 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, the podcast of hardware sugar and this is your host Anton. We just have three bits of news for you this week but they are juicy bits of news. The first is unfortunately another problem with graphics cards. This time from Gigabyte where there are reports that the PCB or 30 series cards that's confirmed and some unconfirmed reports from 40 series cards all Gigabyte, the PCBs have cracked. So Louis Rossman, a famous tech YouTuber, is credited for bringing this to public attention quickly followed by Jay's Two Cents and the problem seems to lie in the unconventional design of Gigabyte's PCB where the latch of the motherboard hooks on to the graphics card. It's in a slightly different place from at the standard configuration and so this odd placement may cause stress on the card especially with modern cards which do get quite heavy and the only thing that's holding that in without a GPU support bracket would be the PCIe latch and the screws at the back of the card the ones connecting them screwing them into the into the plate of the case so once a PCB cracks the PCIe lanes are destroyed basically killing the card now good news this is repairable the components after all are intact the cooling the GPU itself the VRM it's just that the roads between them have been basically cut now while this can be repaired unfortunately it appears that Gigabyte does not consider this part of their warranty policy i.e. if this happens to you you can't send it back for RMA now these are international reports i do not have any firsthand local information none of our Gigabyte cards have come back to us like this so i haven't been able to test our local supplier whether they will accept these cards for replacement we have noted in the past that the reliability of Gigabyte cards is not that great we have a whole video breaking down the statistics on how many components we RMA from each brand not just for GPUs but for CPUs storage RAM PSUs et cetera and just to recap those findings Gigabyte scores significantly poorer compared to other brands such as MSI at least based on our first hand experience moving on to more news which might make you outraged apparently lian li the taiwanese based case manufacturer is in hot water for using the taiwanese flag on their website in the language selector portion of their website they place a taiwanese flag beside one option beside one chinese option and this was enough to trigger the so-called keyboard warriors of china so apparently they've been harassing online lian li famous of course for their very distinctive cases like the o11 design lian li has apologized although the offended chinese users and god knows if they're even customers of lian li have noted that the apology was only posted to chinese social media so apparently they wanted a blanket apology or an old channels all lian li channels apology so not to wade into those waters i mean taiwan china that is a source spot for a lot of people for a variety of reasons although i do think it's kind of silly that a taiwanese based company can't even use their own flag on their own website we are planning a video though on if god forbid the worst comes to worst and china actually decides to invade taiwan what would that mean for your computer like what are the ramifications for that since the chips that we enjoy notably the cpus and the gpus regardless of whatever brand you use intel or amd invidia or amd most of those if not all i think are made in taiwan under tsmc because only tsmc has the equipment and know how to make these really really really small chips now tsmc does have different factories scattered around the world but it's not clear to me i still need to research for the video which of those locations are actually capable of producing these very small high-end chips as far as i know the bulk if not all of the production occurs in taiwan so much so that the us has gone on record as saying that if it looks like they're going to lose taiwan like they can't defend it for whatever reason the plan is to burn down the tsmc factories or the tsmc fab fabrication factories an announcement which did not sit well with taiwan so the us adopting a scorched earth policy if we can't keep it then china can't have it but taiwan saying that heck no are you going to be burning down tsmc's fabs on our soil even if it looks like captured by china is imminent well that's great for a movie can you imagine like the drama involved if you're the us commander or the taiwanese commander one task with destroying the factory the other one tasked with defending it against an erstwhile ally i mean it's bonkers but hopefully that will remain in the realm of speculation nobody wins if china decides to go all out against taiwan i mean that is a quagmire bloody mess which is really up to the hands of the chinese at this point since they're the ones rattling their swords last bit of news and again this might cause some outrage i guess this is the outrage episode where each bit of news might get you upset and this one is actually about storage apparently western digital drives have been left on continuously for three years in a synology nas will deliver an update to the synology's distillation manager but based on the data accumulated by the wd drive so this is basically a message from wd if you've been on for longer than three years then the drives will inform you that the drive has accumulated a large number of power on ours the entire life of the drive please consider to replace the drive soon and what's angered most users is that this message is a dumb message dumb in the sense that it's not based on any kind of data except that it's been running for three years so it's an irrelevant data point you could be running for three years and you could still have 10 years of life ahead of you the whole point of having actionable data is that the data is grounded on findings about the drive itself rather than very basic things like how long has this drive been on what's angered most users is that this seems like a very blatant strategy of making something forcibly obsolete when there's nothing wrong with the particular hardware it's just that oh it might be a little old and you might want to buy a new one moreover this does have real consequences for using the drives inside sinology as pointed out by a sinology spokesperson only drives with a healthy status ie not these wd drives that give off a warning after three years only drives with a healthy status can be used to repair or expand the storage pool now to be fair you can choose to disregard the warning basically clear the warning disable the analytics of wd and then proceed to use these drives like normal but then you lose track of the analytics that wd's proprietary software is supposed to be collecting although if the only data point that the analytics are collecting is that it's been on for x amount of time well that's not really very useful for anyone i do have a wd purple drive right now and i use it for data storage wd red is supposed to be their line for nas wd purple is supposed to be for cctv so you're not really supposed to be using it for data storage or rather you're supposed to use it for low quality data storage but basically all of our youtube stuff all of the video files that i have are on the wd purple i think it's been about two years and so far no problems i mean it does sometimes take a bit long to read depending on the file that i'm trying to fetch but other than that no problems so far it would be pretty annoying though if i had a wd red and that error message error in air quotes just showed up just based on the fact that it's been running for three years straight and those are all the outrage news for this week hopefully we'll have better news next week if you're listening to this on friday june 16 when this episode dropped please do check out as well our new video on youtube 10 pc building tips for any experience level heck regardless of when you're listening to this please do check out that video or whatever new content we have on our channel as always thanks for lending me your ear and see you next week na sa makati yung physical store namin and you can also buy from our site www.hwsugar.ph na 100% palaging up to date yung inventory dun kung instock yung item sa amin available yung sa site we also ship nationwide thanks for watching and maybe one of these days makita tayo sa shop