The Disappointment Shirt: A Year in Review

Rockstar's Red Dead 2 launch on PC was easily among the worst high-profile game launches in the last couple of years. Yes, there are others, but Rockstar's launcher alone brand new launcher didn't even work or let people watch the game. The fact that the desktop shortcut was broken for 100% of people and the fact that the game was riddled with so many bugs all combine to make for a disappointing launch. Rockstar really improved its overall perception in the PC market in the last couple of years with GTA 5's availability, but it killed all momentum with the Red Dead 2 launch on PC. It was lazy, broken, and poorly supported, although we did like that one clip a user captured of the ultra low poly horses.

Google Stadia is one of our heavyweights for disappointment and is one of the last two items on the shirt. One of the most important to our first experiences with Stadia involved not getting what we paid for at a timely fashion. Working with a controller which has seemingly been designed to prohibit repairs and once it was all working, encountering significantly more latency than the negative latency that Google literally promised. Then again, maybe it's negative-negative latency, which would make positive latency also known as latency. Stadia controller was impossible for a reasonable consumer to open without inflicting some kind of permanent damage if you're asking why you'd ever need to be able to open a controller, it's missing the point.

We think this is by design to hurt consumers and their ability to keep products and services forcing replacements and encouraging the damaging "throw away and replace" mentality that's draining our money as a consumer. Because repair is cheaper and two rare-earth metals for something stupid like a Stadia controller. As for the service itself, that part matters more. The latency was untenable in several games, Metro Exodus was completely unplayable, Thumper was by standards of a rhythm game somewhat unplayable, in its best case mostly more difficult to play, and some of our tests showed latency in excess of 200 milliseconds which is crazy when considering standard latency on our test bench somewhere between 20 and 50 maybe 70 milliseconds.

To play on the game, Stadia failed in all of its marketing. It failed to even produce the product with the advertised availability and features offered it walked back its intent to ship a controller that could directly connect to routers and limit latency, and it resigned to saying that it would provide many of its undelivered features later, now we get to. Intel is just so it's like it almost doesn't even need to be on the disappointment shirt. It needs to be on the sad shirt, it's just sort of sad where Intel is right now.

We want to see more from the company this is like a mirror of what we were saying years ago when the FX 83-70 was the best AMD could put out. We wanted to see more from AMD because Intel was murdering them now it's the inverse, where AMD is doing something like 90 plus percent of monthly sales to our viewers and Intel is left floundering around with products that it launched previously that now have an S at the end of the name.

The 10, 9, 8 exe, although it's technically sort of new really is just a rehash of the 79, 80 XE and the 99. See and it's not only boring; it's no longer competitive there's not really any use cases we test for where it would make more sense to buy than some of the competing parts. The only reason to buy something like an x-series low end and quote big quotes their part would be for deep learning to get the PCIe lanes but there's still other options on the market for that.

So, Intel with its plague of security vulnerabilities including three major ones we listed in this video alone and with its lackluster products that can't even really compete at a meaningful level other than the 9900K but that came out over a year ago, the KS doesn't count. It just hasn't asked at the end of it so Intel is easily the most disappointing for this year, and it's not just one product; it's basically everything which is insane. We really want to see Intel pick up where they left off and improve things and compete because that'll push AMD to tear so that AMD doesn't become the new Intel and sit on the same CPU for a decade.

But we'll see what happens, so that's it for this one, thanks for watching, make sure you pick up the disappointment tour shirt 20:19 on store documents access net, and you can also click the link below. Thank you for supporting our fun intros like we did in this video; we don't do a ton of them but they're fun to close out the year and really put things back into perspective. Subscribe for more, we'll see you all next time.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis video is brought to you by us and the 2019 disappointment PC t-shirt the best way to support gamers Nexus and it's special intros and in-depth testing is to wear a constant reminder of your disappointment in 2019 s products the GN disappointment 2019 t-shirt features a major release dates for the year's worst fumbles like corroded liquid coolers bad GPUs lackluster thermal pads cheap plastic and Intel just in general the tour dates are accompanied by a GPU dye and PCB diagrams on the front and small touches on the back like outlines of controllers video cards and CPUs the shirts are high-quality prints and fabric aid with soft 100% cotton or a popular try blend you can visit store doc here--is nexus net or click the link below to grab one now starting at $19.99 this is our disappointment build for 2019 it's got the most disappointing and upsetting or just generally uninteresting products that we've encountered for the year and we have a useful map for it all as you saw in the intro for this we're the back of our new disappointment t-shirt has the tour dates for the 2019 disappointment tour including a couple of notables like prebuilt bios issues from iowa power early in the year copyright strikes issued by the verge earlier the ace who's Helios case zombie loaded one point I was ami lo 2.0 plunder vault came out after we got this shirt printed but that is also worthy of note and then our last item is year-to-date Intel which pretty much sets the tone for the whole thing and it's really unfortunate because Intel hasn't had a whole lot to talk about in the last year and when it finally came out with things to talk about they were not competitive so anyway if you want to grab the shirt it's on store doc gamers access dot net we are not going to be making this forever not necessarily because it's intended to be limited but because it's it's 2019 now and it won't always be 2019 so it'll stop making sense to make those at some point so grab them if you want them we did sell through completely really fast last year we'll probably do so again this year and we've got a link below if you want it alright so what this is versus what this isn't this is a recap it's kind of a rewind last year we made the joke that it's like YouTube rewind except it's actually good and we probably make that joke again this year it's been brought to my attention that YouTube rewind was not particularly liked for 2019 so some of the products to recap it's different from last year last year we could focus mostly on our TX where the whole thing was it just works and actually it didn't it didn't work at all in fact it couldn't work or not work because there were no RT X titles for over 50 days post launch and also the cards had memory artifacting issues that caused them to die or were dead on arrival and it was pretty easy to to call that the most disappointing product this time it's shared the disappointment is spread around equally and part of that goes to the Q 500 L case you see here the stadia not just the controller but stadia itself got a really heavy reference in our intro for this video and we might do like I might do it behind the scenes for some of the making of the disappointment intro for this year because there's a lot of thought that went into it this time and we'll put it on the side channel if we do but anyway stadia controller played a big role in it we've got a quick quick cameo for the screwdriver and hopefully a screwdriver and the Swiss Army knife referencing average from last year and then they also came up this year the cooler master cooler and there is one of the worst we've ever tested especially at about a hundred dollars CPU is the ten nine eight exe of course what else would you use $1000 CPU that even after a price cut exposing Intel's insane margin previously is still not competitive and then Radeon seven so let's look back at a year of what we've had to deal with in the review space we'll run through everything or most of it on the back of the shirt talk about some extras go through all the worst products or biggest fumbles of the year just so everyone can appreciate it and hopefully hopefully we can look forward to an equally disappointing 20/20 so first up is the Nvidia r-tx 2060s screws and glue not the 2060 but the Assembly of the 2060 and a quick side note here I'll apologize for the vocal quality I lost my voice earlier but we're back so although many worse things were to come the Year kicked off with the r-tx 2060 and what became the worst cooler assembly on a product we have ever worked with really impressively bad the r-tx 2060 itself the GPU was okay it was reasonably competitive it worked out of box all that stuff but the founders edition cooler design follows the same reckless abandon for sustainability and maintainable serviceable products that the Google stadia controller falls prey to it's irresponsibly complex to get it open it's so difficult to work with the 2060 that we'd imagine most RMA processes for the card will just resign to sending users a new card rather than fixing the ones that were sent in Nvidia took the worst aspects of its founders Edition r-tx coolers from last year namely the fact that they had as many screws as they had r-tx ops and then added more glue and internal screws that needed right-angle drivers to remove without destroying the soldered on power extension this was all out of the vain desire you'd expect out of Nvidia to move the power header to the edge of the card rather than positioning it where it makes sense at the end of the PCB in the middle of the cooler we hope Nvidia improves it's cooler designs in the future to be more function focused mostly to reduce the complexity and ability to maintain the product something as simple as replacing thermal paste would be impossibly complex for most owners of the art TX 2060 and the 2060 super efi cards despite overall decent performance that was just January 7th - in our best GPUs roundup for 2019 we gave you some insight as to the two GPUs we were most considering for the greatest disappointment we were looking at both the GTX 16:50 and the Radeon 7 and after that piece the RX 5500 XT launched in time would have also been entered into the competition ultimately while both the 1650 non-super and the Radeon seven made the shirt only one of them was worthy of co-starring with the 10 980 x e in the video if you don't remember why the Radeon 7 was bad enough to get on the disappointment sure we can recap some of it for you so a couple of lists there are a couple of items on a list just a small list here that we have of reasons the Radeon 7 was so bad 1 the card was not ready for launch at all that was the title of our review for the card there are no partner models at all inadequate mounting pressure for which AMD tried to compensate with the Hitachi thermal pad is another reason you want partner models high operating temperatures it wasn't loud at about 50 DB stock no changes out of box puts it about 10 DB a above most the other coolers that we were testing at the time AMD called the Radeon 7 a gaming GPU and at CES 2019 announcement and made a whole lot of comments about gaming relating to the Radeon 7 one month later approaching launch and he walked all of that back and then talking to media focused most heavily on creators 5 months after its launch the 5700 XT launched at $300 lower price than the Radeon 7 and matched or sometimes exceeded Radeon 7 performance in gaming applications no availability means even if you wanted one early on it was hard to get the drivers were completely broken if you got the card on launch day you may have had a similar experience to us and a lot of reviewers and other first day adopters which included related specifically to some ASUS motherboards like the maximus extremely popular high on series there were issues with power cycling shutdowns and black screens this was under full stock non overclocked settings occasional black screens screen locks that required hard shutdowns and complete power cycles to fix out of box crash events during benchmarks under full stock or auto settings with release date drivers this particular bug also broke the draw so bad in one of our operating systems that the AMT clean driver install was unable to remove the remnants of what was broken ddu was unable to remove the remnants of what was broken and in checking the Windows registry we found all manner of left-behind pieces of the driver to the extent that it was easier to just reinstall windows fans getting stuck at 100% speed clocks occasionally misreporting I was seven thousand eight hundred megahertz temperatures report him has sixty five thousand degrees or something crashes during OSI stability testing with the Radeon seven where graceless to the extent that we sometimes had to reinstall the drivers to fix them wat man stat readout sometimes completely vanishing the fan options reverting back to the previous version of wat man despite a newer version having come out with launch and then multicolored screen aberrations seemingly at random times what you saw in our intro if you're wondering why we chose the Radeon seven instead of the GTX 1650 or the rx 5500 XT that list is why the 1650 non-super was disappointing as was the 2080 Super for basically being the third 1080 Ti but there's a key difference both of those products worked at launch and were usable the twenty eighty super also performed objectively well despite being horrifically boring and a waste of our time to review because it's a 1080 TI the RX 5500 xt same boat it's another Arc's 480 incredibly boring and we've seen that card being released for nearly five years now but at least it mostly works and at least the four gigabyte model is reasonably competitive with the same price 1650 super the Radeon seven billion turned on at launch and frankly we don't think it'd be right to split the spotlight between AMD and NVIDIA when AMD's product this year was so much worse we certainly didn't split it between AMD and NVIDIA last year with when videos product was so much worse for the launch we've been onto two quick ones the verge sorry we started our something positive campaign earlier this year when in about February when the verge issued a copyright strike against bit wit Kyle for his parody of their PC build and somehow our disappointment build wasn't targeted but I guess didn't use enough that they could get away with it so you'll see the Swiss Army knife cameo and our intro referencing this ultimately to our knowledge the Verge's editor-in-chief never did meet our challenge to also do something positive by donating to charities but our community did great things with that so at least that's the upside d LSS is another one we really wanted to work this into the intro deep learn super sampling also on the back of the shirt but there was a ton going on already with stadia with the 1098 exe the Radeon 7 to $500 everything else so we decided to leave the LSS out of the intro if you missed d LSS basically don't worry everything's better the blurriness is intentional we're using deep learning here to convert this 4k video into a 720p output so it's just like what DL SS types for games the cooler master q500 l was another of the major disappointing products for the year and i was in contention with the Asus Helio Strix for most disappointing case of 2019 we ultimately decided on the Q 500 out as we figured that no one expected a good case out of Asus to begin with so although it was bad and a huge waste of money it wasn't as deeply disappointing as the Q 500 L and it's horribly inefficient ventilation and design in general the case looks ventilated but the actual ratio of steel to hole is leading more towards steel we ended up fixing it in later content as you can you can see if you call that a fix and now we arrive to the GTX 1650 the GTX 1650 was dead on arrival and at the time it made a hell of a lot more sense to buy a new rx 570 for the same price or cheaper the only advantage was lower power consumption but in the budget buying market power consumption has almost zero bearing on what people buy they're looking to stretch their dollars the farthest and the RX 570 or the 580 did that a lot more effectively at a similar price the later launched 1650 super redeemed Nvidia and went on to make the rx 6500 XT look bad by comparison it it made an embarrassment of Andy's newer product so Nvidia sort of recovered somewhat gracefully but that doesn't change the the GTX 1650 non-super was dead on arrival when it launched the product made absolutely no sense to purchase and if we moved down the list on the back of the shirt for the disappointment build 2019 which again is on stored on camera sex it's not net you'll see that we next run into the Asus Helios case the Helios was bad at $280 a Seuss's arrogance was impossibly inflated and in competition with much smaller companies that produce much better products it was hard to understand why Asus ever thought the price was acceptable the company thinks that anything that puts it sticker on is good and that was especially apparent with the Helios the case offered nothing that was new and was only able to achieve sort of acceptable thermal performance by brute force tonight with four fans except it performed worse than $80 cases with better configurations for build quality and features Asus tried to take every box possible on the spec sheet their GPU supports there's a vertical GPU mount fan controls LED controls cable covers and even a carrying handle you know for when you bring your 70 pound two foot tall computer back to your 2001 land party the define the s2 vision RGB by fractal is another one of the worst cases we've looked at for the year when we published this one we said that fractal wasn't even trying It was as if fractal threw in the towel out of desperation or frustration or both realizing that it needed some of that sweet sweet RGB to appeal to the cool hit unfortunately fractals efforts came a few years late and we're technologically outdated by the time they arrived the vision doesn't include an LED hub or a controller but instead has a SATA powered RGB switch with three buttons which we also found on Aliexpress for a few dollars the switch is a bit like a dongle except for RGB maybe Apple will get there one day and it would have to be routed out of the power supply cut out in the case in order to even use it externally alternatively you could remove the front panel every time you wanted to change the RGB LEDs it was too expensive it was poor performing and it didn't even do RGB LEDs well which was the whole point of the case we can now move to the right side of our list of disappointments on the shirt on August 20th we reviewed the msi of vogue 5700 xt and found that the card had some of the worst thermal performance we've ever seen 4g ddr six thermals disassembling the card revealed why pretty quickly Emmis I couldn't be bothered to even Center its thermal pads on the g6 modules and the lack of throwing pads between the PCB and the backplate meant that the card ended up trapping heat against the backplate in the PCB and heating up the flip chip BGA memory just taking thermography of the backside wouldn't show this as you'd have to remove the backplate to get a shot of the PCB and then you'd also be removing the heat trap MSI's findings internally matched our own and the company ended up later issuing a stopgap solution that better centered the pads on the heat source but still didn't scale up the size of the pads so half the issue is still there the company did though add throw hats the backside which helped in thermals in the revision 2 but it still isn't worth buying even with those fixes we revisited the Walmart overpowered PC from 2018 on August 31st of 2019 about one year after it launched and after our first video just to see if Walmart had improved it's terrible offering from the previous version the revisit was done with probably one of our funnier special interest for the year if you haven't seen it and part of that humour was derived from the fact that the out of box experience involved a boot media not found error you couldn't even turn it on and boot into Windows and it's a prebuilt Walmart had not only improved nothing in a year but had also seemingly abandoned the product which is probably not surprising moving on to September 25th we have another 5700 XT to no fault of the GPU itself mind you and that's the XFX RX 5700 xt thick ultra the XFX thick should probably be renamed to the XFX plastic with two C's because the biggest disappointment with the card was the cheap McDonald's Happy Meal toy plastic that comprised the outer shell ultimately ruining much of the cards performance potential in our in-depth testing on the XFX thick we showed a number of char that Illustrated how much improvement was possible simply by removing the plastic outer shell the Shroud mind you could remain but the plastic base plate which is one of the most vexing decisions we've ever run into on a video card was responsible for much of the poor performance in case you weren't permanently scarred by what we found inside of the NR max threader for lick tech CLC's we could remind you with this section when we opened about 16 or so of the NR max lick tech tr4 coolers we found so much corrosion and dunk that some of the cold plates popped off with a fizzy beim almost like shaking a can of soda and opening it once the screws were removed we've since received elec tech two coolers and I found similar corrosion something you'll see in a follow-up research piece soon aromatics clearly hasn't completely resolved the issue it seems we were most disappointed because we had made such strong recommendations for the cooler based upon performance when it first came out but we had to revoke all of those recommendations after seeing the widespread corrosion and gunk build-up which only really appears with time technically the next item on our list would be the NZXT smart device 2 for its overall uselessness when coupled with NZXT cam but it's really not worth giving this one any additional airtime and we already talked about malware on PCs anyway the next one would be Xen TDP we won't go deep here because we already have a 40 minute video explaining it and we'll just have you here to watch it but hardware journalism more importantly on October 25th the hard journalism transmogrified into tabloid reporting more than usually when techpowerup decided to run with a questionable anonymous reddit source it's always a good source that claimed Nvidia was paying people to put cardboard boxes in the background of her video sets or in shots of beer all showing cards and tech power up used us in the thumbnail because there are cardboard boxes on our shelf ignoring the fact that there's also a lot of other stuff on the Shelf like AMD parts and not only is this stupid for a number of reasons but one of the more disappointing aspects was the response from some key people in the community where they said suggesting the common things like well it should be easy enough to remove all doubt by just the products without any competing products in the shots right easy enough while we could film an AMD video card without any nvidia cards in the shop and we could show an Nvidia card without any AMD cards in the shop there are a few things wrong with this to point out first of all we do what we want secondly it's going to be a double standard we all know the same people are going to complain when an Nvidia device is shown without any AMD products in the shot thirdly who's really the shill if you're asking media to show you only one product when reviewing the product and not show competing products that's called an advertisement that's not a review anyway aside from all this the story basically died and tech powerup apologized so we can all move on before the 10 9 8 exe and stadia launches we had originally positioned read that 2 as a story for our disappointment build intro that was ditched for better ideas later but read dead 2 on PC was easily among the worst high profile game launches in the last couple of years yes there are others not alone but rockstars launcher alone brand new launcher didn't even work or let people watch the game the fact that the desktop shortcut was broken for 100% of people and the fact that the game was riddled with so many bugs all combine to make for a disappointing launch Rockstar really improved its overall perception in the PC market in the last couple of years of GTA 5 s availability but it killed all momentum with the Red Dead 2 launch on PC it was lazy broken and poorly supported although we did like that one clip a user captured of the ultra low poly horses that was worth all of it Google Stadium was one of our heavyweights for the disappointment build and is one of the last two items on the shirt one of the most important to our first experiences with stadia involved in not getting what we paid for at a timely fashion working with a controller which has seemingly been designed to prohibit repairs and once it was all working encountering significantly more latency than the negative latency that Google literally promised then again maybe it's negative negative latency which would make positive latency also known as latency stadia controller was impossible for a reasonable consumer to open without inflicting some kind of permanent damage if you're asking and why you'd ever need to be able to open a controller it's missing the point we think this is by design to hurt consumers and their ability to keep products and service forcing replacements and encouraging the damaging throw away and replace mentality that's draining of one your money as a consumer because a repair is cheaper and two rare-earth metals for something stupid like a stadium controller as for the service itself that part matters more the latency was untenable in several games Metro Exodus was completely unplayable thumper was by standards of a rhythm game somewhat unplayable in her best case mostly more difficult to play some of our tests showed latency in excess of 200 milliseconds which is crazy when considering a standard and latency on our test bench somewhere between 20 and 50 maybe 70 milliseconds to play on the game stadia failed in all of its marketing it failed to even produce the product with the advertised availability and features offered it walked back its intent to ship a controller that could directly connect to routers and limit latency and it resigned to saying that it provide many of its undelivered features later and now we get to Intel Intel is just so it's like it almost doesn't even need to be on the dissapointment shirt it needs to be on the sad shirt it's just sort of sad where Intel is right now we want to see more from the company this is like a mirror of what we were saying years ago when the FX 83-70 was the best at AMD could put out we wanted to see more from AMD because Intel was murdering them now it's the inverse where AMD is doing something like 90 plus percent of monthly sales to our viewers and Intel is left floundering around with products that it launched previously that now have an S at the end of the name and the 10 9 8 exe although it's technically sort of new really is just a rehash of the 79 80 XE and the 99 see and it's not only boring is no longer competitive there's not really any use cases we test for where it would make more sense to buy than some of the competing parts the only reason to buy something like an x-series low end and quote big air quotes their part would be for deep learning to get the PCIe lanes but there's still other options on the market for that so Intel with its plague of security vulnerabilities including three major ones we listed in this video alone and with its lackluster products that can't even really compete at a meaningful level other than the 9900 K but that came out over a year ago the KS doesn't count it just hasn't asked at the end of it so Intel is easily the most disappointing for this year and it's it's not just one product it's basically everything which is insane we really want to see Intel pick up where they left off and improve things and compete because that'll push AMD tear so that AMD doesn't become the new Intel and sit on the same CPU for a decade but we'll see what happens so that's it for this one thanks for watching make sure you pick up the disappointment tour shirt 20:19 on store documents access net and you can also click the link below thank you for supporting our fun intros like we did in this video we don't do a ton of them but they're fun to close out of the year and really put things back into perspective subscribe for more we'll see you all next time\n"