, The Most Exciting PC Hardware in Years. Again, a bit hyperbolic as with most things from Linus Tech Tips, but the underlying tech is very interesting. Maybe not something we'll pick up or we can find right away on store shelves. But really, if you look at it five, ten years from now, that's definitely something a lot of the manufacturers would be interested in. Moving on to GPUs, Asus debuted the first 4070 which doesn't require any power connectors. It slots into the motherboard and there are no power cables so it's much neater. Although it does use a proprietary power connector to allow it to connect to the motherboard and also the motherboard itself is designed differently. I think it sort of slots into the back is what I understand. So I'm not sure if this is a commercial product or more a proof of concept and there have been initiatives in the past to kind of declutter the computer with less and less wires. So anything that advances that initiative is good news for me because personally I'm quite terrible at cable management. So the less wires there are, the less you have to worry about it. Still with Asus and their GPUs, they also showcased a 4090 with a liquid cooler, a 360 millimeter rad EIO to cool the 4090 with liquid metal. So there have been cutting edge products from Computex, cutting edge in the sense that they're really novel and unique. This GPU from Asus is basically taking known hardware. So we do know the 4090, we do know large AIOs, we do know liquid metal but basically it's taking all of the high-end things from different lanes or different hardware components and mashing them all together. So headlines, oh liquid metal, 360 mm rad AIO, oh 4090. So this is more like a best of all worlds kind of GPU instead of a GPU that really pushes tech into unknown directions. So a lot of interesting news coming out from Computex and we were actually approached by a brand we work with quite often if we wanted to go to Computex and they would sponsor or at least source some of the cost and to be honest I was quite interested but the scheduling just didn't work out. I'm not or I wasn't available for the time that Computex was on but I'm hopeful that next year we can arrive or we can do something along those lines where brands ask us to come over and they shoulder some of the cost or all of the cost and of course we'll do coverage for them but we'll also be running around looking at all the other brands. I've never actually been to a large-scale convention. I'm not actually a convention goer to be honest but it seems we kind of expected now for content creators and things like that. Local content creators or local tech youtubers are getting enough interest from brands that you know they're saying that oh yeah come over we'll help defray some of the cost. So that does sound like fun and hopefully we can do something like that next year. All right moving away from Computex, NVIDIA's market cap or the value of the entire company briefly hit one trillion US dollars briefly because I think the price is subsided again so it's sub one trillion currently I think at the moment but definitely you know it will probably hold at over one trillion in the coming days. Only five companies I think including NVIDIA have hit the one trillion market cap mark. I'm assuming Amazon, I'm assuming Apple, I guess Google maybe I'm not quite sure about the list but NVIDIA's future does look bright because all of this the interest in AI is powered by GPUs of which NVIDIA is a of course top supplier. AI runs on GPUs because the kind of computation that AI needs right now GPUs are optimized to deliver. So you know something which started out with gaming the kind of processing that you need to display graphics is also coincidentally enough the kind of processing that you need to run the operations needed by AI the kind of deep learning large language models and so NVIDIA has a bright future although I think critics would say that they're also making a lot of money from market grabs like their 40 series which while there has been an improvement in terms of performance there hasn't been a lot of improvement in terms of price it feels like NVIDIA still feels that we're in a GPU chip shortage and we're in GPU Armageddon although as we pointed out before in many videos NVIDIA has been slowly acclimatizing the market like even way back when from the 10 series 20 30 series even pre-pandemic to accepting higher and higher costs for GPUs so a lot of haters for NVIDIA but team green is definitely seeing the green right now before I go I wanted to touch again on a security issue with motherboards last week I talked about MSI's problems with motherboard security this week it is gigabyte stirred so not that great when two major suppliers of motherboards MSI and gigabyte both have security issues with their motherboards it came to light just this week that gigabyte installed a backdoor into their motherboard so this is company sanctioned they were the ones that did it and the backdoor basically runs without the knowledge of the user it runs on the bio so the firmware of the motherboard even before it reaches the os and its function is to call home to check for firmware updates from gigabyte download them and apply them as needed so so far so good right I mean generally updates are good automated updates are a little annoying but for the vast majority of users that's probably what's needed because not everybody is super oc and super anal now they're checking that there's a new update and oh yes I want to update my firmware the problem is as discovered by researchers the backdoor is not secure so it is possible for a malicious third party to hack into the auto updater and have it download an update not from gigabyte so essentially a hacker supplants the backdoor of gigabyte and so now it doesn't download from gigabyte or it doesn't download just from gigabyte but it downloads from other sources i.e. the hacker as well and since that kind of program would lie in the bios it's very difficult to remove you know if you have malware in windows and even if it's super entrenched at the end of the day you can just wipe it and be done with it much more difficult when it resides on the operating system of your motherboard we're talking about millions of gigabyte motherboards i think over 250 different models there's a list which i will link in the which i will link in the podcast description and these are new motherboards we're talking about like the b550 auras elite my own motherboard is an x570s ultra durable from gigabyte and that is on the list as well thanks a lot gigabyte so there are suggestions from the researchers on how to combat this namely you can go into bios and turn off the auto update feature the researchers also recommend putting a password on your bios i didn't even know that you could do that to be honest so the threat of a third party hijacking your motherboard is very real at this point it is something that could happen so i do suggest disabling the auto update feature and number one even just checking if your motherboard is one of those affected or if your motherboard is one of those which gigabyte installed a backdoor too you know backdoor i guess is the proper description now backdoor basically implies any entryway not authorized by the user and the buyer is the user right it's not like we told gigabyte that yes gigabyte you can monkey around with my motherboard and i know i bought the motherboard from you but that doesn't give you permission to monkey around with it after i bought it but gigabyte did that anyway and to be fair there are some pros again a lot of people would not know how to update their bios would be too lazy to update their bios that's me but if you're gonna install a backdoor you better make sure that backdoor is secure which it wasn't in this case so on that scary note thanks for listening to another episode of textual but friendly if you're listening to this on the posting day june 2 stop listening to this and go get jablo 4 which is out now i think for the advanced copies and again this is something which just drives me nuts i don't understand how this trend came to be where you can pay extras so that you can play a game earlier i it's just bonkers to me just the extent of how everything is monetized now like yes it's not enough that i bought the game if i want to play it like the soonest possible i need to pay extra which is kind of the exact opposite of how a lot of users approach games now where yeah we can wait we can wait for the epic game store to have to give it as a free beat two years later we can wait for steam sale where it will be off 60 percent or something like that and that's how i approach my game buying recently but i guess there are a lot of people are for publishers they're like well okay if you're impatient you can pay to skip the line um not something that i would do again i can wait but it's just insane to me that we've reached this point where instant gratification can be had for anything for the right price and on that cheery note have a good day whenever you're listening to this thanks for lending me your ear