The World of Gaming and PC Hardware: The Latest News and Developments

One of the latest developments in the world of gaming and PC hardware is the release of ASRock's Blazing Quad motherboard, which features a unique design that allows for a more compact build. According to the manufacturer, this new design "sort of" connects the GPU to the motherboard directly, but instead rises it off the board, which could be useful for certain applications.

However, one thing to note is that official support for this specific design is limited due to the fact that ASRock doesn't have a lot of boards with PCIe5 slots at this point. Most of the boards listed only show the card as being able to work fully in the first PCIe slot, which is where you would normally install a graphics card. For those looking for a more advanced build, they may need to consider other options.

On the other hand, there are some exciting developments in the world of external GPUs (eGPUs). One such example is the rumored Gigabyte RTS 4090 box, an external GPU enclosure that promises to bring high-performance gaming capabilities to users. This box is water-cooled and features a dedicated power supply for the powerful NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 GPU.

One of the standout features of this eGPU box is its ability to provide a dedicated power supply for the GPU, eliminating the need for an additional power supply unit (PSU) in laptops or other devices. This feature is sure to be music to the ears of gamers who have had to deal with the hassle and expense of carrying around a separate PSU.

The eGPU box also features most of its I/O on the back of the device, where it connects via Thunderbolt 3/4 ports along with two USB Type-A ports and an Ethernet port. This allows for easy connectivity to laptops or other devices, and provides network access to the host PC if needed. While Thunderbolt 3 and 4 are limited to a maximum bandwidth of 40 gigabits per second, this is only slightly better than PCIe 3.0 by 4.

It's worth noting that Thunderbolt 5 is expected to double this bandwidth to 80 gigabits per second in the future, which could be a major game-changer for eGPUs and other applications that rely on high-speed connectivity. For now, however, users will have to make do with the current limitations of Thunderbolt 3/4.

The idea behind external GPUs like this eGPU box is to provide users with the ability to access powerful gaming capabilities without having to carry around a separate GPU or PSU. This makes it an attractive option for gamers who spend a lot of time on their laptops or in other situations where they need high-performance graphics processing.

Microsoft and Nvidia have also recently announced a 10-year deal to offer Xbox PC games via NVIDIA's GeForce Now cloud-based service. This partnership delivers increased choice to gamers and resolves concerns about Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

As part of this deal, users who already own Xbox PC games through the Windows Store or Steam can stream those games via GeForce Now, but publishers must actively choose to grant NVIDIA streaming rights to that game. This means that not all games will be available on GeForce Now, but it promises to bring a wider range of titles to the service.

NVIDIA has also used this opportunity to pitch its support for Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, stating that the partnership delivers increased choice to gamers and resolves concerns with the acquisition. This is likely aimed at reassuring regulators and other stakeholders who may be concerned about the impact of this deal on the gaming industry.

While NVIDIA is often seen as a competitor to Microsoft in the cloud gaming space, it's possible that the market may not be big enough for them to really care about competing directly with each other just yet. Instead, they're looking at the larger trend and how it could benefit all parties involved. Only time will tell if this partnership leads to greater competition or cooperation between these two industry giants.

In conclusion, there are many exciting developments in the world of gaming and PC hardware that are sure to interest gamers and enthusiasts alike. From innovative motherboard designs like ASRock's Blazing Quad to powerful eGPUs like the rumored Gigabyte RTS 4090 box, there's always something new and interesting on the horizon.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everyone welcome back to the Harvard news recap of the week and this one we'll be talking about the Asus corrosion issues in one of its what are called motherboards it's a story that features EK as well we'll also be going over amd's plans for 3D stacked dram not just V cash so instead of just SRAM they're looking at moving other memory to the CPU as well really interesting topic Super Future looking as they don't have a product with it yet but it is the direction that they want to go with Enterprise and data center initially and then probably the consumer eventually additionally we have news of a gigabyte RTX 4090 box it has its own power supply so now you can get a separate basically computer for your 4090 to live in and then you plug it into your other computer uh it's it's an egpu these have been around a long time but this one's kind of interesting and then finally a bunch of Xbox Live games coming to PC via GeForce now in an odd partnership between Microsoft and Nvidia let's get started before that this video is brought to you by Leon Lee's 11d Evo case the o11d Evo is a mid tower that tested well previously with us and is most interesting for attention to find details and its unique features one of those is the easy to use invertible layout the 11d Evo inversion process is the easiest we've ever worked with on a Case allowing it to flip entirely for a unique upside down build or work as a standard layout the 11d Evo has two Chambers for the system and the power supply support for up to nine storage drives and edge to edge glass for a showcase while still offering excellent airflow through side and bottom intakes learn more at the link in the description below up first we're going to be talking about the corrosion issue if you haven't seen it there were a number of posts on Reddit these date back four months but it got more spread recently as more people were finally starting to develop some issues in their motherboard water blocks and this is related to an Asus vrm block corrosion problem where the Rog Maximus z690 formula motherboard word uses an included EK cross chill 3 via a motor block and pairing the two causes galvanic corrosion for the time being Asus is offering either a full refund or replacement to customers who reach out as they stated in their public blog post but asus's public reaction kind of left a lot unexplained and so we did a little bit more digging on it so the things we do know officially Asus itself says that the vrm uses a new electro-less nickel plating process so rather than doing a standard nickel plating what they're instead doing is a purely chemical process so no electricity involved if you're curious how any of this works we have factory tours of factories that do electroplating and you can check that out on the channel but this is a chemical process and the problem with this is that the nickel plating is played in aluminum and not copper probably the rest of the loop is copper and inside the vrm block there are also copper component friends so this means that metals are at risk of being mixed if the nickel plating is imperfect or if there's a problem with the electrolyte process in some way that's where this this issue is coming from and running just as a reminder anyone doesn't know running an AIO you don't run into this problem because with aios you have typically aluminum radiators and you have copper microfins and cold plates in the block the pump block housing the reason it doesn't happen there you don't get this level of corrosion typically unless you're enter Max or MSI sort of Arctic but they fixed that anyway the reason you typically don't get corrosion in aios is because they're using a propylene glycol mixture where the standard distribution is about 20 propylene glycol to the remainder being basically distilled water anyway looking around at images online from users you'll see that the vrm bridge that's the name of the component from Ek will corrode with time as a result of the mixture of aluminum plating and copper cooling components that are part of the bridge the bridge itself is again EK branded as a product but it's Asus that's driving all of this and even though it's basically asus's fault from everything we're seeing from our opinion uh EK is the one that's making the most public effort to reach customers and they're not even ek's customers they're Asus as customers and Asus dragged its feet and reacting to this issue or um offering a solution which it is now sort of doing but once again EK is going through the extra effort of emailing people who bought the vrm bridge so that they know they're reaching them rather than just we'll just post it on the Asus website that absolutely no one ever checks unless they need drivers and hope that people who bought this thing see it so uh anyway and and just to answer the obvious question here of well how would they reach customers if it's sold through retailer typically what you'll do is contact the distributors or suppliers and try to get a message out to customers Amazon has built-in feature for that um Newegg has has done stuff like that in the past as well anyway so EK has raised some attention to the matter we noticed interestingly that the EK water blocks logo on the Asus block isn't even the most current one which made us kind of curious and wonder if the company even had a real level of involvement because certainly EK wouldn't volunteer to put an old trademark on a new product but when we talked to EK they were a little cagey about answering so our speculation here is that there are contracts in place that may benefit Asus more than EK in this partnership and that would explain why EK is the one that's trying the hardest to get word out about the problem now normally ek's products that use aluminum will very clearly State as much so they do a pretty good job like with the fluid gaming line of saying don't mix this with our copper stuff it'll be a bad time and we're probably not going to help you if it's your own fault and we marked everything clearly this one doesn't have that marking though so it's strange that there wasn't any warning here and once again we come back to well it's an Asus product probably Asus is conducting the train I was gonna say driving and then I was gonna mime driving I was like that probably doesn't I don't think the touch trains work so they're the ones conducting the train for the motherboard here uh and the whole thing's just kind of odd but the story is not new as far back as four months ago users on the water cooling subreddit we're beginning to report the issue neither Asus nor EK made a public statement until a more recent post to the same subreddit which is what spur DK into action ek's email statement to customers noted that both companies are aware of the issue they say that Asus is preparing a new vrm heatsink for the board and users of the z690 formula should reach out to Asus for support for more information on when updated parts of will be ready EK also noted that it will help its own customers with the damage block due to incompatibility now unfortunately customers Also may have combined asus's kit with non-ek Brands water cooling and in those instances since the other brands have nothing to do with the aces products at all you're gonna have to go talk to Asus to get to get some kind of compensation or something for potentially ruining your other components that are in the loop because you thought the loop would work with them because Asus did not properly Mark that it could be a mixed Metal's concern so that's the update on all that the story's closed out in the sense that we know it's it is in fact a problem it's confirmed Ace has confirmed it they have refund and replacement options in place EK has replacement refund options in place or at least replacement for uh for new kit and that's kind of the start in the end of it but if you've been asking about it there's your answer AMD FSR this one's pretty interesting too so amd's released version 2.2 of its FSR upscaler Fidelity FX super resolution we've tested FSR in the past but what they're doing now is a little bit different in that they have released uh to the general public some of the source code for FSR functionality and this is through the GPU open project according to AMD the 2.2 release contains a specific Improvement for what it calls High Velocity ghosting artifacts it says that these are common in racing games for example you'd see this in situations where the player's car is basically stationary relative to the screen but the scenery and other objects move at a high speed this has resulted in ghosting artifacts in the past but FSR 2.2 is supposed to fix that and it's already in Need for Speed Unbound and Forza Horizon 5. Andy's GPU open post for the release has a few side-by-side screenshots with sliders that'll allow you to see the difference between no f FSR and FSR 2.2 quality mode and amd's own YouTube video for episode 2.2 shows gameplay for Horizon 5 with a side-by-side comparison of no FSR versus FSR 2.2 the high velocity ghost in mentioned isn't present here which is the main point of the update we tried to find an example in any of these previous FSR 2.1 comparison video but the example game Farming Simulator 2022 moves uh a lot slower as you might notice in the footage personally I'm looking to Farming Simulator 2022's sequel right to repair your tractor simulator voiced over by none other than Louis Rossman so I actually really want that game now so Louis if you're watching please reach out to the Farming Simulator people and do some voice over there are other improvements noted in amd's post as well like improve temporal stability for Less flickering on some of the objects this release of the latest version of FSR is open source means that you'll see these improvements in a wider range of games in the near future not just the handful of games where AMD collaborated directly and notably AMD will also be releasing an FSR 2.2 plug-in for Unreal Engine for direct integration for the many developers who just use Unreal Engine up next nvidia's poster child game lacks Nvidia features but also there's some updates where they have the LSS added to more things so we're going to come back to the headline for this one in a second the quick recap of the newest news so with amd's FSR announcements Nvidia also has something to say it has spread into posting it Nvidia announced that it has added dlss or deep learn to Super sample into seven additional games and a noted presence of reflex and six additional games so the games for dlss that were added include atomic heart which we're going to come back to because uh I have a bone to pick with with that one with Nvidia specifically but that has dlss3 blood Bowl 3 has dlss all the rest of these are are not DLS S3 hello neighbor 2 has dlss and Ray tracing Hi-Fi Rush dlss2 playing outside two which uh okay I guess we can put the LSS on that that has it now return all his DLS S2 enabled sons of the forest and then wanted dead now coming back to atomic heart this is the one that we have a bit of a bone to pick with because atomic's heart launch which is coming out basically now depending on when this video goes up that gate reminds us of when Nvidia first announced RTX Hardware so the RTX 20 series we were at their uh announcement event at Gamescom it was 2018 and when they launched the product there were no RTX games it was something like 55 days at one point we had like a board in the background that was like days without RTX basically days without incident board and I was as high as 50 something at that point so uh they they skipped on the the initial support for the namesake of the new product and they had this new thing where you couldn't use the technology that it was being advertised against atomic heart was part of that so in 2018 atomic heart was used as a they're going to definitely include Ray tracing in this title and then they told us again somewhere around 2020 or so uh as the 30 series neared and then they brought it back again in about 2022 or they were basically like hey you remember atomic heart that we talked about five years ago well if you bought your 20 series card on the back of that announcement an advertisement uh you can finally play this game with your five-year-old video card that was advertised as being like part of this game's launch that game is finally here but the uh atomic heart launch actually does not have Ray tracing that's the best part it's not just that they're five years late the developers said it's not like Nvidia is making the game but they did choose to advertise it as this is why you should buy a 2080. five years from now uh but the game doesn't even have Ray tracings that's really the downside here anyway um the choice to push it that hard and then just it doesn't even have the feature it just it makes the whole 2018 situation look even worse back when there were no games coming out with the feature that it was named after so moving on Nvidia also has some reflex updates so they're adding reflex to six additional games reflex reduces total end down system latency and playing a game uh we tested it in the past it actually does work and it works pretty well so it's a good technology they've added to six things and those are World of Warcraft which Nvidia reminds us is available now uh and for the last 20 years Deliver Us Mars Dying Light Tuesday human Hi-Fi Raj Hitman and Parish up next AMD took the stage at isscc or the international solid state circuits conference which is actually the front runner for best conference named definitely by an engineer Awards the presentation for AMD was over an hour long there's a lot of General back background information if you've kept up with them then you don't need to see most of it but the most interesting segment was future looking and it was new information so although the new technology from AMD is Enterprise focused it's not consumer focused it doesn't come down to what we're all doing yet AMD does have a pretty good track record for its B2B Technologies coming into the consumer market so this one is related to dram stacking where they pose a couple of ideas one of them is and it's important to know these are ideas they're theories but they talk about an option of having dram on top of the interposer so you would have an interposer with the CPU the compute dye potentially HP and things like that all together or they have another idea of packaging dram vertically on top of the hbm modules that are adjacent to the compute modules in in a packaged CPU solution basically AMD is currently working with Samsung to research ondi dram and the company stated this quote what we've demonstrated so far is SRAM stacking on a compute dot there's been a lot of discussion put in processing and memory as a processor person Dr Lisa Sue said that seems a little counter-intuitive but it makes a lot of sense if you think about it from a system standpoint there may be be some processing operations that can be inserted into the memory because with some insertions of algorithms in the memory component you can reduce the overall Access Energy by up to 85 percent now the slides in its presentation suggested a new approach to processing in memory where some kernels would be capable of being executed within memory amd's block diagram of a theoretical CPU again illustrates The Atrium module on the package and flanking the CPU something that it's already doing in the server space but with that additional dram banked stacked on top of the HBO module another image illustrates memory layers stacked on top of compute layers or an alternative of memory layers stacked on top of an inner poser that houses both the compute thighs and the memory and they made an interesting point in its presentation about the direction of processors it said quote the package is sort of the new motherboard you used to take all these pieces from different vendors and put them on a board now what we have to do is ensure that there's a way to put these pieces in a package and the also noted that it wants to standardize chip to chip interfaces so going forward they can maximize performance and multiple vendors can work together instead of redeveloping proprietary interfaces repeatedly over next to azrock has a new blazing quad m.2 card so ASRock is releasing an updated version of a quad m.2 Riser basically they call it blazing quad m.2 card it's very literal if you're not keyed into ASRock marketing speak we did some research and blazing actually has a meaning they've actually mapped it to a real technology that exists and renamed it blazing means pcie Gen 5 m.2 slots whereas a hyper also as rock terminology means pcie Gen 4 and Ultra means pcie gen 3. asrock's made a couple of these cards in the past and they're all fundamentally the same the card reroutes the pcie connections from a full by 16 slot on the motherboard to four m.2 connections on the Riser this probably means that the motherboard needs to support pcie bifurcation to allow one slot to address multiple devices like this but we aren't totally sure about that since we don't have one of these in hand pcie5 ssds can put off a lot of heat that's evident I mean if you look at the gigabyte SSD we talked about last week it had a massive heatsink and in this instance the heatsink has real fins and dual fans that are powered by a motherboard header this is a step up from the previous versions of the card which only had a thin metal shroud to sink heat and a fan with dubious placement now this type of card it doesn't give you hard Hardware raid capabilities you could still set up a raid with this but you would be setting up a software raid for Hardware radio need to buy something else so it's sort of the same as if they were connected all to the motherboard directly in a sense just it rises it off the board which could be useful for certain things now the official support list for blazing quad is pretty short due to the fact that ASRock doesn't have a lot of boards with pcie5 slots at this point in fact most of the boards listed only show the card as being able to work fully in the first pcie slot which is where you would normally install a graphics card and now video cards with the Z has new pictures of a rumored gigabyte RTS 4090 box uh this gaming box it's water cooled like the previous version which was a 30 series gaming box it's an external GPU enclosure and for those of you who were happily memeing about needing a dedicated power supply just for your video card Your Meme has been fulfilled it is now a reality there's a dedicated power supply for the 40 90 in the Box most of the i o is on the back of the box where the display out ports sit along with two USB type A ports and an ethernet port and that can provide network access to the host PC if you're wondering why there's an ethernet port this could be useful for say a laptop that might not have its own ethernet the Box connects via Thunderbolt as is usually the case for external enclosures like this and it's the source of the main Achilles heel for external gpus both Thunderbolt 3 and 4 are limited to a maximum bandwidth of 40 gigabits per second this is only slightly better than pcie 3.0 by 4 and that limitation will hurt the performance Thunderbolt 5 should double this to 80 gigabits per second in the future but it's not here yet the idea for external gpus like this is you connect it to a laptop almost like a docking station to have big GPU power while at the desk and then you'd be able to use the same PC somewhere else without the GPU it's always been a cool idea especially as people who travel a lot we could see a potential use for that for us the challenge normally becomes Logistics which is you don't want to check your expensive GPU uh but carrying it on is kind of problematic for other reasons but uh there's there's potential for external gpus depending on what it is you do like if you have two locations you spend a lot of time in maybe it makes sense to just have a laptop and have a docking station at your work site or your home site or whatever all right last one Microsoft and Nvidia have struck a 10-year deal to offer Xbox PC games kind of oxymoronic as it sounds on nvidia's GeForce now gaming service which is their cloud-based service so for this this includes games such as Halo Minecraft which is already a PC game but okay and if Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard is successful Call of Duty and uh no we're not sure what year it is anymore either it's like we're perpetually stuck in 2009 Microsoft Microsoft Minecraft Halo Call of Duty we've done it all we need at this point is StarCraft 2 and then some Dead game memes and it'll be complete we've we've we've created the summoning Circle for a decade ago now in addition to first party or obvious titles like these Xbox PC games that users already own via the Windows store steam or epic game store can also be streamed via GeForce now however the publisher has to actively choose to Grant Nvidia streaming rights to that game so it doesn't as Jensen Juan says just work Nvidia also took this opportunity to pitch its support for Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard saying quote the partnership delivers increased choice to Gamers and okay and resolves on videos concerns with Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard Nvidia is therefore offering its full support for regulatory approval of the acquisition Nvidia frequently known as the company that is concerned about choice for gamers in its recent series of announcements known as paid nine hundred dollars or go yourself uh also the company that tried to buy arm and then was shot down after all the posturing about how it would definitely be allowed to buy arm and concerning every other company in the entire industry so anyway Microsoft's trying hard to Ward away government and Industry pressure against the Activision Blizzard uh and and Microsoft deal and in some regards GeForce now is almost it's a competitor to Microsoft's Xbox cloud gaming service but maybe this Market is not big enough yet for them to really care about that and they're looking at it more from a perspective of a rising tide since raises all boats but it could sink them too I guess anyway that's it for this one thanks for watching as always subscribe for more go to store.gamers access.net or patreon.com Gamers and access to help us out directly if you like this reporting and we'll see you all next timehey everyone welcome back to the Harvard news recap of the week and this one we'll be talking about the Asus corrosion issues in one of its what are called motherboards it's a story that features EK as well we'll also be going over amd's plans for 3D stacked dram not just V cash so instead of just SRAM they're looking at moving other memory to the CPU as well really interesting topic Super Future looking as they don't have a product with it yet but it is the direction that they want to go with Enterprise and data center initially and then probably the consumer eventually additionally we have news of a gigabyte RTX 4090 box it has its own power supply so now you can get a separate basically computer for your 4090 to live in and then you plug it into your other computer uh it's it's an egpu these have been around a long time but this one's kind of interesting and then finally a bunch of Xbox Live games coming to PC via GeForce now in an odd partnership between Microsoft and Nvidia let's get started before that this video is brought to you by Leon Lee's 11d Evo case the o11d Evo is a mid tower that tested well previously with us and is most interesting for attention to find details and its unique features one of those is the easy to use invertible layout the 11d Evo inversion process is the easiest we've ever worked with on a Case allowing it to flip entirely for a unique upside down build or work as a standard layout the 11d Evo has two Chambers for the system and the power supply support for up to nine storage drives and edge to edge glass for a showcase while still offering excellent airflow through side and bottom intakes learn more at the link in the description below up first we're going to be talking about the corrosion issue if you haven't seen it there were a number of posts on Reddit these date back four months but it got more spread recently as more people were finally starting to develop some issues in their motherboard water blocks and this is related to an Asus vrm block corrosion problem where the Rog Maximus z690 formula motherboard word uses an included EK cross chill 3 via a motor block and pairing the two causes galvanic corrosion for the time being Asus is offering either a full refund or replacement to customers who reach out as they stated in their public blog post but asus's public reaction kind of left a lot unexplained and so we did a little bit more digging on it so the things we do know officially Asus itself says that the vrm uses a new electro-less nickel plating process so rather than doing a standard nickel plating what they're instead doing is a purely chemical process so no electricity involved if you're curious how any of this works we have factory tours of factories that do electroplating and you can check that out on the channel but this is a chemical process and the problem with this is that the nickel plating is played in aluminum and not copper probably the rest of the loop is copper and inside the vrm block there are also copper component friends so this means that metals are at risk of being mixed if the nickel plating is imperfect or if there's a problem with the electrolyte process in some way that's where this this issue is coming from and running just as a reminder anyone doesn't know running an AIO you don't run into this problem because with aios you have typically aluminum radiators and you have copper microfins and cold plates in the block the pump block housing the reason it doesn't happen there you don't get this level of corrosion typically unless you're enter Max or MSI sort of Arctic but they fixed that anyway the reason you typically don't get corrosion in aios is because they're using a propylene glycol mixture where the standard distribution is about 20 propylene glycol to the remainder being basically distilled water anyway looking around at images online from users you'll see that the vrm bridge that's the name of the component from Ek will corrode with time as a result of the mixture of aluminum plating and copper cooling components that are part of the bridge the bridge itself is again EK branded as a product but it's Asus that's driving all of this and even though it's basically asus's fault from everything we're seeing from our opinion uh EK is the one that's making the most public effort to reach customers and they're not even ek's customers they're Asus as customers and Asus dragged its feet and reacting to this issue or um offering a solution which it is now sort of doing but once again EK is going through the extra effort of emailing people who bought the vrm bridge so that they know they're reaching them rather than just we'll just post it on the Asus website that absolutely no one ever checks unless they need drivers and hope that people who bought this thing see it so uh anyway and and just to answer the obvious question here of well how would they reach customers if it's sold through retailer typically what you'll do is contact the distributors or suppliers and try to get a message out to customers Amazon has built-in feature for that um Newegg has has done stuff like that in the past as well anyway so EK has raised some attention to the matter we noticed interestingly that the EK water blocks logo on the Asus block isn't even the most current one which made us kind of curious and wonder if the company even had a real level of involvement because certainly EK wouldn't volunteer to put an old trademark on a new product but when we talked to EK they were a little cagey about answering so our speculation here is that there are contracts in place that may benefit Asus more than EK in this partnership and that would explain why EK is the one that's trying the hardest to get word out about the problem now normally ek's products that use aluminum will very clearly State as much so they do a pretty good job like with the fluid gaming line of saying don't mix this with our copper stuff it'll be a bad time and we're probably not going to help you if it's your own fault and we marked everything clearly this one doesn't have that marking though so it's strange that there wasn't any warning here and once again we come back to well it's an Asus product probably Asus is conducting the train I was gonna say driving and then I was gonna mime driving I was like that probably doesn't I don't think the touch trains work so they're the ones conducting the train for the motherboard here uh and the whole thing's just kind of odd but the story is not new as far back as four months ago users on the water cooling subreddit we're beginning to report the issue neither Asus nor EK made a public statement until a more recent post to the same subreddit which is what spur DK into action ek's email statement to customers noted that both companies are aware of the issue they say that Asus is preparing a new vrm heatsink for the board and users of the z690 formula should reach out to Asus for support for more information on when updated parts of will be ready EK also noted that it will help its own customers with the damage block due to incompatibility now unfortunately customers Also may have combined asus's kit with non-ek Brands water cooling and in those instances since the other brands have nothing to do with the aces products at all you're gonna have to go talk to Asus to get to get some kind of compensation or something for potentially ruining your other components that are in the loop because you thought the loop would work with them because Asus did not properly Mark that it could be a mixed Metal's concern so that's the update on all that the story's closed out in the sense that we know it's it is in fact a problem it's confirmed Ace has confirmed it they have refund and replacement options in place EK has replacement refund options in place or at least replacement for uh for new kit and that's kind of the start in the end of it but if you've been asking about it there's your answer AMD FSR this one's pretty interesting too so amd's released version 2.2 of its FSR upscaler Fidelity FX super resolution we've tested FSR in the past but what they're doing now is a little bit different in that they have released uh to the general public some of the source code for FSR functionality and this is through the GPU open project according to AMD the 2.2 release contains a specific Improvement for what it calls High Velocity ghosting artifacts it says that these are common in racing games for example you'd see this in situations where the player's car is basically stationary relative to the screen but the scenery and other objects move at a high speed this has resulted in ghosting artifacts in the past but FSR 2.2 is supposed to fix that and it's already in Need for Speed Unbound and Forza Horizon 5. Andy's GPU open post for the release has a few side-by-side screenshots with sliders that'll allow you to see the difference between no f FSR and FSR 2.2 quality mode and amd's own YouTube video for episode 2.2 shows gameplay for Horizon 5 with a side-by-side comparison of no FSR versus FSR 2.2 the high velocity ghost in mentioned isn't present here which is the main point of the update we tried to find an example in any of these previous FSR 2.1 comparison video but the example game Farming Simulator 2022 moves uh a lot slower as you might notice in the footage personally I'm looking to Farming Simulator 2022's sequel right to repair your tractor simulator voiced over by none other than Louis Rossman so I actually really want that game now so Louis if you're watching please reach out to the Farming Simulator people and do some voice over there are other improvements noted in amd's post as well like improve temporal stability for Less flickering on some of the objects this release of the latest version of FSR is open source means that you'll see these improvements in a wider range of games in the near future not just the handful of games where AMD collaborated directly and notably AMD will also be releasing an FSR 2.2 plug-in for Unreal Engine for direct integration for the many developers who just use Unreal Engine up next nvidia's poster child game lacks Nvidia features but also there's some updates where they have the LSS added to more things so we're going to come back to the headline for this one in a second the quick recap of the newest news so with amd's FSR announcements Nvidia also has something to say it has spread into posting it Nvidia announced that it has added dlss or deep learn to Super sample into seven additional games and a noted presence of reflex and six additional games so the games for dlss that were added include atomic heart which we're going to come back to because uh I have a bone to pick with with that one with Nvidia specifically but that has dlss3 blood Bowl 3 has dlss all the rest of these are are not DLS S3 hello neighbor 2 has dlss and Ray tracing Hi-Fi Rush dlss2 playing outside two which uh okay I guess we can put the LSS on that that has it now return all his DLS S2 enabled sons of the forest and then wanted dead now coming back to atomic heart this is the one that we have a bit of a bone to pick with because atomic's heart launch which is coming out basically now depending on when this video goes up that gate reminds us of when Nvidia first announced RTX Hardware so the RTX 20 series we were at their uh announcement event at Gamescom it was 2018 and when they launched the product there were no RTX games it was something like 55 days at one point we had like a board in the background that was like days without RTX basically days without incident board and I was as high as 50 something at that point so uh they they skipped on the the initial support for the namesake of the new product and they had this new thing where you couldn't use the technology that it was being advertised against atomic heart was part of that so in 2018 atomic heart was used as a they're going to definitely include Ray tracing in this title and then they told us again somewhere around 2020 or so uh as the 30 series neared and then they brought it back again in about 2022 or they were basically like hey you remember atomic heart that we talked about five years ago well if you bought your 20 series card on the back of that announcement an advertisement uh you can finally play this game with your five-year-old video card that was advertised as being like part of this game's launch that game is finally here but the uh atomic heart launch actually does not have Ray tracing that's the best part it's not just that they're five years late the developers said it's not like Nvidia is making the game but they did choose to advertise it as this is why you should buy a 2080. five years from now uh but the game doesn't even have Ray tracings that's really the downside here anyway um the choice to push it that hard and then just it doesn't even have the feature it just it makes the whole 2018 situation look even worse back when there were no games coming out with the feature that it was named after so moving on Nvidia also has some reflex updates so they're adding reflex to six additional games reflex reduces total end down system latency and playing a game uh we tested it in the past it actually does work and it works pretty well so it's a good technology they've added to six things and those are World of Warcraft which Nvidia reminds us is available now uh and for the last 20 years Deliver Us Mars Dying Light Tuesday human Hi-Fi Raj Hitman and Parish up next AMD took the stage at isscc or the international solid state circuits conference which is actually the front runner for best conference named definitely by an engineer Awards the presentation for AMD was over an hour long there's a lot of General back background information if you've kept up with them then you don't need to see most of it but the most interesting segment was future looking and it was new information so although the new technology from AMD is Enterprise focused it's not consumer focused it doesn't come down to what we're all doing yet AMD does have a pretty good track record for its B2B Technologies coming into the consumer market so this one is related to dram stacking where they pose a couple of ideas one of them is and it's important to know these are ideas they're theories but they talk about an option of having dram on top of the interposer so you would have an interposer with the CPU the compute dye potentially HP and things like that all together or they have another idea of packaging dram vertically on top of the hbm modules that are adjacent to the compute modules in in a packaged CPU solution basically AMD is currently working with Samsung to research ondi dram and the company stated this quote what we've demonstrated so far is SRAM stacking on a compute dot there's been a lot of discussion put in processing and memory as a processor person Dr Lisa Sue said that seems a little counter-intuitive but it makes a lot of sense if you think about it from a system standpoint there may be be some processing operations that can be inserted into the memory because with some insertions of algorithms in the memory component you can reduce the overall Access Energy by up to 85 percent now the slides in its presentation suggested a new approach to processing in memory where some kernels would be capable of being executed within memory amd's block diagram of a theoretical CPU again illustrates The Atrium module on the package and flanking the CPU something that it's already doing in the server space but with that additional dram banked stacked on top of the HBO module another image illustrates memory layers stacked on top of compute layers or an alternative of memory layers stacked on top of an inner poser that houses both the compute thighs and the memory and they made an interesting point in its presentation about the direction of processors it said quote the package is sort of the new motherboard you used to take all these pieces from different vendors and put them on a board now what we have to do is ensure that there's a way to put these pieces in a package and the also noted that it wants to standardize chip to chip interfaces so going forward they can maximize performance and multiple vendors can work together instead of redeveloping proprietary interfaces repeatedly over next to azrock has a new blazing quad m.2 card so ASRock is releasing an updated version of a quad m.2 Riser basically they call it blazing quad m.2 card it's very literal if you're not keyed into ASRock marketing speak we did some research and blazing actually has a meaning they've actually mapped it to a real technology that exists and renamed it blazing means pcie Gen 5 m.2 slots whereas a hyper also as rock terminology means pcie Gen 4 and Ultra means pcie gen 3. asrock's made a couple of these cards in the past and they're all fundamentally the same the card reroutes the pcie connections from a full by 16 slot on the motherboard to four m.2 connections on the Riser this probably means that the motherboard needs to support pcie bifurcation to allow one slot to address multiple devices like this but we aren't totally sure about that since we don't have one of these in hand pcie5 ssds can put off a lot of heat that's evident I mean if you look at the gigabyte SSD we talked about last week it had a massive heatsink and in this instance the heatsink has real fins and dual fans that are powered by a motherboard header this is a step up from the previous versions of the card which only had a thin metal shroud to sink heat and a fan with dubious placement now this type of card it doesn't give you hard Hardware raid capabilities you could still set up a raid with this but you would be setting up a software raid for Hardware radio need to buy something else so it's sort of the same as if they were connected all to the motherboard directly in a sense just it rises it off the board which could be useful for certain things now the official support list for blazing quad is pretty short due to the fact that ASRock doesn't have a lot of boards with pcie5 slots at this point in fact most of the boards listed only show the card as being able to work fully in the first pcie slot which is where you would normally install a graphics card and now video cards with the Z has new pictures of a rumored gigabyte RTS 4090 box uh this gaming box it's water cooled like the previous version which was a 30 series gaming box it's an external GPU enclosure and for those of you who were happily memeing about needing a dedicated power supply just for your video card Your Meme has been fulfilled it is now a reality there's a dedicated power supply for the 40 90 in the Box most of the i o is on the back of the box where the display out ports sit along with two USB type A ports and an ethernet port and that can provide network access to the host PC if you're wondering why there's an ethernet port this could be useful for say a laptop that might not have its own ethernet the Box connects via Thunderbolt as is usually the case for external enclosures like this and it's the source of the main Achilles heel for external gpus both Thunderbolt 3 and 4 are limited to a maximum bandwidth of 40 gigabits per second this is only slightly better than pcie 3.0 by 4 and that limitation will hurt the performance Thunderbolt 5 should double this to 80 gigabits per second in the future but it's not here yet the idea for external gpus like this is you connect it to a laptop almost like a docking station to have big GPU power while at the desk and then you'd be able to use the same PC somewhere else without the GPU it's always been a cool idea especially as people who travel a lot we could see a potential use for that for us the challenge normally becomes Logistics which is you don't want to check your expensive GPU uh but carrying it on is kind of problematic for other reasons but uh there's there's potential for external gpus depending on what it is you do like if you have two locations you spend a lot of time in maybe it makes sense to just have a laptop and have a docking station at your work site or your home site or whatever all right last one Microsoft and Nvidia have struck a 10-year deal to offer Xbox PC games kind of oxymoronic as it sounds on nvidia's GeForce now gaming service which is their cloud-based service so for this this includes games such as Halo Minecraft which is already a PC game but okay and if Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard is successful Call of Duty and uh no we're not sure what year it is anymore either it's like we're perpetually stuck in 2009 Microsoft Microsoft Minecraft Halo Call of Duty we've done it all we need at this point is StarCraft 2 and then some Dead game memes and it'll be complete we've we've we've created the summoning Circle for a decade ago now in addition to first party or obvious titles like these Xbox PC games that users already own via the Windows store steam or epic game store can also be streamed via GeForce now however the publisher has to actively choose to Grant Nvidia streaming rights to that game so it doesn't as Jensen Juan says just work Nvidia also took this opportunity to pitch its support for Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard saying quote the partnership delivers increased choice to Gamers and okay and resolves on videos concerns with Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard Nvidia is therefore offering its full support for regulatory approval of the acquisition Nvidia frequently known as the company that is concerned about choice for gamers in its recent series of announcements known as paid nine hundred dollars or go yourself uh also the company that tried to buy arm and then was shot down after all the posturing about how it would definitely be allowed to buy arm and concerning every other company in the entire industry so anyway Microsoft's trying hard to Ward away government and Industry pressure against the Activision Blizzard uh and and Microsoft deal and in some regards GeForce now is almost it's a competitor to Microsoft's Xbox cloud gaming service but maybe this Market is not big enough yet for them to really care about that and they're looking at it more from a perspective of a rising tide since raises all boats but it could sink them too I guess anyway that's it for this one thanks for watching as always subscribe for more go to store.gamers access.net or patreon.com Gamers and access to help us out directly if you like this reporting and we'll see you all next time\n"