The World of Technology and Gaming: A Recap of Recent Developments

As we continue to navigate the ever-evolving landscape of technology and gaming, it's essential to stay up-to-date with the latest news and developments. In this article, we'll delve into some recent stories that have caught our attention, from the world of hardware and software to the realm of handheld gaming devices.

Nvidia's Fiscal Earnings Report: A Record-Breaking Quarter

Nvidia recently reported its fiscal earnings for quarter 2, 2025, and the company is thrilled to announce that it has achieved record revenues. The company's second quarter yielded $30 billion in Revenue, with a 15% increase from the previous quarter and a staggering 122% increase compared to the same period the year prior. The data center division was the primary driver of this growth, generating $26.3 billion and increasing by 16% compared to the previous quarter and 154% compared to the prior year. The gaming division also saw significant growth, with revenues up 9% from the previous quarter and 16% versus the previous year.

Nvidia's Roadmap: Expectations for the Future

In terms of future expectations, Nvidia announced that it anticipates generating $32.5 billion in Revenue plus or minus 2% for its third quarter. While no specific details were provided on when the company will ship its high-performance chips, codenamed "TDP" (which stands for Trench-Scan Design Process), we can expect to see them hit the market soon.

AMD's Z2 Extreme Chip: A New Era for Gaming Handhelds

AMD recently announced its latest chip, the Z2 extreme, which is expected to be used in gaming handheld devices. This follows hot on the heels of the already-released Z1 extreme, found in devices such as the Rog Ally and others. While there was no further hard specification or performance target provided at the recent AMD Q&A event, it's clear that this chip will play a significant role in shaping the future of gaming handhelds.

AMD's Plans for Steam OS: Expanding the Linux Ecosystem

In addition to its Z2 extreme chip, AMD is also continuing its plans to roll out Steam OS formally for other handheld devices. This move is expected to further diversify the adoption of the Linux ecosystem in handheld gaming and potentially have a positive impact on the broader industry. With developers being the key to unlocking the full potential of any platform, AMD's efforts to promote Steam OS will undoubtedly be welcomed by gamers and developers alike.

Acer's Nitro Blaze 7 Handheld Gaming Device: A New Player Enters the Market

Acer has recently announced its latest handheld gaming device, the Nitro Blaze 7. This device boasts an AI-powered design, a 144Hz refresh rate, and a freesync display. It will also feature a 7-inch touch panel at 1080p resolution. TechRadar had the opportunity to get hands-on time with the device and found it to be using an R7 8840 HS processor. The battery life was reported to be around 50 hours, which is impressive for a handheld gaming device.

A Word from the Editor: Waiting for Acer's Flagship Model

While we're excited to share our thoughts on Acer's Nitro Blaze 7 handheld gaming device, we can't help but feel that its more flagship model, the Nitro Blaze it Blaze TI, will be worth waiting for. The transposition of letters between the two names is a minor annoyance, but we trust that Acer will deliver a top-notch product when it finally hits the market.

Stay Tuned for More: Upcoming Reviews and News

As always, we're eager to dive into more reviews and share our thoughts with you. Two cases are currently in the works, one of which has us particularly excited. We'll be sure to bring you all the details as they become available. In the meantime, be sure to check out our original video from last Friday if you haven't seen it already. Until next time, stay curious and keep exploring the world of technology and gaming!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone welcome back to the hardware news recap of the week we're getting back to normal now that the EK story is done so for this one we're going be talking about news of AMD officially stating that it is for now abandoning the high-end for gpus and focusing on the more mainstream mid-range Market uh further x870 motherboard prices have started to come out and they are very high the PG in another story is pressing the FTC to require more transparency and some more controls over device longevity when it comes to Connected or smart devices citing a number of major examples where consumers have purchased things that have then uh suddenly had new subscription fees pop up without anyone being told of it beforehand among other challenges and uh other stories this one was a couple weeks ago but we were in the middle of that EK stuff so uh anch shutting down we'll talk about that briefly rumors of rdna 4 and some more this actually this is a there's a lot of stuff to talk about it's been a couple weeks 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 failures 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 gamas access or click the link below quick EK debrief for you all so we posted a 1our long investigation it's a totally different format for us it's really fun to work on despite the sort of sad Topic at times uh we had a history piece in there that was kind of interesting it's different and uh the format is totally different from almost anything we've done it's definitely evolved over the years for the investigation so uh we're going to talk about that a little bit now there's also some updates so ek's 2023 tax year filing is now publicly available as of today when I'm filming this might be yesterday when the video goes up uh Monday basically and uh there's some some information we can go through in that as for the video itself uh if you haven't seen it even if you're normally here just for news updates and computer hardware reviews uh we would love for you to go just check it out because this one like I said we tried a totally new format I really liked how it came together and actually one of the things we did was I posted a YouTube Community poll which we can show on the screen where I asked everyone who answered it if they wanted us to spend an extra five or so minutes on company history before just getting into the new information of the investigation so it was effectively like hey do you want us to talk about some of the background of who this company is what is it that we're kind of in the process of losing uh or just only talk about all the bad things that have happened and overwhelmingly people voted for the company history which I was 100% willing to try and that's why we asked the audience uh my concern with it was it's really just YouTube stuff I it was like are people going to find this boring and just leave and and tank the video um I'm glad we ran that poll and kind of took the community request though to include the History Section because that is actually my favorite section for the whole video so if you see nothing else check out about the first 20 minutes or so that'll get you through the rise and the start of the fall uh you'll miss all the details of the fall but you you get kind of the key elements so anyway really enjoyed working on that um like I said it it adds some important context of what is this company what have they accomplished which is also just fair to them because uh K despite its more recent issues as plantiful as they are has not always been uh well we don't know how it's always been how they've always acted internally what we do know is that uh the complaints were not such that employees were coming to us saying they can't afford their houses so it does appear as if EK came from a background of being sort of this legitimate fiercely competitive water cooling company and it's led to the sad state of 10 now anyway uh totally new style so um hopefully you like it check it out and we're constantly striving to improve on the investigations and reports right now and really trying to bring in some influence from things like documentaries too so okay let's go over the new information so ek's public tax fines for tax year 2023 were just made public they had extensions and filed a little late just hit the internet there's some information 2024 in them but not much and then there's also new filings relating to leans that were taken against EK and its properties so this document was updated on SE September 9th that's today at the time of filming it's an extract from the register of leans and seized movable property from the agency of Slovenia for public legal records and related Services the document includes a new entry for a cargo vehicle owned by ekwb a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter 316 the vehicle is subject to a forced judicial lean with NLB the claim is for € 6,16 and the vehicle is subject to seizure if the claim remains unmet and unpaid our understanding is that EK has failed to meet its obligations to pay the Creditor where uh if this persists it may trigger a repossession of the work vehicle this document is the official public tax fine for ekwb it went live this morning it's a 53-page document it notes among other things these key items a reduction in what translates to net revenue from sales for 2023 falling from 37.7 million to 34.7 million a substantial trade payables increase from € 338,000 reported in 2022 to 7191 million EUR in 2023 these indicate delayed or owed payments to suppliers as we understand it reported net profit for the period has declined 81% from 41456 reported in 2022 to just over 78,000 reported for 2023 this is after previously falling from 3.9 million EUR of profit in 2020 for the period net profit reported for the period and 2.9 in 2021 one a reduction in the value reported for buildings this could also indicate a sale a reduction in production equipment and machine value could again indicate a potential sale we're not sure why it was reduced a reduction in cash reserves or cash on hand from € 2.58 million EUR to just € 365,000 a reported trade receivables fall from 6.95 million EUR in 20122 2 3.78 in 2023 an expense increase in bank loan cost of €15,000 not counting the new loans for this year it also notes an increase in influencer engagement opportunities in 2024 now when we asked an analyst who's been helping us with interpreting all this stuff what his thoughts were on this new document his reply was let me just make sure I quote it properly Big O the uh a direct quote this document was sent to retailers and Distributors by ekwb it's different one it instructs them to Halt deposits to the Slovenian bank accounts and instead use a new account under revolute bank which appears to be a legitimate bank with accounts in Lithuania now our understanding is that Slovenian companies must report bank accounts to the tax office within 14 days of opening them and currently ekwb has not reported this foreign account to the Slovenian tax office and one of our consultants for this story completely independently and of his own accord has done so he's reported to the tax office uh without without our direction or request he just felt it was the right and just thing to do okay next part this account was opened around the same time as ek's accounts were restricted by the Slovenian Court blocked accounts once they reached that status have their control handed over to the court as we understand it an unreported account especially one which would required International Bank block request would potentially avoid being restricted or Frozen as long as it remains undiscovered as we understand the situation following all this EK has posted yet another response to its YouTube channel it requires no update from us because there's nothing to respond to it actually says nothing in 2 minutes that's not me framing it I mean like literally I don't know we'll put the comments on the screen you can decide for yourself but it says nothing there's no new information uh it does not address literally one single concrete point with one single concrete either rebuttal or uh promise of specific Improvement so there's nothing to respond to and as we said any further updates will remain in Hardware news unless there is some kind of uh major and unbelievable at this point development so that's kind of it the tax documents we got this morning were the very last piece we're waiting for and now I think we're done there's nothing else to really talk about at the moment we can move on until EK does something else that's uh that requires more again if you want to support this type of reporting then go to store. Gamers access.net you can grab our mod mats solder mats our coaster packs which we've just restock the original coaster packs and The Mule mugs and you can find plenty more over there as well to support our in-depth cover coverage of these types of situations the most important thing to me is just that people give the video a chance try it out cuz it's performing well and I really like the format and I want to use it again so um hope you all like it okay let's go to the next story all right moving on so there have been rumors for a little while now about AMD possibly not doing a flagship as in super top end rdna 4 GPU in what might be called the RX 8000 line maybe 9,000 whatever the one after the 7900 XTX so there have been rumors for a little while now uh Paul Al of Tom's Hardware posted an interview with amd's SVP and GM of computing and graphics and in short AMD confirmed to Tom's Hardware that its intent currently is to pursue more GPU market share rather than going for a potentially smaller Market at a higher end uh focusing its resources and efforts lower down the stack now theoretically AMD wants this to uh help bolster the development support of AMD Hardware because if they can increase market share then you might be able to convince more developers to actively build for and optimize for your Hardware uh the thought process is sound in the sense that if Nvidia has the overwhelming majority of market share and if a development Studio has limited resources they're going to focus all those resources on Nvidia unless there's a a really strong compelling uh reason to to split that support and more market share would be a pretty strong one now we're just going to quote part of two answers here from the Tom's interview we'd encourage you to check out the rest of the interview at Tom's Hardware I don't want to go through the whole thing here it's their coverage go check it out on their website but uh when alorn asked amd's SVP of Flagship gpus this was part of the answer that we thought was key quote so my number one priority right now is to build scale to get us to 40 to 50% of the market faster do I want to go after 10% of the Tam or total addressable Market or 80% I'm an 80% kind of guy because I don't want AMD to be the company that only people who can afford Porsches and Ferraris can buy we want to build game systems for millions of users yes we will have great great products sorry there's another one great great great products it's like great cubed or something that's a lot of greats really really wanted to make sure I got it accurate there don't want to leave out any great and misrepresent it so great times three products but we tried that strategy it hasn't really grown in a later answer uh AMD also stated quote because without scale right now I can't get the developers if I tell developers I'm just going for 10% of the market share they just say say Jack I wish you well but we have to go with Nvidia so I have to show them a plan that says hey we can get to 40% with this strategy then they say I'm with you now I'll optimize on AMD once we get that we can go out the top so there's more in there too you can go check out their website for the full thing on tomshardware.com uh the rest of the discussion is about things like Data Center Enterprise they go through some of the strategy on that it's a little bit different there's some more Nuance to these answers as well but great work by Paul alorn to get some actual answers and not just fluff from AMD on a topic that they up until now haven't really officially talked about so as for the consumer GPU strategy talk a little bit about that this is one that AMD has employed before AMD has fought for the high- end over the years on and off but back in the day it's rx480 and 580 series was the last time it was really getting some major distribution and that was in a more affordable price Class A Vega 56 was also pretty competitive when it was cheap but unfortunately the hbm was so expensive in that era that it was only ever comparatively cheap when AMD was already kind of in trouble on the pricing or at least that's kind of how I felt about it at the time where uh we would occasionally see Vega 56 just plummet and price go on sale and it made a lot of sense for raster it was I guess it was only raster wasn't it it's been a while it made a lot of sense though when the price dropped but you just you kind of looked at those prices and and the feeling I got was there's no way they're making any real amount of money on this so any the old 27x is another card that fought pretty well in its price range as for the downsides we have a whole discussion with Steve from hard run box from in this uh very category where the discussion topic was centered around whether AMD needed a flagship from the perspective of marketing this commonly referred to as a Halo product or basically something to convince people that AMD is technologically fit and capable generally speaking we felt like at the time when we were talking about it if AMD had the resources then Halo marketing is a worthwhile Venture the problem is if it doesn't and uh it seems like if it has to pull resources and really just make one solid product uh in our opinions at GN it would be focusing on that mid-range or entry level and just making some killer cards because that area has been kind of uh it feels like abandoned as a consumer over the years where uh just getting into decent gaming class cards is so expensive so that might be a good place to really put up a fight now it seems like amd's biggest challenge might be the fact that there is now a third player in the market which is Intel Arc Intel Arc still has lots of problems that's amd's biggest Advantage right now over them however with Intel also focusing on that sort of let's say 300 plus or minus category for cards AMD is going to be in battled with them almost more so in some ways than Nvidia and for NVIDIA that's a great thing because you've got the two smaller of the two by market share fighting over scraps hurting only each other momentarily while Nvidia if AMD abandons this Flagship Market uh like they're saying will be completely uncontested and have Total Domination of the super high for Consumer gpus consumer specifically here so in the Thomas Hardware piece they talk about Enterprise sounds like they're not really walking away from that but so that's not great for price control for nvidia's high-end you can certainly not expect their cars to get any cheaper at the the flagship level all right next one Hardware leaker Momo us posted a list of supposed prices for some Asus motherboards and ALS some other ones as well the x870 chipset class for am5 sockets the prices included boards range ranging from €315 to €700 seems like the sub $200 Market might be finally dying for these sort of topend chipsets and the sub $300 Market looks like it's drying up for this generation as well if we see a large absence of these chipsets in the $250 to $300 range that would Mark a notable but continual price increase generationally in another leak M Mo posted some Amazon France prices for gigabyte x870 boards these are listed at € 323 to 345 as a reminder the main chipset differences this time have to do with USB 4 and these published chipset specs list these key differences compared to x670 x870 non has 36 usable pcie Lanes in total and up to 24 as pcie 5.0 with x670 non at 44 and8 for those metrics otherwise the big one is the required usb4 presence on x870 and x870 and this table from AMD is excellent if you're ever confused about the chipset differences uh they do a pretty good job at keeping it clear here and some positive consumer advocacy news consumer reports and PG which we've worked with in the past recently actually uh posted a letter to the FTC the short version of it is that the letter is asking the FTC to impose some clear guidelines and enforce some rules for language for consumers as uh relating to how long a smart device will last and will last in the form that was advertised to the consumer when they purchased it so that means not creating subscriptions to continue use of a device that previously worked without a separate monthly subscription for example and also means being clearer about the lifespan of the device and how long a consumer can reasonably expect it to maintain uh operation so this is the groups asking the ftt to enforce this on manufacturers look at it a little closer so Consumer Reports on PG or public interest research group wrote the letter we previously hosted PG's Nathan Proctor to discuss the Asus warranty issues he gave a lot of great educational information in that piece even unrelated to Asus and we originally connected with him via the respected Lewis Rossman who bridged contacts for us now the letter asks the FTC for quote clear guidance relating to unfair and deceptive trade practices the letter writes quote consumer reports and uspg write to ask the FTC to create clear guidance to address issues of software tethering which leads to several consumer harm including locking features behind a subscription after the purchase of a device and companies selling connected devices only to render them nonfunctional later using software both switching features to a subscription and bricking a connected device purchased by a consumer in many cases are unfair and deceptive practices they continue later saying quote further measures will help alleviate the worst outcomes of software tethering that is making functions of a device reliant on embedded software that ties the device back to the manufacturer servers the the software Server Connection tethers the device to the manufacturer giving the manufacturer post-p purchase control of the software and changing the nature of ownership the letter goes on to list a number of great examples of some of these behaviors so uh one of them was I not familiar with this device but I guess a SN connected bassinet it's called Uh which was $1,700 and some of its originally advertised features were suddenly locked behind a monthly subscription according to the letter the letter also highlighted this example quote another comes from July 2023 when a temperature regulating device called I command which worked in conjunction with the Commando Joe smoker was discontinued the device cost 250 bucks and was sold through 2023 it was abruptly shut off ahead of the July 4th holiday after the company that made I command uh Master build was acquired by middle be which then launched a $1,700 competing product that used a different app and that's not all the letter went into great detail with several others which we'll recap in short here one was the Spotify car thinge device losing support just 22 months after Spotify launched it in the future here noting that refunds were only offered after substantial public resistance devices from what it calls failed startups on the list as well including cookers juicers smart plugs uh breath monitoring devices and computers all bricking after the company's failed or made changes it notes Google's drop cam support termination it also notes Arlo ending support for cameras Amazon ending support for Halo wearables oral be selling a toothbrush that breaks when your Wi-Fi disconnects from it which is an insane sentence for a number of reasons a Levi's denim jacket with smart sensors that was shut down in 2023 which is another insane thing to say that I never knew existed you imagine just like walking around some cyberpunk future dystopia and your server disconnects and then your jacket just disappears just like the textures they just stop rendering and you just walk around in this weird kind of polygon thing uh that's the future I think we're going to live in anyway you can find the full report on the Consumer Reports website the PG also so it was written in collaboration with other groups as well I'm familiar with some of them iFix it was a part of this we have a lot of respect for PG for I fix it for Consumer Reports and we've worked directly with PG in recent history in pretty distant past I fix it as well and uh I've liked what both of them are doing so anyway from a call to action standpoint you can stay on top of consumer Focus protections that these groups are working on by visiting their website so p.org has a newsletter that uh is worth subscribing to because they send out information on what's going on in the space and then every now and then they'll have something where they they have some direct action that if you really care you want to get involved then you can kind of look at that for information on how to do so all right next one a quick story on anant Tech this one happened while we were finalizing the EK coverage but it's important so we wanted to go back and cover it now after 27 years anitech is officially shutting down but is remaining in at least for now a readon state the esteemed Tech publication was created by then 14-year-old Anand L shimpy who started the outlet in his bedroom actually not far from where we're based when he was still living with his parents when it was started it was actually in 97 and the site was on geoc cities I'll throw some personal commentary in here too so I only ever met Anand I think it was once I'll tell that story moment but one time an industry associate told me how they flew out their company flew out to meet him at his house and was to introduce a new product and when they got there they were greeted by his parents before proceeding to his room to do the product discussion and basically the kind of uh release of information relating to it which I personally always related to that story because uh I had that we had just gotten big enough for that to happen I think one or two times to me as well uh where the industry PR people like came over to the house because that's I was still running it out of out of my mom's house but anyway I always related to that part but he later in an interview talked about how he bought a larger house for his business and for his parents to live in as I understand it uh they were much smaller in those days but still growing pretty fast now the time I met Anand was at uh Nvidia GTC I met Scott Watson the same year from tech report who I also have a h huge amount of respect for and we were at the GTC event and uh which is an Nvidia event and AMD was holding an event near bot to announce some kind of product GPU or something so got on the bus to go to the AMD event with Anand and Scott Watson and I I got to introduce myself to both of them this was a very long time ago there was absolutely zero reason they would even know the name Gamers Nexus and uh anyway the thing I took away from it was they said said Nvidia won't be happy about this that is what I remember from that bus ride and when we got back uh I found out that Nvidia was in fact very unhappy about the fact that AMD was hosting an event at the same time as nvidia's event just down the street and little did I know that would set the tone for the next eight years of uh thus far my time in the industry there's a lot of lot of petty back and forth between the companies like that anyway uh shimpy eventually sold the site to perch in 2014 before making the decision to join Apple now the publication was most recently led by Ryan Smith who worked at anitech for over 19 years in a farewell blog post Smith mentioned that the site had produced over 21,500 articles and wrote quote it has been my privilege over the last 19 years to write for one of the most impactful tech news websites that has ever existed and while I'm heartbroken that we're at the end of an's 27-year Journey I can take solace in everything we've been able to accomplish over the years all of which has been made possible links to our industry partners and our awesome readers in 2018 future PLC purchased perch for a reported 132.5 million the Publishing Company plans to keep anatech tocom up and to Archive the site at least for now while no future content will be produced future intends to keep the forums up and operational anatech isn't the only Tech outlet that future has closed or purchased the publisher also shuted the doors of Publications such as Maximum PC it also owns several other Tech and gaming Publications including Tom's Hardware PC Gamer tech radar and Games Radar as well as numerous non-te Outlets such as Guitar World music radar and Country Life Magazine okay I guess we'll throw that one in there although anch content such as news will definitely have obviously reduced relevance with time to me it is incredibly important to keep those resources alive and around whether it's through archive.org or just the website itself and you know other than just historical provenance uh it is important too because whenever we or others do research looking back you you really realize once you get into that late '90s early 2000s era how many of those Publications are gone and uh for that reason it's just like the history has been wiped from the face of the Earth and it gets really difficult to kind of dig up accurate uh things you can cross reference through multiple Publications because they're all gone so really important to keep that around as long as it's available in the archive State it'll not only preserve the news articles for historical context if they can uh keep it archived for a basically permanent period of time but also it would preserve still useful and still educational architectural deep dives from people like Anan shimpy Ian cutus and Ryan Smith uh so anyway it's kind of the the thoughts on that you know from my I share a little more on it but uh I was in a I was in high school writing papers uh on computer engineering topics and one of the things we had to do was bring some kind of news to the class and uh and we had to write up our version of the news and explain it and and what was happening and the sites I would check regularly for that would be tech report and anch and uh I mean tech report kind of seems like it's it's basically done uh anch is done at this point so very sad to see um it was the generation of people who do what we do just before us and there wasn't that much a Time window uh where I started around 2008 but in PC Hardware little you know 2010 or something n something like that and they were in it about a decade before us for some of these guys so uh sad to see GL it's at least archived but I'm a little concerned it'll disappear so I don't know for anyone who's like a data hoarder maybe start pulling some of that stuff just in case although archive should have a lot of it all right next one 96 core Zen 5 thread of CPU surfaces this is a very brief rumor Twitter leaker olak 29 underscore that's a spicy putting the underscore at the end of the name don't see that a lot spotted what appears to be an upcoming thread rer CPU on a shipping manifest dated back to July 3rd following This Thread the chip looks like it carries the code name shimata Peak along with 96 cores this is the same amount of cores that AMD 7995 WX 3 CPU has if it's legitimate it would make sense for shimata Peak to use amd's news zen5 architecture the shipping manifest also says it's a WS part and that's it for the week let's move on the past two weeks presented a few rumors surrounding amd's upcoming 8,000 series gpus these are reportedly based on rdna 4 name of the product might change I don't know I can't follow I don't know amd's naming decisions these days but uh first up is the rumor that the cards are expected to incorporate 20 GB per second gddr 6 memory modules this is in contrast to the Nvidia gdr 7 choices uh that we know to be planned on at least some of the 50 Series cards back in April Hardware leaker Kepler L2 suggested that all rdna 4 gpus may be limited to uh quote only 18 GBS per second we've got another one of the uh Emoji quotes there and then later or more recently tweeted uh that the cards may get faster memory because the leaker has since said this quote 256 space 20 256 space 18 192 space 19 and then another one of these so uh putting our detective hats on for a brief second here the first number in the leftand column seemingly suggests the cards bus width the right hand would suggest maybe gigabits per second uh for the memory and then the insinuation here is that there may be at least three different cards that we know about right now when asked by another user if the leaker had heard anything about cash size Kepler responded 646448 so Kepler a uh a leaker of very few words right actually in this case Zero words it's just just numbers it's a very efficient way to communicate uh okay next one Nvidia recently reported its fiscal earnings for quarter 2 2025 and the company said it had achieved record revenues and in case you're wondering but Steve it's 2024 how are they reporting 2025 revenues well let me just tell you the secret about how Jensen Juan will be CEO of Nvidia for eternity involves a time machine actually just just a different fiscal year reporting period versus the actual calendar year but that's less interesting The Time Machine thing you see this book this book tells the future tells the results of every major sports event till the end of the century I wonder if this can play crisis only Gamers know anyway Nvidia fiscal year doesn't align with the calendar year but uh they do have numbers for it so the time machine and funny taxers aside in terms of Financial results the company announced that its second quarter yielded $30 billion in Revenue Nvidia says this is up 15% from quarter 1 and is up 122% compared to the same period the year prior the line share of that Revenue came by the way of its data center division which generated 26.3 billion and was up 16% compared to the previous quarter and up 154% compared to the prior year the gaming division is up 9% compared to the prior quarter and up 16% versus the previous year for its third quarter Nvidia expects to generate $ 32.5 billion doar in Revenue plus or minus 2% no word on when the time machines will actually ship to the market but we have heard the TDP is quite High 21 GW next one's pretty short but we've merged two stories here they're related uh AMD recently announced Z2 extreme chip you could predict that this follows the Z1 that naming is at least pretty clear and the Z1 extreme is found in gaming handheld this includes the Rog Ally and others we've reviewed the Digital Trends attended an AMD Q&A at EA and reported on the company's plans for the Z2 extreme in quote early 2025 but uh there was no further hard specification or performance Target as of the event beyond that we previously talked about other recent relevant news including valve continuing its plans to roll Steam OS out formally for other handheld devices that would include the Rog Ally we covered this previously if we're lucky we might get Z2 chips and Steam OS on nonv valed devices not to say that they shouldn't be in val devices as well but more diversity in that market good because uh furthering the adoption of the Linux ecosystem in handheld for gaming could also help it in desktop and uh I think it it comes back to the developers developers developers developers developers it'd be good for the whole ecosystem though to have some more OS diversity there while we're on the subject of handhelds Acer has announced its Nitro Blaze 7 handheld gaming device you know it's gaming because of the blaze part and the good news is that it's AI powered we were worried that they'd forget those two letters which should bolster investor confidence beyond that the device has 144 HZ refresh rate it'll natively run Windows it has a freesync display and it runs a 7-in touch panel at 1080p tech radar had Hands-On time with the device and states that it was using an R7 8840 HS and had a 50w hour battery so uh this one is not with the stricks point products uh but we just attached it because they're all kind of handheld news here first personally though I think you should wait for Acer's Flagship model the Acer Nitro 7 blaz it Blaze TI sorry I transposed the letters that's it for this Hardware news recap good to be back to the normal flow of things we've got a lot of reviews coming up so uh two of them are cases we were really positive on one we're kind of mixed on um but really excited for that because I cases are fun to review and it's one of the things that we really enjoy working on as a team so check those out this week subscribe for more go to store. access.net to help us out directly check out the original EK video from Friday if you haven't seen it and we'll see you all next timehey everyone welcome back to the hardware news recap of the week we're getting back to normal now that the EK story is done so for this one we're going be talking about news of AMD officially stating that it is for now abandoning the high-end for gpus and focusing on the more mainstream mid-range Market uh further x870 motherboard prices have started to come out and they are very high the PG in another story is pressing the FTC to require more transparency and some more controls over device longevity when it comes to Connected or smart devices citing a number of major examples where consumers have purchased things that have then uh suddenly had new subscription fees pop up without anyone being told of it beforehand among other challenges and uh other stories this one was a couple weeks ago but we were in the middle of that EK stuff so uh anch shutting down we'll talk about that briefly rumors of rdna 4 and some more this actually this is a there's a lot of stuff to talk about it's been a couple weeks 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 failures 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 gamas access or click the link below quick EK debrief for you all so we posted a 1our long investigation it's a totally different format for us it's really fun to work on despite the sort of sad Topic at times uh we had a history piece in there that was kind of interesting it's different and uh the format is totally different from almost anything we've done it's definitely evolved over the years for the investigation so uh we're going to talk about that a little bit now there's also some updates so ek's 2023 tax year filing is now publicly available as of today when I'm filming this might be yesterday when the video goes up uh Monday basically and uh there's some some information we can go through in that as for the video itself uh if you haven't seen it even if you're normally here just for news updates and computer hardware reviews uh we would love for you to go just check it out because this one like I said we tried a totally new format I really liked how it came together and actually one of the things we did was I posted a YouTube Community poll which we can show on the screen where I asked everyone who answered it if they wanted us to spend an extra five or so minutes on company history before just getting into the new information of the investigation so it was effectively like hey do you want us to talk about some of the background of who this company is what is it that we're kind of in the process of losing uh or just only talk about all the bad things that have happened and overwhelmingly people voted for the company history which I was 100% willing to try and that's why we asked the audience uh my concern with it was it's really just YouTube stuff I it was like are people going to find this boring and just leave and and tank the video um I'm glad we ran that poll and kind of took the community request though to include the History Section because that is actually my favorite section for the whole video so if you see nothing else check out about the first 20 minutes or so that'll get you through the rise and the start of the fall uh you'll miss all the details of the fall but you you get kind of the key elements so anyway really enjoyed working on that um like I said it it adds some important context of what is this company what have they accomplished which is also just fair to them because uh K despite its more recent issues as plantiful as they are has not always been uh well we don't know how it's always been how they've always acted internally what we do know is that uh the complaints were not such that employees were coming to us saying they can't afford their houses so it does appear as if EK came from a background of being sort of this legitimate fiercely competitive water cooling company and it's led to the sad state of 10 now anyway uh totally new style so um hopefully you like it check it out and we're constantly striving to improve on the investigations and reports right now and really trying to bring in some influence from things like documentaries too so okay let's go over the new information so ek's public tax fines for tax year 2023 were just made public they had extensions and filed a little late just hit the internet there's some information 2024 in them but not much and then there's also new filings relating to leans that were taken against EK and its properties so this document was updated on SE September 9th that's today at the time of filming it's an extract from the register of leans and seized movable property from the agency of Slovenia for public legal records and related Services the document includes a new entry for a cargo vehicle owned by ekwb a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter 316 the vehicle is subject to a forced judicial lean with NLB the claim is for € 6,16 and the vehicle is subject to seizure if the claim remains unmet and unpaid our understanding is that EK has failed to meet its obligations to pay the Creditor where uh if this persists it may trigger a repossession of the work vehicle this document is the official public tax fine for ekwb it went live this morning it's a 53-page document it notes among other things these key items a reduction in what translates to net revenue from sales for 2023 falling from 37.7 million to 34.7 million a substantial trade payables increase from € 338,000 reported in 2022 to 7191 million EUR in 2023 these indicate delayed or owed payments to suppliers as we understand it reported net profit for the period has declined 81% from 41456 reported in 2022 to just over 78,000 reported for 2023 this is after previously falling from 3.9 million EUR of profit in 2020 for the period net profit reported for the period and 2.9 in 2021 one a reduction in the value reported for buildings this could also indicate a sale a reduction in production equipment and machine value could again indicate a potential sale we're not sure why it was reduced a reduction in cash reserves or cash on hand from € 2.58 million EUR to just € 365,000 a reported trade receivables fall from 6.95 million EUR in 20122 2 3.78 in 2023 an expense increase in bank loan cost of €15,000 not counting the new loans for this year it also notes an increase in influencer engagement opportunities in 2024 now when we asked an analyst who's been helping us with interpreting all this stuff what his thoughts were on this new document his reply was let me just make sure I quote it properly Big O the uh a direct quote this document was sent to retailers and Distributors by ekwb it's different one it instructs them to Halt deposits to the Slovenian bank accounts and instead use a new account under revolute bank which appears to be a legitimate bank with accounts in Lithuania now our understanding is that Slovenian companies must report bank accounts to the tax office within 14 days of opening them and currently ekwb has not reported this foreign account to the Slovenian tax office and one of our consultants for this story completely independently and of his own accord has done so he's reported to the tax office uh without without our direction or request he just felt it was the right and just thing to do okay next part this account was opened around the same time as ek's accounts were restricted by the Slovenian Court blocked accounts once they reached that status have their control handed over to the court as we understand it an unreported account especially one which would required International Bank block request would potentially avoid being restricted or Frozen as long as it remains undiscovered as we understand the situation following all this EK has posted yet another response to its YouTube channel it requires no update from us because there's nothing to respond to it actually says nothing in 2 minutes that's not me framing it I mean like literally I don't know we'll put the comments on the screen you can decide for yourself but it says nothing there's no new information uh it does not address literally one single concrete point with one single concrete either rebuttal or uh promise of specific Improvement so there's nothing to respond to and as we said any further updates will remain in Hardware news unless there is some kind of uh major and unbelievable at this point development so that's kind of it the tax documents we got this morning were the very last piece we're waiting for and now I think we're done there's nothing else to really talk about at the moment we can move on until EK does something else that's uh that requires more again if you want to support this type of reporting then go to store. Gamers access.net you can grab our mod mats solder mats our coaster packs which we've just restock the original coaster packs and The Mule mugs and you can find plenty more over there as well to support our in-depth cover coverage of these types of situations the most important thing to me is just that people give the video a chance try it out cuz it's performing well and I really like the format and I want to use it again so um hope you all like it okay let's go to the next story all right moving on so there have been rumors for a little while now about AMD possibly not doing a flagship as in super top end rdna 4 GPU in what might be called the RX 8000 line maybe 9,000 whatever the one after the 7900 XTX so there have been rumors for a little while now uh Paul Al of Tom's Hardware posted an interview with amd's SVP and GM of computing and graphics and in short AMD confirmed to Tom's Hardware that its intent currently is to pursue more GPU market share rather than going for a potentially smaller Market at a higher end uh focusing its resources and efforts lower down the stack now theoretically AMD wants this to uh help bolster the development support of AMD Hardware because if they can increase market share then you might be able to convince more developers to actively build for and optimize for your Hardware uh the thought process is sound in the sense that if Nvidia has the overwhelming majority of market share and if a development Studio has limited resources they're going to focus all those resources on Nvidia unless there's a a really strong compelling uh reason to to split that support and more market share would be a pretty strong one now we're just going to quote part of two answers here from the Tom's interview we'd encourage you to check out the rest of the interview at Tom's Hardware I don't want to go through the whole thing here it's their coverage go check it out on their website but uh when alorn asked amd's SVP of Flagship gpus this was part of the answer that we thought was key quote so my number one priority right now is to build scale to get us to 40 to 50% of the market faster do I want to go after 10% of the Tam or total addressable Market or 80% I'm an 80% kind of guy because I don't want AMD to be the company that only people who can afford Porsches and Ferraris can buy we want to build game systems for millions of users yes we will have great great products sorry there's another one great great great products it's like great cubed or something that's a lot of greats really really wanted to make sure I got it accurate there don't want to leave out any great and misrepresent it so great times three products but we tried that strategy it hasn't really grown in a later answer uh AMD also stated quote because without scale right now I can't get the developers if I tell developers I'm just going for 10% of the market share they just say say Jack I wish you well but we have to go with Nvidia so I have to show them a plan that says hey we can get to 40% with this strategy then they say I'm with you now I'll optimize on AMD once we get that we can go out the top so there's more in there too you can go check out their website for the full thing on tomshardware.com uh the rest of the discussion is about things like Data Center Enterprise they go through some of the strategy on that it's a little bit different there's some more Nuance to these answers as well but great work by Paul alorn to get some actual answers and not just fluff from AMD on a topic that they up until now haven't really officially talked about so as for the consumer GPU strategy talk a little bit about that this is one that AMD has employed before AMD has fought for the high- end over the years on and off but back in the day it's rx480 and 580 series was the last time it was really getting some major distribution and that was in a more affordable price Class A Vega 56 was also pretty competitive when it was cheap but unfortunately the hbm was so expensive in that era that it was only ever comparatively cheap when AMD was already kind of in trouble on the pricing or at least that's kind of how I felt about it at the time where uh we would occasionally see Vega 56 just plummet and price go on sale and it made a lot of sense for raster it was I guess it was only raster wasn't it it's been a while it made a lot of sense though when the price dropped but you just you kind of looked at those prices and and the feeling I got was there's no way they're making any real amount of money on this so any the old 27x is another card that fought pretty well in its price range as for the downsides we have a whole discussion with Steve from hard run box from in this uh very category where the discussion topic was centered around whether AMD needed a flagship from the perspective of marketing this commonly referred to as a Halo product or basically something to convince people that AMD is technologically fit and capable generally speaking we felt like at the time when we were talking about it if AMD had the resources then Halo marketing is a worthwhile Venture the problem is if it doesn't and uh it seems like if it has to pull resources and really just make one solid product uh in our opinions at GN it would be focusing on that mid-range or entry level and just making some killer cards because that area has been kind of uh it feels like abandoned as a consumer over the years where uh just getting into decent gaming class cards is so expensive so that might be a good place to really put up a fight now it seems like amd's biggest challenge might be the fact that there is now a third player in the market which is Intel Arc Intel Arc still has lots of problems that's amd's biggest Advantage right now over them however with Intel also focusing on that sort of let's say 300 plus or minus category for cards AMD is going to be in battled with them almost more so in some ways than Nvidia and for NVIDIA that's a great thing because you've got the two smaller of the two by market share fighting over scraps hurting only each other momentarily while Nvidia if AMD abandons this Flagship Market uh like they're saying will be completely uncontested and have Total Domination of the super high for Consumer gpus consumer specifically here so in the Thomas Hardware piece they talk about Enterprise sounds like they're not really walking away from that but so that's not great for price control for nvidia's high-end you can certainly not expect their cars to get any cheaper at the the flagship level all right next one Hardware leaker Momo us posted a list of supposed prices for some Asus motherboards and ALS some other ones as well the x870 chipset class for am5 sockets the prices included boards range ranging from €315 to €700 seems like the sub $200 Market might be finally dying for these sort of topend chipsets and the sub $300 Market looks like it's drying up for this generation as well if we see a large absence of these chipsets in the $250 to $300 range that would Mark a notable but continual price increase generationally in another leak M Mo posted some Amazon France prices for gigabyte x870 boards these are listed at € 323 to 345 as a reminder the main chipset differences this time have to do with USB 4 and these published chipset specs list these key differences compared to x670 x870 non has 36 usable pcie Lanes in total and up to 24 as pcie 5.0 with x670 non at 44 and8 for those metrics otherwise the big one is the required usb4 presence on x870 and x870 and this table from AMD is excellent if you're ever confused about the chipset differences uh they do a pretty good job at keeping it clear here and some positive consumer advocacy news consumer reports and PG which we've worked with in the past recently actually uh posted a letter to the FTC the short version of it is that the letter is asking the FTC to impose some clear guidelines and enforce some rules for language for consumers as uh relating to how long a smart device will last and will last in the form that was advertised to the consumer when they purchased it so that means not creating subscriptions to continue use of a device that previously worked without a separate monthly subscription for example and also means being clearer about the lifespan of the device and how long a consumer can reasonably expect it to maintain uh operation so this is the groups asking the ftt to enforce this on manufacturers look at it a little closer so Consumer Reports on PG or public interest research group wrote the letter we previously hosted PG's Nathan Proctor to discuss the Asus warranty issues he gave a lot of great educational information in that piece even unrelated to Asus and we originally connected with him via the respected Lewis Rossman who bridged contacts for us now the letter asks the FTC for quote clear guidance relating to unfair and deceptive trade practices the letter writes quote consumer reports and uspg write to ask the FTC to create clear guidance to address issues of software tethering which leads to several consumer harm including locking features behind a subscription after the purchase of a device and companies selling connected devices only to render them nonfunctional later using software both switching features to a subscription and bricking a connected device purchased by a consumer in many cases are unfair and deceptive practices they continue later saying quote further measures will help alleviate the worst outcomes of software tethering that is making functions of a device reliant on embedded software that ties the device back to the manufacturer servers the the software Server Connection tethers the device to the manufacturer giving the manufacturer post-p purchase control of the software and changing the nature of ownership the letter goes on to list a number of great examples of some of these behaviors so uh one of them was I not familiar with this device but I guess a SN connected bassinet it's called Uh which was $1,700 and some of its originally advertised features were suddenly locked behind a monthly subscription according to the letter the letter also highlighted this example quote another comes from July 2023 when a temperature regulating device called I command which worked in conjunction with the Commando Joe smoker was discontinued the device cost 250 bucks and was sold through 2023 it was abruptly shut off ahead of the July 4th holiday after the company that made I command uh Master build was acquired by middle be which then launched a $1,700 competing product that used a different app and that's not all the letter went into great detail with several others which we'll recap in short here one was the Spotify car thinge device losing support just 22 months after Spotify launched it in the future here noting that refunds were only offered after substantial public resistance devices from what it calls failed startups on the list as well including cookers juicers smart plugs uh breath monitoring devices and computers all bricking after the company's failed or made changes it notes Google's drop cam support termination it also notes Arlo ending support for cameras Amazon ending support for Halo wearables oral be selling a toothbrush that breaks when your Wi-Fi disconnects from it which is an insane sentence for a number of reasons a Levi's denim jacket with smart sensors that was shut down in 2023 which is another insane thing to say that I never knew existed you imagine just like walking around some cyberpunk future dystopia and your server disconnects and then your jacket just disappears just like the textures they just stop rendering and you just walk around in this weird kind of polygon thing uh that's the future I think we're going to live in anyway you can find the full report on the Consumer Reports website the PG also so it was written in collaboration with other groups as well I'm familiar with some of them iFix it was a part of this we have a lot of respect for PG for I fix it for Consumer Reports and we've worked directly with PG in recent history in pretty distant past I fix it as well and uh I've liked what both of them are doing so anyway from a call to action standpoint you can stay on top of consumer Focus protections that these groups are working on by visiting their website so p.org has a newsletter that uh is worth subscribing to because they send out information on what's going on in the space and then every now and then they'll have something where they they have some direct action that if you really care you want to get involved then you can kind of look at that for information on how to do so all right next one a quick story on anant Tech this one happened while we were finalizing the EK coverage but it's important so we wanted to go back and cover it now after 27 years anitech is officially shutting down but is remaining in at least for now a readon state the esteemed Tech publication was created by then 14-year-old Anand L shimpy who started the outlet in his bedroom actually not far from where we're based when he was still living with his parents when it was started it was actually in 97 and the site was on geoc cities I'll throw some personal commentary in here too so I only ever met Anand I think it was once I'll tell that story moment but one time an industry associate told me how they flew out their company flew out to meet him at his house and was to introduce a new product and when they got there they were greeted by his parents before proceeding to his room to do the product discussion and basically the kind of uh release of information relating to it which I personally always related to that story because uh I had that we had just gotten big enough for that to happen I think one or two times to me as well uh where the industry PR people like came over to the house because that's I was still running it out of out of my mom's house but anyway I always related to that part but he later in an interview talked about how he bought a larger house for his business and for his parents to live in as I understand it uh they were much smaller in those days but still growing pretty fast now the time I met Anand was at uh Nvidia GTC I met Scott Watson the same year from tech report who I also have a h huge amount of respect for and we were at the GTC event and uh which is an Nvidia event and AMD was holding an event near bot to announce some kind of product GPU or something so got on the bus to go to the AMD event with Anand and Scott Watson and I I got to introduce myself to both of them this was a very long time ago there was absolutely zero reason they would even know the name Gamers Nexus and uh anyway the thing I took away from it was they said said Nvidia won't be happy about this that is what I remember from that bus ride and when we got back uh I found out that Nvidia was in fact very unhappy about the fact that AMD was hosting an event at the same time as nvidia's event just down the street and little did I know that would set the tone for the next eight years of uh thus far my time in the industry there's a lot of lot of petty back and forth between the companies like that anyway uh shimpy eventually sold the site to perch in 2014 before making the decision to join Apple now the publication was most recently led by Ryan Smith who worked at anitech for over 19 years in a farewell blog post Smith mentioned that the site had produced over 21,500 articles and wrote quote it has been my privilege over the last 19 years to write for one of the most impactful tech news websites that has ever existed and while I'm heartbroken that we're at the end of an's 27-year Journey I can take solace in everything we've been able to accomplish over the years all of which has been made possible links to our industry partners and our awesome readers in 2018 future PLC purchased perch for a reported 132.5 million the Publishing Company plans to keep anatech tocom up and to Archive the site at least for now while no future content will be produced future intends to keep the forums up and operational anatech isn't the only Tech outlet that future has closed or purchased the publisher also shuted the doors of Publications such as Maximum PC it also owns several other Tech and gaming Publications including Tom's Hardware PC Gamer tech radar and Games Radar as well as numerous non-te Outlets such as Guitar World music radar and Country Life Magazine okay I guess we'll throw that one in there although anch content such as news will definitely have obviously reduced relevance with time to me it is incredibly important to keep those resources alive and around whether it's through archive.org or just the website itself and you know other than just historical provenance uh it is important too because whenever we or others do research looking back you you really realize once you get into that late '90s early 2000s era how many of those Publications are gone and uh for that reason it's just like the history has been wiped from the face of the Earth and it gets really difficult to kind of dig up accurate uh things you can cross reference through multiple Publications because they're all gone so really important to keep that around as long as it's available in the archive State it'll not only preserve the news articles for historical context if they can uh keep it archived for a basically permanent period of time but also it would preserve still useful and still educational architectural deep dives from people like Anan shimpy Ian cutus and Ryan Smith uh so anyway it's kind of the the thoughts on that you know from my I share a little more on it but uh I was in a I was in high school writing papers uh on computer engineering topics and one of the things we had to do was bring some kind of news to the class and uh and we had to write up our version of the news and explain it and and what was happening and the sites I would check regularly for that would be tech report and anch and uh I mean tech report kind of seems like it's it's basically done uh anch is done at this point so very sad to see um it was the generation of people who do what we do just before us and there wasn't that much a Time window uh where I started around 2008 but in PC Hardware little you know 2010 or something n something like that and they were in it about a decade before us for some of these guys so uh sad to see GL it's at least archived but I'm a little concerned it'll disappear so I don't know for anyone who's like a data hoarder maybe start pulling some of that stuff just in case although archive should have a lot of it all right next one 96 core Zen 5 thread of CPU surfaces this is a very brief rumor Twitter leaker olak 29 underscore that's a spicy putting the underscore at the end of the name don't see that a lot spotted what appears to be an upcoming thread rer CPU on a shipping manifest dated back to July 3rd following This Thread the chip looks like it carries the code name shimata Peak along with 96 cores this is the same amount of cores that AMD 7995 WX 3 CPU has if it's legitimate it would make sense for shimata Peak to use amd's news zen5 architecture the shipping manifest also says it's a WS part and that's it for the week let's move on the past two weeks presented a few rumors surrounding amd's upcoming 8,000 series gpus these are reportedly based on rdna 4 name of the product might change I don't know I can't follow I don't know amd's naming decisions these days but uh first up is the rumor that the cards are expected to incorporate 20 GB per second gddr 6 memory modules this is in contrast to the Nvidia gdr 7 choices uh that we know to be planned on at least some of the 50 Series cards back in April Hardware leaker Kepler L2 suggested that all rdna 4 gpus may be limited to uh quote only 18 GBS per second we've got another one of the uh Emoji quotes there and then later or more recently tweeted uh that the cards may get faster memory because the leaker has since said this quote 256 space 20 256 space 18 192 space 19 and then another one of these so uh putting our detective hats on for a brief second here the first number in the leftand column seemingly suggests the cards bus width the right hand would suggest maybe gigabits per second uh for the memory and then the insinuation here is that there may be at least three different cards that we know about right now when asked by another user if the leaker had heard anything about cash size Kepler responded 646448 so Kepler a uh a leaker of very few words right actually in this case Zero words it's just just numbers it's a very efficient way to communicate uh okay next one Nvidia recently reported its fiscal earnings for quarter 2 2025 and the company said it had achieved record revenues and in case you're wondering but Steve it's 2024 how are they reporting 2025 revenues well let me just tell you the secret about how Jensen Juan will be CEO of Nvidia for eternity involves a time machine actually just just a different fiscal year reporting period versus the actual calendar year but that's less interesting The Time Machine thing you see this book this book tells the future tells the results of every major sports event till the end of the century I wonder if this can play crisis only Gamers know anyway Nvidia fiscal year doesn't align with the calendar year but uh they do have numbers for it so the time machine and funny taxers aside in terms of Financial results the company announced that its second quarter yielded $30 billion in Revenue Nvidia says this is up 15% from quarter 1 and is up 122% compared to the same period the year prior the line share of that Revenue came by the way of its data center division which generated 26.3 billion and was up 16% compared to the previous quarter and up 154% compared to the prior year the gaming division is up 9% compared to the prior quarter and up 16% versus the previous year for its third quarter Nvidia expects to generate $ 32.5 billion doar in Revenue plus or minus 2% no word on when the time machines will actually ship to the market but we have heard the TDP is quite High 21 GW next one's pretty short but we've merged two stories here they're related uh AMD recently announced Z2 extreme chip you could predict that this follows the Z1 that naming is at least pretty clear and the Z1 extreme is found in gaming handheld this includes the Rog Ally and others we've reviewed the Digital Trends attended an AMD Q&A at EA and reported on the company's plans for the Z2 extreme in quote early 2025 but uh there was no further hard specification or performance Target as of the event beyond that we previously talked about other recent relevant news including valve continuing its plans to roll Steam OS out formally for other handheld devices that would include the Rog Ally we covered this previously if we're lucky we might get Z2 chips and Steam OS on nonv valed devices not to say that they shouldn't be in val devices as well but more diversity in that market good because uh furthering the adoption of the Linux ecosystem in handheld for gaming could also help it in desktop and uh I think it it comes back to the developers developers developers developers developers it'd be good for the whole ecosystem though to have some more OS diversity there while we're on the subject of handhelds Acer has announced its Nitro Blaze 7 handheld gaming device you know it's gaming because of the blaze part and the good news is that it's AI powered we were worried that they'd forget those two letters which should bolster investor confidence beyond that the device has 144 HZ refresh rate it'll natively run Windows it has a freesync display and it runs a 7-in touch panel at 1080p tech radar had Hands-On time with the device and states that it was using an R7 8840 HS and had a 50w hour battery so uh this one is not with the stricks point products uh but we just attached it because they're all kind of handheld news here first personally though I think you should wait for Acer's Flagship model the Acer Nitro 7 blaz it Blaze TI sorry I transposed the letters that's it for this Hardware news recap good to be back to the normal flow of things we've got a lot of reviews coming up so uh two of them are cases we were really positive on one we're kind of mixed on um but really excited for that because I cases are fun to review and it's one of the things that we really enjoy working on as a team so check those out this week subscribe for more go to store. access.net to help us out directly check out the original EK video from Friday if you haven't seen it and we'll see you all next time\n"