RejZoR

Your claim makes no sense. No one just charges premium and everyone's like "yup, all fine". You earn the right to charge premium and EK has always been the premium brand. Guess what, premium brands charge premium prices. People also forgot how copper prices increased through years and how machining specific blocks simply costs more. As for EVGA, do you realize EVGA was actually making the "NVIDIA" branded graphic cards for NVIDIA back in the day and that it was known as brand with toughest PCB's and power delivery circuits? In similar way how Sapphire has been making "Built by ATi" back then. Also your warranty claim makes no sense. Last thing any company wants is for most of their products to be processed through warranty. It's just absolutely worst for business. Either you lower the warranty period and risk people avoiding your products or you raise the warranty to attract customers with longer warranty and ensure most of your sold products survive warranty period without any need for service. This is the best outcome. But if something goes wrong, users have the peace of mind warranty will cover their expensive graphic card and as far as I know EVGA has always correctly dealt with warranty claims and was actually know to be very "pro consumer" oriented.

Microsoft is "fixing" Windows for ARM for the last 15 years... If you think it'll suddenly miraculously get better, you're an hyper optimist.

This whole dumb rebranding of Twitter as X is such a massive shitshow it's incredible. None of this X crap makes any sense. It's like Elon has zero clue about branding and everyone is glorifying him as this entrepreneur genius. ?!

While overclocking almost isn't a thing anymore, to really peak the full potential of components, good cooling is required. I mean, Ryzens will clock themselves as high as they can until they hit 90°C these days. But if you hit those 90°C really quickly, you're leaving a lot of performance on the table. If you can keep it a bit below that limit, it'll perform at its 100%. And it's not really that different with old Ryzens either. If they go near thermal throttle, the boost will slightly decrease, losing maximum potential. So, water cooling still makes sense. Also there is noise. Even AiO's can soak a lot of heat before they need to kick up fans so you have a much more lazy fan curve that's easier on ears. I honestly never understood EK's approach to all the super expensive, super custom "this fits this exact model only" approach to be profitable. I'd understand if they made the best AiO's in the world by building all in one solution with stronger pump and their signature CPU blocks that can fit many CPU's and they'd just be selling extra socket plates to adjust to new ones, basically creating a dominance in AiO segment where everyone's basically the same. But all the super expensive full cover blocks that only fit super expensive motherboards that are bought by 1000 people worldwide, I don't know. Same goes for graphic cards. Too many too specific boards that require too many specific blocks. And when you're talking 500€ a full cover block, I'd then just rather buy a new graphic card instead of squeezing those few extra FPS from old one, noise or not factored in. They really need to narrow down and optimize because they've gone so wide with their offerings I don't think it makes any sense anymore. Best would be to focus on CPU's more as they are much more universal and maybe try to convince graphic card makers to standardize their GPU designs so more universal water cooling could be fitted to graphic cards. Hell, even go as far to make them CPU AiO friendly, so you could just buy 2x CPU AiO and slap one on CPU and another on GPU. That kind of universal approach that would in the end benefit EK too as they wouldn't have to make all the expensive full cover blocks down to specific revisions of a single graphic card from a single graphic card maker.

That's pretty rough. I always looked at EK with pride since they were the apex of custom cooling and being from small country of Slovenia to make such huge impact on industry, it was quite something. Hearing this stuff is very rough and saddens me that they went this way.

That doesn't and shouldn't work like that. Even Roman had to buy several Lamptron products and contact AIDA64 devs directly and specifically ask about keys to find something fishy is going on. Now tell me how realistic is for that to ever happen to an average consumer who buys single Lamptron product? At best, key not working would make user contact Lamptron and they'd just generate a new key and user would probably be happy long enough for them to forget about issue on a grand scheme of things.

And it shouldn't be buyers job to do that. Whoever is importing those products should do this kind of checks to make sure good sold to users are not fraudulent. And they should be liable, not the users. If you purchased it via authorized/official reseller, user shouldn't be liable for ANYTHING. It would be different if you import it yourself by buying it from AliExpress or some other unreliable source. That changes things and if I want something genuine, I'm not going to buy it on AliExpress because you can't be sure about anything there, it's China after all. Amazon used to only have genuine brand name products, but these days it's almost the same as AliExpress so I wouldn't rely on that at all anymore. Full of cheap knock off looking items.

I don't get it how can Germany criminalize USERS for this crap? By what dumb logic? It's not users responsibility to go full Sherlock to figure out if company is screwing them over or not. Users shouldn't be liable at all and Germany as government should prosecute Lamptron in this case. As simple as that.

I wish this was also enforced in my country. All ISP's just furiously advertising their "promo" prices that last for 1 year or so and then you're up to regular prices. It's super annoying when you're trying to change providers and you want to actually know how much you'll be paying the rest of the time.

It's very likely it's just a bad looking number because of restructuring. Also with Intel opening foundries to 3rd parties, that's a huge potential seeing how TSMC is oversaturated, Samsung slightly underwhelming, GloFo seems to almost disappear from mainstream and the rest are small players or very focused like Siemens who mostly make chips for industrial use. People often diss Intel nodes as "bad", but we have to admit they know how to make chips run at stupid high clocks and if that's application even at expense of some power envelope, it's worth using. Would be kinda ironic if Intel made chips for AMD and NVIDIA tho. There is also potential for Qualcomm and Mediatek, at least for lower end chipsets, but potentially even higher end ones. We'll see how all that will roll out in the future.

Linux has been quite mature for a lot of things, its main issue is still gaming as graphic companies don't really put much effort into it and neither do game studios. Valve's approach of emulation and compatibility hacking/patching is really not the way. It is weird how companies where Windows isn't really needed still insist on it. Is it because of familiarity people have with Windows? I can totally see my work using I don't know, Kubuntu to really go with most vanilla Linux approach. It has almost the same layout as Windows with KDE and all the stuff I run is Java and inside browser anyway which can run on any Linux. Then again, most coworkers aren't even familiar with Windows either so I'm kinda confused why. Is administration of Windows easier than Linux?

Or at least allow bluetooth only mode. So many things would be fine with just BT remote control yet require WiFi and account for some reason.

The fact that all these "Ai" companies trained shit they are selling on everyone's work in the entire existence of it is highly problematic. Like, I love to make stuff and hand it over to people for free to use, but I absolutely don't want mega corporations make even more wealth by using my designs or creations. And that's exactly what these Ai companies are doing. Their LLM's are worthless without the data they trained them on. So this whole Ai stuff will just crumble down if anyone goes on and regulates it and yeah, it won't be usable on any such level anymore.

Would be pretty cool if fully local Ai alternative was bolted into Linux distros to go against Microsoft and their Ai stuff that runs in the cloud and most aren't happy about because of cloud part.

Glassdoor "So transparent you can see real names through the glass!"

I mean, clocks are impressive, but I'd still take 7800X3D any time. It's the ultimate gaming chip and still plenty fast for general compute of any sort. Just because cooling all that heat from the chip just isn't fun even if you have water cooling.

If you turn on Auto Blocker on Samsung, I very much doubt any non techy person would be able to find its setting and disable it, even though it doesn't even have a lock option for the setting.

I mean, Samsung has Auto Blocker which blocks everything non authorized and official. If you want pure security you can enable it and it will refuse to allow any sideloading entirely. But you can also choose not to if you want to sideload. Why can't Apple just do that instead of being always so stupidly pedantic about "their ways"?

They could easily shape it in a similar familiar way and get rid of the archaic Win9x limitations old one has. And without literal seconds long delays for opening and applying it. And it would be fine. But they'll instead invent something new, f**k it up and then not fix it for next 20 years.

There is a clear difference between preferring something known and whatever the F this outdated broken garbage from 2004 is. They could have done it better if they wanted back in 2004 already. I mean for F sake, we had NVMax if anyone remembered that one. Hell, NVIDIA had direct access to most common settings back in the day directly in taskbar's tray area. NVMax was snappy and sleek and didn't depend on this ancient Internet Explorer spaghetti code. Some random dude did it as a fan project and huge company like NVIDIA can't? Come on.

Well this one came entirely unexpected. LMG uses a lot of RED's, I wonder what will be their take on the acquisition.

Wasn't this whole thing a big deal few years ago, but the whole implementation was so stupid and hard to use no one used it? Like, if you could easily install any app from any app market, people would use it. But I'm rather technical user and apart from knowing this subsystem was available, I've never even tried it because it was so clumsy and overcomplicated.

Cheaters are hardly Valve's specific issue. Same for these scams, I'm certain that people who were scamed here will get their money back no questions asked. It's just odd that Valve allowed changes of game name and even publisher details to be identical to some other. And DRM is not Valve's domain. Steam in itself has some protections the way system works, but in the end it's up to game devs and publishers what they use or don't use. Most games have no protection outside of Steam itself, other who are so scared of their work being stolen usually use stupid Denuvo which often has bunch of performance problems. At least for the last one you always have GOG where games are always without DRM because that's their policy. And I religiously defend it because they respect me as customer and I respect them as consumer and I have never shared any GOG game with anyone, ever.

There are reputable sellers on grey market, some that I've been using for years without single issue. But you're always buying it as is and you're also not covered by protections from original game store, like for example you can't refund a grey market game you registered to Steam if you find it's not what you were expecting it to be. The deal is final. But I'm okay with that. Basically only game I sort of regret buying this way was Fallguys which I played just few times and then it was removed and transitioned to Epic Games anyway and Tiny Tina's Wonderlands because it's just boring AF even though I'm a huge Borderlands fan. But I accepted that loss and moved on. If price between Steam and grey is very small I'll always pick Steam directly, but in general I prefer GOG over anything because of their no-DRM policy which I really dig. If I buy games I expect not to be treated like a criminal by default and have constant problems with said stupid DRM. Had so many problems with legally bought games in the past because of DRM I hate it the most out of everything.

Maybe, just maybe, they'll start doing fines based on valutation of the company, so that fines actually hurt them. What's the point in fining Apple 5 million $ when they'll make that amount literally in minutes of time that just passes and is like you said, literally operating expense. 2 billions on the other hand, it's something you can't just write off even as such huge company. EU is stupid sometimes, but boy they are doing good stuff lately.