The Hardware Asylum Podcast

With 2024 quickly coming to an end we decided to reflect on some of the hardware highlights of 2024 to recall some of our favorite products and projects from fancy motherboards to the popular dual subwoofer build. We also end the year with one last system build that may not completely break the bank.

Dennis has this an unhealthy obsession with retro pc hardware from repairing old motherboards to assembling unicorn builds that max out the platform in ways that could not have been imagined when they were relevant. Well, it would seem that others have noticed and started sending in some mysteries of their own.

It has been a while since we featured an AMD motherboard on Hardware Asylum or the Podcast and in celebration of this achievement the duo offer an in-depth look at the new flagship motherboard from ASUS including Nitropath and how a SS Phase doesn’t faze the Ryzen 9 9950x.

For this Podcast Extra, the duo will be diving into what might have been one of the most anticipated movies of 2015 that was quickly rushed out in 2024 to become one of the many box office flops of the season. From a poor script to completely irrelevant casting choices it makes you wonder if anyone will ever make a good movie based on a video game.

We talked quite a bit about how messed up the RTX 4070 launch was from the initial release to a highly public recall to the final version, which was pretty good. Well, seems NVIDIA is at it again with a silent nerf of memory performance. However, all is not lost given the current RTX 50 Series rumors proving that the Blackwell generation could be really good.

By now most of you have heard of ChatGPT and its significance in bringing AI principles into the mainstream. There are quite a few different types of AI from generative ai to create assets and language models which can create chatbots and digital assistants. Most of these systems will run in the cloud as a service but, you could run your own AI with some rather simple tools.

In this episode the duo dive back into the topic of sound quality and if sound bars are really all that good or just cleaver marking combined with the placebo effect. There is some truth to each side and after some in-depth real-world testing they are here with a verdict.

Based on what Dennis saw during Computex 2024 there is a very good chance that the era of the DIY personal computer is finally coming to an end. Of course, there will always be ways to build a computer however, we noticed that then hardware makers gave up on competitive overclocking it killed an entire niche from the enthusiast PC sector and now it is happing on the gaming side. In this episode the duo discusses the writing on the wall and paint some pictures on what the future could be.

This is part 3 of our Computex 2024 coverage. A common theme for Computex 2024 was AI and sadly the absence of Gaming and/or Overclocking hardware. Despite this there were a few interesting and overkill motherboards followed by purely custom power supplies and retro matrix displays on coolers.

This is part 2 of our Computex 2024 coverage. As mentioned in the previous episode, there wasn’t much in the way of gaming hardware on the show floor but there was plenty of AI accessories and hardware available along with example of the new CAMM2 memory modules designed for ultra-portable computers.

It has been a while since Hardware Asylum was at Computex and the 2024 edition of this global technology show did not disappoint. NVIDIA had their keynote the day before Computex opened followed by an AMD keynote to kick the show off. After that Dennis visited with Gigabyte, Corsair, beQuiet during the first hours of the event.

Have you ever wondered how your build stacks up against EVERYONE else playing Steam games? Well, the Steam Hardware Survey can give you that data and the results are shocking, to say the least. In this episode we use the April 2024 Steam Hardware Survey to build the ultimate gaming PC according to gamers from around the world.

In this episode we explore some of the things that makes NVIDIA a company to watch from their dedication to gaming using NVIDIA GTX and RTX graphics cards to game related technologies such as Ray Tracing and DLSS. Their GPUs are fueling the AI revolution with datacenter construction and hardware designed specifically for AI processing. All of this collectively impacts their publicly traded stock which is embedded into thousands of mutual funds and the S&P 500 market index.

It is not uncommon for people to establish a home office either for their day job, their night job or even a side hustle. While you only need a computer there are certain accessories that make the entire process more enjoyable and vastly more productive. In this episode we explore a number of essential components including the Yeyian Gaming Flexcam.

Dennis recently had an old review motherboard come back to the Hardware Asylum Labs and was a completely unexpected sight. The board in question is the Soltek SL-75DRV4 and was a board he first reviewed back in 2001 on Ninjalane (the Parent site). The board had leaking capacitors and was a common failure that claimed the lives of so many motherboards before their time. Later in the show the duo talk about lost Memories, not from getting old but rather losing your data due to storing SSDs for too long.

With the pending launch of Fallout on Amazon and Borderlands in the theater we decided to revisit some great video game movies including a dream casting discussion we had over 10 years ago centered on the Borderlands movie and how badly a movie could be perceived when it starts to stray to far from the source material. However, the new Fallout series on Amazon might just be the crown jewel to save the summer.

Recently Jensen Huang the CEO of NVIDIA attended the World Governments Summit and talked about the current state of AI and made some amazing claims from Sovern AI to regulations to howe everyone in a company could be a coder. This raised some eyebrows, including those belonging to John Carmack who mentioned that learning how to code is not about programs but the process of learning how to solve problems. In this episode we talk about different implementations of AI and the hardware used to run it.

We have mentioned that one of quickest and most secure ways to back up your personal data is using a NAS device. Many commercial NAS systems are self-contained and have limited power. The CS382 is a dedicated NAS chassis allowing you to build the server you need without the common limitations. Later in this episode we talk about the new game modes in Fortnite and how to get rich quick using in game vbucks.

The RTX 40 Series Super video cards launched in January and encompass some of the final versions of the NVIDIA RTX 40 Series and Ada Lovelace architecture. We have the Gigabyte RTX 4070 Super in the lab and discuss some of the features and the take a deep dive into the interesting and completely messed up launch history of the 40 Series.

In this episode we do a debrief of the popular Consumer Electronics Show talking about each vendor we visited. While we focus on the computer hardware aspects of CES and checking out the latest motherboards, and related computer accessories there are some other amazing things to see including some AR Sunglasses, Mega Servers and an awesome all wheel drive robot lawn mower.