The Disappointment PC 2020: Worst Parts of the Year

[Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you [Music] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] we are open to revisiting this in the future should your editorial direction change [Music] oh everything just works i was being sarcastic [Music] before that this video is brought to you by us and the 2020 disappointment pc t-shirt the best way to support gamers nexus and its testing methodology and special intros is to wear a constant reminder of the disappointment of 2020. 2020 feels like one never-ending year and the back of the gn 2020 disappointment t-shirt features major milestones like the am bike cold plate slime part 2 cpu naming schemes power supply shortages gpu availability and eight so called k gaming the worst fumbles on the back are presented like tour dates and the front of the shirt features a pc component design with stock level indicators that we've all grown familiar with the shirts are high quality prints and fabric made with soft 100 cotton or popular tri blend and printed with sustainable water-based inks you can visit store.camerasnexus.net or click the link below to grab one now starting at 19.99 you know for 2019's disappointment build after the impressive swath of disappointing products we had i said hopefully hopefully we can look forward to an equally disappointing 2020. so sorry okay well 2020 certainly uh didn't disappoint if you were looking for disappointment the biggest trend of this year in the hardware industry was a three-act arc of trying to control media and the direction of media that's something we'll be recapping again in fact 2020 was such an impressively long year that we had forgotten about the first two acts of the three-act arc the third one being nvidia's act and then we had deep cool and we had msi mixed in there as well so we've got a lawn year to recap and for this one we're gonna be going through some of the most disappointing launches and parts and trends of 2020 and for this as noted we do have our new shirt i always like to talk about this because we put a lot of time into designing these for each year these are not necessarily intended to be limited edition shirts except by nature of printing 20 20 on it and theming it around 2020 it is going to be limited just because we're not going to print a 20 20 shirt forever we will come back with a front design only at some point but if you want one with the disappointment toward 2020 dates on it then pick it up on store.camerasnexus.net we did two runs of them last year for the 2019 edition we sold through very fast each time it's basically instant sell through so we're trying not to do that we ordered a good amount of them but hopefully i guess it would be it would be a fantastic irony if we also ran out of stock of our shirts i promise they're not a paper launch but anyway some of the dates on it for this year so first of all andrew did a bit of a red theme on it we've got the front of it showing out of stock indicators for things except for of course the case there are plenty of cases to be had this year just not a whole lot of anything else as we've got out of stock indicators that we've all become used to but designed in a way that uh it doesn't necessarily come off too on the nose and then on the back of it reminders of the bios reversal heat pipe marketing at the beginning of the year probably everyone's forgotten this stuff by now and all the way down to supply availability issues there's the ps memory thermals ray tracing demands the kill shot msi controversy and plenty of other stuff and then for each of those we've got different icons on the back representing the product so anyway if you want to grab one of the shirts you can go to store.cameratexas.net and pick one up they're in cotton and in tri-blend starting at 20 and we always sell through them very quickly so make sure you grab one if you want one let's go through a year of downsides for for the hardware industry so the year started off relatively innocently from a tech industry standpoint little did we know what we had in store later it didn't involve global logistics or a pandemic or any of the other controversies that we'd unknowingly encounter later in the year we were but naive hardware reviewers then and that was the focus of what we were doing at the time we weren't yet grizzled veterans of 2020. so it's hard to imagine that the rx 5600xt launched in 2020 but in fact it did it's life though the 5600 xts started with 2v bios's and that was the issue with that one that was the floor for disappointment in 2020. we thought it was we thought it was a pretty bad start we had no idea what was coming though so the 5600 xt had a v bios that in the face of the 1660 super and ti the two of which uh needlessly overlapped each other and the 2060 especially the new lower priced 2060s in the face of that amd was forced to pull a classic amd rtg move and panic and change everything last second and pretend like it was all planned so amd launched a second v bios that was higher power consumption and higher performance higher clocks for the 5600 xts but it created a logistical nightmare for the partners in rolling that v-bios out not all the cards started with it and some of the cars really couldn't properly support it without running a little bit on the hot side so heat pipe marketing was another classic issue this arose in february of 2020 and this was when we discovered that deepcool had been falsely marketing its assassin 3 coolers as being a combination of sintered powder pipes and grooved heat pipes the assassin 3 had marketing materials on every retail page that we found and product page that we found heavily emphasizing the benefits of having composite heat pipes with grooves and sintered powder rather than just the sintered powder that we typically see and it claims that it's quote grooves that centered technology is 15 faster in heat conduction and that's questionable for other reasons but the company claimed that quote deep cool cfd engineers took the lead and the whole r d process of the assassin 3 hundreds of simulation and verification tests were made before its finalization apparently though at no point in this process did anyone cut the heat pipe open to make sure it was what they thought they were selling or what they thought they were buying from their supplier if we give them the benefit of the doubt but when we cut the heat pipes open uh something the whole either didn't do themselves or didn't expect a third party to do we found that it was only centered and that there were in fact no grooves in these heat pipes which was the major marketing point the sad thing is that this cooler was actually pretty good overall perhaps adding to the disappointment of the false marketing until we cut it open however we had no reason not to believe them but now we'll forever question such claims deepcool even responded to our queries prior to publication as we gave them time to respond and said this quote yes it's sintered and not grouped we misunderstood its interior structure from the very beginning we confirm that it's just entered this point has been corrected from october actually sorry that we didn't make it clear to you earlier so it's not needed to mention that part thanks this was actually worse because deepcool admitted it knew about its own false advertising but all of its product pages we found still stated that the heat pipes had groove centered design that the company knew wasn't present and this was many months later b550 delays in b550a for the next one so the next topic on the shirt relates to the b550a motherboard which was actually just a re-branded b450 motherboard that was done with a 100 digit increment in order to appease the system integrators so that they could make their new systems look like they have a newer motherboard in them in the form of b550a which was again literally b450 with an a at the end and a five instead of a four so that however led into the bigger issue for the diy community which was the long delays of the b550 motherboards which fed into a further still issue of the chipset outrage also featured on the shirt later in the year so these delays triggered a cascade of problems for amd because b550 had taken so long to come out delayed past 2019 past the es 2020 and into june of 2020 many builders bought x470 or b450 motherboards that would later be declared incapable of supporting future amd cpus andy was making moves to only support zen 3 on the x570 platform and later released a b550 platform but due to delays the company walked into a minefield of its own making and had to backpedal its decision and re-engineer its agiza binary to support new cpus on 400 series platforms as well this created one logistical issues for the company and for the motherboard partners and all relates later again to the chipset outrage that happened in may of 2020. cold plate slime redux is the next one that we're covering from earlier in the year so jumping back the cold plate slime redux related to testing of the second iteration of enter max's lictech tr4 cooler that we showed in 2018 i think in 19 for sure where they had gunk buildup corrosion and became unbelievably nasty inside but ultimately failed to work in any sense because it was so clogged up that you no longer got any cooling power that happened previously but this year what we did was take apart a couple of the revisions of it to see if the problem had been resolved lo and behold it had not been resolved and we sent off some of the cold plates to a lab for x-ray analysis and determine some of the uh potential theories or hypotheses for the issues a lot of them relating to metal choices and the quality of the water being used at the manufacturing plant and our thanks to mr fahrenheit one of our viewers for help with the x-ray analysis on that a500 flatness and gddr5 1650 up next we'll skip through these two quickly the a500 flatness is related to corsair's return to air coolers which included the invention of an excellent cold plate for testing thermal interfaces that's because the early production runs of the a500 were so horrendously unflat that they produced a tool that we could use for testing how interfaces can conform to an unflat cold plate when you have large gaps between the cold plate and the ihs as for the 1650 gddr5 unit well that should have never existed under the name that it took because it becomes misleading and confusing for consumers when you're talking about functionally a same named card in nearly every aspect except changing one thing at the very end cpu names annoying cpu names were shared by both amd and intel for 2020. intel had it worse following up its genius of the intel core i9 10 980 x e extreme edition cpu it launched an entire series of confusingly named parts uh to the extent that later in the year intel couldn't even remember the names of its own products based on what we saw in its presentation to media and its laptop presentation we even made a chart with how many times intel names its own product as opposed to competing products and the end result was one hopefully a lesson learned to intel that its names need to be improved because its own staff can barely remember them and two that naming competitors constantly stands to only teach people the names of the competing products as for amd the company released some of the worst value cpus it has ever created the r7 3800 xt was particularly bad in an impressive way it was priced the same way as the r9 3900x but performing worse in nearly every single metric and running with a court deficit of 50 and this was at the same price this was amd's first move towards trying to re-establish a higher asp re-establish a higher price point or perceived value and it did it with a product that should have never existed to begin with because ryzen 5000 was just around the corner and the xt series barely did anything to improve in any aspect at all the price going up by a hundred dollars certainly didn't help when compared to the non-t versions of the parts that came out previously the 3800 xt replaced a cpu that at launch was already a waste of sand given its price and then furthered the waste of sand imbued with intelligence by slotting it at the same price point as the 3900x the xt 3800 was fully killed and buried with the ryzen 5000 launch if it hadn't already been killed at that point where it proved worse than the entire lineup in gaming and it wasn't that much later and uh not better in most of the other applications either that was the whole point of the xt refresh by the way was strictly gaming focused of course intel had its own disappointing cpu the i510 400 featuring all the usual locks in place except at a time when intel couldn't afford to be locking its own parts down the r33300x was one of the first cpus that launched in the year that started to preempt what would happen later of a lack of supply it seemed as if the cpu never launched our own keegan the editor of a lot of our videos was trying to buy a 3300 x for his own system and it had been delayed and shipping two times over a couple of months before he finally got one that however wasn't uh as largely discussed as online as the later ryzen 5000 and rtx 3000 supply insufficiencies or at least phrased maybe more appropriately the impossibly high demand versus the supply capabilities especially after the industry was recovering from reduced manufacturing potential from half of the year in the middle of all this intel again expressed its fear of benchmarks and tried to refocus the media and its purchasers on the idea of quote real world benchmarks which uh of course would precede the 11 series launch that's coming out in the next couple months if not sooner where we assume intel will undoubtedly want to shuffle back towards benchmarks and they're important among other stupid claims in the past year intel was at this point an overturned turtle getting spun in circles by all of its competitors including arm and apple not just amd it retreated into its shell and it later emerged holding claims of six times more soldiers with its cpus versus amd's the best part of course is that they didn't make it obvious what that multiplier was calculated against it wasn't the immediate competitors or the immediate predecessors but older parts still ndxt build mid year we did a stain operation on ndxc's bld pre-built service and we tested the customer service and build quality of the systems nzxt's customer service exhibited the most demonstrable email incompetency present at almost any corporation these days which was an inability to answer more than one question in an email even when bulleted and formatted the company routinely ignored requests for assistance under our undercover emails including complaints about scuffs or damage on the computer we had purchased now those were claims we had fabricated in order to test the support department they weren't actually on the box but ndxc never even asked for a photo which seemed like it could have really circumvented a lot of the wasted time in that thread and you can watch the whole video for that of course the company then proved incapable of troubleshooting something as basic as an unplugged eps 12 volt cable and instead suggested that we ship it express across the country twice to fix a cable that was unplugged which could then presumably come unplugged again in shipping instead it's assumed that there was a loose cpu and that was causing the problem but you can check out the video for that and since then ndxd claims it has improved its customer service policies this all started after ndxt was responding to tweets for help from customers with memes and totally unhelpful responses like just yank hard in response to a genuine customer question about removing the front panel of the case the company continues to regress into the most immature possible version of a future dystopia where corporations meme with the best of them and a desperate flailing appeal to youth but now with the latest cases catching on fire issue it seems like there's been an injection of maturity and we hope that ndxt comes out ahead because the company in the past has been one of the easiest companies to work with that has really tried hard and has innovated in a sincere way in the case market but it's lost its way over the last year or so and we hope that this is a turning point for nzxt msi kill shot up next so now we get into the big stuff our msi kill shot video came in response to msi attempting to silence tech team gb's criticisms of the company by asking him to withhold publication of complaints even going as far as offering cash in exchange for quote time that is time spent on the review on the the uh insinuation that the review not be published tech team gb did the right thing and published and in response to msi's behavior we unloaded five years of behind the scenes ammunition about the company where we tried unsuccessfully several times for half a decade or more to write the company's behavior and explain hey certain things you're doing are unethical and here's how you fix that and instead they just kept doing those things except two smaller channels where we wouldn't be looking apparently was the assumption so we try to resolve these unethical behaviors from companies privately first and especially since language or translation or cultural barriers can come into play in some conversations but msi proved it was willing to continue and apparently at directive of hq to try and control the narrative of publications so we buried lucky the dragon in that video intro cancelled an ad campaign with msi and decided not to build them for the rest and then reinforced tech team gb and taking a stand against the behavior msi later contacted us thanked us for the video and said it would be working on improvements internally we haven't heard from the company since then but we sincerely hope that the message has been gotten across because again it was a half a decade or so of of gentle reminders that hey this isn't how you should treat independent media because then it's not independent media anymore uh it's marketing but we'll see maybe they learn this time 12 fan zero airflow next on the shirt we get back to a more trivial disappointment that's purely product driven our favorite kind of disappointment and the better kind of deal with this is in relation to the abconcor ram c780 or r780 case which was sent to us by brian of bps customs when he realized that shipping would be cheaper than the cost of bringing it to his local dump and leaving it there the case featured what we've all wanted airflow asterisk it had 12 fans but they were all covered by glass and steel so not quite it was an interesting case it was a lot of fun to work with but not for reasons that were good we in fact cut our testing short because we became concerned about the health of the components when they were running as hot as they were so three of the fans were custom molded to do even more of nothing than the others and then the additional nine fans beyond that were mostly pointed at solid panels next on the shirt is that of gpu availability and 8k gaming although we made jokes in the intro about paper launches the reality is that several of these component launches weren't truly paper launches which is the idea of a specs only on paper only launch but they were incapable of meeting the pandemic demand and that's after obviously having reduced manufacturing capabilities the two together produce what appears to be a paper launch except in some cases there were some genuine paper launches end result nothing's available and that's the point of the line item as for the 8k gaming well maybe one of those gpus should have remained a paper launch that would be the rtx 3090 it's advertised as a gaming gpu targeted for so called eight so called k gaming even though it makes the most sense as an artist's gpu for something like blender because of its 24 gigabytes of memory at fifteen hundred dollars which is actually extremely useful in 3d art and maybe that's about it gaming though it's a stretch at best so 8k first of all is 7680 by 4320 it's a far cry from 1080p or 1920 by 1080 not anywhere close to the scaling we see there hence eight so called k nvidia made it seem like the 30 90 card again best used for 3d art would be the first real 8k gaming card in actuality it rarely broke 30 fps on the test that we ran for 8k gaming and some of the paid influencer campaigns sure showed 60 fps in do maternal but once again 60 fps in do maternal could be achieved by a 1959 pdp one so it's not that impressive to be able to do that in that game the company burned all of its social capital with a marketing campaign which at best was misleading and this came in the form of paid marketing that went up before independent reviews completely shifting the marketing in the last second before the reviews launched of course we were happy to shuffle and accommodate the renewed 8k obsession for our review nvidia at this point had burned its capital on the troubled rtx 3080 launch and ran a deficit with the 3090 campaign it wasn't long after this that instability issues plagued nvidia's 30 series reputation pursuant to overly aggressive boosting that would later be resolved with drivers the am bike will be brief but it was a fun one andy decided to slap his sticker on a bike or perhaps more realistic maybe one of walmart's containers was accidentally rerouted to tsmc at which point the company stuck stickers on it but nonetheless amd attempted to launch the amd mountain bike labeled am bike on our box when we received it it was shipped and when we bought it we first had trouble getting it out of the parking lot and then riding it down the sidewalk before things started breaking that's how soon they broke we then took it to some of my favorite mountain biking trails and before publishing the video we emailed amd with a host of concerns we had about the product that includes several safety concerns some severe like issues with braking and uh the most severe of which was structural stability or integrity issues in the frame of the bike where the head tube of a steel frame managed to crack after just a couple hours of riding and could potentially shear the head tube and some of the fork through your chin but that's another story and it wasn't until after our video that amd fully responded and the response was to kill the product and to offer a refund to all purchasers canceling the remaining orders you can check out that video for more on that in an impressive display of emotional incongruence i guess nvidia thanked reviewers hardware unboxed for its reviews of the rtx cards and then stated that it would be pulling review samples until the editorial direction changed and that was the key phrasing that was truly problematic although an email informing you that you're not receiving samples anymore is extremely uncommon normally you just don't receive them so this in itself was out of place and out of character and no reviewer is entitled to review samples to really make that clear we also could buy them it's the matter of getting them sometimes like this year but sending an indiscriminate threat functionally to a reviewer that could be scribed even by koala as himself as damaging to the credibility of the entire industry is probably not the best move because this undermines and subverts the coverage of nvidia's own technologies the genuine coverage that's not paid for and it starts to make it look like everything is paid for or is done out of fear both of which are bad things as consumers become increasingly aware of the paid influencer campaigns that nvidia especially is pursuing right now this straightforward takula form self-owning sanction served more as an insanitable double shot to the sabaton than its reputation rooted salvific intent and the response to which wiped nvidia's scatterphage's grin off of its face it ended up backpedaling and apologizing twice the real problem again was not one of who gets sampled and who doesn't but the message sent by nvidia knowing full well that it'd go public and knowing full well just like msi that it might be able to get away with spawning a hobgoblin in the minds of reviewers less equipped to strike out on their own especially the smaller reviewers or the upstart it's precisely in line with what msi did to get in trouble with us earlier this year but perhaps more egregious nvidia ultimately apologized profusely it walks back its statements and its decisions but we wonder whether it'll just wait until the rallied reviewers look elsewhere to try it again and the end result of this of course is that newer reviewers smaller reviewers reviewers with less ability to just buy the cards that they want to review might have this email on the back of their heads when they're working on content and whether or not it directly influences the content being written this is a problem nvidia it seems is moving away from supporting independent reviewers and towards instead a influencer specific campaign approach where it's supporting people like streamers which nothing against game streamers but it is primarily moving towards supporting people who are not going to review the product and are instead are going to just use the product to play the games or do whatever it is they normally do and that's again not a statement about those professions because uh we know those people a lot of them and and have worked with them in the past too it's also an important or an entertaining job but it's a statement about nvidia and it's a level of confidence that it can start to move more in the direction of purely paid influencer campaigns and perhaps away from reviews and we'll see how long this apology stands before something like this happens again but that's it for the disappointment build of 2020. thank you for watching the intro is a lot of fun to make we think it's our best one yet you should check out the series of them we've published one each year for the past several years now i think this is the fourth and of course you can go to store.camerasaccess.net to pick up one of these shirts the disappointment 20 20 shirt we've got one run of inventory in now they will be shipping in about three to five days after this video goes live and uh then if they run out we'll we'll get more in asaf but otherwise just assume that it's part of the theme if we run out of stock it'll fit at least or you go to patreon.com thanks for helping out and we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 654,165

Rating: 4.9269347 out of 5

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, disappointment pc, disappointment build, disappointment pc 2020, disappointment build 2020, 2020 year in review, best pc parts 2020, best pc parts 2021, worst pc parts 2020, worst pc parts 2021, video card supply, rtx 3080 in stock when, ryzen 5000 in stock

Id: hGnBI0rDgA4

Length: 29min 58sec (1798 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/-Gast-]

The biggest disappointment is of course 6900xt. Claimed to even beat 3090, but nothing.

[u/geforce73]

Waiting for my 3080 to arrive and it will take at least 4 to 12 weeks.

[u/Naekyr]

AMDs terrible launch and lies around availability should be pretty high up that list

[u/CaptainHijinx]

The 3800xt for 280 dollars was not a disappointment to me in any way!

[u/GcodeG01]

There’s a lot of whataboutism in this thread. Can people not grasp that Nvidia fucked up or can do any wrong? It’s okay to state your opinion as an opinion, but it seems like people are taking this personally. Currently at the time of writing this, all the comments are about AMD. I question if the fanboys of Nvidia are worse than AMD. Seriously guys, there’s no incentive to protect Nvidia, they’re a company who don’t give a fuck about you, but your money. Before you again go, what about AMD, same applies.

[u/karl_w_w]

Are we in /r/amd? Why is everyone talking about AMD in here?

[u/R9Jeff]

Bought a 3090 Strix OC. Best decision i made. This shit is borderline sexual

[u/lmfao605914]

bruh this sub has to be worst than r/amd . I'm not even joking the fanboys in here are terrible. The 3090 is a terrible buy and people are actually happy that they got the card fail. ill be laughing when i pick a 3080ti up that'll be on the same performance as the 3090 for $800 less.