Epic Games Loot Box Settlement Deadlines Looming

The 26.5 million dollar settlement to settle claims for randomized loot boxes has led to several deadlines looming for affected gamers. As part of this settlement, Epic Games will be handing out tens of millions of dollars worth of in-game credits for each of the affected games. In Fortnite, this would translate to V-Bucks, while in Rocket League, it would be Rocket League credits.

Epic started depositing these credits to accounts not long after the settlement was approved, demonstrating their commitment to addressing the concerns raised by players regarding loot boxes. The 26.5 million set aside for additional compensation was also a topic of discussion recently, highlighting the significant amount of money that will be made available to those who have valid claims.

However, with several deadlines approaching, it is essential for gamers to take action to avoid missing out on this opportunity. On April 12th, 2021, players have until then to object or exclude themselves from the settlement altogether. This provides a chance for those who may not be satisfied with the terms of the agreement to opt-out and potentially receive additional compensation.

On the other hand, for those who wish to claim their share of the loot box settlement, April 26th marks the deadline to file a claim. It is crucial that gamers submit their claims before this date to ensure they receive their rightful compensation.

Furthermore, AMD's Radeon RX 6800 XT Midnight Black Edition GPU has been making headlines recently. This special edition card was created in response to community feedback and popular demand, with the primary modification being an all-black design featuring minimal silver elements compared to its standard counterpart.

The card's release was also notable as it was made available first to AMD's Red Team Community members, who received advanced notice of its arrival. The card's performance is identical to that of the widely popular RX 6800 XT, indicating that it is a high-quality offering from AMD.

In other news, Intel has accidentally used a competitor's product in one of its advertisements. Specifically, an advertisement for Intel's Tiger Lake i7 1185 G7 processor featured a MacBook Pro with an image that was not actually using the new processor. Furthermore, a stock photo from Getty Images showed "Millennial Man Playing Computer Game on Laptop at Home" - which is also visible in several different angles.

The use of this image may seem innocuous at first but considering Intel's recent campaign against Apple and its M1 processors, it can be seen as a defensive move. Additionally, the presence of the MacBook Pro with an Intel processor blunder highlights the challenges that companies like Intel face when trying to promote their products in a crowded market.

Intel's marketing team has been actively promoting the new Tiger Lake i7 1185 G7 processor, and while this may not be surprising given the competitive nature of the tech industry, it is clear that they are taking steps to address Apple's dominance in the M1 space.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone welcome back to another hardware news recap for the week in this one we have new modmaps really excited to talk about those we have a new large modmat that is in our anti-static modmat line we're calling it the volt we'll be talking about that today there's also news on a new amd gpu chiplet patent chiplet designs for gpus have been in talks for years at this point and video put out an mcm white paper many years ago talking about it but there's finally some progression towards an eventual chiplet approach for gpus also gpu is getting smuggled into hong kong via fishing boat because that's where we are now with shortages it was specifically a mining line of gpus from nvidia's new cmp line we talked about a potential amd zen 3 side channel exploit and a couple of other industry news and hardware release topics for the past week before that this video is brought to you by asus and the asus tough gaming b550 plus wi-fi motherboard ready for amd ryzen cpus the tough gaming b550 board comes in atx and micro atx variants with key features including a wi-fi 6 module 2.5 gigabit ethernet a fanless chipset heatsink for quiet operation and a focus on stability and up time learn more about the tough gaming b550 plus wi-fi motherboard at the link in the description below so first up we have some really big news that i'd like to spend a few minutes on hopefully that's okay we've spent the last year working on advancing our modmat manufacturing process and doing new designs and testing and quality assurance just sampling back and forth for the past year or so for this new design so this is called the gamer's nexus large modmat volt we have the original large modmat still for sale in the store it's just been restocked and the medium original mod mats are on the store as well so all three will be available at the same time we're not discontinuing any of them they'll exist simultaneously and many of you probably know that we've been out of stock for mod maps for about four months now this was an active decision by us we didn't even do back orders this time because we knew we had a new one coming out so we wanted to just put them all back up at the same time that way everyone could get the specific one that they wanted we've done a lot of cool testing for the modmat volt and it applies backwards to the others as well for example we did a bunch of destructive testing where we broke apart our own components that we're selling to really dissect them and quality assurance testing we did we've already blown through about half of the inventory of the new large modmat volt we still have a lot of inventory of the original large modmat it's the same high quality materials and technical processes as the new volts and then the medium modmat we have a decent amount of inventory as well although it's been selling fast but so far if you want the volt and you see this around when it goes up you should probably buy it because it will sell through pretty quickly we bought a huge amount of inventory it's it's stupid the amount we bought compared to previously because we had to literally knock down walls in our distributor's warehouse in order to accommodate the shipment of modmats so it was a lot of inventory but we're through about half of it of course they'll go up on backorder as soon as they sell through again so a couple behind-the-scenes notes on the modmap give you the background of it first if you missed the announcement video there is a brief announcement video on the channel that goes through all the details on it but the modmat is a pc building surface an anti-static work service that we introduced in 2017 this is our first revision of the large mod map where we've introduced a lot of new elements so it has two snaps now to accommodate left-handed users but also just so that you don't drag the uh the cable across the screws wherever you're tracking them on the left or the right side of the pad there's this grid of four i didn't explain in the announcement video but this grid of four squares over on the left side was andrew's idea for just sort of generic or miscellaneous screw tracking or component tracking put the stuff in the tray and then you can write down one two three four whatever on a piece of paper so you remember which one goes to which area of the thing that you're taking apart we now have an ethernet wiring diagram on the bottom left that's got 568a and 568b if you build your own ethernet cables but not commonly enough to memorize it we have the power pin outs for molex fans pcie and cpu eps 12 volt power there's actually a two scale memory pin out in the top left for ddr1 through four and we also have some quick reference material for inductors mosfets things of that nature and the reason we put that one on there specifically is because when last year when we were designing this this has been by the way in development for more about a year maybe a little more at this point but when we were designing this last year we i happened to be working on some water blocks at the time and i noticed that one of them in particular the instructions said to apply the one millimeter thermal pad to the inductors and to apply the two millimeter thermal pad to the mosfets but it never explained what those were that's not a problem for us but just kind of got me thinking there's there's a lot of people who are going to install water block for the first time not know which is which and sure you can look it up it's not a huge inconvenience but that right there helps and also frankly a lot of people probably won't look it up they're going to take a guess and if it's wrong that will matter quite a bit on a water block where you're talking about a one versus two millimeter thickness so we put those on there as reference materials just to continue sort of the educational approach of our products and the functional approach of them which we want to make stuff that's actually useful every day and high quality and will last a long time so that's what this is we have some other cool stuff on here too there's electrical cymbals in the top right the grid has been expanded to have two gpus on them so this is less if you're buying a new gpu and more of if you're maintaining one right now but if you're maintaining a card it makes it easier to track the back side versus the top side pcb screws so you don't have extras when you rebuild it but the behind the scenes stuff the mod mats are the most expensive product we make by a long shot and basically last year when we placed the order it takes the logistics are really slow right now globally and manufacturing's all backed up because the factories also make stuff like ppe for example so we're low on their priority list because of that but when we placed the order we basically blew out the bank account to get the order in because i need to pay for them before i get them and then we have to sell them to get the money back to order more of them so that's the cycle we've been in for years now but in spite of the rising materials and logistics cost we actually haven't increased the price the msrp of the product so the large modmat volt the new one that was described in the announcement video is the same price as the original and the same price that it's been for four years despite those increasing costs for us over time we're really happy with it the print quality is super vibrant really crisp design there's a lot of functional stuff on here and it's the densest print we've ever done in terms of information per square area so we think you'll like it too you can go to store.cameratexas.net if you want to buy one and thank you to everyone who has purchased one over the last four years because those purchases and the ones that are coming in over the last couple days for this which have been absolutely amazing it's i really honestly didn't think we would move through all the inventory this fast but this happens every time and it's just a matter of accumulating more money from the sales to order more to satisfy the man but all that support from all of you from the last four years who bought them is the reason we've been able to expand the team to for example that nzxt h1 fire hazard testing that was all done by patrick stone and that salary is basically paid for by modmats so and then things like the test equipment purchases where we've bought pressure testers that are really expensive we've purchased dummy heaters we've purchased uh surface flatness testers and we're working on a thermal chamber as one of our next major purchases those are probably in the 10 to 20 grand range depending on the level of climate control so that's all made possible by basically the mod mats and the last four years of sales and mod mats toolkits mousemats so thank you to everyone who's bought one and you can go to store.gamingtexas.net if you'd like to pick one up okay let's move on to the first story first up in the news amd this past week published a new white paper on its website detailing some potential security vulnerabilities regarding predictive store forwarding or psf which is a feature on zen 3 cpus and is something you can toggle off as well psf works by attempting to predict the dependency between a load and a store and then it speculatively executes instructions based on that prediction it's similar to some of the other cpu technologies that attempt to speed up execution we've seen this with speculative execution and branch prediction in the past quote in typical code psf provides a performance benefit by speculating on the load result and allowing later instructions to begin execution sooner than they otherwise would be able to most of the time the psf prediction is accurate however there are cases where the prediction may not be accurate and cause incorrect cpu speculation says amd and its white paper in the case of that inaccurate speculation that amd is describing the cpu is supposed to flush the incorrect results from the cpu pipeline amd illustrates a couple of different ways in which inaccurate predictions can occur as well as detailing some limitations regarding speculation on zen 3 cpus andy then goes on to outline what it believes are the primary securities concerns quote because psf speculation is limited to the current program context the impact of bad psf speculation is similar to that of speculative store bypass and they list spectre version 4 as an example of this in both cases security concerns arise if code exists that implements some kind of security control which can be bypassed when cpus speculate incorrectly this may occur if a program such as a web browser hosts a piece of untrusted code and the untrusted code is able to influence how the cpu speculates in other regions in a way that results in data leakage this is similar amd says to the security risk with other spectre type attacks furthermore andy warns that software that uses isolation or sandboxing might be vulnerable here all told amd believes that the amount of code that might actually be vulnerable to psf's security implications is low though andy does suggest disabling the feature if users are concerned or have a specific concern related to their use case while it was thought that disabling psf would carry a significant performance hit early testing done by pharonix finds that any performance penalty seems to be negligible in most cases for onyx found that workloads showed no more than a one to two percent performance difference with the psf feature disabled additionally amd has also made patches available to the linux kernel that allow psf to be disabled for the time being it seems this issue isn't as big of a concern as some of the early x86 speculative execution vulnerabilities that we've covered in the past and that's a good thing up next the gtx 1080 ti is dead well it it's been dead for quite a while now it hasn't been made for uh at least one full generation at this point but there were rumors over this past week that got a lot of people excited for a 1080 ti revival because specifically relating to an evga i think it was 1080ti fcw3 there was a story that the model sold it carried a newer serial number not a whole lot of detail to that but pretty easy to vet the story so we called evga and we asked dbga is it true is it true that one of the best gpus nvidia ever made and a mistake that nvidia will probably not make again in terms of selling something at such a good price for the performance is it true that this thing's coming back officially ebj's answer was quote the official answer is no it is not being remade the 1080 ti is no longer in production now uh unofficially when we asked evj's representative is the 1080 ti getting remade the answer was haha no so a little bit hurtful to those of us who might have wanted to see a 1080ti come back but it is not coming back sorry to shoot that one down but you can mark that rumor for the past week as false up next an interesting turn of fate for the work that customs agents do so tvb news in hong kong has reported that hong kong customs seized an illegal shipment of a number of things among those though gpus we're at that point at the point now we're smuggling operations are smuggling video cards and actually ram in here as well phones are not particularly new to be smuggled but those were also in the batch so in this shipment of items that hong kong customs and excise departments seized there was a cache of 300 unidentified video cards not a specific model or brand name attached to them at least right now there was some footage of the items that were seized in tbb news's report and we'll show some of that as we go through this story but it's mostly video cards that look to be lacking any sort of display outputs so we thought we spotted a couple in the top row that might have display outs but for those that are lacking display out that might be something in the nvidia cmp hx line or some other mining line of gpus where a display out is simply not needed and is often stripped to reduce the resale value of the mining gpu the smuggling run included other technology products with tvb primarily showing cell phones video cards and trays upon trays of ram we'd be open to shipping the hong kong customs department one of our new modmats so they can identify if it's ddr4 or ddr3 hong kong customs said that the phones the ram and the gpus all together were worth approximately 2 million hkd or just over 257 000 us dollars all the items were found on a fishing boat or a speedboat as we understand it we're assuming we're destined for ports in mainland china or in shenzhen and other illegal items included shark fins and other endangered sea life but the technology products got the bulk of the coverage we saw also that last month serial leaker at mobilemo underscore us on twitter spotted a paylet cmp 30 hx gpu one of nvidia's new mining gpus for sale for about 724 usd so gives you some sense of as if the audience doesn't already know but gives you some sense of the true value of scalping the fact though that it's gotten uh gps have found their ways into smuggling operations is surreal in in the bizarre sense not really something that we've ever seen in our specific niche of the industry again it's happening with phones but this is kind of a new thing for gpus so uh either way that's been seized and presumably the hong kong customs department will do something with the cards maybe they'll set up a mining operation who knows alternatively they could start competing with linus and do a verified actual gamer program to relinquish those cards back into the market next up an amd patent so amd is expanding on its patent that it filed back in january for a chiplet approach to gpus this has been something that's been discussed for a number of years now where probably about five or six years ago and video was talking about the introduction of multi-chip modules as an approach for gpu manufacturing amd of course talking about chiplets taking terminology from its ryzen advancements in architecture and this is something where moving away to the extent possible from large monolithic silicon is a more sustainable approach to manufacturing because it's a lot cheaper to make smaller dies and the yields increase which also helps with the cost and cost control it's not always possible depending on what they're working on what the chip is going to be used for but multi-chip modules or chiplet approaches will become more common included in gpus as we move forward in the context of the patent filing the new amd patent expands on a previous patent that amd filed regarding gpu chiplets and one of the key differences is an active bridge versus a passive bridge in the patent the bridge is the means in which the gpu chiplets are interconnected and coupled to resources such as l3 or another form of cache amd's first gpu chiplet patent called for a passive bridge to connect to the gpu chiplets and that was back in january back then and he described it like this quote the gpu chiplet array includes the first gpu chiplet communicably coupled to the cpu via a bus and a second gpu chiplet communicably coupled to the first gpu chiplet via a passive crosslink the passive cross link is a passive interposer die dedicated for interchiplet communications and partitions system-on-chip or soc functionality into smaller functional chiplet groupings in some way if you visualize this sort of as the infinity fabric language that amd uses right now it starts to make a bit more sense it's really not too hard to follow once you break down the language to the base elements which is that multiple chiplets will be connected to each other and then one chiplet somewhere will speak to whatever it needs to speak to in this case the cpu at some level amd has refined its approach with the second patent and amd's first patent again it talks about a passive interposer based bridge whereas now it's proposing an active silicon based bridge the actual pull quote from the document doesn't change too much from the original filing but there's one key difference and it's where amd talks about coupling the gpu chiplet to the cpu via a boss and here's the change it says a second gpu chiplet communicably coupled to the first gpu chiplet via an active bridge chiplet the active bridge chiplet is an active silicon die that bridges gpu chiplets and allows partitioning of systems on chip or soc functionality into smaller functional chiplet groupings other aspects remain the same such as connecting all chiplets to an l3 cache that is cache coherent and unified across all gpu triplets it seems that the l3 cache is actually located on the active bridge itself from what we understand right now and seemingly functions similar to that of amd's infinity catch and these patents mention a communications bus and that's likely some iteration of amd's existing interconnect another key aspect is how the active bridge approach would mimic a monolithic gpu die which would have certain benefits from a developer or a programmer standpoint quote accordingly as discussed here in an active bridge chiplet deploys monolithic gpu functionality using a set of interconnected gpu chiplets in a manner that makes the gpu chiplet implementation appear as a traditional monolithic gpu from a programmer model or developer perspective in other words you wouldn't really have to change how you do things as a programmer and that's important to make sure there's adoption further quoted from amd the scalable data fabric of one gpu chiplet is able to access the lower level cash on the active bridge shiplet in nearly the same time as to access the lower level cash on its same chiplet and thus allows gpu chiplets to maintain cash coherency without requiring additional inter-chiplet coherency protocols this low latency inert template cache coherency in turn enables the chiplet-based system to operate as a monolithic gpu from again the software perspective now this whole section of that filing is more or less saying that you're not going to have to do special things as a programmer in order to leverage the gpu so it can be interfaced with via code in the same ways mostly that would be used currently with a monolithic gpu again that's really important to make sure any of this stuff actually goes anywhere because if you don't have software side support unless there's a massive market takeover then it just sort of sits there and spins its wheels so that's where amd is with the patents also in amd news we've more or less just confirmed the amd x570 passive chipset uh rumors that were going around this week not really a a big thing this is from what we understand been a slow and and silent rollout from amd but the x570 chipset has a new piece of silicon physically different silicon from what we understand right now not just a firmware update that allows the x570 chipset to run passively without any form of active cooling and this is something that was at least this week spotted in uh some of the eec filings by gigabyte for x570 s motherboards the suffix there that s isn't necessarily amd's naming gigabyte is a big fan of tagging letters onto chipsets to just demonstrate that it's a refresh that might be what this is either way though it does from what we've heard from board partners sound like there are two versions of the x570 chipset and one of them is the passive one some of the discussion was getting a little carried away and started talking about zen 3 refreshes we're not really sure about the legitimacy of those rumors right now we weren't able to dig anything up to validate them so for now we'll mark that as maybe a bit of a stretch and otherwise we'll keep an eye out for additional changes up next intel ceo pat gelsinger and the us government talking about chip shortages so there's a continued semiconductor shortage that's been gaining an increasing amount of attention from governments around the world the u.s government included for this week's story previously the white house signed an executive order meant to address the silicon shortage by proposing a review of the supply chain for key semiconductors the executive order was preceded by a letter penned by multiple silicon designers including intel nvidia and amd among others all calling for an expansion to us-based semiconductor manufacturing additionally the white house recently called for a 50 billion dollar fund to bolster the semiconductor industry with funds earmarked for manufacturing incentives research and design as well as creating a new national semiconductor technology center of course for semiconductor manufacturers to use any of their record profits to build their own fabrication facilities is unheard of and we wouldn't want to take our profits and build fabs with them so this is the direction that it looks like things are going right now on april 12th the u.s government will be hosting a summit specifically to talk about the global semiconductor shortage uh in the past couple weeks we reported on the eu having its own talks about bringing some more fabrication facilities online in europe and this april 12 discussion will feature samsung general motors and global foundries actually alongside intel ceo pat gelsinger who recently took over for intel and has been making some changes that for intel look like they are going in the right direction in addition to the automakers and the chip manufacturers the uh us government will have some people present so national security advisor and national economic council directors will be present and we'll be discussing the shortage and how it's impacted the multiple industries that are attached to them semiconductor manufacturing at this point has become an interesting political football certainly not something we were really expecting to see from our point of view in the industry but nonetheless it's important at this point and there aren't that many companies that are capable of manufacturing semiconductors at least not ones that are truly leading in technology we mostly have two manufacturers in the space there's tsmc which is nearly the market cap of intel amd and nvidia combined at this point and there's samsung of course there are others like sk hynix or micron but those aren't nearly as big as tsmc or samsung in this in this capacity increasing capacity at boundaries or the ability to produce more silicon wafers or chips is measured in months to years not in days or weeks there's no quick way to flip a switch and bring more fabs online and there's no amount of sitting around a table that's going to speed up the process so to provide a bit of realism here although it's good news that governments are interested in silicon manufacturing and stabilizing the supply chain we don't want people to think that there's going to be any immediate uptick in the supply or availability of components as a result of government interest it will take a very long time for any of the changes that are being made right now to materialize again talking months to years months at best depending on if the changes are in existing fabs as opposed to constructing wholly new ones up next epic games and the loot box settlement deadlines so not long ago epic games settled its class action lawsuit regarding randomized loot boxes but there's some deadlines looming if you want to either opt out or claim rewards for this which is why we're bringing it up now there's a 26.5 million dollar settlement that will see epic games hand out tens of millions of dollars worth of in-game credits for each of the affected games for fortnight that'd be v bucks or for a rocket league it'd be rocket league credit in fact epic started depositing these credits to accounts not long after the settlement was approved the 26.5 million set aside to settle claims for additional compensation was also up for discussion in recent coverage so for valid claims epic will be paying out an additional fifty dollars in cash or up to thirteen thousand five hundred v bucks or thirteen thousand rocket league credits while this news is a few weeks old at this point we bring it up because again several deadlines are looming april 12th 2021 marks the deadline to object or exclude yourself from the settlement altogether april 26th is the current deadline to file a claim while the final approval and the hearing takes place on may 6 2021. amd's rx 6800 xt midnight black edition gpu in the news as well so this was a special uh what amd called midnight black version of its rx 6800 xc reference video card the special edition is relatively unnoteworthy stands the fact that it took zero seconds to both appear on the internet and disappear the card is mostly all black as the and the standard rx 6800 xt removing some of the silver elements that were mixed in originally and according to amd it was created in response to community feedback and popular demand the card was also released as first dibs for amd's red team community members as those members received advanced notice of the card's arrival based on community feedback and popular demand we've created a select quantity of amd radeon rx 6800 xt midnight black graphics cards featuring the same performance as the widely popular rx-6800xt this is an exclusive advance notice to members of red team community and this offer has limited availability and we're not sure yet if andy's planning to do another run of these but certainly it was popular enough where they might be incentivized too and finally intel accidentally uses a competitor's product in one of its advertisements can't get a break at intel intel's marketing team is out in force promoting uh what they're calling the world's best processor on a thin and light notebook if you have spent any amount of time with ads enabled banner ads enabled on websites you've probably seen some intel ads at this point especially common on facebook right now where intel is getting aggressive targeting apple and its m1 computers in a fashion which is starting to look a little bit defensive from intel since they're so so specifically targeting uh the new apple components so the latest advertisement from intel is talking about its tiger lake i7 1185 g7 however there is a problem other than the name and it's that they're showing a macbook pro not not the processor whose name shouldn't be named again to be fair macbooks have used intel's chips in the past sure but apple also famously ditched intel for its own line of arm-based apple silicon m-series processors last year that said there's no way the macbook pro in the picture is using one of intel's latest x86 mobile chips intel is using a stock image from getty images and while we could probably have an entirely different discussion on 250 billion dollar companies using stock images there is another problem aside from that which is again that the machine in the photo is a mac so if you give it more than a cursory glance you'll notice a few things like the touch bar and the magic mouse furthermore visiting getty images shows the same quote millennial man playing computer game on laptop at home end quote at several different angles and further confirms the macbook pro this blunder probably wouldn't be as funny had intel not recently gone on its anti-mac and anti-m1 campaign as well as using its own questionable first-party benchmarks to try and cast the m1 in a less than favorable light but nonetheless seeing millennial man playing computer game on laptop at home has certainly sold us on wanting one of these laptops that's it for hardware news this week thanks for watching as always you can go to store.camerasnexus.net if you'd like to pick up one of our three modmat options that are now available or patreon.com slash gamers nexus for some behind the scenes videos and check back next week for hardware news or other videos this week when we talk about uh millennial man stabbing motherboard with screwdriver or other giddy images stock photos that are available for intel to use in its next advertising campaign thanks for watching we'll see you all next time thehey everyone welcome back to another hardware news recap for the week in this one we have new modmaps really excited to talk about those we have a new large modmat that is in our anti-static modmat line we're calling it the volt we'll be talking about that today there's also news on a new amd gpu chiplet patent chiplet designs for gpus have been in talks for years at this point and video put out an mcm white paper many years ago talking about it but there's finally some progression towards an eventual chiplet approach for gpus also gpu is getting smuggled into hong kong via fishing boat because that's where we are now with shortages it was specifically a mining line of gpus from nvidia's new cmp line we talked about a potential amd zen 3 side channel exploit and a couple of other industry news and hardware release topics for the past week before that this video is brought to you by asus and the asus tough gaming b550 plus wi-fi motherboard ready for amd ryzen cpus the tough gaming b550 board comes in atx and micro atx variants with key features including a wi-fi 6 module 2.5 gigabit ethernet a fanless chipset heatsink for quiet operation and a focus on stability and up time learn more about the tough gaming b550 plus wi-fi motherboard at the link in the description below so first up we have some really big news that i'd like to spend a few minutes on hopefully that's okay we've spent the last year working on advancing our modmat manufacturing process and doing new designs and testing and quality assurance just sampling back and forth for the past year or so for this new design so this is called the gamer's nexus large modmat volt we have the original large modmat still for sale in the store it's just been restocked and the medium original mod mats are on the store as well so all three will be available at the same time we're not discontinuing any of them they'll exist simultaneously and many of you probably know that we've been out of stock for mod maps for about four months now this was an active decision by us we didn't even do back orders this time because we knew we had a new one coming out so we wanted to just put them all back up at the same time that way everyone could get the specific one that they wanted we've done a lot of cool testing for the modmat volt and it applies backwards to the others as well for example we did a bunch of destructive testing where we broke apart our own components that we're selling to really dissect them and quality assurance testing we did we've already blown through about half of the inventory of the new large modmat volt we still have a lot of inventory of the original large modmat it's the same high quality materials and technical processes as the new volts and then the medium modmat we have a decent amount of inventory as well although it's been selling fast but so far if you want the volt and you see this around when it goes up you should probably buy it because it will sell through pretty quickly we bought a huge amount of inventory it's it's stupid the amount we bought compared to previously because we had to literally knock down walls in our distributor's warehouse in order to accommodate the shipment of modmats so it was a lot of inventory but we're through about half of it of course they'll go up on backorder as soon as they sell through again so a couple behind-the-scenes notes on the modmap give you the background of it first if you missed the announcement video there is a brief announcement video on the channel that goes through all the details on it but the modmat is a pc building surface an anti-static work service that we introduced in 2017 this is our first revision of the large mod map where we've introduced a lot of new elements so it has two snaps now to accommodate left-handed users but also just so that you don't drag the uh the cable across the screws wherever you're tracking them on the left or the right side of the pad there's this grid of four i didn't explain in the announcement video but this grid of four squares over on the left side was andrew's idea for just sort of generic or miscellaneous screw tracking or component tracking put the stuff in the tray and then you can write down one two three four whatever on a piece of paper so you remember which one goes to which area of the thing that you're taking apart we now have an ethernet wiring diagram on the bottom left that's got 568a and 568b if you build your own ethernet cables but not commonly enough to memorize it we have the power pin outs for molex fans pcie and cpu eps 12 volt power there's actually a two scale memory pin out in the top left for ddr1 through four and we also have some quick reference material for inductors mosfets things of that nature and the reason we put that one on there specifically is because when last year when we were designing this this has been by the way in development for more about a year maybe a little more at this point but when we were designing this last year we i happened to be working on some water blocks at the time and i noticed that one of them in particular the instructions said to apply the one millimeter thermal pad to the inductors and to apply the two millimeter thermal pad to the mosfets but it never explained what those were that's not a problem for us but just kind of got me thinking there's there's a lot of people who are going to install water block for the first time not know which is which and sure you can look it up it's not a huge inconvenience but that right there helps and also frankly a lot of people probably won't look it up they're going to take a guess and if it's wrong that will matter quite a bit on a water block where you're talking about a one versus two millimeter thickness so we put those on there as reference materials just to continue sort of the educational approach of our products and the functional approach of them which we want to make stuff that's actually useful every day and high quality and will last a long time so that's what this is we have some other cool stuff on here too there's electrical cymbals in the top right the grid has been expanded to have two gpus on them so this is less if you're buying a new gpu and more of if you're maintaining one right now but if you're maintaining a card it makes it easier to track the back side versus the top side pcb screws so you don't have extras when you rebuild it but the behind the scenes stuff the mod mats are the most expensive product we make by a long shot and basically last year when we placed the order it takes the logistics are really slow right now globally and manufacturing's all backed up because the factories also make stuff like ppe for example so we're low on their priority list because of that but when we placed the order we basically blew out the bank account to get the order in because i need to pay for them before i get them and then we have to sell them to get the money back to order more of them so that's the cycle we've been in for years now but in spite of the rising materials and logistics cost we actually haven't increased the price the msrp of the product so the large modmat volt the new one that was described in the announcement video is the same price as the original and the same price that it's been for four years despite those increasing costs for us over time we're really happy with it the print quality is super vibrant really crisp design there's a lot of functional stuff on here and it's the densest print we've ever done in terms of information per square area so we think you'll like it too you can go to store.cameratexas.net if you want to buy one and thank you to everyone who has purchased one over the last four years because those purchases and the ones that are coming in over the last couple days for this which have been absolutely amazing it's i really honestly didn't think we would move through all the inventory this fast but this happens every time and it's just a matter of accumulating more money from the sales to order more to satisfy the man but all that support from all of you from the last four years who bought them is the reason we've been able to expand the team to for example that nzxt h1 fire hazard testing that was all done by patrick stone and that salary is basically paid for by modmats so and then things like the test equipment purchases where we've bought pressure testers that are really expensive we've purchased dummy heaters we've purchased uh surface flatness testers and we're working on a thermal chamber as one of our next major purchases those are probably in the 10 to 20 grand range depending on the level of climate control so that's all made possible by basically the mod mats and the last four years of sales and mod mats toolkits mousemats so thank you to everyone who's bought one and you can go to store.gamingtexas.net if you'd like to pick one up okay let's move on to the first story first up in the news amd this past week published a new white paper on its website detailing some potential security vulnerabilities regarding predictive store forwarding or psf which is a feature on zen 3 cpus and is something you can toggle off as well psf works by attempting to predict the dependency between a load and a store and then it speculatively executes instructions based on that prediction it's similar to some of the other cpu technologies that attempt to speed up execution we've seen this with speculative execution and branch prediction in the past quote in typical code psf provides a performance benefit by speculating on the load result and allowing later instructions to begin execution sooner than they otherwise would be able to most of the time the psf prediction is accurate however there are cases where the prediction may not be accurate and cause incorrect cpu speculation says amd and its white paper in the case of that inaccurate speculation that amd is describing the cpu is supposed to flush the incorrect results from the cpu pipeline amd illustrates a couple of different ways in which inaccurate predictions can occur as well as detailing some limitations regarding speculation on zen 3 cpus andy then goes on to outline what it believes are the primary securities concerns quote because psf speculation is limited to the current program context the impact of bad psf speculation is similar to that of speculative store bypass and they list spectre version 4 as an example of this in both cases security concerns arise if code exists that implements some kind of security control which can be bypassed when cpus speculate incorrectly this may occur if a program such as a web browser hosts a piece of untrusted code and the untrusted code is able to influence how the cpu speculates in other regions in a way that results in data leakage this is similar amd says to the security risk with other spectre type attacks furthermore andy warns that software that uses isolation or sandboxing might be vulnerable here all told amd believes that the amount of code that might actually be vulnerable to psf's security implications is low though andy does suggest disabling the feature if users are concerned or have a specific concern related to their use case while it was thought that disabling psf would carry a significant performance hit early testing done by pharonix finds that any performance penalty seems to be negligible in most cases for onyx found that workloads showed no more than a one to two percent performance difference with the psf feature disabled additionally amd has also made patches available to the linux kernel that allow psf to be disabled for the time being it seems this issue isn't as big of a concern as some of the early x86 speculative execution vulnerabilities that we've covered in the past and that's a good thing up next the gtx 1080 ti is dead well it it's been dead for quite a while now it hasn't been made for uh at least one full generation at this point but there were rumors over this past week that got a lot of people excited for a 1080 ti revival because specifically relating to an evga i think it was 1080ti fcw3 there was a story that the model sold it carried a newer serial number not a whole lot of detail to that but pretty easy to vet the story so we called evga and we asked dbga is it true is it true that one of the best gpus nvidia ever made and a mistake that nvidia will probably not make again in terms of selling something at such a good price for the performance is it true that this thing's coming back officially ebj's answer was quote the official answer is no it is not being remade the 1080 ti is no longer in production now uh unofficially when we asked evj's representative is the 1080 ti getting remade the answer was haha no so a little bit hurtful to those of us who might have wanted to see a 1080ti come back but it is not coming back sorry to shoot that one down but you can mark that rumor for the past week as false up next an interesting turn of fate for the work that customs agents do so tvb news in hong kong has reported that hong kong customs seized an illegal shipment of a number of things among those though gpus we're at that point at the point now we're smuggling operations are smuggling video cards and actually ram in here as well phones are not particularly new to be smuggled but those were also in the batch so in this shipment of items that hong kong customs and excise departments seized there was a cache of 300 unidentified video cards not a specific model or brand name attached to them at least right now there was some footage of the items that were seized in tbb news's report and we'll show some of that as we go through this story but it's mostly video cards that look to be lacking any sort of display outputs so we thought we spotted a couple in the top row that might have display outs but for those that are lacking display out that might be something in the nvidia cmp hx line or some other mining line of gpus where a display out is simply not needed and is often stripped to reduce the resale value of the mining gpu the smuggling run included other technology products with tvb primarily showing cell phones video cards and trays upon trays of ram we'd be open to shipping the hong kong customs department one of our new modmats so they can identify if it's ddr4 or ddr3 hong kong customs said that the phones the ram and the gpus all together were worth approximately 2 million hkd or just over 257 000 us dollars all the items were found on a fishing boat or a speedboat as we understand it we're assuming we're destined for ports in mainland china or in shenzhen and other illegal items included shark fins and other endangered sea life but the technology products got the bulk of the coverage we saw also that last month serial leaker at mobilemo underscore us on twitter spotted a paylet cmp 30 hx gpu one of nvidia's new mining gpus for sale for about 724 usd so gives you some sense of as if the audience doesn't already know but gives you some sense of the true value of scalping the fact though that it's gotten uh gps have found their ways into smuggling operations is surreal in in the bizarre sense not really something that we've ever seen in our specific niche of the industry again it's happening with phones but this is kind of a new thing for gpus so uh either way that's been seized and presumably the hong kong customs department will do something with the cards maybe they'll set up a mining operation who knows alternatively they could start competing with linus and do a verified actual gamer program to relinquish those cards back into the market next up an amd patent so amd is expanding on its patent that it filed back in january for a chiplet approach to gpus this has been something that's been discussed for a number of years now where probably about five or six years ago and video was talking about the introduction of multi-chip modules as an approach for gpu manufacturing amd of course talking about chiplets taking terminology from its ryzen advancements in architecture and this is something where moving away to the extent possible from large monolithic silicon is a more sustainable approach to manufacturing because it's a lot cheaper to make smaller dies and the yields increase which also helps with the cost and cost control it's not always possible depending on what they're working on what the chip is going to be used for but multi-chip modules or chiplet approaches will become more common included in gpus as we move forward in the context of the patent filing the new amd patent expands on a previous patent that amd filed regarding gpu chiplets and one of the key differences is an active bridge versus a passive bridge in the patent the bridge is the means in which the gpu chiplets are interconnected and coupled to resources such as l3 or another form of cache amd's first gpu chiplet patent called for a passive bridge to connect to the gpu chiplets and that was back in january back then and he described it like this quote the gpu chiplet array includes the first gpu chiplet communicably coupled to the cpu via a bus and a second gpu chiplet communicably coupled to the first gpu chiplet via a passive crosslink the passive cross link is a passive interposer die dedicated for interchiplet communications and partitions system-on-chip or soc functionality into smaller functional chiplet groupings in some way if you visualize this sort of as the infinity fabric language that amd uses right now it starts to make a bit more sense it's really not too hard to follow once you break down the language to the base elements which is that multiple chiplets will be connected to each other and then one chiplet somewhere will speak to whatever it needs to speak to in this case the cpu at some level amd has refined its approach with the second patent and amd's first patent again it talks about a passive interposer based bridge whereas now it's proposing an active silicon based bridge the actual pull quote from the document doesn't change too much from the original filing but there's one key difference and it's where amd talks about coupling the gpu chiplet to the cpu via a boss and here's the change it says a second gpu chiplet communicably coupled to the first gpu chiplet via an active bridge chiplet the active bridge chiplet is an active silicon die that bridges gpu chiplets and allows partitioning of systems on chip or soc functionality into smaller functional chiplet groupings other aspects remain the same such as connecting all chiplets to an l3 cache that is cache coherent and unified across all gpu triplets it seems that the l3 cache is actually located on the active bridge itself from what we understand right now and seemingly functions similar to that of amd's infinity catch and these patents mention a communications bus and that's likely some iteration of amd's existing interconnect another key aspect is how the active bridge approach would mimic a monolithic gpu die which would have certain benefits from a developer or a programmer standpoint quote accordingly as discussed here in an active bridge chiplet deploys monolithic gpu functionality using a set of interconnected gpu chiplets in a manner that makes the gpu chiplet implementation appear as a traditional monolithic gpu from a programmer model or developer perspective in other words you wouldn't really have to change how you do things as a programmer and that's important to make sure there's adoption further quoted from amd the scalable data fabric of one gpu chiplet is able to access the lower level cash on the active bridge shiplet in nearly the same time as to access the lower level cash on its same chiplet and thus allows gpu chiplets to maintain cash coherency without requiring additional inter-chiplet coherency protocols this low latency inert template cache coherency in turn enables the chiplet-based system to operate as a monolithic gpu from again the software perspective now this whole section of that filing is more or less saying that you're not going to have to do special things as a programmer in order to leverage the gpu so it can be interfaced with via code in the same ways mostly that would be used currently with a monolithic gpu again that's really important to make sure any of this stuff actually goes anywhere because if you don't have software side support unless there's a massive market takeover then it just sort of sits there and spins its wheels so that's where amd is with the patents also in amd news we've more or less just confirmed the amd x570 passive chipset uh rumors that were going around this week not really a a big thing this is from what we understand been a slow and and silent rollout from amd but the x570 chipset has a new piece of silicon physically different silicon from what we understand right now not just a firmware update that allows the x570 chipset to run passively without any form of active cooling and this is something that was at least this week spotted in uh some of the eec filings by gigabyte for x570 s motherboards the suffix there that s isn't necessarily amd's naming gigabyte is a big fan of tagging letters onto chipsets to just demonstrate that it's a refresh that might be what this is either way though it does from what we've heard from board partners sound like there are two versions of the x570 chipset and one of them is the passive one some of the discussion was getting a little carried away and started talking about zen 3 refreshes we're not really sure about the legitimacy of those rumors right now we weren't able to dig anything up to validate them so for now we'll mark that as maybe a bit of a stretch and otherwise we'll keep an eye out for additional changes up next intel ceo pat gelsinger and the us government talking about chip shortages so there's a continued semiconductor shortage that's been gaining an increasing amount of attention from governments around the world the u.s government included for this week's story previously the white house signed an executive order meant to address the silicon shortage by proposing a review of the supply chain for key semiconductors the executive order was preceded by a letter penned by multiple silicon designers including intel nvidia and amd among others all calling for an expansion to us-based semiconductor manufacturing additionally the white house recently called for a 50 billion dollar fund to bolster the semiconductor industry with funds earmarked for manufacturing incentives research and design as well as creating a new national semiconductor technology center of course for semiconductor manufacturers to use any of their record profits to build their own fabrication facilities is unheard of and we wouldn't want to take our profits and build fabs with them so this is the direction that it looks like things are going right now on april 12th the u.s government will be hosting a summit specifically to talk about the global semiconductor shortage uh in the past couple weeks we reported on the eu having its own talks about bringing some more fabrication facilities online in europe and this april 12 discussion will feature samsung general motors and global foundries actually alongside intel ceo pat gelsinger who recently took over for intel and has been making some changes that for intel look like they are going in the right direction in addition to the automakers and the chip manufacturers the uh us government will have some people present so national security advisor and national economic council directors will be present and we'll be discussing the shortage and how it's impacted the multiple industries that are attached to them semiconductor manufacturing at this point has become an interesting political football certainly not something we were really expecting to see from our point of view in the industry but nonetheless it's important at this point and there aren't that many companies that are capable of manufacturing semiconductors at least not ones that are truly leading in technology we mostly have two manufacturers in the space there's tsmc which is nearly the market cap of intel amd and nvidia combined at this point and there's samsung of course there are others like sk hynix or micron but those aren't nearly as big as tsmc or samsung in this in this capacity increasing capacity at boundaries or the ability to produce more silicon wafers or chips is measured in months to years not in days or weeks there's no quick way to flip a switch and bring more fabs online and there's no amount of sitting around a table that's going to speed up the process so to provide a bit of realism here although it's good news that governments are interested in silicon manufacturing and stabilizing the supply chain we don't want people to think that there's going to be any immediate uptick in the supply or availability of components as a result of government interest it will take a very long time for any of the changes that are being made right now to materialize again talking months to years months at best depending on if the changes are in existing fabs as opposed to constructing wholly new ones up next epic games and the loot box settlement deadlines so not long ago epic games settled its class action lawsuit regarding randomized loot boxes but there's some deadlines looming if you want to either opt out or claim rewards for this which is why we're bringing it up now there's a 26.5 million dollar settlement that will see epic games hand out tens of millions of dollars worth of in-game credits for each of the affected games for fortnight that'd be v bucks or for a rocket league it'd be rocket league credit in fact epic started depositing these credits to accounts not long after the settlement was approved the 26.5 million set aside to settle claims for additional compensation was also up for discussion in recent coverage so for valid claims epic will be paying out an additional fifty dollars in cash or up to thirteen thousand five hundred v bucks or thirteen thousand rocket league credits while this news is a few weeks old at this point we bring it up because again several deadlines are looming april 12th 2021 marks the deadline to object or exclude yourself from the settlement altogether april 26th is the current deadline to file a claim while the final approval and the hearing takes place on may 6 2021. amd's rx 6800 xt midnight black edition gpu in the news as well so this was a special uh what amd called midnight black version of its rx 6800 xc reference video card the special edition is relatively unnoteworthy stands the fact that it took zero seconds to both appear on the internet and disappear the card is mostly all black as the and the standard rx 6800 xt removing some of the silver elements that were mixed in originally and according to amd it was created in response to community feedback and popular demand the card was also released as first dibs for amd's red team community members as those members received advanced notice of the card's arrival based on community feedback and popular demand we've created a select quantity of amd radeon rx 6800 xt midnight black graphics cards featuring the same performance as the widely popular rx-6800xt this is an exclusive advance notice to members of red team community and this offer has limited availability and we're not sure yet if andy's planning to do another run of these but certainly it was popular enough where they might be incentivized too and finally intel accidentally uses a competitor's product in one of its advertisements can't get a break at intel intel's marketing team is out in force promoting uh what they're calling the world's best processor on a thin and light notebook if you have spent any amount of time with ads enabled banner ads enabled on websites you've probably seen some intel ads at this point especially common on facebook right now where intel is getting aggressive targeting apple and its m1 computers in a fashion which is starting to look a little bit defensive from intel since they're so so specifically targeting uh the new apple components so the latest advertisement from intel is talking about its tiger lake i7 1185 g7 however there is a problem other than the name and it's that they're showing a macbook pro not not the processor whose name shouldn't be named again to be fair macbooks have used intel's chips in the past sure but apple also famously ditched intel for its own line of arm-based apple silicon m-series processors last year that said there's no way the macbook pro in the picture is using one of intel's latest x86 mobile chips intel is using a stock image from getty images and while we could probably have an entirely different discussion on 250 billion dollar companies using stock images there is another problem aside from that which is again that the machine in the photo is a mac so if you give it more than a cursory glance you'll notice a few things like the touch bar and the magic mouse furthermore visiting getty images shows the same quote millennial man playing computer game on laptop at home end quote at several different angles and further confirms the macbook pro this blunder probably wouldn't be as funny had intel not recently gone on its anti-mac and anti-m1 campaign as well as using its own questionable first-party benchmarks to try and cast the m1 in a less than favorable light but nonetheless seeing millennial man playing computer game on laptop at home has certainly sold us on wanting one of these laptops that's it for hardware news this week thanks for watching as always you can go to store.camerasnexus.net if you'd like to pick up one of our three modmat options that are now available or patreon.com slash gamers nexus for some behind the scenes videos and check back next week for hardware news or other videos this week when we talk about uh millennial man stabbing motherboard with screwdriver or other giddy images stock photos that are available for intel to use in its next advertising campaign thanks for watching we'll see you all next time the\n"