[Music] hey everyone welcome back to the hardware news recap for the week in this one we'll be talking about a strange lawsuit against valve also Microsoft being charged with breaching antitrust rules Microsoft automatically uploading your files to the internet they're they're different stories uh 4070 TI supers potentially it looks like getting the ad 102 die and a couple others like nvidia's market cap reduction of half a trillion dollars in a couple days they're still like the top three or four companies in the world by market cap before that this video is brought to you by thermal Grizzly's aeronaut and hydronaut thermal pastes aeronaut is thermal Grizzly's entry-level thermal solution marketed as resistant to curing and for long-term urance hydronaut is thermal Grizzly's Next Step Up targeted for overclocking and higher performance applications we've used hydronaut on a lot of our systems internally over the years you can learn more at the link in the description below all right first one is valve being sued for 656 million British pounds or about $832 million us this is in the UK obviously and it's based on claims that valve is quote rigging the market and taking advantage of UK Gamers end quote this Collective action claim was put forth by a digital rights campaigner named Vicky shopold and it is being brought forth by the legal firm milberg London LLP the lawsuit claims that that valve has been quote shutting out its competition and the BBC reports that the lawsuit quote says valve forces game Publishers to sign up to so-called price parity obligations preventing titles from being sold at cheaper prices on Rival platforms choel claims that this allowed valve to charge an excessive Commission of up to 30% also a quote according to shop bolt and the law firm valve has been in breach of UK competition law for over six years with the lawsuit she aims quote to stop this unlawful conduct and help people get back what they are owed end quote now at the core of this from what we understand it looks like this is based on maybe just an incorrect understanding of how things work on Steam so uh this comes down to the price floor for games that are sold off platform it's kind of what the claim is about saying that valve is setting the price limit uh and is also taking a what they call an excessive commission we'll talk with that in a second following the lawsuit game developer Jason Thor Hall and uh streamer maybe better known as pirate software replied and came to valve's sort of Defense stating quote steam's pricing restriction is only for steam key pricing off platform meaning you cannot use steam as a Distribution Hub and sell steam keys off platform for cheaper this prevents valve from getting ripped off and is absolutely fine they do not dictate the lowest price your game can be sold for unless you are using steam Keys end quote steam Keys is a free valve solution it's a service that valve provides to steam developers as single use codes that they can give people like beta testers or press as for the 30% commission Hall AKA pirate software stated quote the steam 30% cut is not actually 30% it's 30% for all sales made on the steam platform if you sell steam Keys valve makes a 0% cut of that transaction they also don't charge for generating steam Keys the claim that the 30% is egregious is also a subjective opinion as many developers myself included find that the value brought by steam is well worth it whether or not 30% is too high is Up For Debate as stated by pirate software we're not game developers but as YouTubers the most I can say is wow 30% would be awesome I that would leave 70% for the one actually like making the thing that'd be pretty cool so I'm just saying like we'd be okay with it uh but you know it's it's a different industry there's different costs involved whatever anyway aside from the Epic gam store which collects 12% cut and uses that as a major marketing point the majority of competitors we're aware of charge 30% to the best of our understanding this includes GG the Microsoft store the PlayStation Store Xbox game store Nintendo eShop Apple's app App Store and famously Apple's App Store actually and Google's Play Store some developers have special deals with the store host uh that's kind of a different thing though that's that's arranged privately overall seems like this lawsuit might be founded on maybe uh an inadequate understanding of how the feature functions all right next one in other legal news the European commission has charged Microsoft with breaching EU Anti-Trust rules for bundling Microsoft teams with its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 subscriptions the European commission raised concerns that this maneuver stifles competition writing in the press release quote the commission is concerned that since at least April 2019 Microsoft has been tying teams with its core software as a service productivity applications thereby restricting competition on the market for communication and collaboration products and defending its Market position in productivity software and its suet Centric model from competing suppliers of individual software in particular the commission is concerned that Microsoft may have granted teams a distribution Advantage by not giving customers the choice whether or not to acquire access to teams when they subscribe to their software as of service productivity applications this Advantage may have been further exacerbated by interoperability limitations between teams as competitors and Microsoft's offerings the conduct may have prevented teams as Rivals from competing and in turn innovating to the detriment of customers of the European economic area end quote in particular the commission States that Microsoft's actions infringe on article 102 of the Treaty of the functioning European Union which the commission says quote prohibits the abuse of a dominant Market positions kind of uh anti-monopoly stuff the European commission began its investigation to Microsoft July 27th 2023 for this particular issue that was after receiving a complaint from Microsoft's rival uh slack and Alpha view gmbh the EU Executive Vice President in charge of the commission said that quote we are concerned that Microsoft may be giving its own communication product teams an undo advantage over competitors Microsoft like most of its large competitors is no stranger to European Union antitrust charges in 2004 the company was fined 497 million EUR and was required to release a version of Windows without Windows Media Player in 2008 the company was fined €899 million EUR for not complying with a 2004 ruling regarding the sharing of information in 2013 the European Union finded Microsoft € 561 million for failing to give Windows users a choice of web browsers but that's enough of Microsoft So speaking of Microsoft Microsoft this time with one drive following its recent massive controversy around the recall service which aims to save screenshots regularly of the desktop for future llm training and other AI use cases Microsoft is aiming to solidify concerns about its platform and push people away as rapidly as possible by defaulting to automatic uploads of your files to one drive great it's opt out not opt in before we get into the story just a public service announcement so we install Windows without webc connected account for every machine in the office that's test benches and workstations alike there are a lot of good reasons for this this is one of them because if you have no web connected Microsoft account attached to your OS then it cannot automatically enable this one drive uh uploading feature feature whatever privacy concern future breach and waiting whatever you want to call it um if you also want to install Windows with local only accounts like we do we recommend it you can do so by when you get to the windows install prompt you hit shift F10 when it starts asking you for an account or to create one that will pop up command prompt and then you type in o o uh SL bypass nro we'll put that on the screen o I think stands for outof box experience and then the bypass will uh bypass an account requirement you'll have to restart it will remember that when you boot back into the installer then you can make a local only account uh and if for some reason that doesn't work you can Google oob uh bypass and there'll be a million articles about how to do it so all right onto the story Microsoft's newest change enables opt out meaning on by default automatic uploads to its one drive storage service windows will now upload the libraries folders to one drive which includes pi pictures documents videos and music this story originally kind of got popular from Reddit post asking about the behavior we saw run on Tom's Hardware and a couple other places for security reasons primarily so you don't have backups floating around without your knowledge of it we'd recommend turning the feature off unless you intend to use it and to keep track of it anytime you're using a cloud storage service whether that's something like adob cloud or Microsoft or whatever it may be uh we'd recommend only using those if you're going to keep track of them because if you don't and there's an account breach that you're unaware of then whatever documents you have there tax files whatever it may be social security number uh which you shouldn't really be storing there anyway but people definitely do it that obviously becomes a concern so we just recommend turning it off unless you're going to use it all right next one 4070 TI super gpus coming based on a102 the die that's used for the RTX 490 so this is according to leaks by MSI and later colorful uh where future manufacturing runs the 470 TI super gpus will apparently be based on a102 and these will be cut down variants of the die that is used for the RTX 490 which is kind of crazy CU that is a gigantic die typically manufacturers like Nvidia AMD Intel will use their defect silicon and then fuse off non- defective functionality that is congruent with the higher-end product that maybe wasn't uh a defect in manufacturing they'll fuse it off knock it down to a lower skew and that allows the manufacturer to reclaim the die if it wouldn't Pass qualification for the full fat die 490 MSI revealed to bench life. info that it's upcoming 4070 TI super Ventus 3x black OC which probably should get some kind of award for amount of words in a product title it'll use a GPU that's code named 80102 d175 the RTX 490 on the other hand debuted with 8102 D300 chips and a story on video cards claims that it will be 8102 d225 not 8102 d175 in either case the part that's important is the move to 8102 the RTX 4070 TI super gpus typically use a cut down 80103 chip which is what RTX 480s the originals are based on in terms of specs msi's outcoming card doesn't deviate from the Fe versions much The Core specs are all identical so that's memory the core count all that stuff looks like Nvidia is just rescuing defects in the process and shipping them as 4070 TI supers we see this all the time but one of the most noteworthy historical rescues was the 2060 ko the60 ko was really interesting and is a mistake that Nvidia will probably never make again so the KO was evj specific skew but uh that version of the die was also sold through MSI cards the difference was on the 2060 KO EVGA model they guaranteed that specific cut down version uh of the other Di and so what happened was and we have a video on it the 2060 KO and some workstation applications was massively uh better at those tasks than the original 2060 and that wasn't supposed to happen so that was a cut down version of another die it was supposed to have features disabled uh and it was just supposed to be a 2060 in every capacity but it wasn't in gaming it was about the same to the best of my memory anyway it was just those production applications from a mistake in nvidia's fusing process anyway 8102 dies are significantly larger than their 8103 equivalent so uh there's really no reason they'd use 8102 unless it's a a down Bend defect this die size is approximately 68 mm squared for 8102 with 8103 at a significantly smaller area of 378.5 that's millimet squared again this die size difference is Meaningful large die areas nearer the reticle limit like 8102 are more expensive to produce this is partly due to actual material machine time but also partly due due to the lower yields saving defects to convert them into lower spec parts is a way to recoup the cost now MSI leaking to bench lifee isn't the only company to push the 4070 TI Super Cards based on 8102 according to video cards colorful is also releasing a skew based off of 8102 the publication notes that it features a 310 watt TDP that would make it 15 watts higher than MSI variant but this is a choice by the card maker not by Nvidia one last Nvidia story here I think unless unless more come through before the end of the episode we have to shove them in but Nvidia recently saw a half a trillion dollar reduction in its market cap let's just you you hear half a trillion $500 billion doll just to put it into perspective it's it's like orders of magnitude more than a fathomable amount of money you hear that kind of reduction and market capitalization and you might think that the stock chart would look like the end times like it's it's the ocalypse everything's over it's doomed but this is what it actually looks like it's a blip it's hardly noticeable this drop happened over the course of 3 days making it the largest shorttime reduction in company value in stock market history Not only would this spell the end for most companies uh it is in fact five times what Dr Evil held the world for ransom for in 1997 we hold the world ransom for one 100 billion or 2.54 times if adjusted for inflation and probably Dr Evil would need to do that just to cover his costs obviously now this is what half a trillion dollar drop in market cap looks like just again we'll put on the screen the drop follows nvidia's meteoric rise to briefly become the world's most valuable Company by market capitalization which uh it held on June 18th with a market cap of 3.33 $ 5 trillion for some fun but mostly meaningless numbers let's just let's just do some math just to see what it looks like so if you take that $3.33 five trillion and you divide it by the headcount 29,600 employees then the perv value market cap share if you want to it doesn't work that way but if you want to do it that way that would be $113 million per employee or if you divided the annual revenue of 9.77 4 billion from April of this year year uh reporting by the employee headcount that average would dwindle down to a poultry $2.7 million per employee per year just terrible where's the value in that all right next one Hy is making steam controllers and not those steam controllers the company's variant is more similar to the steam deex controls and that it has the steamex menu buttons it also has touch sensors on top of its sticks that allow users to activate gyro controls unlike the steam deck and the steam controller if you remember those it lacks track pads and Rumble support and while it has buttons on the back like the steam controller they're only two compared to the Dex 4 instead it moves two of those back buttons to the front with one under the d-pad and the other under the right control stick in terms of connectivity it supports Wireless over Bluetooth and a wired connection via USBC and the steam controller from Hy will come in at four colors black white neon yellow Y and violet and will retail for 7,890 Japanese Yen which amounts to about 50 bucks us unfortunately the steam controllers are only targeting a Japan release for now more frighteningly though it's set to launch on October 31st up next previously Microsoft revealed that it was working on a game streaming Hardware device back in 2021 which the company has since shelv but it's kind of reemerged here that device carried the code name project Keystone and aside from Snippets of it sitting on a desk behind Xbox head Phil Spencer we never really got a look at it more recently though Windows Central was able to unearth some of the Keystone patent filings which uh gives some more illustrations of the cloud streaming device visually Keystone looks a bit like a small record player it features a square design with the circle on top and bottom that are reminiscent of the Xbox series s's black circle the front of the console appears to have an Xbox logo shaped power button and a USB type a port the drawing of the back of the console depicts what looks like an ethernet port HDMI and power connectors alongside exhaust vent the right side features what looks to be a controller pairing button and finally the bottom of the console also looks like it has numerous circular vents the documentation shows that the patent was filed on June 1st 2022 and the date of the patent was established on December 26th 2023 there's still a lot we don't know about the device including its specs or Os Spencer spoke to the verge and mentioned back in November of 2022 that the device was being pushed back because of its price according to the publication Microsoft was originally targeting a $99 to $129 price point for the device and speaking with Wall Street Journal back in October 22 Spencer didn't rule out the possibility of an Xbox streaming device and said quote will we do a streaming device at some point I suspect we will but I think it's years away and those were kind of their last real comments on any of this a couple years old now from a functionality standpoint Keystone would have occupied a similar space to Google's now defunct stadia platform uh it would be a competitor to Nvidia solution as well formerly called grid and now called GeForce now uh all of which are designed to make sure you own absolutely nothing and barely even the hardware that you're using to stream the games too but unlike Google and stadia though Microsoft remained in the game streaming space with its Xbox cloud gaming service which bundles with the Xbox game pass ultimate subscription so Keystone ultimately didn't make it to Market there have been rumors about handheld development as well those haven't been publicly shown in any official capacity yet uh but Microsoft is definitely playing around with different things the concern we always have with the game streaming stuff is that it is the clearest path forward to making sure all of the games are purely licenses and that's kind of where it's going already even with steam however the uh big difference with game streaming is you now start to strip away the hardware ownership as well so it's not just the software but it's also the we'll provide all the hardware in our remote data centers you just pay for that indefinitely uh which is uh concerning future for a lot of reasons we've already gone that Direction with productivity software like the Adobe suite and uh it's really not it's not where I want to go with Hardware Arctic has released a new nvme SSD cooler so this isn't something we're going to go too in detail with but it's called the M2 Pro talking about it because we saw thermal Tes m.2 SSD coolers at compex where they used really tiny 20 mm fans to basically compete in the same market so Arctic says that the cooler is compatible with the PS5 meaning that it'll fit in that small chamber it also makes some interesting claims for the performance but as far as how it assembles they say it uses a click in mechanism for the SSD and the heat sink and then it also has two of arctic's tp3 thermal pads that allow it to contact on both sides of the SSD which is particularly useful if it's a dual-sided SSD now as far as their performance Arctic claims that it measured a Samsung 990 Pro hitting a peak temperature during a right test of 0° CI and that was without a cooler and then it claims that it went down to 55° CI with the M2 Pro uh we are currently way over capacity on testing meaning we have way too many things in to do reviews on so we don't plan to validate that claim uh but that is what they State for the performance all right Mini's forum is releasing a new Mini PC called the um 890 Pro which will be powered by amd's refreshed zen4 Hawk Point processor specifically it will use the ryzen 98945 HS CPU which is an 8 core 16 thread part now confusingly minis form has conflicting information here so they have this image on the page for the product that says it's Zen 3 architecture higher up on the page they say Zen 4 architecture and then AMD officially has the correct specs of course for the 8945 HS which is in fact Zen 4 looks like a copy paste error they forgot to update the image text from a previous generation or something in terms of ports the Box seemingly does a good job of cramming a bunch of Hardware into a tiny space and includes an audio jack as well two USB 4 Port 4 USB 3.2 display port 1.4 HDMI 2.1 ocul link and to ethernet ports the um 890 Pro starts as a Bare Bones kit 480 bucks you'd bring your own storage and RAM for that or it's 650 for the full skew with 32 gigs of memory and a 1 tby SSD Mini's form has been overall recovering pretty well so when we first worked with the company when is still um I don't know how new it was but it was at least new to us at the time with the liquid metal solution years ago we did a review on that we the experience was that we felt they had very misleading marketing uh the main selling point feature wasn't even in the device and that was it looked bad I me it really didn't look good for min's form they have recovered in a massive way and it looks like they're they're going the right direction all right valve releases steam game recording in beta this is kind of similar in ways to Shadow play or AMD relive where it is Hardware agnostic here it works on the steam deck as well but it tries to complete some of the same functions that those do steam game recording can function in background recording mode which captures continuously but can overwrite and the other is active recording on key press steam game recording also features lightweight editing tools it allows you to uh basically clip footage save out an mp4 and then it also has sharing functionality and it has timeline event markers so these are kind of cool because if any of you have ever used a a one of the older model GoPros especially there's always the problem where you collect a ton of footage and then it's kind of hard to scrub through and find the interesting points so these markers are supposed to solve that where they will on a predefined game event uh programming which are mostly unknown right now and are set as we understand it by developers markers will drop which will make it easier for players to find those events in the game so valve says that players can also drop their own markers this would be useful to cut down useless capture like say when you're camping waiting for something to happen and terms of performance overhead valve says that it tries to quote minimize CPU usage of video encoding by using the dedicated video encoding Hardware of your AMD or Nvidia gpus end quote it's unclear if intel is at a disadvantage its Arc gpus have a robust media engine but valro quote when run on systems without those graphics cards seemingly referencing the prior AMD Nvidia statement uh the system CPU is used to create video recordings which may cause a noticeable performance impact on those systems in other steam related news according to PC games and uh approximately $19 billion has been spent on unplayed Steam games so there's a lot of extrapolations in this but let's just go through it for interest the publication explained that it came to this conclusion by quote out of all the registered steam accounts in the world only 10% or about 73 million in Steam ID finders database are public Based on data from those accounts we calculate that collectively there's around $ 1.9 billion worth of games that have been purchased and then never played even a single time multiply that by 10 to roughly account for all steam profiles that are not public and you arrive at $19 billion couple things here first of all extrapolating multiplied it by 10 is is a big extrapolation uh but they're hoping that it's kind of linear and then additionally it's not clear if all these games were calculated at MSRP or at their sales price uh there's also a lot of assumption where there have been many times where steam will distribute free games as part of a bundle or the developer will do so rather and either way assuming the $1 199 billion number is Right 19 billion for unplayed games to put that into terms that are actually fathomable that would be almost the value of 17 Nvidia employees and that quip was the only reason that story was in this news episode thanks for watching subscribe for more go 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