Take-Down of Thermaltake's Engineering & Marketing

I hope you guys don't publish this marketing on the website because will burn you over it okay okay the thermal takes version of Computex was hosted online this time with physical gatherings impossible and this year the products that Thermaltake showcased was incompetence it was showcasing incompetence of design of its product management and marketing departments and specifically its repeat inability as exhibited tradeshow after trade show to listen to both customer and media feedback especially media feedback provided in private to give the company time to improve we've been trying to tell Thermaltake what it needs to do to improve its brand credibility and its reputation at every single show for no fewer than six years at this point and it seems like all that has fallen on deaf ears fortunately we have now completely lost all faith in thermal takes ability to take feedback and improve upon itself and so we're just gonna put it all out there publicly maybe that'll work because really what we want is they don't take to get from product classifications of almost really good to actually really good it's so damn close and that's the reason it's so frustrating it's thrown take just throws it all away at the end of the game before that this video is brought to you by thermal Grizzlies conduct a not liquid metal conductor nada is what we've used in all of our liquid metal and delayed thermal tests capable of dropping CV thermals significantly and replacing the stock thermal interface over CPU thermals don't just allow better overclocks but also lower noise levels because the transfer efficiency is increased the mix of gallium and indium makes for a thermal conductivity of 73 watts per meter Kelvin outclassing traditional pastes significantly learn more at the link in the description below this video is going to be pretty ranty talking about some of the many issues we've had with thermal take over the years especially with its marketing their whole take has some really skilled good people at the company who do good work who want to make good products and for one reason or another it just doesn't quite make it far enough up the chain to actually exact change and push through and make something truly competitive their own take has had things like the core p3 that wall-mountable KS will put a shot of on the screen that's a really good case if they could just consistently do that they'd be in a good spot but instead they're all take has a history of well there was the thermal fake controversy for many years ago but aside from that it has a history of putting out products like over 20 RS or the g20 or g20 one whatever was called as two good examples of cases that were almost good at least in terms of thermals and performance and noise and then they just toss it all away because they refuse to listen to the fact that you shouldn't actually have three layers of mesh all triple stacks blocking the holes in the subsequent layers of mesh behind each one but that's only one small part of the many issues with thermal tape the quick recap of thermal takes a new lineup of products is that there are a lot of cases the thermal take typically only shows the bad ones at a trade shows they literally hide the good ones in a dark corner with a curtain around it not even joking that's where they go and they also have some new power supplies they have some new gaming peripherals they have some liquid coolers that range from useful to over marketed misleading wastes of time at the bad end if that wasn't obvious and we were very critical of thermal takes designs and our meeting this time we always are but this one was different because since it was hosted online there were higher up people in the company on the call that we were on with thermaltake and we could see those names in the the meeting room so hopefully this didn't fall on deaf ears again but we've been through this so many times the throne will take now it's it's really it's getting hard to take they're all take seriously because it's a company that the right people that we interface with and you know who you are there are many of you want to do a good job and make a good product and do a great job of representing the products that they're given or have to deal with from wherever it comes from in the company but unfortunately the the people who whoever it is who control the change they're not letting enough of it come down to improve brand credibility the key word there and brand perceived quality Thermaltake has finally gotten away from its thermal fake controversy as our viewers like the comment and it's parted ways with that subset of its history but the company's really going to have to get into trihard mode to fully recover and build a better reputation than just cheap stuff and it needs it needs more effort one of the things we've been pushing on thermal takes Taiwan headquarters which headed up the call is that it needs to stop treating press like we're easily manipulated consumers so this is what we said to the Taiwan headquarters when we started the call was we're not trying to I'm not trying to be a dick but I'm just being real with you this is how these marketing words you're using they're not gonna work on us we're not stupid and the more ammunition that Thermaltake gives me in terms of things like a couple of examples not understanding math or or not understanding as another example how thermal cameras work despite thermal being in the name of the company and they try to slide these by us but it doesn't work and then they push it on to the consumers and maybe it works there and that's really the disappointing part but let's start with some of the misleading that Thermaltake tried to slide by us this time first up the third will take flow RC this is a special one so this is they're all takes new flow RC cooler it's the one that we have the most issues with principally they're all takes marketing a product on the merits of cooling down the memory which is completely irrelevant it's fine to market it for looking cool or being interesting but making bold claims like increasing performance or increasing lifespan is largely meaningless RAM is not a component that gets very hot and it doesn't need much active cooling and it certainly doesn't need water cooling water cooling might look cool and that's fine regardless though our bigger issue is that thermal take made some claims which are horribly misleading they're all take made a big deal about being quote twenty percent lower than completely natural convection cooling claiming that this ensures quote better stability and longer life spent most of that statement is debatable but there's one part that's just straight up mathematically wrong and that's the percentage temperature measured on a scale like Celsius or Fahrenheit is an arbitrary human-friendly representation of the average kinetic energy of particles in a system it's a representation of thermal energy twenty percent here isn't really 20% of the base unit of energy so you could maybe do a percentage change against the actual unit of energy but no one understands that or wants it here's a clip from our call to give you some perspective what is 20% lower mean to you guys how is that number calculated here's the numbers we computed a number based on the memory we're doing overclocking so is it yeah okay so you're doing the math you guys are doing is 39 minus 49 divided by 49 right right right the 10 degrees a new - all new minus old divided by old you is this a delta T over ambient number or is this just the actual that this is the actual temperature yeah okay you can't you can't do math that way with temperature because if we convert 49 and 39 to Kelvin which is still the same amount of energy the percentage scale will change so you're gonna go from a 20% difference to off top my head it's gonna be a couple percent like this is temperature is an arbitrary scale that unless it's Kelvin does not start at zero right so like when we let me prove my point so 49 Celsius to Kelvin is gonna be 322 and 39 Celsius to Kelvin is 312 so if we do 312 minus 320 2/3 on 22 it's actually a three point one percent difference not a twenty percent difference okay you understand what I mean because I know yeah because I mean it's not a theory it's like math but again the biggest thing is that it just doesn't matter cooling the memory is is functionally irrelevant at least once you get to this point of coin it's not even about it's better to have cooler because why wouldn't you it's always better to have cooler it's about it actually it isn't it isn't always better to have cooler because you're now putting this big bulky thing on your system and in the middle of your system it's going to be proprietary and going to be difficult to get replacements for in the future once it inevitably fails and they stopped making it and now you end up with something that is difficult to wrangle just to install and maybe is debatable for how it looks to begin with just because now you've got all these tubes routing around all over the place and plus the socket to memory distancing isn't the same on every motherboard it complicates things so that's really the main problem here if they want to market that it looks whatever different fine but they didn't have any numbers saying look at how much higher it overclocks with water clean because frankly I don't think thermaltake has anyone who works there who knows how to overclock memory I think they probably outsource it but the next one is new cases their own will take and its most promising product was the tower 100 this year this follows up the tower 900 for many years ago and actually thermo Mike as he's known epithermal take today fantastic job with a tower 900 mod many years ago where it was a Donkey Kong cabinet and that was probably one of the best representations of that case the tower 900 is a legitimately unique case from Thoreau I'll take much like the Corp III is and to that end this is one of the products that is the most promising from throne take from its event this time the tower 100 that is the tower 100 is a mini ITX variant of the already released our 900 we like its concept but it's fatally flawed in several ways the case is glass walled and has some ventilation on the lower sides along with a pop-out mesh played on the top that looks somewhat promising except for the huge amounts of plastic once again and the multiple layers of mesh but we've been over that fans installed in the demo system included a fan on the bottom and a fan on the top since we weren't there in person it looks like a 120mm but it could be a 140 either way though the support is for one radiator at the top either 120 140 we need to look into it further and not on the bottom for radiators so water clean support is limited to a single radiator closed-loop liquid cooler so you're either cooling the CPU or the GPU with liquid but not both thermal take decided to use an Rx with d7 or XE reference card for its demo solution smashed right up against the glass while taking both available PCIe slots for the case the GPU has absolutely zero source of external air with this configuration and we're still thermal takes demo our system is set up so incompetently as to use a bottom exhaust fan and a top exhaust fan with no intake anywhere in sight there's no direct intake into the case this glass-walled abomination is set up in a full negative pressure configuration except without any sufficient sources of air intake that's the key dividing factor negative pressure can work really well but not like this air will find its way through those tiny vents in the bottom at least whatever amount it can with all the layers of mesh in between but because of the pressure created by to exhaust fans that are going to overpower the GPU fan it's unlikely that the GPU ever breathes it anyway also by the way that reference card is already thermally tortured it's likely that a cpu will also run hot under a 120 or 140 ml c LC especially one that's got limited intake further still thermal takes representative was hesitant to show us the bottom of the case when we asked but eventually tilted it to show off a dust filter our question was simple how does that 120 or 140 fan on the bottom breathe if it were intake we asked where would it pull its air from the answer we found is that it'll pull air from the fourth dimension well put some graphics on the screen to help illustrate this because you probably haven't heard of this before thermaltake is using a time cube which it is deploying aside a tesseract to access a previously unexplored universe within its bag of holding whereupon air can teleport into existence the bottom of the case is currently steel with a dust filter on it just in case the steel you're using is the magic kind that transcends physics and warps things into existence like some kind of warp gate shoutout to artosis we're told that they hope to drill holes into this later and make it properly ventilated and the problem is that this doesn't actually fix the problem in fact exposes a whole new host of problems now you have a power supply fan facing down rather than in and right now the power supply fan faces in in the demo system because it can't breathe otherwise because it's a steel bottom so what happens well there's a fan that sits above it in the middle of the case and it blows air straight into the power supply that's all well and good it exhausts out the power supply there's at least a direct path somewhere that the fans doing something might not be the best thing to do but it's doing something the when thermaltake tried to defend its design by saying well we're gonna drill holes into the bottom what they didn't really seem to quite realize is that it then exposed a new incompetence of design because with the power supply fan facing down now the fan that's in the middle of the case actually can't send air anywhere so if it's exhaust it's now blowing into a steel wall the underside of the power supply rather than into a fan where it can at least be pulled out of the system and if it's intake it's got to figure out how to pull the air through the steel see again in traditional pocket fused with a tesseract and a time cube that's how this all works we think we're not sure but based on our extreme experience reviewing cases that is the only way that this fan will do anything because otherwise it's just smashed up against steel or glass and if you're thinking about the small ventilation on the bottom sides of the case those black ventilated strips on the sides well bad news there too because the fan is extremely far away from those at that point you're dealing with now a stretching out whatever static pressure performance of the fan you have several inches to try and hope that you can somehow magically pull air through a multi filtered hole in the case that's very far away and also very small this entire concept is cool but it's horribly executed and that's what's so frustrating about thermaltake year after year they're all take has made a name for itself and our review is over the years by building products that are almost good then shoving its fingers and its ears and ignoring what everyone says that includes the customers and the media this is all in favor of doing the least amount of effort to make a sellable product just the baseline effort and if thermal takes just not willing to push back release dates in favor of design improvements it has to learn to do that other companies in the space small ones even like silverstone set a fantastic example of pushing back through these states when they're not happy with where our product is today sometimes you have to decide you're gonna lose you're not gonna be the first one to market with the idea but you're gonna be the one with the best idea to market or the best implementation of that idea to market instead thermal takers are often the first and so not very good so what happens is its competitors and thermaltake dammit I hope you're listening because this is what's happening the competitors of thermaltake then see that idea come out they go huh well 95% of this is a joke let's spend an hour on a conference call making fun of it but hey that 5% that's new that's really good we can do that and we can take it and we can make it better and that's exactly what a product manager's job is if they haven't come up with an idea their job is to go take one from somewhere else and improve upon it and for the most part that's fine but sometimes it's a bit egregious like the fantex Leon Lee ripoff for example other times though you start to see bits and pieces of ideas form together into one case and now it's got a little bit of fan tax a bit of silver stone a bit of Corsair and you have something really unique cool and interesting that does new stuff Thermaltake is the one that's providing those ideas that gets stolen and shoved into something else rather than executing them properly and making something that's genuinely really good there are a few exceptions to this again the Corp III is a fantastic case and we're happy to work with it happy to use it in our test benches when we need a vertical bench it's wall mountable all this cool stuff very simple case and it works well there's also oh and to think about it for a second those complete water cooling kits that are just a box of water cooling parts that they ship and it's like here's baby's first open lube that's pretty cool too we actually like those kits of water cooling parts the whole take does a good job there of getting something prepared for people who've never worked with it before the RAM is fine it's something that we run ads for we don't mind it it's gotten on to a lot of QV else the qualified vendor lists so it's actually getting wider support in the ecosystem and ultimately the memory chips come from someone else and it's kind of hard to screw that up so what is on QB ELLs once they have the memory chips all you're really talking about is pricing the exact specification source from the memory supplier and then the looks and so we don't really have problem with the RAM and they haven't screwed it up it's fine now that said ram is a commodity this is something that every memory vendor will tell you that they agree with its commodity and people don't really put a whole lot of weight into what Ram they choose aside from hitting some baseline specification on the right price and looks come before all of that in most cases whether or not that's you that's how it mostly works so having a good kid of RAM a preassembled water-cooling kit and one maybe two or three cases in recent history that are good like tower 900 would be another one that's not really enough we need to see more from thermal take care they have so many good core ideas and they just fail to execute the tower 100 should cost $80.00 that's its expected price 90 for the white version and it'll come out at the end of August we'll see if they fail to make any of the improvements we've requested they probably will because it's been pretty deep at this point and they basically have to replace the glass panel near the GPU with something else we want to reiterate that this is a really interesting case nearly and they're all take could make the changes necessary to improve it but we don't think their HQ team will push it back we think that they have too much pride and they're probably more invested and rushing it through then listening and in all the responses that HQ gave to all of our feedback it always just sounded like the points weren't landing if anybody from thermaltake management is in the meeting but I hope they're listening cuz ok I've been I've had this same conversation every year for like six years thermal takes it next almost good case that it announced this week was the 300 TG a RGB divider which is definitely a design that other manufacturers will soon copy in fact we sort of saw this with CyberPower at CES this year where we said that the CyberPower amethyst case was the one we expect case manufacturers likely to adapt as the amethyst combined steel and glass into a single split panel at the time though CyberPower was effectively gluing the steel to the glass whereas Thermaltake is going with a split panel approach so a couple of things here this divider this is what we're talking about where it's a really cool idea and thermaltake should have kept its mouth shot until it had it better figured out there are a lot of problems with the execution that will go through in a moment but what thermal think should have probably done is released a line of them all the same chassis all the same cooling with different side panels and they could have done some really cool things with that split panel design because now you can start cutting out holes in the glass and the metal and put a screw in the steel in the metal get two screws in there and you can potentially get a fan mounted that cuts into where the glass would have been now you have a sight intake fan that you can potentially if done properly power with pin the pad contact rather than a cable being one of the first cases to re add a side intake fan that isn't ugly that doesn't have an annoying cable that stretches to the motherboard other things they could have done would include rotating the damn glass so that you can see the computer with the glass instead of the big empty space at the front of the computer the glass should be from bottom left to top right with the third point in the top left thus revealing most of the actual components in the system as it stands now the glass basically reveals a giant empty compartment in the front of the chassis which will be even more empty if the user doesn't add the optional fans to the side for intake it's just oriented the wrong way you'll see just a black steel wall and that's it as for the rest of the front panel of the chassis was boasted to us as having ventilation and big air quotes there which we genuinely didn't see for the first time in the video demonstration the ventilation looks a couple millimeters wide it's making a worse version of the mistake Coolermaster made with its original H P the non-match one the case could be a decent performer if they're on will take fully close to the front and committed to site intake but then you wouldn't have three RGB fans behind a glass panel which is a design four or five years old at this point that thermaltake seems committed to we try not to be too critical of demo systems since they aren't representative of stock configurations but it's hard to overlook flaws and assembly that make a company look utterly vexed as to how to build a computer they are disconnected from their audience the demo system takes air in from the front presumably and then it immediately spits it out the side because those side panel fans are set up as exhaust that's probably not the stock configuration in fact it isn't the stock configurations three front only but what this means is that Thermaltake has no idea what it's doing when it builds a system that means that none of the air ever actually makes it into the computer it's entering and it's taking a 90-degree turn and leaving before getting to the motherboard this could be actually good with side intake but then you'd need to block the front or set up front intake in the front to prevent air from escaping there the case concept is good to do something different with the side panel but everything else about it is poorly executed and the demo system is too we fully expect a more capable company to rip this idea off and execute it properly before thermaltake fixes its own execution and very sadly tragically for Thermaltake that company whoever it ends up being won't be accused of being thermal fake and they won't be accused of stealing ideas because this one didn't get far enough to have that privilege of seeming like like it was thieved from Thermaltake before really properly being executed thermaltake is the company whether it's fair or not that has now this ghost following it this demon of being a knockoff company and these products aren't going to help it because what's going to happen they're all take again let's listen listen this time please what's going to happen is Thermaltake releases these versions of these cases they do okay in the market poorly - ok they're all take fixes some of the things and iterates on them maybe not thermally but at least flips the panel around iterates on the design some way that case ends up whatever it is being actually kind of good and getting some recommendations here's the problem in the time from now and the next iteration of its case that idea will be executed better by someone else and you know what will happen thermaltake will again be called thermal fake they'll be accused of stealing an idea that they put to market and that's because they didn't do it well not the first time so no one ever really notices it they don't catch on finally if their own takes it most interesting development was its new tough fan which looks an awful lot like an eye tech solution and is meant to take on Noctua head-to-head the tough and 12 runs at 500 to 2,000 rpm it's non RGB and we praised it for that and at mark it's a quote 58 CFM we asked how if they're all take measures its flow rate but we were not provided with a response or documentation the bearing is a hydraulic bearing the motor is for phase and it's supposed to be available for $20 within weeks of this announcement for the 120 ml version or by mid q3 for 140 ml this is definitely if they're on takes most promising product lines shown here it will be included with coolers at a later date but we don't have further details on that so that's really it then it's time for Thermaltake to learn I'll probably have a conclusion thing at the timestamps but spoiler alert I'm not gonna try and recap all of the rage that I just unborrowed into the camera because that was a lot of rage and it's the problem is again it's it's not even just I don't know I want to say I'm not mad I'm disappointed but as I started writing this and really getting into the script I was realizing actually I'm Ken I'm at kind of at and it's because it's been years that thermal takes been doing the same damn thing where they get so close to having something really good and then they just let it slip so please please don't take the only reason I'm doing this is because I want you the company to improve I want thermaltake to get better because the people who work there have good ideas and execute well thermal takes us headquarters has some of the best PC builders in the industry throw a mic again as an example does most of their show systems for the Computex our CES when they happen and when he does those they're good but it takes more than one person building demo systems to make a good product and a good company and whoever hears this hopefully they can make the right decisions to start improving things and the first decision should be we need to start delaying products when they're not there yet and the second one should be we need to start listening to people because it's not the same industry it was in the 90s when people thought that the company was called thermal talkie it's a much different industry now so that's it for this one thanks for watching and subscribe for more to support this type of content you go to store documents access net or patreon.com slash gamers access I'll see you all next time [Music]

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 913,679

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, thermaltake, thermalfake, thermaltake 2020, thermaltake tower 100, thermaltake tower 900, thermaltake divider 300, thermaltake 300 divider tg, thermaltake floe rc, thermaltake Noctua fan, thermaltake toughfan

Id: vhkYcO1VxOk

Length: 26min 41sec (1601 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 08 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Mannekino]

Whole video is worth a watch if you enjoy seeing marketing babble getting destroyed.

[u/N-Orpheus13]

No way TechJesus shouts out my favourite SC2 personality :0 does someone know if he knows him personally or is he just a StarCraft fan?

[u/t0b4cc02]

you guys should scroll back a bit for the context

wow

[u/EzioAs]

I saw this too and commented on the video about him giving Artosis a shoutout.

[u/SinnlicheSara]

At what time does he get shouted out?