 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. This is Tech Show But Friendly, Hardware Sugar's podcast with your host Anton, and let's jump right into it, saying goodbye to a very famous and very likable tech YouTuber. Unfortunately, I think last week or so, but very recently, the tech YouTuber known as Bitwit aka Kyle aka Lyle announced that he would be stepping back from creating tech content to focus on his more lifestyle. He has a secondary channel which he started relatively recently compared to his main tech channel Bitwit, but he'll be focusing on that channel on Workhorse for now. The content of Workhorse seems a lot broader than his usual fair on Bitwit, so less tech related, more gaming related, more vlogging style like what he's doing, and Kyle has always been a funny guy. He varied down to earth. I think that's a large part of his appeal for his audience where he does seem very relatable. So a channel mainly focused on him, and sorry, I believe he changed Workhorse, the title of his secondary channel to act to his real name. So I think it's Kyle Hansen or something like that, again to realign the brand to revolve around him. And I don't mean that like in a very conceited or self-centered way, just the fact that his content will be focused on basically what he's doing rather than a particular topic such as tech. Bitwit is one of the most recognizable names for tech YouTubers right up there with LTT, GamersNexos, Pulse Hardware. I mean those are sort of the top tier tech guys that are always kind of hanging out with each other and messaging each other, mentioning each other on their channels. So aside from, so he is part of that club, but aside from being part of that club, he got there on the back of a very likable personality. So not afraid to kind of take a bit risky comedic slant as with Lyle. To be honest, the Lyle character, I'm always surprised there wasn't like a backlash because it seems like everything that might even be slightly offensive now gets a backlash. Although the Lyle character was retired a while back, so maybe you know the the current thinking wasn't around yet when the Lyle character was out, but it seemed like the very stereotypical Chinese individual or Asian, very stick in the mud kind of Asian way of basically a prig, yung kind of stick up his ass, kind of no sense of humor, which is the whole point of why the character Lyle was so funny. But yeah, so the Kyle's humor certainly pervasive or permeating his entire channel, even though tech can be a bit dry. So actually that was a very refreshing take on the whole tech YouTuber approach. So at the same go as personally I was a fan, I enjoyed his comedic slant as well as his in-depth tech coverage. He was sort of like us in the sense specs were important, but they were the end all and be all. And he was a self-taught tech guy. So yeah, that kind of content especially now with a lot of the tech YouTubers kind of outracing themselves to prove that they're the techiest, the most specs-oriented, the most conversant in the most archaic of naming systems and in-depth coverage of the nitty-gritty of hardware. I mean there's a place for that. Certainly people can learn a lot from that but there's also a place for more mainstream fare where we kind of don't forget that this is a hobby that's supposed to be fun instead of like a quiz or a lesson in school that we need to memorize the stats and the references and oh if you don't know that then you're not a real PC guy and things like that. So I will miss the bit-with approach to tech YouTube reporting. The YouTube tech channel of course very associated with that hard, hard, hard core tech reporting is Gamers Nexus and they came out with another banger of a video or sensational coverage this past week when they delved into the specifics of why the 7,000 series CPUs of AMD have been burning up. Like they literally get so hot that they sometimes bulge out of the motherboard or out of the frame that they're in. So this latest controversy of a brand new tech component burning up from too much heat and too much voltage has been mostly focused around the X3D versions of the 7,000 series although AMD's latest statement regarding the solutions to the problem doesn't specify that it's the problem or the concern is only limited to X3D CPUs. So the commentary online seems to be that any 7,000 series CPU might be affected not just the X3D. There have been scattered reports of the same thing happening to 7,000 series non-X3D but the focus of the attention has been on the X3D specifically the 7800X3D just because it seemed like such a nice chip for gaming. I mean performance wise it seemed it had the optimal performance for gaming in particular but unfortunately there have been users reporting the news first came out on reddit where a poster showed a picture of like yeah you know i just basically got home my brand new 7800X3D chip seems to have burned itself out on the motherboard and gamers next those got involved eventually chasing the problem to too much voltage so there's just too much juice the motherboard forced too much juice into the CPU this is an abbreviated less techy version less hardcore version since this is textual but friendly but basically the motherboard sends too much juice to the CPU and it fried it. Now this can happen due to user error or an overzealous user can set the SoC voltage beyond 1.3 volts so the current number to remember is 1.3 you don't want to go over 1.3 volts for your SoC voltage but even if you're a user that never monkeys around with a BIOS this can still happen to you as depending on your motherboard manufacture depending on your BIOS version sometimes the motherboard will pump in more than 1.3 volts to the SoC and it's doing this because it's trying to implement an overclock xmp or expo setting now the findings have been very clear that expo or xmp is not the problem there's no inherent danger in enabling xmp or expo it's just that because the BIOS is trying to carry out that instruction as a side effect of that it pumps in or tries to pump in more voltage to the SoC beyond the recommended 1.3 volts but as a practical solution what to do now AMD has released new instructions to motherboard manufacturers and in turn the motherboard manufacturers have released new BIOS basically just update your BIOS per GN's video this isn't you know just focusing on the SoC voltage is a stopgap measure like they identified further problems in the architecture and how things get done with the AM5 platform but even the gamer's nexus video says that this is a rare problem so it's not like every other 7000 series CPU is going up in smoke while it is a reproducible problem because they were able to burn up a CPU intentionally or by design again this is not something that predominantly happens it is a rare occurrence and with the latest advice from AMD to update your BIOS and with a lot of the BIOS with a lot of the motherboard manufacturers issuing new BIOSes that should be a reasonably effective measure to ensure that your motherboard doesn't burn up your CPU in its zealous quest to get faster speeds i mean that's basically why it's pumping more voltage more juice into your CPU it's trying to make it run faster and the dismaying thing about this was i mean these are quite expensive new parts right the 7800 x3d just came out and then the user in particular who posted on reddit had a rog x670e motherboard also not cheap by any means we have one currently in the shop that we're planning to use for a build and just although the one the cpu that we have in the shop is the 7950 x3d so the top top top of the line and just those two components the cpu and the motherboard are just shy of 100k pesos so you know these are expensive components and i think that's what's shaken up the pc world a bit that you know you're you're supposed to be buying quality especially when you when it comes to motherboards as you go higher and higher in the in the tier structure in the pricing they put so many doodads or you know additional features into the motherboards so many additional protections as a consumer you kind of think that these kind of things shouldn't happen anymore with all of the fancy ai and other features built into especially more premium products but it does happen more growing pains for the am5 platform very reminiscent of i mean it's not like every major launch of a pc component we've had now has had some issue of basically having too much juice of something melting or blowing up or burning up of course the 40 series of nvidia amd struggles also with the 7 000 series gpu and now the am5 cpu so always good to keep abreast the latest news if you don't like religiously follow the hardware news don't worry about it just follow textual but friendly every week and we usually report on things like this and more importantly perhaps for our customers in the shop we do try to keep ourselves up to date and aware so that we know the potential problems you might encounter when we're assembling your computers when we're ensuring that the rigs that we assemble are a safe be efficient and see good value for money i mean what's the point of buying these expensive things when they're just going to melt down on you right and i'm quite proud that with that policy we haven't had na konwod any of the concerns that we've reported on so like for example we haven't had any 40 series card especially the earlier ones that we did like the 40 90s none of those guys ever burnt up even when we were using the adapter and it's kind of interesting just to look at it from an outsider's perspective there's like a mass hysteria every time somebody reports that oh my my component burned up my gpu burned up and it's like troan kagad it's like a spider man meme where the brand is blaming the manufacturer the manufacturer is blaming the user and you know it can quickly become a mess and it's just unfortunate that lately with all of the new stuff coming out it's no major product launch has escaped a part spontaneously combusting i don't know if it's because you know our modern components we don't appreciate just how much juice and how much heat how much electricity we're using up and how much just we're really on the line of you were towing the line between awesome performance and catastrophic performance so it's been interesting i mean i don't have an am5 cpu i don't have a 40 series gpu so it's just been interesting from an outsider's perspective to be looking at these very new components and seeing the growing pains i'm sure if you're a user of any of these products it's less an academic exercise in taking a look in what could go wrong and rather a really palpable realistic concern and again that's why we do try to keep up to for our further education but also for the benefit of our customers usually the point of all this fancy hardware is to play games but you can still have the best like literally top of the line hardware in the world but if the game is unoptimized it won't run any better case in point is the recently released jedi survivor a sequel to i forget what the first game was called although i did play that i'm a big star wars fan i did play it um jedi outcast i think and it jedi survivor is the continuation of that story i enjoyed outcast i will be playing survivor but not just yet i'll explain a little bit but jedi survivor came out to pretty positive reviews especially on the consoles but everybody especially the pc guys were up in arms on the port on the version that we got on the pc because there were a lot of graphic issues reported and when people dived into it you could have a 40 90 and you could still have stuttering and they were taking you know users were taking a look at the gpu usage at most it was only coming around to like 30 35 percent so the game was so ill optimized so unoptimized that it wasn't even using the graphics card to 50 percent of the graphics card's potential and it's really highlight something that i wish more people appreciated that it's not just about the hardware the software can even be more important than what hardware you're running kaya pa minsan may nagta tanong sa amin oh you know i want to play this game at these specs this frames per second what hardware do i need or i i just want to play these kind of games at 2k 100 fps what hardware do i need and i always find it very difficult to give specific hardware because that's always a moving target the games optimization the games performance can change on the settings that you have and also the patches that come out after the game has been released game patches and driver patches for whatever gpu you're using so it's i digital foundry had an excellent review of jedi survivor and around the 7 minute 30 second mark they have a statement where like it's never it's not a realistic option to just be presented with a laundry list of hardware and expect any game to run at x settings it's really a case to case basis also because there are so many possible permutations of computer hardware possible permutations of the settings even in game so it always drives me kind of nuts when we get those kind of inquiries na yung gusto ko lang ganito parang war zone at 60 fps at 2k and what do i need and it sounds simple but it's you know the tendency for the shop is to kind of provide a more or a slightly higher and build than probably what's needed just to make sure that it can really cover the wants of the customer and so it's not an ideal situation for us because it's yunya there's so many games on the market there's so many hardware components hardware brands on the market that yunya there's there's so many variables and permutations that it's really difficult to come up with yes we can tell you 100% sure that this game will run it at this settings because you have this hardware i mean outside of putting it together muna before the customer pays for everything and then and then trying it out and then even then yunya it's a moving target it which can be improved or performance can decrease depending on the drivers and depending on the game patches and jedi survivor is just a terrible example of that that you can have the best hardware but if the software optimization sucks you're gonna have a very or you're gonna have a subpar experience i mean you have a 4090 you don't expect any stuttering of any kind and yet apparently the shade like not to get too in-depth but the shader loading wasn't optimized so regardless of what card you have there's gonna be some stuttering or some slowdown as certain graphics are being rendered but to go back to what i said earlier i am a big fan of star wars i was a big fan of outcast but i won't be playing survivor yet because i realized first of all this is not the first time this happened the same problems were reported in outcast everybody was like what the hell what the hell and yeah i mean game developers can rush out do rush out especially these console ports because you know everybody all the versions have to release at the same time it was probably developed natively for the console and in the pc version was just an afterthought you can definitely see that in outcast where the ui the menu is geared towards a console controller rather than the kind of controls or just the interface that you would expect from a computer game a native computer game and i don't mind because i won't be paying full price for survivor one thing that really ticked me off when i bought outcast yeah you know i was in between games i was ready for a new game it came out i bought it full price but then the christmas of that year you know it had like a big discount on steam or an epic and i think that was the last game what i which i really bought at full price kasi na isip ko you know i can wait for it and especially now with survivor coming out with so many bugs so many performance related issues and they're only starting to address that now i can definitely wait for the price to go down and for the performance to be optimized in fact the price has already gone down for the console versions of the game amazon i is reportedly offering a ten dollar discount on the console versions i won't be playing this on console but when come around christmas time definitely if the price is right on steam or an epic i'll be snagging myself a copy and that's really an under look great feature of pc games you can just wait them out and they doesn't take that long i mean less than a year let's just see i think it's around 70 dollars now for the full price launch price let's just see what it is you know at the end of the year with all the steam sales and things like that and you know you have so many games left waiting anyway in your steam queue at least i do that there's really no rush to get the latest triple a game at least for me where i'm usually a more single player kind of guy so i don't buy these multiplayer titles that you know you come out and you want to play right away probably the only game i can think of off the top of my head where i would buy it at launch date for the full price would be the upcoming mass effect but even then i might be tempted to wait depending depending what i'm doing how much time i have when that game actually comes out if it ever comes out and the round out today's show with an update from canada which recently passed a law providing one of their government agencies with oversight over streaming services requiring streaming services to pay a certain amount of money for the advancement of canadian shows or supporting local i.e. canadian talents and shows and productions and whatnot as well as promoting canadian culture shows in general and this doesn't seem relevant to us but i'm always fascinated by these kind of local laws i mean laws passed by individual countries which affect international services it's an easy move by any government to start passing laws on facebook yeah the australian parliament i think a couple of years ago threatening to charge facebook it was a news thing and they wanted facebook to pay newspapers or other journalistic outlets basically like if you're if you're a journalist and you publish something and then on facebook the link is there but they read in facebook rather than going to your page the australian government wanted facebook to pay or it was something something along those lines and it's a bit similar here with the canadian law where the government is trying to flex its muscle and bring these international services in line just as a lawyer it's pretty interesting to see the development of national laws trying to cope with transnational actors and certainly there have been many many corporations in the past that have been transnational that do operate in many many jurisdictions but nothing quite as pervasive as streaming so the internet is all encompassing it's an octopus that has you know its tentacles all around the world and the content that passes through that is so accessible anywhere so so i i always fear these kind of laws it might have a chilling effect where it makes it harder for the provider so if it's netflix or the service rather the netflix spotify all of these guys to operate in a particular country then they might just say to heck with that country and that's where the fragmentation of the internet begins i mean metcalfs law right um a network is is only as valuable sorry i'm paraphrasing i don't remember the exact formulation of metcalfs law but basically the network gains its strength from the number of connections in the network and there's like an exponential effect to that and that's that's what i'm always afraid for our internet now it gains its power because anywhere in the world you can log on and you can when you go to www.philippineairlines.com for example and you can buy a ticket from philippine airlines because everybody's on literally the same network but if you start Balkanizing the internet on in terms of speed in terms of content then that interoperability might be lost and that's that's the beauty like that's the fundamental bedrock of the internet is that everything can talk to each other tcpip is the lingua franca of all of these computers on the network and that's what makes it so powerful because each individual computer whether user or server adds to the value of the network and you start pruning these connections like you know it's like or streaming services because you know you're so bandwidth intensive and it's not fair to the other guys we're going to charge you more or we're going to have certain rules applied to you compared to other services i mean you know when you start distinguishing like that i always fear that it's an attack on or the unintended effect is a diminution of the public internet which we all enjoy i mean you know for its many many shortcomings most of which can be traced to the users ie us ie foolish humans who get toxic and upset and like flaming people i mean you know it's in our nature to be social but on the internet it's in our nature to be social in an antisocial way sometimes unfortunately for a lot of us but for all the ills of the internet it's an amazing thing if you think about it i mean i grew up initially like when i was born there was no internet yet so i mean having grown up with it from scratch as you know it started out with the dial-up days and the different services that have now come along and taken advantage precisely of that fact that it can reach so many people it's it's an amazing thing and i wish that and the problem with politicians who try to impose these laws these vague there are some concerns that the canadian law is over broad and vague meaning i don't know how to come i'm not sure whether my actions would violate the law so that's the vague part and broad meaning that the regulator has a lot of power to impose its judgment on these streaming services and i do fear that these kind of laws are made by people who don't understand the internet who don't appreciate the the magic that makes it run they just think you know they just see oh this is an entity that we can charge disney plus is making a lot of money in the country spotify is making a lot of money in the country then it should give back to the country but in taking its share and you can argue whether it's a fair share or not but in taking its pound of flesh from the services i fear that it's a diminution or it's it we all everybody on the internet is affected by these types of legislation and it's not like i'm even pro business like i'm not i'm not automatically in favor of like the big tech giants now like spotify and google youtube uh disney plus hulu all the streaming services it's just that i wish there were it's we're a bit more circumspect in how we monkey around with assigning value and trying to recoup value from these transnational actors that do provide value to everybody not just to canadians not just to americans but to filipinos malaysians indonesians people in africa people in europe i mean literally it's the worldwide web right although the worldwide web only runs on top of the internet so it's just really a protocol on top of the internet but you know no need to get overly semantic but and i do fear sometimes when you hear local politicians here na oh we should uh regulate facebook i mean we're not very good at regulating guys i mean i'm just talking about like the philippines in general i we have very poor metrics in terms of properly regulating things i think maybe that's where my in my knee jerk reaction to regulating comes from the fact that i've lived in the philippines on my life and have seen very little examples of good regulation like you know regulation that makes sense for both parties involved for the entity being regulated and for the end users so i'm skeptical of my initial position is always a bit skeptical of regulation and well i'm not canadian there's not much i can do about it this probably seems like a very academic topic to a lot of the a lot of our users definitely not directly hardware related but it is something to think about in the broader scheme of the internet that we all enjoy and that we've all profited from not perhaps in the monetary sense i mean not all of us use the internet to sell things but just in terms of knowledge of being able to call someone on viber through the internet being able to face time with your family whom you're separated from because you're a seaman on a boat and they're here in the philippines i mean the internet is a wonderful thing and when we have these national laws that may be indirectly threatened to extinguish that magic i'm always a bit on the fence and like and as an internet user i wish i had my two cents on it but it's it's also interesting from a national transnational perspective where national you know specific country laws can affect me even though i am not a citizen of that country and there have been laws like that i mean you have the us fakta where you have to declare you know if you have a dollar account or whatever you because of the anti-terrorism stuff in the past from over the past 20 years or so there's been a lot of transnational legislation regarding the movement of money so there are laws in place that are transnational enacted by national actors but the internet always seems sacrosanct a little bit you know the realm of geeks but i guess we passed from that time a long time ago and now you know you have tick talk appearing before the u.s congress u.s congressmen not particularly adept or technically in general okay i did see one testimony where he was actually a software developer or had had extensive knowledge in software this particular congressman but in general you know a lot of the questions were very cringe not you know more suited to grandstanding rather than finding out exactly what is this service doing how can we make it better for our citizens and i would imagine the same experience in a lot of countries that are trying to tackle new technologies but the people doing the tackling are less interested perhaps in so to extend the metaphor you tackle somebody because you're trying to gain possession of the ball and maybe they're interested less in the ball the prize but more in the tackle if that makes any sense like you know let's do some damage to these internet companies that think that they can come in here and tell us how to interact with our citizens or how to run our country or things like that but neither here nor there just open speculation my end thanks so much for listening to another episode of tech show but friendly again if you're listening to this on youtube you are one week delayed you can always catch the latest episodes via spotify apple or google and they drop six a.m every friday thanks for watching have a great friday guys or have a great day whenever you're listening to this