You know, this is some shit that I expect when dealing with some shady asshole on ebay, but LMG?
Bro... Are you ok?
I always wondered if Linus was actually a slimy POS, but this Billet Labs situation has cemented it for me. If you haven't watched the Gamers Nexus followup video, definitely watch it.
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I've been seeing this news article circling around the internet all day, and I have yet to see anyone mention what the monoblock actually is. It's starting to feel like some kind of mysterious primal artifact, like maybe the master computer from which all flavors of Linux originated.
It is a water cooling block designed for a specific graphics card. It is a new type of design and Billet Labs sent their best prototype (as in, the only one they had) to LMG for review. Linus proceeded to strap it to a video card where it didn't fit, so bad that there was a 1mm gap (which might as well be a million miles when you're talking about cooling). Of course the performance sucked due to it being strapped to a card it wasn't designed to fit, linus trashed the block and the company.
And here's the part that just fucks me off. Billet Labs SENT THEM THE CORRECT CARD WITH THE BLOCK! There is literally no valid excuse for putting it on the wrong card, Billet Labs sent them the correct one!!!
And the thing that a lot of people aren't understanding is the Billet Labs is not some large corporation, it is two guys putting hard work into a product. Unless I'm mistaken, they have regular ass jobs. People talking about them being able to sue... With what imaginary money? LMG is a 100,000,000 dollar company (at least). Their sloppy, misinformed, shitty, shameful, video basically has the power to cut them off at the knees when they did absolutely nothing wrong.
There is so much more to this, but whatever. Linus is a garbage person. I feel as though Luke is a decent guy but afraid to give Linus the reality check that he desperately needs.
Anyway, the first sentence answered your question I think. I rambled and ranted.
I honestly don't understand why Luke puts up with him. I'd have left years ago. Although I have never been friends with the pompous tit to begin with.
Probably because it’s the best paying job he can ever get. What’s he gonna do when he leaves? Which other podcast/YouTube channel can he work for that’s in the Greater Vancouver Area? If he leaves his live would get upended, he either needs to move or switch careers and in both cases probably takes a salary cut. This is how shitty bosses like Linus retain employees. Just look at other shitty companies where employees don’t have transferable skills that only apply to one very specific industry, like for example the gaming industry. Employees don’t leave even when the bosses behave terribly, like Riot Games
Riot Games behaves terribly?
It was basically run like a frat house. Ball tapping, farting in people's faces, unsolicited dick pics. Basically bro culture imposed by the C-suite and that went on for years and when the company punished these men who enabled that behavior all they got was a slap on the wrist. You'd expect a company like that would have a hard time finding people, but no people stay and fresh grads are eager to work there. Basically because it's one of the biggest employers in the gaming industry in LA. Same with Blizzard, it baffles me why people still want to work there after all the shit that happened there while Kotick and his then girlfriend, Sheryl Sandberg, even tried to cover the story up.
I get it.
Imagine you start working with your friend, and you start to get successful. He starts acting like an asshole more and more, the friend part shrinks and the boss part grows, and he's oblivious to that.
But he also trusts you, would happily fund you building new things, and has an enormous audience. He's only willing to share a small slice of the pie, but it's a very big pie
Now either you leave and get a normal job, or you stay, get lots of autonomy, minor fame, and maybe a ton of money down the line, but you have to handle a narcissist.
Also by staying, you can steer the narcissist now and again - and that ripples out into the viewers
Linus has done a lot for him, that is probably the main thing.
Thanks, the context you provided was important. If it was just the first sentence I would have been left with "ah, it's a water-cooling block... wait, why is it such a big deal that it got auctioned off and lost? Water cooling blocks aren't unusual. I have one in my computer right now." The rest of the comment explained why this particular block was at the heart of such a fiasco and why losing it is so harmful.
Aside from that, when people criticized the video because he was essentially bashing a small company made by 2 dudes^1 , he then went on a rant on a WAN show saying that he wouldn't review the thing again because he is not going to waste employee time and money into doing a proper review. And that he does't really care because, ultimately, he thinks it's a product that nobody should ever buy because it's too expensive, even if the performance was great.
All said by the dude that used to make the weirdest shit and pay a shit ton of money for garbage, but god forbid someone made a waterblock for water cooling enthusiasts (you know, the kind of person that likes spending money on these products just for funsies, like audiophiles).
When you mentioned it was only two people, I got curious.
Turns out, it's a small company operating out of london, and one of the directors lives two streets away from me.
If it wasn't weird, I would absolutely take a basket of sympathy cookies or something over.
Haha, I'd very much appreciate it myself if it were the case. I don't think you are losing anything if you try to do so.
It's not weird. I'd appreciate it if it were me.
That is a bit unfair, they call nVidia names all the time, and keep bashing its practices. They can barely talk to them, because of past beef.
Their videos are obviously bad from the technical quality point of view, their rig all kinds of crappy shit, it's just entertainment. They also publish stuff that would benefit from more work, he has his own idea of how to be a Youtube reviewer, but it seems like it's worked out for him so far, so I guess he knows what he's doing.
It has worked so far because the videos used to be good and years ago Youtube wasn't as competitive. From then on, once you amass a decent amount of subscribers it's fairly easy to ride the wave. It is also worth mentioning that his videos are very obviously focused towards "casual" audiences, most of which won't even know when he is showing bad data or doing a poor review.
Sometimes? Maybe. But let's not pretend like they haven't been called out by the community multiple times for being "too soft" when Nvidia pullsed some shit, even when other reviewers did complain.
Okay, would we be even talking about Billet Labs after a month if they didn't fuck up this video and selling off the prototype? This situation has been probably the best case scenario for them. This isn't to absolve LMG's part in losing the prototype and selling it off but if it worked as intended we wouldn't be talking about a 900+ waterblock for a gpu right now. It would be a long forgotten video because most consumers don't give a shit about boutique water cooling solutions, wow what a filler ltt episode. There is a market for it but and I continue to say this what super water cooling enthusiast is going to follow the words of local idiot/"funny" youtube man who does stupid watercooling projects in the dumbest ways possible.
It does work as intended. LMG fucked up once again by using the wrong card. Billet Labs sent them a compatible card and LMG lost it.
You missing the point I was making. I'm saying if LTT shot the video right and used a 3090 TI, we wouldn't be talking about this it would be a pointless video that most people wouldn't have given a shit about. It was 100% a filler episode. They really should have done it on a 3090 TI but holy shit this drama about this has been going on for a fucking month now only just rekindled with the GN news.
Sure, we wouldn't be talking about this. But also Billet Labs wouldn't have lost their only prototype device. It's not like they can turn this attention into new customers when they don't have a product to sell.
It is literally up for preorder right now and set to be delivered in a month or 3. You literally don't think they have production models or cad files for this thing? Like yes losing this prototype sucks and it can hamper further development since they will need a new one made but if they haven't updated their page that is a bit questionable to me. Their consumers should be informed of how this may affect things seeing as this has been a problem for months now.
Losing the prototype mostly hampers their ability to send it to other review channels, showing it to potential clients, and so on, so in a sense Linus forced them to milk the controversy as much as possible.
And also: did they really milk it all that much? Addressing the flaws of a test done by a major outlet would be PR standard operating procedures.
Not to mention if a standard outlet fucked up this hard, firings and industry blacklistings would swiftly follow.
Billet Labs has not done anything to promote the controversy as far as I can tell. Gamer's Nexus is the one amplifying this, and rightfully so.
The whole point of including that element in their video was as another example of how sloppy, rushed and unprofessional LMG has been operating. The complete lack of respect for an enthusiast tech startup, the exact kind of company that Linus always talks about wanting to support, is incredibly revealing about how the priorities and objectives of the company are practiced.
It is extremely telling that the CEO and CFO of LMG came out directly, throwing Linus under a bus.
You're missing the point that you're out here saying it doesn't work as intended, when apparently it does. That wouldn't be happening without LTT fucking them over.
Not OP, but I think the point they're making is that LTT screwed up the video, and that the drama sparked from LTT's screwup gave Billet a lot of publicity they wouldn't have had otherwise.
Personally, I'd trade the publicity for my only working prototype and $2,000 GPU back and a video that didn't shit on me, but if you believe any publicity is good publicity...
I understand they point they're trying to make, but while attempting to do so they repeated the same false conclusion that LTT came to in the review. Someone pointed that out to OP and rather than take that comment in good faith they wanted to harp about "missing the point".
That block is the internet, Jen. It's incredibly important that you protect it or the elders will be irate
I know that reference, I upvote!
It's a novel design of watercooler, on one side you screw a CPU, on the other side you screw a GPU, in the middle you screw the water pipes. So you get an i7-13700k + rtx 4090 in the size of an ITX motherboard, and because everything is screwed together is super rigid.
is a super niche and super expensive stuff that cater to 0.000001% of PC users, but seeing him shitting on the product like this ("it's a shitty and expensive product that doesn't make sense and nobody should buy it") is painful
After all isn't he always buying expensive and niche stuff for himself like insisting on having the monitor, keyboard and mouse cables converted to fiber optic because the PC must be in a custom rack design in the basement cooled with the water of the swimming pool. That instead is a cheap idea that everyone can do?
Well now that doesn't make any sense
Edit: format
I saw the video on it. It is an extremely overbuilt water cooling system that LTT completely fucked the review on. I don't really know if the cooler was any good since the testing was far from complete.
It's an expensive novelty item and completely useless for practical purposes as much cheaper blocks can perform the same task just as well. It's like that one time when LTT build an Xbox controller out of gold, nice bling-bling, but it doesn't make your gaming any better.
I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. Comparing to a traditional loop, it has marginally better thermals, one less set of tubing (i.e. places for leaks to spring up), and a smaller form factor. Wether or not those are “worth the money” is completely subjective. As someone interested in custom SSF builds I thought it was interesting.
We don't actually know this since no one actually test it, just to be clear.
Unless you are going the "My minivan works just as well as Ferrari for driving to work" angle, which isn't what the high-end tech segment is really about.
So what, LTT does all kinds of impractical and extreme stuff
not that anyone watching LTT could possibly know this, since they didn't bother to test it properly
It's a an $800 water cooling block for a graphics card made completely out of copper. One that Billet has preorder open for and expects to ship in "September-November 2023" to customers, yet somehow has only this single prototype of that they decided to ship to LTT.
I didn't see the video, but it seems weird that they only have one prototype... It's like the script from Grandma's boy.
I didnt see anywhere that it was the "only" prototype. I believe it was their most complete or their pre-production prototype.
So likely a hand machined and finished item as opposed to something made with production tooling or in batches to reduce manufacturing cost. Something that could also be sent to reviewers as its essentially what the finished product will be. So not only are they out their best prototype, but the opportunity cost and the potential that someone like EK could have bought it and reverse engineered it to release a competing product with little to no R&D cost.
The monoblock was a prototype watercooling block that interfaced with the cpu and gpu simultaneously. Normally if you wanted to watercool both components one would purchase seperate waterblocks for the cpu and gpu and then use plumbing in between the two.
The monoblock is a prototype water-cooling block, like in just the thing that actually makes contact with the thing you want to cool, not the piping, not the pump, not the reservoir, just the block. What makes this block a monoblock is that it covers the entirety of the gpu, so not just the actual graphics processors, but memory and power delivery, too.
Or so it appears to me.
I keep thinking of the monoblock as the monolith from 2001. But with water cooling tubes sticking out of it.
I don't want to look it up because I like the picture in my imagination.
It's a cooling block for the GPU, and apparently it can knock off up to 20 degrees. However, it is crazy expensive, like 900$.
3-5 degrees compared to EK's equivalents. Jesus people, even Billet labs says this and they are the manufacturer
Apparently it can knock off like 80-90 degrees.
Honestly the best subzero cooler on the market, just need the soul of an orphan to power it.
Apparently it can knock off the head of the Gambino crime family.
Apparently it can kill the heads of Al Qaeda/Isis and bring peace to the middle east before breakfast time.