The Breakup Between Blizzard and Netease: A Tale of Betrayal and Heartbreak

In a shocking turn of events, the publishing relationship between Blizzard Entertainment and Netease has come to an abrupt end. The two companies had been working together for years, with World of Warcraft, Overwatch 2, Starcraft 2, and other Blizzard games being published under Netease's umbrella. However, it appears that the partnership has soured, and the relationship has deteriorated into a messy breakup.

According to Simon Jew, a NetEase employee who publicly stated his side of the story on LinkedIn, the situation started out innocently enough. However, as time went on, Blizzard began to behave in a increasingly jerky manner, making it difficult for Netease to work with them. The final straw came when Netease decided to shut down all of Blizzard's servers, leaving players without access to their accounts.

The shutdown was met with widespread disappointment and frustration from the gaming community, particularly those who were invested in World of Warcraft. Many players had formed close bonds with one another while playing the game, and the sudden loss of access to their accounts was a devastating blow. The situation was made even more poignant by the fact that Blizzard had provided an archival way for players to store their data, allowing them to preserve their profiles and characters in case of an emergency.

However, this offer came with a catch - it locked players out of their accounts entirely. This move sparked outrage among gamers, who referred to the process of creating the archival file as "cremation." The experience was described as final and massive player gatherings took place on the day of the shutdown as friends tried to say goodbye.

The situation is especially tragic because Blizzard has announced that it will no longer be working with Netease in the future. This means that any games previously published under their partnership are now orphaned, leaving players without a clear path forward. The only exception is Diablo Immortal, which is still playable in China but is not recommended due to its poor quality.

The breakup between Blizzard and Netease serves as a warning for the gaming industry about the fragility of relationships and the importance of communication. It also highlights the potential risks associated with server-based games, particularly when it comes to data ownership and control. As streaming services continue to gain popularity, it's likely that we'll see more examples of this kind of breakdown in the future.

The Fallout: Nvidia's Discord Bug

Meanwhile, a separate issue has arisen with Nvidia's Discord app. It appears that if you're running Discord in the background on an Nvidia machine, your memory clock can be reduced by 200 megahertz. This may not seem like a major issue at first glance, but it can have a significant impact on performance.

Nvidia has posted a support article detailing the problem and offering a solution. According to the article, users can download the GeForce 3D Profile Manager, a relic from the SLI era, and use it to export SLI profiles. From there, they can edit the file to include a specific line of code, which should fix the issue.

The workaround is a bit convoluted, but it's been made possible by a team of Nvidia employees who figured out how to make it work. It's a testament to the dedication and expertise of these engineers that they were able to solve this problem using legacy software. While it may not be the most elegant solution, it's a great example of how gamers can adapt and overcome even the most unexpected challenges.

The Takeaway: A Cautionary Tale

In conclusion, the breakup between Blizzard and Netease serves as a reminder that relationships in the gaming industry are fragile and easily broken. It also highlights the potential risks associated with server-based games and data ownership. As streaming services continue to gain popularity, it's likely that we'll see more examples of this kind of breakdown in the future.

In the meantime, gamers can take comfort in knowing that they're not alone in their struggles. There are dedicated communities and forums available for discussion and support, as well as resources like Nvidia's support article and the GeForce 3D Profile Manager. By working together and adapting to these challenges, we can build a stronger, more resilient gaming community that's better equipped to handle whatever comes our way.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enAndy just announced its pricing and release date for the x3d CPUs so we just published a hardware news video there's already a lot more news and also we published an Intel Arc driver updates news video because those were pretty massive too where Intel's claiming 10 to 77 uplift but check that video for that information so in this one we'll be talking about the x3d pricing the release date we're also going to go over Intel's financials being way down uh fraudulent remanufactured video cards and rumors of a Titan card from Nvidia before that this video is brought to you by Squarespace we use Squarespace for our own GN store and juggle complex multi-piece orders all the time with it Squarespace makes it fast for us to roll out new products with detailed Pages full of galleries videos and descriptors it's also useful for your own resume sites for photographer or project portfolios or for starting your new small business idea there's never been a better time to try and start your new business than right now and we can vouch that Squarespace makes it easy visit squarespace.com Gamers Nexus to get 10 off your first purchase with Squarespace AMD the 7950x3d 700x3d and 7800x3d were all previously announced so that information is known we'll put a spec table on the screen if you need to catch up on what it was get a refresher but otherwise you check our previous news video to get the full details either way those are the specs that you see on the screen now pricing has been officialized at this point so Andy just told us today that the 750 x 3D the highest end one is going to sell for 700 the 7900x3d which is a 12 core that will sell for 600 and then the 7800x3d which is the lowest end of the x3ds will be 450 the release date is there's two of them so February 28th is the release date on shelf that's the date you can buy it not necessarily the reviews date that will be for the 7950x3d and the 7900x3d so February 28th for that and we'll have reviews and then 7800x3d Launches on April 6th so pretty far in the future I'm sure we'll have review of it but it's too far out for right now so that's the release dates and the price and now for comparison the 7950x non-3d the original 16 core for this generation that launched with the price uh that is close to like 750 dollars most retail like actual availability and now it's about 600 on B H Photo a new AG from a quick check we saw 7900x is anywhere from 420 450 or so on retailers and that establishes at least 100 price gap for the 7950x and x3d whether or not that's worth it I mean the hundred bucks could easily be very worth it it could also easily be very not worth it so we'll test it we'll let you know once we have the parts in but at least there's some Flex on the pricing the next story is related but uh this is about the 7000 x3d information that was in flux mostly amd's fault here not like rumor stuff but AMD put some stuff out and they retracted it so just to recap you may have seen a February 14th release date for the x3ds originally that date was incorrect that wasn't a rumor that was AMD that was the source of that so Andy put out this statement they said as you know today amd.com briefly published a launch date for The Horizon 7000x3d Series Desktop processors however that date is incorrect we have not confirmed a launch date at this time that this was posted like a week ago we will provide updates on the expected availability of these processors at a future date and again now they've provided it so you have those that was it was an annoying mistake for AMD I'm sure but not a big deal over overall more recently there was another error that we noticed where AMD published a a page that 9550 Pro on Twitter caught where they said the the new 7000x3d processors will be unlocked for overclocking and then that page disappeared in less than 12 hours so uh we called AMD and we asked about this detail Andy provided this quote about this error ryzen 7000x3d processors are unlocked for memory and infinity fabric overclocking just like ryzen 5800 x3d new to the 7000x3d we have also added PBO and curve Optimizer capabilities to just be abundantly clear for them on their phrasing here that means new to the 7000x3d as opposed to the 5800 x3d but not new to the 7000 series you can already do that on the side of the Thousand series processors so we asked David for some more detail they elaborated that individual voltage control so v-core and multiplier control will not be available to you for the x3d processors only PBO and uh and the other things they discussed the iaf and and curve Optimizer so that's it we're not really sure what was going on with AMD in the last month relating to these CPUs but it's all cleared up now so next story Intel financials way down following up Intel's good news about the arc driver improvements that again is a separate video if you want to catch up on that they also had news of a really bad fourth quarter for 2022 and we don't typically cover industry financials we do when it's more interesting or relevant to our audience this is definitely one of the times it's worth covering because it was a bloodbath for Intel so Intel's overall fourth quarter 2022 Revenue was 14 billion dollars it's down 28 percent year over year and just the uh the quick existential reminder here 14 billion dollars still an unfathomable number so certainly a little bit of boohoo so it's not 15 or 16 billion dollars but it's a pretty big change for Intel a 28 is a massive drop especially for a company that has as many employees as Intel does where compared to Nvidia for example Intel's employee account is just through the roof uh and there's some inefficiency baked into Intel's processes anyway gross margin was 44 so that's down 12 percentage points year over year all this is official information from Intel earnings per share was 10 cents or down 92 ish percent year over year and overall Intel lost 664 million dollars for the quarter now even though 664 million is a large number that's actually not catastrophic for Intel as a whole but certain specific business units took the brunt of this blow like AMD and Nvidia and everyone else Intel divvies its different groups of Technologies and segments into different categories when it reports financials so uh the client Computing group represents desktops laptops most of the stuff our audience would interact with the consumer products basically that took a massive hit Revenue there was down 36 percent uh profit operating income was down 82 percent yikes 700 million dollars so margin was 11 this is definitely filed under the category of everybody saw that coming including Intel uh I mean you ride high for years on insane demand for work from home and everybody suddenly needs computers to work in different locations not a surprise that it all comes crashing down because it's not even a difference of like it's the Delta that's the problem right where it skyrockets so high and then it falls below the original Baseline so now the fall looks precipitous and much worse than realistically uh if you kind of average two numbers it might not look quite as bad but that's not the way the economy works or companies of evaluation as high as Intel's so this is a big deal of course but again not a surprise the server Market is another interesting point though this one saw a similar results Intel's Data Center and AI group was down 33 on Revenue year over year operating income was also down by 84 to 400 million dollars this resulted in a margin of only nine percent so Intel places partial blame for this on a smaller total addressable Market or what the business types like to call Tam and someone who's been to a lot of press events over the years uh that is one of the the phrases I've picked up Tam is something that people who wear suits care deeply about so now I use that word and it makes it sound like I'm relatable to them so anyway there was also competitive pressure from AMD which is something I understand a little bit better so AMD and other companies are pressuring Intel there's reduced demand of course and Intel says it will now focus on increasing the unit cost of Next Generation server products so if you are being sold they're just going to charge more for what's going out the door Intel covered some other segments as well the most interesting is Graphics or axg which includes products like Arc Revenue here was flat it managed to gain one percent year-over-year operating income has actually been a loss for axg so far this really shouldn't be a surprise it's new they have to put money in you got to lose some at the beginning but Intel has only lost 441 million dollars for the past year Well actually in quarter four sorry uh of 2022 versus 641 million for the year before for for Arc for the prior year so uh that is looking better they're chipping Arc now they're starting to reclaim some money some of the sunk cost is getting kind of reconciled or nullified um we're we're a little so I'm a little bit worried about these numbers for this particular unit uh because this is one that we really want to see succeed and like we said when we reviewed Arc like it's not up to you as consumers to kick start a multi-billion dollar International corporation's new product line so it's not up to Consumers it's not consumer's fault if intel kills this and rug pulls Arc and walks away from it all uh and don't let anyone shame you for boohoo consumers then buy it that's why it failed so now consumers have failed themselves because Nvidia names they have no competition that's not what this is but Arc is starting to improve in serious ways the drivers that release just today show that that's a massive increase in performance and very promising there's a ton of room where Intel can gain ground and performance without even changing the hardware that's the best type of performance uplift because it doesn't really cost anything other than development time it doesn't cost the 18 months or whatever it is to really re-engineer a refresh for silicon so that's good what we're concerned about what I'm concerned about is if the suits at Intel or its investors see these numbers shareholders and they go what what do we why did we why are we losing billions of dollars over years on this thing this doesn't make any sense because this is a longer term play now hopefully Intel has done well enough to communicate that to the shareholders and the shareholders aren't vultures enough to kill something before in this instance it really has a chance to shine because it's it's starting to get there there's a real chance for Arc anyway the the losses are down so that's good at least looking forward Intel confirmed that it's on track for new desktop CPUs it noted specifically meteor Lake it says second half of 2023 so that's coming out this year they also have something called lunar Lake coming out in 2024 sometime and then Sapphire Rapids workstation CPUs are actually starting to ship and get moving and they'll be launching officially in February Intel didn't mention anything about a rumored Raptor Lake CPU or Alchemist GPU refresh so we're not going to hold our breath for those but those have also been kind of talked about in the rumor mill lately up next fraudulent remanufactured video cards the shortest possible version of this story is be careful when you buy new video cards right now because some of them are being kind of repackaged and Frankenstein into what is billed as a new card when in fact it's multiple parts from old dead mining cards turned into a definitely not new video card so after the crash of cryptocurrency mining obviously lots of cards ended up on the used Market they've been sitting there for quite a while and now it seems like some of them are going to the New Market instead maybe it was they were like hey when we put the used car on our used car lot it's not selling what if we change it and we write new on the windshield and uh we'll put some new tires on it problem solved someone else's problem so YouTube channel is iskandar Souza and Tech Lab have both been doing some digging into suspect cards being sold as new sealed units on marketplaces like AliExpress however what they're uncovering is that in reality the cards are either just repacked used units or the Frankenstein monsters that are composed of bits of several dead ones in the Tech Lab video they unbox what is called an afox affix whatever RX 588 gigabyte card it's supposed to be new and it has all the markings packaging and even the seals that one would expect after they take the cooler off of the board the group reveals a GPU package with a discolored almost burnt looking substrate ultimately Tech Lab shows that three cards like this and Compares them to a known good model from Sapphire and the difference in color is evident moving on to eskandar Souza he shares footage from an electronics repair specialist who goes into more detail about what he believes is happening with cards like this he shows several examples of their rarely use GPU substrates and memory packages comparing ones with and without discoloration on the green PCB on the epoxy and these are both really cool investigation videos where they start looking into stuff it's I mean it's I love seeing stuff like this this is the type of work I like doing and to see what they're putting into it it's it's pretty cool so uh super worth watching check out Tech Lab and his guitar so as uh we will print the names on the screen or show the channel and uh and Link them for you so anyway they go on to explain a couple ways that the memory can end up being discolored one of them is from extended use and heat and GPU mining uh they talk about some other ways as well I'm not going to go through them all because I'd rather you watch his video but there's a couple different ways you can identify how a package may have been used in the past and that's what they talk about the repair technician also shows off an RX 550 it didn't have any signs of hard use but after heating the memory with a hot air tool he was actually able to scrape off a top layer of printing to reveal the original Underside so in this instance sense what they're doing is revealing that the repackaging factory is painting over evidence of Prior use and there's a lot of this that go into more detail um but it's pretty crazy how it works So eventually the cards end up getting just dissected reassembled into something else and sold as new now some opinions here on one hand it is awesome to get reuse out of something that is otherwise just E-Waste because the previous owner thought it's not worth selling this and collecting Pennies on the dollar for what I paid I'm just gonna get rid of it so it's cool to see that salvaged what's not cool is uh lying about it so if it's sold as used and everyone's clear that's fine but when you peace be able to gather something that is not actually what it's advertised as that's the problem so there's nothing wrong with the practice of transplanting parts from one board to another it's actually awesome if it is done transparently and ethically but anyway if you are buying cards online especially from third-party Marketplace sellers then at this point you need to not only be wary of used cards but also or maybe especially of new cards particularly if they're from Brands you've never heard of so that's what you need to know on the consumer side just be careful what you're buying right now for gpus all right knocked has a new cooler out this is an am5 low profile cooler and this is the l9a low profile cooler it's specifically for use on ryzen 7000 CPUs the L9 has already existed for other sockets but this one comes out of the box for use on am5 the whole thing is pretty tiny for a cooler it's only 37 millimeters tall with one of an octopus fans installed it's an nfa9 by 14 and that's a 90 millimeter fan all of its Dimensions fit within amd's socket keep out Zone and that ensures access to memory fan headers and whatever other connections you might have near the socket especially on sff configurations noctua intends this cooler to be used in small form factor builds and with amd's 65 watt TDP non-x CPUs but it claims it's been used internally for the higher wattage Parts as well so we're fairly certain the quiet part wouldn't apply in those situations the wattage is going up enough fans gonna have to run louder but the nhl9a am5 is available now and noctua's brown and beige color 45 bucks and I also have an all black chromax for 55. so next one the GPU Rumor Mill is spinning about as fast as it can with the newest rumor being of an Ada Titan an Nvidia Ada Lovelace Titan GPU so the last time we saw the name Titan in any official capacity was the Titan RTX that was 2018 at this point and the newest rumor is from a Twitter user named mega size GPU it's an appropriate name so this is it's an i o plate but it's weird because it's four slots wide with a huge hole in the middle the second photo as it was leaked assuming these are legitimate shows the card with a a very 40 series ask outer frame and it has a champagne gold color on a clearly gigantic four slot card now for you all for an inside look into our process when Jeremy was writing this news story when he brought it to me and asked about it I I basically said we're not covering that when we first looked at it together because I looked at the photo of the card and I was like no way like this is too comically large it seems fabricated so the only reason we came back to it and we're like well it's covered it seems like it's worth covering is because it actually kind of correlates with a previous leak that we also elected to skip actually uh about a GPU that was photographed and it looked like it was some rooftop AC unit because it was so huge so the most unusual thing we can see here is the way the i o ports are stacked rather than side by side this could just be Nvidia trying a new i o layout to possibly save PCB space it could be fake it could also be a stranger Theory which maybe the PCB has rotated 90 degrees line parallel to the motherboard rather than perpendicular like normal now this particular layout would corroborate an earlier leak of a very strange Nvidia looking cooler again we chose to skip that one months ago because I mean I frankly I looked at it I thought it didn't look real but with this leak it makes more sense so this cooler has several design features that really scream Founders Edition like the fan mounts in the upper left and the x or X frame style in the top for The Hourglass frame another difference versus the 4090 fe's cooler is that the fins are all straight rather than Chevrons facing the camera is the cold plate but it's on the raw inside of the cooler as compared to traditional designs they're clearly areas for contact with gdr memory on three sides of the GPU die power stages and other components as well a final complication is that if the main PCB is relocated like we're talking about here you would still have to get it into the pcie slot somehow the only way we can think of is to have a smaller board soldered on at a 90 degree angle or doing a Bend I guess in the PCB so that I can still plug in normally and that's why initially when we were looking at this we thought against covering it because it just seems like an insane amount of gymnastics to jump through to come to a conclusion of why would a card that traditionally sockets like this suddenly be basically oriented this way except the pcie slot is still here uh but again as we started piecing together like oh maybe this makes sense so we're basically just talking about this for fun at this point we'll see where it goes um If This Were a real design though the obvious question of why would you design a card that way for a Titan I we kind of came to two conclusions so one of them was thermal the other one was GPU sag where if you move the card to more or less be like that you have now effectively eliminated the concern of GPU sag insofar as the cooler pulling away from the PCB we've had this happen internally we have enough video cards and enough systems here where some of them have needed maintenance over time because the cooler actually does depart from the mosfets the inductor and stuff like that and you have to tighten it down every now and then if it's not well designed so this orientation avoids that uh it perhaps introduces new issues but you would avoid GPU sag the other upside of doing something like this especially if it's four slots deep is that now you get a complete flow through design all of the air can go through the whole cooler and you don't have sort of this one and over here on the GPU side that hits a wall and can't flow it completely through and conversely a potential downside of this is that if the PCB is oriented this way you potentially I can't figure out another phrasing form a Hot Pocket behind I'll take my money now thank you you form a Hot Pocket behind the video card and against the motherboard where that area is typically kind of airflow starved anyway and lots of boards put m.2 slots right there so maybe that's the downside one last bit of information that gives us some credibility though is a an import entry from volza that contained several references to 699-1g137 graphics cards being shipped to India for development and testing purposes and that was the entry that made us go okay let's cover it so for this that code matches the markings on the i o plate of the card that was shown in the leaked photo and it corresponds to nvidia's internal naming convention for different PCB designs that detail and the fact some of these entries include 48 gigabytes and the naming that is give a little bit of credence to leaker copyte 7 chemist bows from July 2022 about a design he dubbed quote the Beast so it's a lot to take in and at least on sort of the rumor side you get to see a little bit of our process for why do we skip stories sometimes we eliminate them if we aren't really sure about it typically if we cover something that's a leak or a rumor it's because we're close enough that we kind of have an idea of what's coming out anyway but in this instance uh it's a very mechanically interesting approach to design we think there's credibility here given all of these different pieces that you can Cobble together and if it is in fact oriented in the way we're thinking I really want to test that video card I know the team here is ready to do some work on it because there's a lot of really interesting angles from a thermal and mechanical sense next one Corsair rmx shifts power supplies these are pretty interesting so they move the modular power supply cable connection point to the side so that if you ever wanted to add or remove cables from your build after it's built you're not in there trying to shove your hand into a power supply shroud and unplug a cable you can't see that goes somewhere you also can't see so Corsair says these will fit in any case that supports an ATX power supply and is at least 210 millimeters wide the width is very important here the power supply also has to be accessible from the correct side when mounted that said we don't think it would work in the ever popularly and the 11d Evo and its derivatives in that case the power supply is rotated 90 degrees which would leave the plugs on top directly below the hot swap Drive cage corsair's design also locks you into having the fan down for most cases but most cases support that orientation anyway so it's probably not a huge concern compatibility concerns aside the new rmx shift power supplies are ATX 3.0 and pcie 5.0 certified with both 80 plus and cybernetics gold ratings for efficiency and electrical characteristics another interesting detail with these is that they use corsair's type 5 microfit connectors on the power supply side which are smaller than the standard minifit microfit is actually the same overall size and pin pitch as what's used on the 12 volt high power 12 plus 4 connector our assumption here is that coarser did this to minimize how far the plugs need to protrude from the side of the power supply so that you don't need a case that is monstrously wide the downsides here are obvious compatibility is the main one it's worse than standard ATX because it's not completely standard ATX and even without testing them that makes it harder to recommend especially since it's not just going to be Plug and Play however we think this is actually really cool idea because uh as long as you know what you're getting into with it the rmx shift line from a usability standpoint in a case where it is usable would actually be far easier to work with and certainly if you're the type of person who might add or remove cables over time that's a valuable feature if you're more the type of person who builds it and then you don't touch it for four or five years it's not going to matter for you but uh for us I we frequently have to connect disconnect the Engine Systems all the time basically and being able to just access it all and basically just a patch panel more or less on the side of the computer that's instantly exposed when you pull the panel off that'd be pretty cool so these are available and they start at 160 the 850 Watts uh 270 dollars for 1200 watts we don't have any plans to do any testing on these specifically right now but it's an interesting approach and uh I guess let us know if you end up getting one up next so last week there was a sad day for blizzard gamers in China because netease which effectively acted as Blizzard's publisher in China and blizzard couldn't come to an agreement on how they wanted their publishing relationship to work and uh so long story short World of Warcraft OverWatch 2 Starcraft 2 basically any Blizzard game except for I think Diablo Immortal or something they uh they shut all the servers off so I mean just purely from a gaming standpoint especially people into MMOs that's gonna it's depressing because people put a lot of time into MMOs they build actual friendships they form actual groups they play with and talk with so that's it was sad to hear about it so to catch you up on this the breakup between the two companies was pretty messy netease has uh so net uses Simon Jew publicly stated in a LinkedIn post the following he said quote one day when what has happened behind the scene could be told developers and Gamers will have a whole new level of understanding of how much damage a jerk can make and it only escalated from there net ease ramped it from saying they're jerks and mean to tearing down statues with sledgehammers blizzard statues not just random ones uh tore down blizzard statues with sledgehammers and the now vacant Chinese office campus which had its own coffee shop on site had a temporary green tea drink that they offered um in association with this now if you're thinking that's very nice of them green tea is good uh green tea in this context we think just connecting the dots of the Mandarin education I've received is probably related to the slur top yeah which is like um it's like someone who acts Innocent but is actually extremely manipulative behind the scenes and is sort of preparing to stab you in the back is my best interpretation of that particular idiom and if you're native and have a better understanding feel free to leave it below but that's how I understand it so uh anyway there's bad blood between the companies as the day of the shutdown approached for World of Warcraft at least blizzard did make available at an archival way to store data for profiles for characters for accounts so players could effectively uh preserve their accounts in the event that blizzard is able to work with a new publisher because it sounds like they're not going back at this point to establish servers once again now players in China started calling this file basically an electronic urn and the process of creating it they referred to as more or less cremation unfortunately for the players this process locked them out of their accounts entirely there's videos online a final massive player Gatherings as the servers go down and I mean if you've ever played an MMO and built connections with people you couldn't feel for the players in these clips the only Blizzard game is still officially playable in China right now is Diablo Immortal not that you should play it because that one is actually developed by netease and it's operating under a different licensing approach as for why we included it other than it just being significant this is a fantastic warning of the future of video games where basically overnight everything is wiped out and obliterated because you you owe nothing so in games where everything is server based and if game streaming ever takes off where not only is your data server based but all of it is server based uh you have no recourse just like it's like it never happened so that's I don't know that's a a future we don't really want to see with the total lack of ownership of anything certainly Nvidia is interested in that as well with their streaming services although it hasn't taken off yet all right next one last one Discord has a bug where with Nvidia Hardware specifically if you're running Discord in the background the app the there's a chance that the memory clock is reduced by 200 megahertz so it's not the biggest a loss memory clocks go pretty high but that's definitely a decrease in performance hopefully this will be addressed with an official update in the near future but for now Nvidia has posted a support article with a worker out users can download the GeForce 3D profile manager which is a relic from the SLI era and then use it to export SLI profiles and just to be clear this is even if you have one card after you have the file exported you can open in a text editor find a Discord in the text add a specific line and then save the file finally use the profile manager to import the edited file which should fix the issue and credit to the team that figured this out where they basically took a legacy software and they worked their way backwards to solving the problem it's a strange problem given the popularity of Discord and nvidia's market share it may be affecting you without you knowing it so definitely worth looking into that one and uh maybe doing the work around if you see the problem that's it for this one thanks for watching as always subscribe for more go to store.gamers access.net to grab a shirt like this one while they're still there or patreon.com Gamers access we'll see you all next timeAndy just announced its pricing and release date for the x3d CPUs so we just published a hardware news video there's already a lot more news and also we published an Intel Arc driver updates news video because those were pretty massive too where Intel's claiming 10 to 77 uplift but check that video for that information so in this one we'll be talking about the x3d pricing the release date we're also going to go over Intel's financials being way down uh fraudulent remanufactured video cards and rumors of a Titan card from Nvidia before that this video is brought to you by Squarespace we use Squarespace for our own GN store and juggle complex multi-piece orders all the time with it Squarespace makes it fast for us to roll out new products with detailed Pages full of galleries videos and descriptors it's also useful for your own resume sites for photographer or project portfolios or for starting your new small business idea there's never been a better time to try and start your new business than right now and we can vouch that Squarespace makes it easy visit squarespace.com Gamers Nexus to get 10 off your first purchase with Squarespace AMD the 7950x3d 700x3d and 7800x3d were all previously announced so that information is known we'll put a spec table on the screen if you need to catch up on what it was get a refresher but otherwise you check our previous news video to get the full details either way those are the specs that you see on the screen now pricing has been officialized at this point so Andy just told us today that the 750 x 3D the highest end one is going to sell for 700 the 7900x3d which is a 12 core that will sell for 600 and then the 7800x3d which is the lowest end of the x3ds will be 450 the release date is there's two of them so February 28th is the release date on shelf that's the date you can buy it not necessarily the reviews date that will be for the 7950x3d and the 7900x3d so February 28th for that and we'll have reviews and then 7800x3d Launches on April 6th so pretty far in the future I'm sure we'll have review of it but it's too far out for right now so that's the release dates and the price and now for comparison the 7950x non-3d the original 16 core for this generation that launched with the price uh that is close to like 750 dollars most retail like actual availability and now it's about 600 on B H Photo a new AG from a quick check we saw 7900x is anywhere from 420 450 or so on retailers and that establishes at least 100 price gap for the 7950x and x3d whether or not that's worth it I mean the hundred bucks could easily be very worth it it could also easily be very not worth it so we'll test it we'll let you know once we have the parts in but at least there's some Flex on the pricing the next story is related but uh this is about the 7000 x3d information that was in flux mostly amd's fault here not like rumor stuff but AMD put some stuff out and they retracted it so just to recap you may have seen a February 14th release date for the x3ds originally that date was incorrect that wasn't a rumor that was AMD that was the source of that so Andy put out this statement they said as you know today amd.com briefly published a launch date for The Horizon 7000x3d Series Desktop processors however that date is incorrect we have not confirmed a launch date at this time that this was posted like a week ago we will provide updates on the expected availability of these processors at a future date and again now they've provided it so you have those that was it was an annoying mistake for AMD I'm sure but not a big deal over overall more recently there was another error that we noticed where AMD published a a page that 9550 Pro on Twitter caught where they said the the new 7000x3d processors will be unlocked for overclocking and then that page disappeared in less than 12 hours so uh we called AMD and we asked about this detail Andy provided this quote about this error ryzen 7000x3d processors are unlocked for memory and infinity fabric overclocking just like ryzen 5800 x3d new to the 7000x3d we have also added PBO and curve Optimizer capabilities to just be abundantly clear for them on their phrasing here that means new to the 7000x3d as opposed to the 5800 x3d but not new to the 7000 series you can already do that on the side of the Thousand series processors so we asked David for some more detail they elaborated that individual voltage control so v-core and multiplier control will not be available to you for the x3d processors only PBO and uh and the other things they discussed the iaf and and curve Optimizer so that's it we're not really sure what was going on with AMD in the last month relating to these CPUs but it's all cleared up now so next story Intel financials way down following up Intel's good news about the arc driver improvements that again is a separate video if you want to catch up on that they also had news of a really bad fourth quarter for 2022 and we don't typically cover industry financials we do when it's more interesting or relevant to our audience this is definitely one of the times it's worth covering because it was a bloodbath for Intel so Intel's overall fourth quarter 2022 Revenue was 14 billion dollars it's down 28 percent year over year and just the uh the quick existential reminder here 14 billion dollars still an unfathomable number so certainly a little bit of boohoo so it's not 15 or 16 billion dollars but it's a pretty big change for Intel a 28 is a massive drop especially for a company that has as many employees as Intel does where compared to Nvidia for example Intel's employee account is just through the roof uh and there's some inefficiency baked into Intel's processes anyway gross margin was 44 so that's down 12 percentage points year over year all this is official information from Intel earnings per share was 10 cents or down 92 ish percent year over year and overall Intel lost 664 million dollars for the quarter now even though 664 million is a large number that's actually not catastrophic for Intel as a whole but certain specific business units took the brunt of this blow like AMD and Nvidia and everyone else Intel divvies its different groups of Technologies and segments into different categories when it reports financials so uh the client Computing group represents desktops laptops most of the stuff our audience would interact with the consumer products basically that took a massive hit Revenue there was down 36 percent uh profit operating income was down 82 percent yikes 700 million dollars so margin was 11 this is definitely filed under the category of everybody saw that coming including Intel uh I mean you ride high for years on insane demand for work from home and everybody suddenly needs computers to work in different locations not a surprise that it all comes crashing down because it's not even a difference of like it's the Delta that's the problem right where it skyrockets so high and then it falls below the original Baseline so now the fall looks precipitous and much worse than realistically uh if you kind of average two numbers it might not look quite as bad but that's not the way the economy works or companies of evaluation as high as Intel's so this is a big deal of course but again not a surprise the server Market is another interesting point though this one saw a similar results Intel's Data Center and AI group was down 33 on Revenue year over year operating income was also down by 84 to 400 million dollars this resulted in a margin of only nine percent so Intel places partial blame for this on a smaller total addressable Market or what the business types like to call Tam and someone who's been to a lot of press events over the years uh that is one of the the phrases I've picked up Tam is something that people who wear suits care deeply about so now I use that word and it makes it sound like I'm relatable to them so anyway there was also competitive pressure from AMD which is something I understand a little bit better so AMD and other companies are pressuring Intel there's reduced demand of course and Intel says it will now focus on increasing the unit cost of Next Generation server products so if you are being sold they're just going to charge more for what's going out the door Intel covered some other segments as well the most interesting is Graphics or axg which includes products like Arc Revenue here was flat it managed to gain one percent year-over-year operating income has actually been a loss for axg so far this really shouldn't be a surprise it's new they have to put money in you got to lose some at the beginning but Intel has only lost 441 million dollars for the past year Well actually in quarter four sorry uh of 2022 versus 641 million for the year before for for Arc for the prior year so uh that is looking better they're chipping Arc now they're starting to reclaim some money some of the sunk cost is getting kind of reconciled or nullified um we're we're a little so I'm a little bit worried about these numbers for this particular unit uh because this is one that we really want to see succeed and like we said when we reviewed Arc like it's not up to you as consumers to kick start a multi-billion dollar International corporation's new product line so it's not up to Consumers it's not consumer's fault if intel kills this and rug pulls Arc and walks away from it all uh and don't let anyone shame you for boohoo consumers then buy it that's why it failed so now consumers have failed themselves because Nvidia names they have no competition that's not what this is but Arc is starting to improve in serious ways the drivers that release just today show that that's a massive increase in performance and very promising there's a ton of room where Intel can gain ground and performance without even changing the hardware that's the best type of performance uplift because it doesn't really cost anything other than development time it doesn't cost the 18 months or whatever it is to really re-engineer a refresh for silicon so that's good what we're concerned about what I'm concerned about is if the suits at Intel or its investors see these numbers shareholders and they go what what do we why did we why are we losing billions of dollars over years on this thing this doesn't make any sense because this is a longer term play now hopefully Intel has done well enough to communicate that to the shareholders and the shareholders aren't vultures enough to kill something before in this instance it really has a chance to shine because it's it's starting to get there there's a real chance for Arc anyway the the losses are down so that's good at least looking forward Intel confirmed that it's on track for new desktop CPUs it noted specifically meteor Lake it says second half of 2023 so that's coming out this year they also have something called lunar Lake coming out in 2024 sometime and then Sapphire Rapids workstation CPUs are actually starting to ship and get moving and they'll be launching officially in February Intel didn't mention anything about a rumored Raptor Lake CPU or Alchemist GPU refresh so we're not going to hold our breath for those but those have also been kind of talked about in the rumor mill lately up next fraudulent remanufactured video cards the shortest possible version of this story is be careful when you buy new video cards right now because some of them are being kind of repackaged and Frankenstein into what is billed as a new card when in fact it's multiple parts from old dead mining cards turned into a definitely not new video card so after the crash of cryptocurrency mining obviously lots of cards ended up on the used Market they've been sitting there for quite a while and now it seems like some of them are going to the New Market instead maybe it was they were like hey when we put the used car on our used car lot it's not selling what if we change it and we write new on the windshield and uh we'll put some new tires on it problem solved someone else's problem so YouTube channel is iskandar Souza and Tech Lab have both been doing some digging into suspect cards being sold as new sealed units on marketplaces like AliExpress however what they're uncovering is that in reality the cards are either just repacked used units or the Frankenstein monsters that are composed of bits of several dead ones in the Tech Lab video they unbox what is called an afox affix whatever RX 588 gigabyte card it's supposed to be new and it has all the markings packaging and even the seals that one would expect after they take the cooler off of the board the group reveals a GPU package with a discolored almost burnt looking substrate ultimately Tech Lab shows that three cards like this and Compares them to a known good model from Sapphire and the difference in color is evident moving on to eskandar Souza he shares footage from an electronics repair specialist who goes into more detail about what he believes is happening with cards like this he shows several examples of their rarely use GPU substrates and memory packages comparing ones with and without discoloration on the green PCB on the epoxy and these are both really cool investigation videos where they start looking into stuff it's I mean it's I love seeing stuff like this this is the type of work I like doing and to see what they're putting into it it's it's pretty cool so uh super worth watching check out Tech Lab and his guitar so as uh we will print the names on the screen or show the channel and uh and Link them for you so anyway they go on to explain a couple ways that the memory can end up being discolored one of them is from extended use and heat and GPU mining uh they talk about some other ways as well I'm not going to go through them all because I'd rather you watch his video but there's a couple different ways you can identify how a package may have been used in the past and that's what they talk about the repair technician also shows off an RX 550 it didn't have any signs of hard use but after heating the memory with a hot air tool he was actually able to scrape off a top layer of printing to reveal the original Underside so in this instance sense what they're doing is revealing that the repackaging factory is painting over evidence of Prior use and there's a lot of this that go into more detail um but it's pretty crazy how it works So eventually the cards end up getting just dissected reassembled into something else and sold as new now some opinions here on one hand it is awesome to get reuse out of something that is otherwise just E-Waste because the previous owner thought it's not worth selling this and collecting Pennies on the dollar for what I paid I'm just gonna get rid of it so it's cool to see that salvaged what's not cool is uh lying about it so if it's sold as used and everyone's clear that's fine but when you peace be able to gather something that is not actually what it's advertised as that's the problem so there's nothing wrong with the practice of transplanting parts from one board to another it's actually awesome if it is done transparently and ethically but anyway if you are buying cards online especially from third-party Marketplace sellers then at this point you need to not only be wary of used cards but also or maybe especially of new cards particularly if they're from Brands you've never heard of so that's what you need to know on the consumer side just be careful what you're buying right now for gpus all right knocked has a new cooler out this is an am5 low profile cooler and this is the l9a low profile cooler it's specifically for use on ryzen 7000 CPUs the L9 has already existed for other sockets but this one comes out of the box for use on am5 the whole thing is pretty tiny for a cooler it's only 37 millimeters tall with one of an octopus fans installed it's an nfa9 by 14 and that's a 90 millimeter fan all of its Dimensions fit within amd's socket keep out Zone and that ensures access to memory fan headers and whatever other connections you might have near the socket especially on sff configurations noctua intends this cooler to be used in small form factor builds and with amd's 65 watt TDP non-x CPUs but it claims it's been used internally for the higher wattage Parts as well so we're fairly certain the quiet part wouldn't apply in those situations the wattage is going up enough fans gonna have to run louder but the nhl9a am5 is available now and noctua's brown and beige color 45 bucks and I also have an all black chromax for 55. so next one the GPU Rumor Mill is spinning about as fast as it can with the newest rumor being of an Ada Titan an Nvidia Ada Lovelace Titan GPU so the last time we saw the name Titan in any official capacity was the Titan RTX that was 2018 at this point and the newest rumor is from a Twitter user named mega size GPU it's an appropriate name so this is it's an i o plate but it's weird because it's four slots wide with a huge hole in the middle the second photo as it was leaked assuming these are legitimate shows the card with a a very 40 series ask outer frame and it has a champagne gold color on a clearly gigantic four slot card now for you all for an inside look into our process when Jeremy was writing this news story when he brought it to me and asked about it I I basically said we're not covering that when we first looked at it together because I looked at the photo of the card and I was like no way like this is too comically large it seems fabricated so the only reason we came back to it and we're like well it's covered it seems like it's worth covering is because it actually kind of correlates with a previous leak that we also elected to skip actually uh about a GPU that was photographed and it looked like it was some rooftop AC unit because it was so huge so the most unusual thing we can see here is the way the i o ports are stacked rather than side by side this could just be Nvidia trying a new i o layout to possibly save PCB space it could be fake it could also be a stranger Theory which maybe the PCB has rotated 90 degrees line parallel to the motherboard rather than perpendicular like normal now this particular layout would corroborate an earlier leak of a very strange Nvidia looking cooler again we chose to skip that one months ago because I mean I frankly I looked at it I thought it didn't look real but with this leak it makes more sense so this cooler has several design features that really scream Founders Edition like the fan mounts in the upper left and the x or X frame style in the top for The Hourglass frame another difference versus the 4090 fe's cooler is that the fins are all straight rather than Chevrons facing the camera is the cold plate but it's on the raw inside of the cooler as compared to traditional designs they're clearly areas for contact with gdr memory on three sides of the GPU die power stages and other components as well a final complication is that if the main PCB is relocated like we're talking about here you would still have to get it into the pcie slot somehow the only way we can think of is to have a smaller board soldered on at a 90 degree angle or doing a Bend I guess in the PCB so that I can still plug in normally and that's why initially when we were looking at this we thought against covering it because it just seems like an insane amount of gymnastics to jump through to come to a conclusion of why would a card that traditionally sockets like this suddenly be basically oriented this way except the pcie slot is still here uh but again as we started piecing together like oh maybe this makes sense so we're basically just talking about this for fun at this point we'll see where it goes um If This Were a real design though the obvious question of why would you design a card that way for a Titan I we kind of came to two conclusions so one of them was thermal the other one was GPU sag where if you move the card to more or less be like that you have now effectively eliminated the concern of GPU sag insofar as the cooler pulling away from the PCB we've had this happen internally we have enough video cards and enough systems here where some of them have needed maintenance over time because the cooler actually does depart from the mosfets the inductor and stuff like that and you have to tighten it down every now and then if it's not well designed so this orientation avoids that uh it perhaps introduces new issues but you would avoid GPU sag the other upside of doing something like this especially if it's four slots deep is that now you get a complete flow through design all of the air can go through the whole cooler and you don't have sort of this one and over here on the GPU side that hits a wall and can't flow it completely through and conversely a potential downside of this is that if the PCB is oriented this way you potentially I can't figure out another phrasing form a Hot Pocket behind I'll take my money now thank you you form a Hot Pocket behind the video card and against the motherboard where that area is typically kind of airflow starved anyway and lots of boards put m.2 slots right there so maybe that's the downside one last bit of information that gives us some credibility though is a an import entry from volza that contained several references to 699-1g137 graphics cards being shipped to India for development and testing purposes and that was the entry that made us go okay let's cover it so for this that code matches the markings on the i o plate of the card that was shown in the leaked photo and it corresponds to nvidia's internal naming convention for different PCB designs that detail and the fact some of these entries include 48 gigabytes and the naming that is give a little bit of credence to leaker copyte 7 chemist bows from July 2022 about a design he dubbed quote the Beast so it's a lot to take in and at least on sort of the rumor side you get to see a little bit of our process for why do we skip stories sometimes we eliminate them if we aren't really sure about it typically if we cover something that's a leak or a rumor it's because we're close enough that we kind of have an idea of what's coming out anyway but in this instance uh it's a very mechanically interesting approach to design we think there's credibility here given all of these different pieces that you can Cobble together and if it is in fact oriented in the way we're thinking I really want to test that video card I know the team here is ready to do some work on it because there's a lot of really interesting angles from a thermal and mechanical sense next one Corsair rmx shifts power supplies these are pretty interesting so they move the modular power supply cable connection point to the side so that if you ever wanted to add or remove cables from your build after it's built you're not in there trying to shove your hand into a power supply shroud and unplug a cable you can't see that goes somewhere you also can't see so Corsair says these will fit in any case that supports an ATX power supply and is at least 210 millimeters wide the width is very important here the power supply also has to be accessible from the correct side when mounted that said we don't think it would work in the ever popularly and the 11d Evo and its derivatives in that case the power supply is rotated 90 degrees which would leave the plugs on top directly below the hot swap Drive cage corsair's design also locks you into having the fan down for most cases but most cases support that orientation anyway so it's probably not a huge concern compatibility concerns aside the new rmx shift power supplies are ATX 3.0 and pcie 5.0 certified with both 80 plus and cybernetics gold ratings for efficiency and electrical characteristics another interesting detail with these is that they use corsair's type 5 microfit connectors on the power supply side which are smaller than the standard minifit microfit is actually the same overall size and pin pitch as what's used on the 12 volt high power 12 plus 4 connector our assumption here is that coarser did this to minimize how far the plugs need to protrude from the side of the power supply so that you don't need a case that is monstrously wide the downsides here are obvious compatibility is the main one it's worse than standard ATX because it's not completely standard ATX and even without testing them that makes it harder to recommend especially since it's not just going to be Plug and Play however we think this is actually really cool idea because uh as long as you know what you're getting into with it the rmx shift line from a usability standpoint in a case where it is usable would actually be far easier to work with and certainly if you're the type of person who might add or remove cables over time that's a valuable feature if you're more the type of person who builds it and then you don't touch it for four or five years it's not going to matter for you but uh for us I we frequently have to connect disconnect the Engine Systems all the time basically and being able to just access it all and basically just a patch panel more or less on the side of the computer that's instantly exposed when you pull the panel off that'd be pretty cool so these are available and they start at 160 the 850 Watts uh 270 dollars for 1200 watts we don't have any plans to do any testing on these specifically right now but it's an interesting approach and uh I guess let us know if you end up getting one up next so last week there was a sad day for blizzard gamers in China because netease which effectively acted as Blizzard's publisher in China and blizzard couldn't come to an agreement on how they wanted their publishing relationship to work and uh so long story short World of Warcraft OverWatch 2 Starcraft 2 basically any Blizzard game except for I think Diablo Immortal or something they uh they shut all the servers off so I mean just purely from a gaming standpoint especially people into MMOs that's gonna it's depressing because people put a lot of time into MMOs they build actual friendships they form actual groups they play with and talk with so that's it was sad to hear about it so to catch you up on this the breakup between the two companies was pretty messy netease has uh so net uses Simon Jew publicly stated in a LinkedIn post the following he said quote one day when what has happened behind the scene could be told developers and Gamers will have a whole new level of understanding of how much damage a jerk can make and it only escalated from there net ease ramped it from saying they're jerks and mean to tearing down statues with sledgehammers blizzard statues not just random ones uh tore down blizzard statues with sledgehammers and the now vacant Chinese office campus which had its own coffee shop on site had a temporary green tea drink that they offered um in association with this now if you're thinking that's very nice of them green tea is good uh green tea in this context we think just connecting the dots of the Mandarin education I've received is probably related to the slur top yeah which is like um it's like someone who acts Innocent but is actually extremely manipulative behind the scenes and is sort of preparing to stab you in the back is my best interpretation of that particular idiom and if you're native and have a better understanding feel free to leave it below but that's how I understand it so uh anyway there's bad blood between the companies as the day of the shutdown approached for World of Warcraft at least blizzard did make available at an archival way to store data for profiles for characters for accounts so players could effectively uh preserve their accounts in the event that blizzard is able to work with a new publisher because it sounds like they're not going back at this point to establish servers once again now players in China started calling this file basically an electronic urn and the process of creating it they referred to as more or less cremation unfortunately for the players this process locked them out of their accounts entirely there's videos online a final massive player Gatherings as the servers go down and I mean if you've ever played an MMO and built connections with people you couldn't feel for the players in these clips the only Blizzard game is still officially playable in China right now is Diablo Immortal not that you should play it because that one is actually developed by netease and it's operating under a different licensing approach as for why we included it other than it just being significant this is a fantastic warning of the future of video games where basically overnight everything is wiped out and obliterated because you you owe nothing so in games where everything is server based and if game streaming ever takes off where not only is your data server based but all of it is server based uh you have no recourse just like it's like it never happened so that's I don't know that's a a future we don't really want to see with the total lack of ownership of anything certainly Nvidia is interested in that as well with their streaming services although it hasn't taken off yet all right next one last one Discord has a bug where with Nvidia Hardware specifically if you're running Discord in the background the app the there's a chance that the memory clock is reduced by 200 megahertz so it's not the biggest a loss memory clocks go pretty high but that's definitely a decrease in performance hopefully this will be addressed with an official update in the near future but for now Nvidia has posted a support article with a worker out users can download the GeForce 3D profile manager which is a relic from the SLI era and then use it to export SLI profiles and just to be clear this is even if you have one card after you have the file exported you can open in a text editor find a Discord in the text add a specific line and then save the file finally use the profile manager to import the edited file which should fix the issue and credit to the team that figured this out where they basically took a legacy software and they worked their way backwards to solving the problem it's a strange problem given the popularity of Discord and nvidia's market share it may be affecting you without you knowing it so definitely worth looking into that one and uh maybe doing the work around if you see the problem that's it for this one thanks for watching as always subscribe for more go to store.gamers access.net to grab a shirt like this one while they're still there or patreon.com Gamers access we'll see you all next time\n"