Just two cents here and I'm gonna do something I haven't really done before.

I'm gonna do sort of a year end recap when it comes to the tech.

Anyways, when it comes to the PC genre, the PC space, because I've done these end of year kind of recaps with my channel.

But this has been a very interesting year.

2018 is one of those years I would probably down in the record books as one of the worst for PC gamers.

And let me explain why in this video why I say it's the worst.

Although we saw some great innovative tech come out, there's some reasons why I think this year is gonna go down in history as one of the worst.

So hear me out on this.

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All right.

So, 2018.

I'm probably gonna talk about this a little bit out of order, and I'm probably going to be a bit more scatterbrained.

It's just a talking head video.

So do me a favor.

Feel free to minimize this.

You weren't being inconvenienced by this on your screen.

I wouldn't wantto Kaiser pixels to do any extra work to render this face.

Okay, so 2018 man.

Where to start?

Let's go and start with G pews, because if we're talking about PC enthusiasts graphics card, they get all the glory right.

Everyone cares about the graphics cards.

They brag about their graphics cards and this well, this has been the most expensive year for graphics cards ever.

It's quite a few reasons for that one lack of competition.

That's no surprise.

We've all talked about it before.

We talked about the dangers of lack of competition years ago.

A couple years ago.

We're making videos on this all of us.

Paul, Kyle, Linus, myself hardware connects.

All of us talked about the dangers of having no competition.

Why, although we may have preferences and My personal preference obviously isn't video.

I love the performance of a media.

Many of you have a preference of MD, which is perfectly fine.

But the problem is, when you have no competition in that space, it effects everybody.

Now the problem is, we started off the year with the incredibly spiking price of crypto currencies.

We have Bitcoin within the last year, reaching what $20,000 per coin and people looked at as a quick, easy way to get rich.

They ran out and they bought up the GP use and stuff not necessary because of Bitcoin, because Bitcoin had moved over to a sick mining where that really surpassed what GPS could do.

But because of a theory, um, Ethereum was looked at as the next coin that was going to break the market in terms of changing things with digital currencies and stuff.

So and it did a fantastic job at leveraging the GDR five found in graphics cards because it was a very memory intensive type of mining.

So Jeep use up all shapes and sizes were getting sold out across the board when Bitcoin was using Jeep use.

The Rx 4 80 was the card that became extremely difficult to find because that was the sweet spot for, like, hash rate versus Price.

And it was a complete moneymaker.

But Ethereum didn't care what kind of card you had.

You just had to have the GDR, and as long as you had that you could create these crazy render farms in his mining farms and make stupid amounts of money.

And everyone was buying into that because a theory, um, was climbing at a very sharp rate.

Make it look like the next Bitcoin.

So we saw 102 103 100% price increases when it came to G BYU's.

And the problem is, although the manufacturer's claimed they weren't selling direct, we had plenty of people involved in the industry telling us that that was a bold faced lie, that they were indeed selling direct to the render farms because they could increase the price first.

What they were selling them to their merch are the merchant fix prices because you understand when they sell these deep use and stuff, they have a A price, a wholesale price.

But they get up that wholesale price, sell direct and make a ton of money, which meant the supply chain completely dried up when you finally were seeing graphics cards making their way to new egg Amazon at the time N c a N C E x is that it takes I want N c.

I s like the TV show set beside the point When they finally made it to market, they were so jacked up in price, the many are they.

Retailers wanted their cuts, so they inflated the price even more meaning you're paying over $1000 for a GTX 10 80.

You're paying 1500 plus dollars for 10 a.

T.

T.

I.

The problem is, people were buying them by the hundreds and you would see these tweets where people driving around all the micro centers and going in there one after another with various people, like entire clan's of people, wine graphics cards one of the time.

And then they would brag about their photos of 200 cards sitting in their living room.

Ha ha.

Look what we got.

That was a problem because the card was no longer available for retail.

Availability of supply and demand made the prices go up ridiculously.

I'm sure, someone here watching nose and was probably trying to buy a car during the air, which made it seem like men.

I finally saved six months or a year to build my system.

I've got everything I need except a graphics card.

Even the used card market was extremely inflated.

But the problem with that is we also didn't have competition in the space.

So once it's started to normalize and come back down, we then had new graphics card launches coming out.

Unfortunately, nothing from a MD this year.

What we did have the Rx 5 90 which is just a slight increase in improvement on a bit of an architecture change when it came to the Rx 5 80 But a single 5 90 is not going to change The market last year showed us Vega which, unfortunately, there were no updates to Vega this year and that mostly being because the project manager for that Roger Katori, moved to Intel because Intel want to get into the space and compete against in video.

But we're far off from that.

We're gonna see anything from that in terms of retail availability to probably 2020 at the soonest, and that's if it doesn't get pushed back.

So you haven't video left to just kind of control the market all they wanted, Which is why we've now seen the most expensive G pews come vermin video.

Yet that being obviously the arty Exline.

So this is the 28 e.

T.

I.

The card that when it launched, everyone was like, Oh, my God, $1200.

What is happening here with an M S r p of $1000?

That's a bargain basement, right?

Well, of course, the EIB's or the board partners didn't want Thio be, you know, basically outshined by in video.

So they come out of their custom boards, which costs them, or to make, which means they cost more than $1200 in most cases.

So now you had the tea I version of graphics cards, which used to be around the $650 range, now costing double that well, double that once again with now the Titan launch.

That although they say it's not a gaming card, has the exact same technologies that are in here, which is a gaming card with just a little bit more memory at the price of $2500.

We haven't seen a mid Mintier card yet.

These cards were teased back in September, officially came out in October.

Here we are now rolling into January, and we still haven't seen a 60 Siri's Carter a 50 Siri's, which usually debuted within a month or two after the main launches.

Why they haven't done that?

No idea.

Probably competition and stuff.

But you could probably expect those cards to rain somewhere in the three or $400 range, where they normally would reside in the 200 to $250 range.

So, as you can see, we have a bit of a conundrum here with GPS and pricing, where it sucks this year because it's just too damn expensive.

Now moving on to see pews.

It's been an interesting year because although the Jeep You mark, it's been a big stagnated and that in video waited like almost 20 months to release this card.

You know, the Turing deep you.

The CPU stuff's been moving very quickly.

The problem is, it's still extremely divided in terms of performance and cost.

It's all over the place because we're finally seeing Intel have.

It's caged rat a little bit showing an I three here when I never opened.

Oh, I guess it did open it whenever I don't And he launched it.

Zen Architecture 2016.

And we saw some amazing I P C improvements where it caught up to Intel for the most part.

But it still was lacking behind in single core performance or just overall because of its lackluster speeds.

And I say lackluster.

I mean by that Intel has really worked hard on getting the the species, of course, where they are but also getting the clock speed up where now we have C P is launching here in 2018 with boost clocks at five gigahertz something just a couple of years ago, we thought the silicon wasn't gonna be capable of it.

Now we've got mainstream seep used with more cores and sitting at five gigahertz, which is amazing.

The problem is, a MD is having a hard time scraping past four diggers, at least with Zen and Zen.

Plus n Plus was able to get us about 4.24 point three on a couple cores.

But Zen to which again isn't coming out until 2019 is looking at giving us that five gigahertz number, which means more competition in this space.

Now, Andy Reason probably should be on the list of things that were great for 2018 because more gamers could get si, pues get great.

I peces get multi core performance.

Of course, they had their SMT or simultaneous multi threading the same thing.

It's hyper threading, and we saw them catch up great when it comes to Intel, the problem is Intel came out with the exact same type of philosophy and line up eight cores 16 threads.

But as they increased the thread count as they increase the clock speeds instead of competing with a M D, they then just continue to raise the price where the 9900 k, which is their current mainstream flagship steep you is costing about $550.

If you look at a M D right now, you could actually get a thread, will proceed pew for that price.

Now, yes, there's a lot of debate on which is better for which application.

Red Ripper versus Mainstream.

Intel versus X 2 99 The great thing is we have competition there and we have choice.

Unfortunately for new builders, that choice is very confusing where it used to be, very cut and dry.

You want a good bargain?

See, people get value performance per dollar.

You went with Andy.

If you want it, just the most performance you could possibly get at any price.

Then you went with intel.

But that doesn't hold true as well today as it used to.

So if you can't tell, there's a common thread here that 2018 sort of sucked because of pricing.

Speaking of pricing, I didn't even talk about memory yet.

That's been going on for a couple of years now, with the suspected price fixing coming from the couple or what two or three manufacturers in the entire world that make RAM.

And apparently there was some cocoa aversion, coercion, collusion.

They were working together at price fixing, causing the price to go up.

Fortunately, that's been investigated.

It's been proven now, and I guess there's like litigation happening and apparently lawsuits now happening out in China, where the price fixing has been uncovered and that's why you were seen.

Prices of ramps are to come down so overpriced cheap use.

We have rising prices of intel, see pews and obviously the superfluous inflated pricing of both used and new G pews.

Because, as people started going, Why don't want Artie X cards or too expensive?

I'm just gonna buy a used car.

The used market.

Hey, people want Pascal in pastels going away, so we're gonna raise the use price of Pascal.

It's supply and demand.

It's just markets.

It's, uh it's kind of a shitty situation, but 2019 should hopefully be a whole lot better because we've got hopefully Naveed coming out, which we've been waiting for from a MD, which is supposed to compete directly with what we're seeing here with Artie Exits opposed.

The rumors have it that there's gonna be a new GP from Andy coming out early in the year, probably Q.

One Q two.

That's supposed to give you R T X 2070 performance, which don't forget is a $500 graphics card from in video at $250.

So if you can actually get Artie X 2070 performance of $250 R TX aside, you can't turn on our T X for the 2070.

In my opinion, it's no good.

You can't even do it with the 28 e t.

I in 10 80 people because you can now with the updates.

But it hasn't been optimized enough.

The 2070 is not going to give you a good gaming experience with Artie ex.

So if you can get that level, though, of rationalization performance or just standard decks 11 performance at 250 bucks, that's what we need.

We have no major Mid Ranger Low range from NVIDIA.

That's where AMG has always resided, and I would love for them to come out with a card and a product stack that could compete with in video across the board cause them prices will have to come down.

And if they don't, then in video is the one that will kind of suffer because in video spent $1 billion to belt developing this technology over the last 10 years, and they're trying to get that money back as quick as possible.

That's why pricing is so high.

But we're also going to see reason to rise into the next generation rising not just send plus architecture which is supposed to, As I said, Breeze near that five gigahertz number, which is gonna put the eye PC on par with Intel as well as the clock speed, which means Intel will either have to adjust or lose market share.

That's how you bring pricing down.

Market share has to shift, but I am.

The stock prices over the last year have skyrocketed versus where they were even two years ago.

In fact, Gerry and I on Tech talk made a joke a couple years back about You should buy a M d stop because it was a dollar.