HW News - Intel P-Core Only CPUs, ASUS Updates, RTX 5090 & Battlemage Rumors
# Weekly Tech News Recap: HP Discontinues DRM, Asus Customer Service Improvements, and More
Welcome back to the Hardware News Recap for the week! In this episode, we’re discussing a variety of tech-related topics, including HP discontinuing its controversial DRM policies, Asus improving its customer service, Intel’s new CPUs, and more. Let’s dive into each story in detail.
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## **1. HP Discontinues Its Controversial DRM on Budget LaserJet Printers**
HP has made a surprising move by discontinuing one of its most contentious policies: the subscription-based DRM (Digital Rights Management) for budget LaserJet printers. These printers required users to have an active HP+ service subscription, which mandated a permanent internet connection and prevented customers from using non-HP toner cartridges.
The company confirmed that this decision was made after recognizing that some customers in managed office environments were unable to meet the cloud connection requirements for their printers. However, it’s worth noting that negative reviews and public backlash likely played a significant role in prompting this change.
HP has also faced legal action for its practices, with a class-action lawsuit accusing the company of disabling scanning functions unless users purchase more toner, even when unnecessary.
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## **2. Asus Addresses Customer Service Complaints**
The team at Gamers Nexus has noticed an improvement in Asus’s customer service processes since their previous report in June. While there are still mixed results, the company has made strides in resolving issues and has implemented proactive measures to address billing inaccuracies and overcharges.
Asus has settled over 120 cases dating back to 2011 and proactively reached out to correct billing errors for 300 customers. The company has also improved its language and advanced shipment emails, ensuring clarity in communication with customers.
Additionally, Asus is continuing its efforts to establish a repair center in North America by the end of the year. This move aims to provide customers with an option to send in their defective motherboards for repairs rather than receiving replacement units, which may not meet their expectations.
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## **3. Intel Reveals Details About Upcoming CPUs and Battle Mage GPUs**
Intel leaker J.Kin shared details about upcoming Bartlett Lake CPUs, which are reportedly designed for consumer use despite initial speculation that they were intended for network and edge applications. The lineup includes five SKUs: Core 9 (12P+0E), Core 7 (10P+0E), Core 5 (8P+0E), Core 3 (6P+0E), and a two-core processor with no E-cores.
The rumors suggest that these CPUs will revert to an all-P core design, which could simplify thread management in Windows applications. However, this shift may also signal Intel’s response to challenges faced with its hybrid P-core and E-core design, particularly the scheduling issues reported in earlier 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs.
Meanwhile, DigiTimes reported that Intel’s upcoming Battle Mage GPUs will use TSMC’s 4-nanometer EUV process. This aligns with previous reports from CT.com, which stated that Intel is also exploring TSMC’s 3nm N3X process for future graphics chips like the Celestial series.
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## **4. AT&T Pays Hacking Group $572K in Bitcoin to Delete Customer Data**
In a shocking development, AT&T has paid a hacking group 5.72 Bitcoin (approximately $373,500) to delete stolen customer data. The breach involved the metadata of millions of AT&T customers, including phone numbers, call durations, and cell site IDs, which could potentially be used to track individuals.
The hackers demanded $1 million initially but settled for 5.72 Bitcoin after negotiations facilitated by a third party. A video allegedly showing the deletion of data was produced as part of the deal. However, there is no guarantee that the data has been permanently erased, as it could still exist in cold storage.
The breach occurred due to unsecured Snowflake cloud storage accounts, which also affected Ticketmaster, Santander Bank, Lending Tree, and Advance Auto Parts. These accounts lacked multi-factor authentication (MFA), making them vulnerable to attacks.
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## **5. Samsung Launches 61.4TB SSD for游戏玩家**
Samsung has introduced its new BM 1743 SSD, offering an impressive 61.4TB of storage. The drive is designed to accommodate large game patches and DLCs, with enough space for one Call of Duty patch plus 10TB of additional content. It’s also capable of storing half of Bethesda’s DLC catalog.
The BM 1743 uses the U.2 interface with PCIe Gen 5 support and offers sequential read speeds of up to 7,200 MB/s or 2,000 MB/s for write operations. Samsung attributes the increased storage density to advanced processing techniques that allow for more layers in the NAND flash.
The drive is priced at $699.84, making it a premium option for gamers and professionals who need massive storage solutions.
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## **6. Intel Kills Its NUC Brand, Asus Launches ROG KNOCK Mini PC**
In September 2023, Intel discontinued its NUC (Next Unit of Computing) brand, which was later acquired by Asus. Now, the company has launched the ROG KNOCK, a mini PC designed as a “game-changer and space-saver.”
Available in two SKUs, the ROG KNOCK features either an Intel Core Ultra 9 or 7 processor, paired with integrated Iris Xe graphics. Other specs include three M.2 SSD slots, dual-channel memory support, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.3.
Measuring 7x10.6x2 inches, the device is reminiscent of the old Hades Canyon form factor. It comes with a 330W brick for power and can be arranged horizontally or vertically using an included stand. The RGB lighting adds to its gaming appeal, but at $1,630 for the base model and $2,200 for the higher-end version, it’s a premium option.
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## **7. Rumors Swirl Around NVIDIA’s RTX 590**
Hardware leaker Panzer Li has shared rumors suggesting that NVIDIA’s highly anticipated RTX 590 GPU will have a base frequency of nearly 2.9 GHz. This would represent a significant increase over the previous generation, with the RTX 490 running at 2.235 GHz.
While there’s no confirmation on other specifications or pricing details, this rumor highlights NVIDIA’s potential focus on high-performance gaming GPUs as competition heats up with AMD and Intel entering the market.
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## **8. PC Market Rebounds After Seven Quarters of Decline**
The global PC market is showing signs of recovery after seven consecutive quarters of decline. According to IDC, worldwide shipments reached 64.9 million units in Q2 2024, marking a year-over-year growth of 3%. Excluding China, the growth rate exceeded 5%, driven by new hardware releases and demand for upgraded systems.
Lenovo emerged as the top PC vendor during the quarter, shipping 14.7 million units and holding a 22.7% market share. HP followed with a 21% share, but the overall market recovery is attributed to favorable comparisons to the weak results of 2023, which Gartner described as “the worst year in PC history.”
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## **9. Xbox Gives Away Deadpool-Themed Butt Controller**
In a quirky promotional move, Xbox is offering two Deadpool-themed controllers as part of its marketing campaign for the upcoming *Deadpool and Wolverine* movie. The giveaway requires users to follow @Xbox on Twitter and tweet with the hashtag #XboxCheekyControllersSweepstakes by August 11.
The controller features Deadpool’s signature style and humor, but it’s not for sale. It’s unclear if this will become the butt of every joke or if its haptic feedback could mimic the feeling of being “ass-kicked” during gameplay.
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That wraps up this week’s tech news recap! Thanks for watching, and make sure to subscribe for more updates. Visit [Gamers Nexus](https://gamersnexus.net) for all your hardware news needs, or support us directly on Patreon. See you next time!
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome back to the hardare news recap for the week in this one we're talking about HP discontinuing its Draconian DRM you own nothing of printers the the one that's been loved by everybody according to HP which is that you needed a subscription for Inc so we'll talk about that briefly Asus has an Rog knok there are rumors of the 5090 starting to flood out some more and then Intel battle mage as well alongside other things before that this video is brought to you by Squarespace and visiting squarespace.com Gamers Nexus will give you 10% off your first purchase with them we've built a number of our own websites with Squarespace where we list catastrophic PC Hardware failures to inform subscribers of those failure we also built our store website with Squarespace using its built-in e-commerce tools and of course we built a website for our CEO snowflake because she demanded our audience know who really runs the show get to the core of your idea and spend less time on web design by signing up at squarespace.com Gamers Nexus or click the link below up for this one AT&T pays a hacking group 5.72 Bitcoin to delete customer data so you may have heard about the breach of AT&T in the last couple of weeks uh AT&T is an interesting company if you're not in the US I'll give you some background on them uh they suck and everybody hates them so AT&T is of course an ISP they also provide cell services so AT&T had a breach hacking group shiny Hunters recently stole the call and text messaging metadata of millions of AT&T customers the stolen data did not include the content of the calls or the messages but it did involve extensive metadata this included phone numbers call durations and cell site IDs so for example the cell site IDs would give the approximate location of a cell number as it relates to a particular cell tower you could feasibly track someone that way and their daily movements that's cool uh and then they and what I say cool just to be clear I mean very not cool AT&T they also had the records of calls that a number would make to other numbers so it didn't include as stated here the actual discussion The Voice uh text messages didn't include the the content of the message but you could look at Associates of numbers the frequency with which they are in contact with each other uh the duration of that contact you could build a pretty good web about someone if you wanted to now a hacker from the group demanded compensation to delete that data AT&T did comply with it the hacker originally asked for $1 million us but AT&T denied and said best I can do is 5.72 Bitcoin so that 5.72 Bitcoin at the time that this story was published would have amounted to roughly $373,500 the time of the transaction wired and online Crypt tracking tools claimed that the money was quote then laundered through several cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets they also report that the negotiations were made through a third party who goes by Readington and was paid a separate brokerage fee wired reports that a video was produced which allegedly shows the data being deleted the breach occurred due to a unsecured cloud storage accounts with the service snowflake just to be clear I you know I need to put out a very important public statement from Gamers Nexus uh this is not to be confused with snowflake our CEO and my cat or or maybe I'm the I might actually just be her uh underlane but either way not the same snowflake just to be really clear or our snowflake is actually the hacker now this unsecured snowflake cloud storage accounts these allowed hackers to access and siphon data from several other companies not just AT&T it's also included Ticket Master uh Santander Bank not familiar with that One Lending Tree and Advance Auto Parts the accounts were not secured with multiactor authentication and that made them vulnerable to the attacks once the attackers had a username and password the stolen AT&T data could be used to Loosely track phones by following cell pains and although the effectively Ransom was paid to have the data deleted as far as we're aware there's no way to really fully verify with complete certainty that the data is in fact completely gone uh and not somewhere in Cold Storage so next story with the talk of LGA 1700 compatible CPUs nearing their end uh as as it does with Intel leaker J kin tweeted an image highlighting several upcoming Bartlet Lake s CPUs that are allegedly compatible with the socket when word first broke about Bartlet Lake s the CPUs were thought to be designed for network and Edge applications however the leaker in the Tweet has stated that it would be sold to Consumers according to the leaker there will be five SKS core 9 core 7 Core 5 Core 3 and one that's just called core that won't confuse anybody at all thanks Intel thanks Steve the most interesting rumor is that there may be pee only processors it's actually super interesting the core 9 for instance looks to have if this leak is accurate 12 performance cores and zero e cores similarly there will allegedly be a core 7 with 10 P cores and zero e cores and a core 5 with eight P cores and zero e cores moving to an all PE Core Design would take us back to simpler times in scheduling thread scheduling thread management uh Windows applications where it's kind of back to the 11th generation and prior uh before the company introduced it's hybrid design of pees and EES which is supposed to stand for efficient but am the recently called economy cores Intel you know they have a performance core an economy core and that design started with the 12th gen Alder Lake CPUs so uh this also would be somewhat of a response to amd's recent stage presence for Zen 5 CPUs theoretically this would have been uh in production for a while before that however it is kind of an attack on the challenges that Intel has had with scheduling where over the years uh there have been times especially earlier in the 12th gen era where software just didn't run properly on CPUs with PES and EES you would commonly see work being assigned to ecores when it really should have been given to peores to the extent that some motherboards introduced a uh hotkey feature where you just toggle off the ecores by pushing a button so this doesn't mean that Intel is moving away from its hybrid chips as a matter of fact the leaker also listed several hybrid Bartlet Lake SC CPUs which include the 8p core and 16e core uh core 7 along with the 6p core and 8 e core Core 5 and the 6p core and four e core Core 5 and then at the core of all of this is a pretty terrible naming convention another interesting thing to glean from this is an allegedly two core part without any ecores this CPU would be perfect for those of you who yearn for the days of 2004 processing capabilities up next sticking with the Intel rumors for a little bit so Digi time recently published something about Intel's upcoming gpus for battle mage stating that these will use tsmc's 4 nanometer euv or extreme ultraviolet lithography Foundry node this GPU uh is again believed to be battle mage we sort of reported on the beginnings of battle mage with official Intel shouldn't have used that word with official Intel from Intel uh in during compex when they disclosed their lunar Lake s so that solution has xe2 gpus and uh that kind of gave us the foundation for it but if this rumor proves to be true it would corroborate what ct.com tww reported back on April 2nd 2023 in addition to predicting that battle mage would be built on tsmc's 4 nanm process the Taiwanese site also stated that Intel is looking to tsmc's 3 nanometer n3x process for the company's Celestial Graphics chip which would be the next one Intel's current Alchemist gpus that'd be the A7 50 a770 and so forth are built on tsmc's 6 nanom duv process or deep ultraviolet Intel has already announced that it is roughly doubling the core count of some configurations now we don't have formal battl Mage discret GPU information but presumably that would extend to it and this was published in a battle mage architectural content piece around the time of Intel's lunar Lake disclosure so you can check that out on the channel it's already available if you want to learn more about it someone inside Intel once unofficially said to me quote uh we should be wrapping each a750 in money when we ship it out Intel clearly intended the a750 and the a770 to compete at a higher class than they ended up competing now part of this other than sort of the initial massive driver problems uh was because intel was so late with shipping Alchemist so because it missed its window like two or three times it ended up shipping at a time when it had to compete with AMD and nvidia's then new gpus rather than a prior generation it put Intel in a really bad spot and when they launched our review is pretty clear don't buy these and they have improved over the last couple years but Intel is again in a situation where they might now be launching up against RTX 50 Series cards not sure about AMD right now I haven't been many rumors about them uh but it does look like they'll be against 50 Series at least at the high end so the the point is that a750 and 8770 have had really competitive pricing and Intel has consistently dropped that pricing to the extent that with some of the driver improvements in our most recent one year later revisit we were in a position where we were saying hey uh as long as you're okay with sometimes it not working with games it is actually in a decent spot right now and is very competitive for Price performance when it works so that was important but that price drop is interesting because the die size as in the area of the die on an a770 is massive compared to what Nvidia and AMD are shipping especially Nvidia uh at that roughly same price point I don't think these days you would really see Nvidia willingly selling a die of the a770 size at that price so uh Intel has been either on extremely thin margin for gpus or maybe negative margin uh either way they're not making much money if they're making any on Alchemist so battle mage is going to be really important for the company and uh personally my gut feeling on it is that they're going to have to keep competing on price for at least one generation to establish a foothold prove to the customer base that hey we're not abandoning this thing if that's in fact true uh and show that they're really serious about just trying to get market share so they'll probably have to keep competing on price and taking some some L's on the finances right now for for Arc gpus but we'll see we'll see what they ship it at for price and also what the RTX 50 Series brings uh when it launches all right so anyway Intel's best bet uh is really just going to be to keep proving to customers that it's sticking around for gpus that's the number one thing they need to prove out the drivers have at least been improving so okay next story The inflow of emails about asus's customer service faults and processes has changed since our report we ran back in June so the main changes are uh we're definitely getting fewer emails which is probably a good thing we've gotten a few emails from people who have explicitly told us that their issue was retroactively resolved or that they're happy with it we've also gotten emails from people who are still unhappy uh and I've intervened with a couple of those because I definitely agreed with the customer I have not had time to read all of them though always a lot of emails but anyway it's changed uh and there's at least some people getting resolutions seems like it's still somewhat of a mixed bag but overall improved now Asus is published its July customer service improvement memo this is something it's committed to where it is publicly documenting and posting the changes it's making internally and to its CS processes so we wanted to update everyone on what they've said most recently Asus claims that has now settled over 120 cases going back to 2011 we are aware of at least a couple who had trouble finding resolution and again in some cases uh we were able to kind of jump in and help broker a solution between the parties Asus stated quote we've proactively reached out to 300 customers to correct billing inaccuracies where customers were overcharged and ensure those affected received rightful compensation end quote this is a great move it's exactly what they need to be doing proactive Outreach is huge and we want to encourage them to keep doing that because there's definitely more than 300 people who've had that problem over the years uh but it's at least a a token if nothing else of moving in the right direction and we hope Asus keeps doing that it's really the proactive part that matters a lot of customers have no idea any of this has gone on they got their thing they were pissed off they never looked back after that the company also notes improvements to the language and its Advanced shipment emails this is something that we talked with them about in our uh interview discussion we uploaded it has formalized the changes to what company has power over CID claims so now Asus is the only party that can do that not third party repair centers and Asus also noted that it is continuing its work to roll out a repair center in North America this is something we talked about in our uh series but now they have more of a tentative timeline they say facility will be opening by the end of the year we already talked about this I think it was in that last video we did where we uh sat down and talked to them but that point specifically so uh a was telling us previously that the North American repair center the point of it is going to be so that customers who want to keep their specific products their motherboard but have it actually repaired can choose to send it to that repair center the other option being effectively a replacement and so the problem if you don't recall was that The Replacements were going to be RMA or refurb items so there was really no guarantee you might get something back that you're less happy with than the defective thing you sent in and so this would in theory uh open up an actual board level repair process for affected components so now they're just saying opening by the end of the year that's new up next Samsung has released the solution to game patch sizes it is their new 61.4 4 terab SSD this follows the solid and Western Digital 60 terby class ssds as well Samsung officially stated begun the Storage Wars have the drive is big enough to fit at least one Call of Duty patch plus 10 tby extra to fit half of bethesda's DLC catalog Samsung hasn't revealed how much the drive costs but overclock.net points out that Solid 61.4 4 tbte equivalent costs almost $7,000 so not only can it fit all of bethesda's DLC it also costs about the same the BM 1743 uses the u.2 solution with support for pcie Gen 5 for performance Samsung advertises a 7200 megabyte pers second quential read speed or 2,000 megab pers second sequential right speed the BM 1743 uses Samsung's 7th gen they call it qlc vand and speaking on how the company was able to cram so much space into the drive Samsung stated quote The increased density is achieved through advanced processing techniques that accommodate a substantially greater number of layers than the previous generation end quote so in other words more layers of more storage here the company also noted that with its uh solution it will theoretically be able to accommodate drives up to 122.8 terab up next HP discontinu part of one of its Draconian policies uh this one is the DRM for cheap printers and Inc so or toner so in a surprising move hulet Packard is discontinuing its budget LaserJet eer printers which required a subscription to the company's HP plus Service uh this is something I'm sure we've complained about at some point in a news episode but uh the service mandated a permanent internet connection and it prevented users from using non HP Inc the bad news is that this will only impact HP LaserJet printers with an e at the end of their names moving forward inkjet printers won't be affected other laser Jets won't be affected uh for instance at least 11 HP LaserJet SKS will be discontinued and in addition existing owners of these printers will still have to abide by HP Plus's annoying rules explaining the reasoning behind the change h P spoke with German publication Jer Channel and with the help of machine translation stated quote since the introduction of hp+ our smart connected printing system has been embraced okay by customers who appreciate the convenience extended warranty and solutions now you know this was machine translated from German probably as a lot of you know uh German has a really interesting linguistic component where you can basically infinitely combine words to create a new word probably this was mistranslated by Google so uh you know I've it's been over a decade since I uh learned any German or really have used it in a serious way but I'm going to just bring it back out and try to translate it better for you um my translation of this is it's actually it's actually pretty simple anyway the comment continued quote we know that some customers in it managed office environments are unable to meet the cloud connection requirements for their printer uh and quote now for Gan we're sure the negative reviews and terrible publicity had absolutely nothing to do with this change at all as a matter of fact here's a snippet from the top Amazon video review of hp's LaserJet m110 we it's like watching the origin of this Channel all over again now HP is also the target of a class action lawsuit for its practices probably completely unrelated and a text notes quote the company has also been accused of disabling scanning functions until users buy more HP Inc even when they don't need to print anything it is actually so evil that they are at like cartoon villain levels of evil it is it is comically know it's just it's just sad that's really what it is moving on speaking of things that were sad Intel previously killed its knck brand and then sold it to a using its acquisition of Intel's nuck brand from September 2023 Asus has launched the Rog knok the company's building it as uh quote Game Changer space saver marketing aside the Mini PC is available in two SKS it's equipped with either Intel Core Ultra 9 or 7 has a 470 or 460 although video cards noted that this is with the laptop GPU variant other advertised specs include 3 m.2 SSD slots options for dual Channel memory Intel Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 Asus says the Rog knok is 7x 10.6 x 2 in it's actually really similar to the old Hades Canyon form factor when we're just looking at it I don't have one to compare physically but uh looks very similar to that solution and it also comes with a 330 watt brick for power so a lot of that actual volume is just in the brick you're going to need for it uh most of the volume is made up there users can arrange the Rog knock horizontally or vertically with an included stand and because it's an Rog device it has RGB Lighting on it unfortunately the price is pretty high here the higher end skew is going to be $2,200 and the base is630 $1,630 all right up next rumors of the 590 hitting almost they say 2.9 GHz the short version of this rumor is that there's not a lot you can do with it uh we're just going to throw it in here keep it quick though so according to Hardware leaker Panzer Li on the or Panzer lead maybe on the chipal forums the base frequency of nvidia's much rumored RTX 590 will be almost 2.9 GHz we are not sure what almost means in this case but assuming it's just 2900 even on the dot that would make it 665 MHz higher than the 490 before it by nvidia's official spec which ran an advertised clock of 2235 MHz base it's a noticeable uplift and it is feasible that's what they do there's a lot more to Performance than just the clock speeds though so we'll have to see what else comes out for these not a ton of rumors on specs yet but it looks like the flood is beginning so up next according to the IDC after seven quarters of decline the PC market is bouncing back so the intelligence firm reports that the industry has grown for two consecutive quarters it wrote quote worldwide shipments reached 64.9 million units in the second quarter of 2024 representing year-over-year growth of 3% while the overall Market benefited from favorable comparisons to 2023 weak results in China continued to hold the market back excluding China worldwide shipments grew more than 5% year-over-year this trend follows a major slump for the year 2023 which uh research and consulting firm Gartner called quote the worst year in PC history someone from IDC also said uh that the PC market quote faces challenges in the near- term due to maturity and headwinds but they ultimately acknowledged that aicc's are the uh the salvation of the PC market so that's great still don't know what that means but okay now as IDC points us out Lenovo moved the most PCS in the second quarter of 2024 they shipped 14.7 million units according to this report and the company also has the largest PC market share at 22.7% beating HP which was at about 21% for its share we included this story cuz I remember reporting on the big Doom and Gloom like PC market is uh down big time whatever it was a year ago or something and the thing we said then was why are we acting like nobody saw this coming everybody went crazy and bought computers and computer parts in 2020 through 2021 at least it is not a surprise that people don't then go do that a second time in such short succession so really this uh this is expected for it to start ticking back up as people near the end of whatever their perceived life cycle is for the system they bought uh especially with the new RTX 50 Series cards AMD CPUs Intel CPUs all on the immediate Horizon so last one this is kind of different so uh Xbox is giving away a Deadpool themed butt controller like actually this is it's actually a thing they're doing we'll show you the image of it so the giveaway includes two Deadpool themed controllers that are equipped with the superhero's largest asset on them you could say it's a cheeky sort of humor the controller is purportedly designed by Deadpool that's a direct quote we sure he put in the maximum effort now this badass controller is part of the upcoming Deadpool and Wolverine movie promotion and unfortunately as it rears its head it isn't for sale if you want to get your hands on it Twitter users will need to follow Xbox and tweet # Xbox cheeky controllers sweep Stakes yes that's an actual one by August 11th for a chance to win possibly one of the longest hashtags you could make but now compared to other controllers we're not sure if this one will be the butt of every joke with haptics though it could actually feel like you're getting your ass kicked or at least Deadpool's ass kicked uh on closer examination we do I hadn't read that line Jimmy wrote this one I didn't read that line uh until just now I'll finish the line it says on closer examination we think the controller might be broken because it's got a big crack in it so thanks Jimmy for contributing to the humor for this one I think everybody appreciates normally the the audience has been uh very appreciative of Jimmy's puns and movie references so that's it for this one thanks for watching you come here for this kind of Quality Reporting subscribe for more go to store. Gamers access.net or patreon.com Gamers access to help us out directly and we'll see you all next timewelcome back to the hardare news recap for the week in this one we're talking about HP discontinuing its Draconian DRM you own nothing of printers the the one that's been loved by everybody according to HP which is that you needed a subscription for Inc so we'll talk about that briefly Asus has an Rog knok there are rumors of the 5090 starting to flood out some more and then Intel battle mage as well alongside other things before that this video is brought to you by Squarespace and visiting squarespace.com Gamers Nexus will give you 10% off your first purchase with them we've built a number of our own websites with Squarespace where we list catastrophic PC Hardware failures to inform subscribers of those failure we also built our store website with Squarespace using its built-in e-commerce tools and of course we built a website for our CEO snowflake because she demanded our audience know who really runs the show get to the core of your idea and spend less time on web design by signing up at squarespace.com Gamers Nexus or click the link below up for this one AT&T pays a hacking group 5.72 Bitcoin to delete customer data so you may have heard about the breach of AT&T in the last couple of weeks uh AT&T is an interesting company if you're not in the US I'll give you some background on them uh they suck and everybody hates them so AT&T is of course an ISP they also provide cell services so AT&T had a breach hacking group shiny Hunters recently stole the call and text messaging metadata of millions of AT&T customers the stolen data did not include the content of the calls or the messages but it did involve extensive metadata this included phone numbers call durations and cell site IDs so for example the cell site IDs would give the approximate location of a cell number as it relates to a particular cell tower you could feasibly track someone that way and their daily movements that's cool uh and then they and what I say cool just to be clear I mean very not cool AT&T they also had the records of calls that a number would make to other numbers so it didn't include as stated here the actual discussion The Voice uh text messages didn't include the the content of the message but you could look at Associates of numbers the frequency with which they are in contact with each other uh the duration of that contact you could build a pretty good web about someone if you wanted to now a hacker from the group demanded compensation to delete that data AT&T did comply with it the hacker originally asked for $1 million us but AT&T denied and said best I can do is 5.72 Bitcoin so that 5.72 Bitcoin at the time that this story was published would have amounted to roughly $373,500 the time of the transaction wired and online Crypt tracking tools claimed that the money was quote then laundered through several cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets they also report that the negotiations were made through a third party who goes by Readington and was paid a separate brokerage fee wired reports that a video was produced which allegedly shows the data being deleted the breach occurred due to a unsecured cloud storage accounts with the service snowflake just to be clear I you know I need to put out a very important public statement from Gamers Nexus uh this is not to be confused with snowflake our CEO and my cat or or maybe I'm the I might actually just be her uh underlane but either way not the same snowflake just to be really clear or our snowflake is actually the hacker now this unsecured snowflake cloud storage accounts these allowed hackers to access and siphon data from several other companies not just AT&T it's also included Ticket Master uh Santander Bank not familiar with that One Lending Tree and Advance Auto Parts the accounts were not secured with multiactor authentication and that made them vulnerable to the attacks once the attackers had a username and password the stolen AT&T data could be used to Loosely track phones by following cell pains and although the effectively Ransom was paid to have the data deleted as far as we're aware there's no way to really fully verify with complete certainty that the data is in fact completely gone uh and not somewhere in Cold Storage so next story with the talk of LGA 1700 compatible CPUs nearing their end uh as as it does with Intel leaker J kin tweeted an image highlighting several upcoming Bartlet Lake s CPUs that are allegedly compatible with the socket when word first broke about Bartlet Lake s the CPUs were thought to be designed for network and Edge applications however the leaker in the Tweet has stated that it would be sold to Consumers according to the leaker there will be five SKS core 9 core 7 Core 5 Core 3 and one that's just called core that won't confuse anybody at all thanks Intel thanks Steve the most interesting rumor is that there may be pee only processors it's actually super interesting the core 9 for instance looks to have if this leak is accurate 12 performance cores and zero e cores similarly there will allegedly be a core 7 with 10 P cores and zero e cores and a core 5 with eight P cores and zero e cores moving to an all PE Core Design would take us back to simpler times in scheduling thread scheduling thread management uh Windows applications where it's kind of back to the 11th generation and prior uh before the company introduced it's hybrid design of pees and EES which is supposed to stand for efficient but am the recently called economy cores Intel you know they have a performance core an economy core and that design started with the 12th gen Alder Lake CPUs so uh this also would be somewhat of a response to amd's recent stage presence for Zen 5 CPUs theoretically this would have been uh in production for a while before that however it is kind of an attack on the challenges that Intel has had with scheduling where over the years uh there have been times especially earlier in the 12th gen era where software just didn't run properly on CPUs with PES and EES you would commonly see work being assigned to ecores when it really should have been given to peores to the extent that some motherboards introduced a uh hotkey feature where you just toggle off the ecores by pushing a button so this doesn't mean that Intel is moving away from its hybrid chips as a matter of fact the leaker also listed several hybrid Bartlet Lake SC CPUs which include the 8p core and 16e core uh core 7 along with the 6p core and 8 e core Core 5 and the 6p core and four e core Core 5 and then at the core of all of this is a pretty terrible naming convention another interesting thing to glean from this is an allegedly two core part without any ecores this CPU would be perfect for those of you who yearn for the days of 2004 processing capabilities up next sticking with the Intel rumors for a little bit so Digi time recently published something about Intel's upcoming gpus for battle mage stating that these will use tsmc's 4 nanometer euv or extreme ultraviolet lithography Foundry node this GPU uh is again believed to be battle mage we sort of reported on the beginnings of battle mage with official Intel shouldn't have used that word with official Intel from Intel uh in during compex when they disclosed their lunar Lake s so that solution has xe2 gpus and uh that kind of gave us the foundation for it but if this rumor proves to be true it would corroborate what ct.com tww reported back on April 2nd 2023 in addition to predicting that battle mage would be built on tsmc's 4 nanm process the Taiwanese site also stated that Intel is looking to tsmc's 3 nanometer n3x process for the company's Celestial Graphics chip which would be the next one Intel's current Alchemist gpus that'd be the A7 50 a770 and so forth are built on tsmc's 6 nanom duv process or deep ultraviolet Intel has already announced that it is roughly doubling the core count of some configurations now we don't have formal battl Mage discret GPU information but presumably that would extend to it and this was published in a battle mage architectural content piece around the time of Intel's lunar Lake disclosure so you can check that out on the channel it's already available if you want to learn more about it someone inside Intel once unofficially said to me quote uh we should be wrapping each a750 in money when we ship it out Intel clearly intended the a750 and the a770 to compete at a higher class than they ended up competing now part of this other than sort of the initial massive driver problems uh was because intel was so late with shipping Alchemist so because it missed its window like two or three times it ended up shipping at a time when it had to compete with AMD and nvidia's then new gpus rather than a prior generation it put Intel in a really bad spot and when they launched our review is pretty clear don't buy these and they have improved over the last couple years but Intel is again in a situation where they might now be launching up against RTX 50 Series cards not sure about AMD right now I haven't been many rumors about them uh but it does look like they'll be against 50 Series at least at the high end so the the point is that a750 and 8770 have had really competitive pricing and Intel has consistently dropped that pricing to the extent that with some of the driver improvements in our most recent one year later revisit we were in a position where we were saying hey uh as long as you're okay with sometimes it not working with games it is actually in a decent spot right now and is very competitive for Price performance when it works so that was important but that price drop is interesting because the die size as in the area of the die on an a770 is massive compared to what Nvidia and AMD are shipping especially Nvidia uh at that roughly same price point I don't think these days you would really see Nvidia willingly selling a die of the a770 size at that price so uh Intel has been either on extremely thin margin for gpus or maybe negative margin uh either way they're not making much money if they're making any on Alchemist so battle mage is going to be really important for the company and uh personally my gut feeling on it is that they're going to have to keep competing on price for at least one generation to establish a foothold prove to the customer base that hey we're not abandoning this thing if that's in fact true uh and show that they're really serious about just trying to get market share so they'll probably have to keep competing on price and taking some some L's on the finances right now for for Arc gpus but we'll see we'll see what they ship it at for price and also what the RTX 50 Series brings uh when it launches all right so anyway Intel's best bet uh is really just going to be to keep proving to customers that it's sticking around for gpus that's the number one thing they need to prove out the drivers have at least been improving so okay next story The inflow of emails about asus's customer service faults and processes has changed since our report we ran back in June so the main changes are uh we're definitely getting fewer emails which is probably a good thing we've gotten a few emails from people who have explicitly told us that their issue was retroactively resolved or that they're happy with it we've also gotten emails from people who are still unhappy uh and I've intervened with a couple of those because I definitely agreed with the customer I have not had time to read all of them though always a lot of emails but anyway it's changed uh and there's at least some people getting resolutions seems like it's still somewhat of a mixed bag but overall improved now Asus is published its July customer service improvement memo this is something it's committed to where it is publicly documenting and posting the changes it's making internally and to its CS processes so we wanted to update everyone on what they've said most recently Asus claims that has now settled over 120 cases going back to 2011 we are aware of at least a couple who had trouble finding resolution and again in some cases uh we were able to kind of jump in and help broker a solution between the parties Asus stated quote we've proactively reached out to 300 customers to correct billing inaccuracies where customers were overcharged and ensure those affected received rightful compensation end quote this is a great move it's exactly what they need to be doing proactive Outreach is huge and we want to encourage them to keep doing that because there's definitely more than 300 people who've had that problem over the years uh but it's at least a a token if nothing else of moving in the right direction and we hope Asus keeps doing that it's really the proactive part that matters a lot of customers have no idea any of this has gone on they got their thing they were pissed off they never looked back after that the company also notes improvements to the language and its Advanced shipment emails this is something that we talked with them about in our uh interview discussion we uploaded it has formalized the changes to what company has power over CID claims so now Asus is the only party that can do that not third party repair centers and Asus also noted that it is continuing its work to roll out a repair center in North America this is something we talked about in our uh series but now they have more of a tentative timeline they say facility will be opening by the end of the year we already talked about this I think it was in that last video we did where we uh sat down and talked to them but that point specifically so uh a was telling us previously that the North American repair center the point of it is going to be so that customers who want to keep their specific products their motherboard but have it actually repaired can choose to send it to that repair center the other option being effectively a replacement and so the problem if you don't recall was that The Replacements were going to be RMA or refurb items so there was really no guarantee you might get something back that you're less happy with than the defective thing you sent in and so this would in theory uh open up an actual board level repair process for affected components so now they're just saying opening by the end of the year that's new up next Samsung has released the solution to game patch sizes it is their new 61.4 4 terab SSD this follows the solid and Western Digital 60 terby class ssds as well Samsung officially stated begun the Storage Wars have the drive is big enough to fit at least one Call of Duty patch plus 10 tby extra to fit half of bethesda's DLC catalog Samsung hasn't revealed how much the drive costs but overclock.net points out that Solid 61.4 4 tbte equivalent costs almost $7,000 so not only can it fit all of bethesda's DLC it also costs about the same the BM 1743 uses the u.2 solution with support for pcie Gen 5 for performance Samsung advertises a 7200 megabyte pers second quential read speed or 2,000 megab pers second sequential right speed the BM 1743 uses Samsung's 7th gen they call it qlc vand and speaking on how the company was able to cram so much space into the drive Samsung stated quote The increased density is achieved through advanced processing techniques that accommodate a substantially greater number of layers than the previous generation end quote so in other words more layers of more storage here the company also noted that with its uh solution it will theoretically be able to accommodate drives up to 122.8 terab up next HP discontinu part of one of its Draconian policies uh this one is the DRM for cheap printers and Inc so or toner so in a surprising move hulet Packard is discontinuing its budget LaserJet eer printers which required a subscription to the company's HP plus Service uh this is something I'm sure we've complained about at some point in a news episode but uh the service mandated a permanent internet connection and it prevented users from using non HP Inc the bad news is that this will only impact HP LaserJet printers with an e at the end of their names moving forward inkjet printers won't be affected other laser Jets won't be affected uh for instance at least 11 HP LaserJet SKS will be discontinued and in addition existing owners of these printers will still have to abide by HP Plus's annoying rules explaining the reasoning behind the change h P spoke with German publication Jer Channel and with the help of machine translation stated quote since the introduction of hp+ our smart connected printing system has been embraced okay by customers who appreciate the convenience extended warranty and solutions now you know this was machine translated from German probably as a lot of you know uh German has a really interesting linguistic component where you can basically infinitely combine words to create a new word probably this was mistranslated by Google so uh you know I've it's been over a decade since I uh learned any German or really have used it in a serious way but I'm going to just bring it back out and try to translate it better for you um my translation of this is it's actually it's actually pretty simple anyway the comment continued quote we know that some customers in it managed office environments are unable to meet the cloud connection requirements for their printer uh and quote now for Gan we're sure the negative reviews and terrible publicity had absolutely nothing to do with this change at all as a matter of fact here's a snippet from the top Amazon video review of hp's LaserJet m110 we it's like watching the origin of this Channel all over again now HP is also the target of a class action lawsuit for its practices probably completely unrelated and a text notes quote the company has also been accused of disabling scanning functions until users buy more HP Inc even when they don't need to print anything it is actually so evil that they are at like cartoon villain levels of evil it is it is comically know it's just it's just sad that's really what it is moving on speaking of things that were sad Intel previously killed its knck brand and then sold it to a using its acquisition of Intel's nuck brand from September 2023 Asus has launched the Rog knok the company's building it as uh quote Game Changer space saver marketing aside the Mini PC is available in two SKS it's equipped with either Intel Core Ultra 9 or 7 has a 470 or 460 although video cards noted that this is with the laptop GPU variant other advertised specs include 3 m.2 SSD slots options for dual Channel memory Intel Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 Asus says the Rog knok is 7x 10.6 x 2 in it's actually really similar to the old Hades Canyon form factor when we're just looking at it I don't have one to compare physically but uh looks very similar to that solution and it also comes with a 330 watt brick for power so a lot of that actual volume is just in the brick you're going to need for it uh most of the volume is made up there users can arrange the Rog knock horizontally or vertically with an included stand and because it's an Rog device it has RGB Lighting on it unfortunately the price is pretty high here the higher end skew is going to be $2,200 and the base is630 $1,630 all right up next rumors of the 590 hitting almost they say 2.9 GHz the short version of this rumor is that there's not a lot you can do with it uh we're just going to throw it in here keep it quick though so according to Hardware leaker Panzer Li on the or Panzer lead maybe on the chipal forums the base frequency of nvidia's much rumored RTX 590 will be almost 2.9 GHz we are not sure what almost means in this case but assuming it's just 2900 even on the dot that would make it 665 MHz higher than the 490 before it by nvidia's official spec which ran an advertised clock of 2235 MHz base it's a noticeable uplift and it is feasible that's what they do there's a lot more to Performance than just the clock speeds though so we'll have to see what else comes out for these not a ton of rumors on specs yet but it looks like the flood is beginning so up next according to the IDC after seven quarters of decline the PC market is bouncing back so the intelligence firm reports that the industry has grown for two consecutive quarters it wrote quote worldwide shipments reached 64.9 million units in the second quarter of 2024 representing year-over-year growth of 3% while the overall Market benefited from favorable comparisons to 2023 weak results in China continued to hold the market back excluding China worldwide shipments grew more than 5% year-over-year this trend follows a major slump for the year 2023 which uh research and consulting firm Gartner called quote the worst year in PC history someone from IDC also said uh that the PC market quote faces challenges in the near- term due to maturity and headwinds but they ultimately acknowledged that aicc's are the uh the salvation of the PC market so that's great still don't know what that means but okay now as IDC points us out Lenovo moved the most PCS in the second quarter of 2024 they shipped 14.7 million units according to this report and the company also has the largest PC market share at 22.7% beating HP which was at about 21% for its share we included this story cuz I remember reporting on the big Doom and Gloom like PC market is uh down big time whatever it was a year ago or something and the thing we said then was why are we acting like nobody saw this coming everybody went crazy and bought computers and computer parts in 2020 through 2021 at least it is not a surprise that people don't then go do that a second time in such short succession so really this uh this is expected for it to start ticking back up as people near the end of whatever their perceived life cycle is for the system they bought uh especially with the new RTX 50 Series cards AMD CPUs Intel CPUs all on the immediate Horizon so last one this is kind of different so uh Xbox is giving away a Deadpool themed butt controller like actually this is it's actually a thing they're doing we'll show you the image of it so the giveaway includes two Deadpool themed controllers that are equipped with the superhero's largest asset on them you could say it's a cheeky sort of humor the controller is purportedly designed by Deadpool that's a direct quote we sure he put in the maximum effort now this badass controller is part of the upcoming Deadpool and Wolverine movie promotion and unfortunately as it rears its head it isn't for sale if you want to get your hands on it Twitter users will need to follow Xbox and tweet # Xbox cheeky controllers sweep Stakes yes that's an actual one by August 11th for a chance to win possibly one of the longest hashtags you could make but now compared to other controllers we're not sure if this one will be the butt of every joke with haptics though it could actually feel like you're getting your ass kicked or at least Deadpool's ass kicked uh on closer examination we do I hadn't read that line Jimmy wrote this one I didn't read that line uh until just now I'll finish the line it says on closer examination we think the controller might be broken because it's got a big crack in it so thanks Jimmy for contributing to the humor for this one I think everybody appreciates normally the the audience has been uh very appreciative of Jimmy's puns and movie references so that's it for this one thanks for watching you come here for this kind of Quality Reporting subscribe for more go to store. Gamers access.net or patreon.com Gamers access to help us out directly and we'll see you all next time\n"