The Disappointment PC 2021: Worst Parts of the Year

[Music] [Music] so foreign [Music] three [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] before that this video is brought to you by us and the 2021 disappointment pc t-shirt the best way to support gamers nexus and its testing methodology and these phenomenal special intros is to wear a constant reminder of the disappointment of 2021. 2021 was an unrelenting firestorm rot from the depths of hell and the back of our shirt commemorates the tour dates of demon spawn like case fires power supply explosions mismarketed components cpus that waste sand and more the tour date layout uniquely maps the year and the front of the shirt features a recognizable gpu shroud repurposed as an hourglass wherein the components turn to dust as the sands of time march on the shirts are high quality prints and fabrics made with 100 soft cotton or a very popular tri blend and printed with sustainable water-based inks these sell out fast so visit store.gamersnexus.net or click the link below to grab one of these limited shirts now starting at 19.99 it's been a hell of a year for computer hardware but no perfect the air for the disappointment built although we said that last time too and then 2020 happened and that was pretty bad so anyway sorry about that we're seemingly predicting the future at this point but uh we didn't get the three-act arc of trying to control media reviews of computer hardware this year that we got last year we did however get some new things one of those was a phenomenal new trend of fire there it is it's a feature now sell your product with a little bit of extra spice in it to replace rgb because that's boring now we also had a trend of wasting natural resources to make products that are basically relegated to the dumpster as soon as the next generation comes out only a few months later like this one we had exploding power supplies burning motherboards burning monitors burning cases and riser cables almost another burning case from fractal but they got in front of that one so that was actually good and referencing our uh handy map here on the back of the shirt there was usb dropout issues a couple of pretty disappointing cases but they didn't catch on fire it's not that bad i guess that's sort of the bar now it's pretty low uh lots of gpu value issues windows 11 launched but a lot of you forgot about that and a whole host of people gaming pcs if you want to grab one of these shirts it's a great way to support our intros we do for these special builds we do one of these every single year this is i think the first one we did was in 2017 so we're now looking at four years running for the disappointment pc uh we love doing them it's really fun and creative and you can go to store.gamersnexus.net to grab one of these shirts they are limited by nature because it says 2021 on it so we're not going to print them forever we'll do another version with just the front design in the future but just couple notes on this so for the design obviously it's an hourglass with sand in it because waste of sand you know for the components but a couple cool easter eggs in here the hourglass is shaped like the nvidia founders edition shroud so we actually originally had just a normal hourglass shape kind of looked at it and we were like you could make that into an nvidia shroud so sorry nvidia but uh fantastic design for this particular shirt so that'll be on the store and you should definitely grab one because they are limited we sell through these extremely fast we make a ton of them we normally do two runs and then that's it because this is 20 21 on it so by nature we're not going to make them forever so if you want to grab one grab one we have them in 100 cotton and a comfortable tri blend if you prefer so to just remind you of a few of the dates for this year for the most momentous launches the nzxt fire issues for the h1 they started previously in 2020 end of 2020 and they persisted all the way through the beginning of 2021 so that was a major storyline for us and the rest of the industry uh it got big enough that the us government got involved in it the gigabyte power supplies us government also got involved in because they were exploding and this is generally regarded as a bad thing in your electronics product and then additionally the intel launches you may have forgotten but the 11 series did actually come out this year amd has launched several woefully enough graphics cards in the value department okay otherwise to end up with the amd and nvidia just completely capitalized on their position in this duopoly until intel comes in and hopefully bringing some competition to drive down prices uh overall disappointing to see versus the previous half decade or so where it was just improvement in performance with the price increase uh not linearly increasing with that performance so you saw the performance curve steeper than the price curve and that was when it was good but it's not like that now let's get started with the first major disappointment and recap though and that's going to be ndxc's h1 case it's been a little while since nzxt produced a truly trend-setting piece of hardware the company used to be industry leading in a lot of ways two of them were its h440 case and s340 case which were both trend setters for power supply shrouds and cable management and ease of installation features all of these things that basically everyone else in the market copied what we didn't expect was that nzxt's h1 would also set trends in the market the h1 introduced a new feature to computers in 2021 transcending even rgb leds by offering a single use heat emitting diode known as a fire although many imitators would later launch throughout the year none were as good as the original flame emitting diode that launched on the ntxd h1 although the explosion emitting diode on the gigabyte power supply came pretty close some organizations like the consumer protection agencies might have you believe that going through fire in flames is bad they might argue that you'd feel the pain of a lifetime loss in a thousand days but through the fire in flames we carry out sorry i had to slip that one in there because ndxt only knows how to communicate through memes so we thought this would maybe land a little bit better with them than constructive criticism of a product that's dangerous the h1 was the first time we've ever worked on an issue that was truly this important where we were genuinely worried about it catching on fire and causing tremendous loss for people so it was pretty serious for us to work on it was the first time we worked with government agencies on researching things learning about recalls uh great learning experience for us and hopefully a good one for nzxt to not do that again but the h1 required multiple subpar workarounds like plastic screws that didn't do anything to remedy the core issue of a 12-volt power plane being exposed to a screw that connected it straight to ground causing a short of 12 volts to ground and a phenomenal flame that on ours didn't even self-extinguish we had to put it out ourselves so that's another screw up that nzxt had we might as well talk about all the fires right up front so jumping around both in our lab and on the back of the shirt we now land on gigabytes explosive power supply just as gigabytes power supply burst into the market it also burst into flames and gigabyte followed ndxt's roadmap almost precisely for this specific issue where the issue was originally discovered months prior to us looking at it it was discovered by iris who does a lot of power supply testing in the industry most of it actually at this point and they more or less ignored him and his findings and never talked about it never really resolved the issue we looked at it later our initial look at it prompted gigabyte to post a press release wherein it directly but indirectly addressed us and our findings of course we did what anyone would do we called our insurance company adjusted our policy to better cover for fire and then we bought 10 more gigabyte power supplies ultimately determining the failure rate was impressively hot as you can see on these charts gigabytes public statement accused testing of quote certain media outfits of being unrealistically abusive and at unreasonably long periods it tried to make power supply testing sound like it was magic and somehow unfair it's a bold strategy let's see how it pays off for them [Laughter] it uh it didn't it didn't didn't pay off for that we did a speed run of the explosion without a single cut in the video not even for the ad that's something that no one else has done before for a power supply at least to our knowledge the power supply failed within 20 minutes it did give us however mean potential for the rest of time so there was an upside after all of this gigabyte servers got hacked and its support uh department really struggled to help people with their power supplies so we don't really know what happened for the most part after this gigabyte eventually addressed the issue at this point we're not willing to ever say buy the uh gigabyte p750 gm at this point or the 850 gm because frankly there's the fact that there's any rescuers might explode if you end up with old stock or new old stock it makes it not worth even rolling the dice on it even if the chances are pretty low so this product to us is dead gigabyte has made good power supplies this wasn't one of them that wasn't the only bad power supply we tested this year but it was the only one that exploded the aries game power supply also was tremendously disappointing because it was one of the top sellers on amazon for the 750 and 850 watt categories and its problem was that it claimed to be 80 plus gold in fact it even had an 80 plus certificate for gold but the power supplies that were actually being sold long after the 80 plus cert was given to aries game were actually 80 plus bronze barely it was however a fantastic learning opportunity for us and our audience as it prompted us to do a bunch of research on 80 plus and talk about the certifications upsides and many downsides now right at the end of the year there were a few additional fires that get an honorable mention one of them is the asus z690 hero motherboard currently in our lab for investigation and testing because there's a capacitor that was installed backwards so we're looking at that to see what kind of sparks that can produce additionally also at the end of the year acer slid into the disappointment build with its monitors because we had two viewers who reached out noting that there was a special vaporizer feature in the back of their display producing some smoke it's a one-time use feature but that pretty much rounds out the fires and they really skated in there in the last week of the year we're in the cpu and gpu testing area now so you can guess what's up next we'll highlight a few dates for the next one the shirt design overall does a great job of demonstrating that the sand used in the 11900k or the gpus launched this year would be better even in a desert than it was in the silicon used to create these products if you've ever wondered what it looks like for a gold medal gymnast to trip over her own feet while doing something as mundane as walking you need look no further than amd's xt cpus in 2020 until then is more like watching a toddler trip over its own feet because it was neither unexpected nor did it have far to fall and everybody in the room looked away so as not to trigger a tantrum and that's what intel did in 2021 when it launched the 11 series intel recovered its position with alder lake and has a lot to be proud of but just nine months prior its shameful launch of the 11 900k and 11700k showed us that intel still had a lot to lose these cpus were such a monumental cluster f skew that they even managed to regress in performance compared to the previous generation the 1100k proved that it is in fact possible to make a product that is literally worse than nothing the 11900 case chief use case will be as a photograph in a 30th century anthropology textbook about the downfall of humanity wrought by corporate hubris or maybe in a marketing 101 class today with the assignment of make this product sound good the good news is that the intel alder lake cpus are actually good and they're very competitive which is awesome to see so intel started off very weekly this year and ended on a pretty strong note what we hope is that this produces more of an atmosphere where intel and andy focus on making just a good product to compete with each other rather than trying to appease shareholders who aren't interested in what's best for the company and its long-term reputation only what's in it for them and that is how at least the 11 series launch felt it was rushed out the door as a stopgap solution just like the xt series was because they felt like they needed something to sell and even though this thing sucks we're already in it this far so we might as well commit and just damage our reputation but at least we'll have something to sell if anyone wants it the next one for us is an amalgamation of various bios issues like amd usb dropout early in the year and the usual intel over aggressive bios settings by motherboard manufacturers throughout the year the issue manifested in the form of usb devices unexpectedly and seemingly randomly losing connectivity with the host that's the am the usb dropout issue and then additionally z590 bios issues that later appeared in z690 where we have overly aggressive settings for the cpus for the amd issue at best it would cause inconvenience where your mouse or your keyboard might disconnect and you lose input randomly or sporadically at worst it caused data loss and corruption on hard drives that may have been connected externally via usb amd attempted several fixes for this and actually today we're still not sure if it's completely resolved this is where you could come in if you had experience with the usb dropout issue and it's now fixed we'd love to hear from you in the comments and if it hasn't been fixed we would love even more to hear from you in the comments because after the first say five months of the year when this was a hot topic it seemed to have vanished we're assuming that's because it was mostly resolved but andy did try multiple fixes uh some motherboards haven't been fully brought up to speed yet so we'd love to hear from the community on where it is today as for the other issue that's the z590 bios configuration and it extends to z690 to some extent this has been going on for years now but motherboard manufacturers love shipping boards with unstable bio settings or overly aggressive ones to force cpus to run at full tilt technically outside of official intel guidance but technically within the spec they do this so that their board outranks competition if someone for some reason makes a chart comparing motherboards which is sort of a fool's errand anyway because the cpu performance is the same it's just the board effect in it and you should just run it default the end result is that the cpus often throttle and overheat due to excessive or overly aggressive core settings especially where they'll blast it really high in order to maintain the maximum peak frequency constantly so these are things like ignoring tau suggestions by intel and otherwise blasting the power limit next up cases feel really far away from the camera but that's okay it's like there's a sea of mediocrity between the audience and the msi secura 500x which is the worst thing we looked at this year in terms of a case asterisk that that doesn't catch on fire so we'll skip the h1 here since it was already shown but msi fought hard to land on our list of disappointing products by launching its sakira 500x this was followed up by cooler masters poorly thought out mf 700 and the lienly odyssey x although these didn't catch on fire the 500x did its best to keep components nice and toasty it's a weird case because it has abnormally high quality materials high build quality but extremely poor design and execution of the basics like like letting air into the computer so msi is out there on its own with something that is both supremely high quality and at the same time the cooler master mf700 meanwhile shared problems with the odyssey x both of them suffer from trying to do too many things and offering a transforming feature that no one asked for and it doesn't work well even if they did the mf700 tries to be a test bench while also trying to be a normal case it ends up somehow making an open air configuration bad for radiator airflow and also it's extremely heavy and it's questionable whether you could even wall mount it as is advertised without it being too much weight for the vase amount once you've mounted the glass and all the components the odyssey x is 500 and really offers nothing interesting to anyone so that one stands on its own as just being sort of embarrassing of course we can't skip pre-built gaming pcs which have been a major staple of coverage for us in 2021 perhaps not something we wanted to be a major staple of coverage but one that has proven actually really fun and interesting to work on because of their many unique issues and features the g5 5000 from dell ended up permanently honored on our disappointment toward 2021 t-shirt right alongside dell's own alienware r10 overly plastic pre-built and these systems weren't alone going through our pre-built gaming pc's playlist on youtube you'll see that we only managed to find three good to good adjacent pcs this year with the rest featuring issues like proprietary motherboards with bizarre form factors proprietary power supplies a single stick of ram and multi-thousand dollar pcs stock coolers for eighteen hundred dollars in a box that overheats damaged motherboards from bad or lazy packaging and plenty more this wouldn't actually be disappointing because we normally just sort of expect that if it weren't for the specifics of this year where we've sort of come to rely on pre-built gaming pcs in a lot of ways and it's time for them to step up the oems and si have a lot of responsibility to take their really high allocation of gpu inventory and put them in computers that don't suck and as for responsibility of putting components to good use in a pc that will actually be sustainable and usable long-term for the customer which is just good economically for the customer good for the reputation of the company uh dell fits in while here too because dell has decided recently that it's going to take a new approach to its company ethos now it is self-aggrandizing the concept of maybe possibly thinking about the idea of making a computer that isn't bound for a landfill the instant it leaves the factory line that's right dell wants to make something that isn't ill-fated enough to end up in a landfill next week while simultaneously shipping millions of units of e-waste every month we'd love to see dell and the other oems actually do something environmentally conscious like working on their proprietary boards and power supplies that are one completely useless in any other case or system and two very difficult to repair and keep alive of course that's what they want because then you have to buy another one why the oems think you would buy another one from them after going through that we're not sure but it seems to be working regardless we look forward to reviewing more pre-built gaming pcs in 2022 because it is genuinely a really fun product category to work on since there's a lot of range and variants from extremely good and well put together to wow how did that happen so that's it for this one there were a lot of good things in 2021 as well but we have our best of series already out there if you want to see that that's not what this is there were also a lot of additional bad things in 2021 other disappointing things most of them are up there but we're not going to talk about every single one in detail because then we'd be remaking all the videos we made this year so those are on the channel if you want to see them as far as 2022 goes it's looking pretty good right now the next few weeks there's some major announcements uh it seems very unlikely that 2022 could possibly be as disappointing as 2021 was that was ominous so anyway we're really excited about 2022 because we're gearing up with all this new testing stuff we've been working on this for years you know the last decade plus been doing this about almost 15 years now with gn specifically it started as a website and we've been doing in-depth testing ever since we've been adding to it as we've gained more skill and it's really starting to show in our modern content because one we've got more skill and talent on the team with patrick lathan on things like cases pre-built patrick stone on power supplies motherboards things like that mike gaglione working on the cooler technician work so the team's really gained a lot of skill which is awesome we're buying all this new equipment and expanding our workspace and um i mean we're feeling pretty good about what we're going to be capable of doing in 2022 really excited about it and that's going to mean potentially even more exciting and interesting disappointment build for 2022. andrew's work in the intro of this please give him props in the comments below andrew did all those animations that you saw the flaming cases and the cpu is turning to send all of that was his work so let him know you appreciate it in the comments uh and of course you can let all of us know that you appreciate it by grabbing a shirt on store.camerasnexus.net which supports us and my team directly and our efforts for 2022 we'll have these for probably a couple weeks normally they sell through within one week for the first run second run doesn't last much longer and uh that's going to be it so if you want one grab one on the store it's got all the tour dates on it just like a band t-shirt and i love the design of the colors too it's new for us and expands on our sort of existing line of disappointment to our shorts so thanks everyone for supporting us for watching hope you had fun with this video and you can go to patreon.com for more behind-the-scenes stuff we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 598,651

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, worst pc 2021, worst pc parts 2021, worst gaming computer ever, disappointment build, disappointment pc, gamersnexus disappointment build, fire computer, computer catching on fire, nzxt h1, nzxt h1 on fire, intel 11900k, worst cpu ever made

Id: KHhUtAOmGKc

Length: 24min 21sec (1461 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 01 2022