NZXT PODCAST - #099 - Deskbottom

Episode Date: August 1, 2021

This week on the podcast we decipher the secrets of desktops and deskbottoms. Listen live to the NZXT 💜 CLUB CAST on our Discord server at discord.gg/NZXT every Thursday at 10AM PT and submit your questions to [e-mail]!

Yes, hello. I was wondering if you could play that song again. Hmm, which one, man? The one that goes, be-bo-bo-bo-bo-p-pop, be-bo-bo-pop. Everybody and welcome to episode 99, Big 99, of the N-Z-T Clubcast, the official podcast of the N-Z-X-T community. This podcast is recorded live every Thursday at 10am-ish Pacific Center time of the official N-ZXT Twitch, and is available to stream on demand

on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify. and SoundCloud permitted all of our hardware work. So get ready, guys, because this is a brand new visual experience. Hopefully, your eyes are delighted to see something new, something different, something exciting. My name is Dennis, and with me as always, for the first time on video on Twitch. On Twitch.comTV slash NZXT is Ivan. Live from the NZXT podcast studios. I'm live from my office at home.

a bunch of stuff in the background I'm glad that we're finally doing video on this podcast after almost 100 episodes This is this would be the perfect time to do video Wouldn't it be? When it'd be like the best time to do this? Yeah

We did actually I mean this room that I'm in We literally built this specifically for the podcast Yeah Because you know When we first started the podcast we wanted to

you know have like a nice little fancy studio and have video and then you know this this stupid coronavirus thing happened and then we couldn't go to the office anymore and yeah yeah it's kind of ruined the whole podcast plan but I guess now we're

back back in action man ready to get the the actual real podcast I guess yeah I know it's it's crazy because yeah we had we had such plans to get everything going. I was like planning out the cameras are going to buy and where we're going to put the like lighting in that little studio and you know, set everything up and before I even got a chance to like sit down and like and like thinking about it.

It's just like, hey, everyone's going home for like a year and a half, have fun. So we had to figure it out. We had to figure it out. We're doing it from home now. Well, I'm doing for home. I'm in the office. But I think it works. It's cool. You know, it's sleek. It's, it's, it's fresh, I would say, right? I think so far so good. This is the first time we were doing this on Twitch. So I think I got pretty much everything set up audio-wise. The regular podcast should sound perfectly fine on all the regular, you know, SoundCloud, you know, I wasn't saying Netflix, SoundCloud and Netflix, we got to deal with Netflix. Let's go. Netflix podcast, you know, but Apple, Google, Spotify, SoundCloud, all that stuff that you guys

listen to the podcast on. That should sound perfectly normal. The video is where we're going to need a little bit of a little bit of help. So, you know, feel free to yell at us in the chat. I know people already telling you, telling us that we, that you couldn't hear anything, which I immediately fixed, because I'm super smart. So yeah. How excited are you, Ivan? I'm actually really excited, man. I almost missed the podcast today, though, on the phone talking to medical professionals. Oh, yeah? It's like every time, like, I don't know, every time I have to do anything involving a doctor, Yeah. It's like I have to deal with the doctor.

I have to deal with like a pharmacist. I have to deal with like an insurance company. It's just like the most annoying thing in the world. But everything's under control, man. Yeah, do you, it's maybe too personal, but do you have Kaiser? No, I don't. Okay. I wanted Kaiser.

Yeah, yeah. It's expensive, right? It would have cost me like half my paycheck every month to use Kaiser. It's like super expensive. But I wanted it. I have United. Should have voted Bernie. Should have voted Bernie.

That's it. I've been auto-breaking. Yeah, if you guys are hearing any issues with audio, let me know. I've been cut out on the regular still shows green thingy on this cam. Seems to be coming through fine for me. But, yeah, if it doesn't come through fine, let me know, guys. NoiseGay activation is too high. He's cutting off when he speaks to softly.

That shouldn't be a thing. You know what it is? Because somebody set noise filters. So this should be much better. Ivan, say something real quick. A quick brown file. Chips over the lazy dog. There you go.

Should be a little bit better. Yeah, so here's what happened for those who don't know, right? I have regular OBS live for my personal streams, right? Twitch.tv. Slot TV slash Ashoki. Get up to the plug out there, right? Doing all this work. And for the podcasts, we're using Stream Labs OBS.

And Strelat's OBS is like account-based, right? So you log into your Twitch and it should theoretically save all your settings. So I think the podcast. the last time we used stream labs OBS was for probably the pop-up last time we streamed on this account. Like, I actually did like a real stream that wasn't like me streaming like the podcast or something. That was like two years ago, man. Yeah. So when it logged in, there was like a bunch of stuff saved there.

There was like templates for like the pop-up and all these like things that we just never ended up using. I just deleted them all. I'm like, I was going to start fresh, but I didn't realize that they would throw on a noise gate and a filter on there. So those are off. Those should be fine. Let me know if Ivan sounds any better or any worse. like I said, for those who are listening on demand afterwards through our audio platform,

should be perfectly cool. So, yeah, episode 99, Ivan, almost there. One more. I can't believe it, man. I know. It's crazy. I keep, I always, every time we talk about how many episodes we've done, I always think back to that first stat.

I read about podcasts when we thought about making a podcast. Yeah. Remember that stat, it said, on average, most podcasts only last six episodes. Yes. So my goal was literally like, let's just do at least six episodes. Because I was like, I hope this thing like, you know, doesn't get canned or whatever. But, yeah, 99 episodes in. And I'm not going to, you know, say we're like as popular as the Joe Rogan podcast.

Who? Never heard of them. I don't know who that is. The numbers, you know, they keep getting better every month. So we're going to keep doing this as long as people are listening. and hopefully now that we have video and, you know, we're actually starting to, like, get a little bit more serious about the podcast, getting better guests and whatnot. You know, maybe the next, the next 99 episodes will be even better. Yeah.

I was thinking about this today as I was setting this whole thing up. I'm like, first off, we're finally doing video, right? Like, we bit the bullet for certain reasons. We're doing video. Just, you know, expanding the podcast and stuff. and I was like, if we didn't do the podcast every single week, because it does take a lot of time, right, doing the setup, the production, right, the editing afterwards.

I was thinking, like, what would I do every Thursday? Do documents and stuff? You know what's funny, man, is like when I first started working at NZXT, it was right around the same time where, like, Twitch was first starting. Yeah. Like, not just in TV, but, like, when it was becoming, like, or when, you know, Twitch started, like, being a thing, I guess. and my whole thing back then was like oh there's this this new app and it's for gamers and we're

we're gamers so we should be on this app and like I tried I tried streaming every single day for a couple months and it just got too time-consuming man like it it really like not just streaming, but anything involving video, yeah. It's basically like a full-time job apart from your regular job. So, yeah.

I actually used to make a lot of YouTube videos too back in the day. It's like YouTube and Twitch and then one day I was like, I just can't do this anymore. I'm over it later. Someone has to tweet, you know? Yeah.

That was basically it. Oh, that's funny. Yeah, like it's... Once a week is doable. Yeah. You know, there's something that like I've been kind of like discussing with you and like other people at the company for a while like doing Twitch and stuff.

And my whole thing is like, you know, if we're going to do Twitch, if we're going to do YouTube, we're going to do other platforms, right? We have to have other content to support the more than one thing that we do. Right. So like hopefully, you know, over time we can add some more stuff to this Twitch, you know, as we kind of grow and think about more from like a content marketing perspective. I'm getting a little bit deeper into the weeds here for those who might be interested. but, you know, like, there are, there are channels out there, you know, won't name names, right, just in general, who just do a podcast and that's it.

And to me, I don't think that's enough, right? I think, especially with, with Twitch, it really does, the audience really values consistency in having, like, an actual schedule because unlike YouTube, right, as long as you have a good video and, you know, it's hitting all the marks and people are hitting like and subscribe and smashing that bell, you know, It's going to do well. The algorithm is going to serve it to people who might possibly enjoy it. Whereas with the Twitch stream, right, Twitch is absolutely horrendous when it comes to, when it comes to discoverability. When people are asking personally like, you know, oh, how do I, you know, get big on Twitch? Like, you don't get big on Twitch.

You don't get big other places. And then you start building out and doing Twitch. And people come from other sources to your Twitch because there's no, they've, they've, they've tried to do that with. like the tags and you know the I don't know the like you know recommended for you when you go view like a game category but for the most part it doesn't really do anything you know so you really have to like you know have content in other places to lead people smack my mic to lead people professional here to to lead people to your Twitch right because if you're not live your channel

is basically useless doesn't do anything like looking at the mic I'm staring directly at the camera I'm looking directly at you person watching. If you don't do YouTube or something, you're useless. But that's just the thing with Twitch, right? It's not good at that kind of stuff. So hopefully, you know, over time, we can add some more stuff on here. Like something that I've pitched multiple times

is having like a 24-7 camera in the warehouse just pointing at like one of the build stations just have somebody build, right? It's like, hey, who wants to build on the station and someone walks over, they take all the parts and start building stuff, right? I've always wanted that too. and like every time I ask Carrie, he's like,

are you crazy? We're not going to do that. Yeah. There's like a lot of, a lot of top secret stuff, I guess, going on in that warehouse. I guess so, right? Ripcord Jack says,

I love to see interviews with CS agents that what to do with them, having them talk about how they get into tech, how they started, NZC, etc. So, Ripcord Jack, if you go to our SoundCloud, Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, or, I think I'm missing one, right?

I think that's it, actually. we have previous episodes with multiple CS agents I think we've had we've had Sergio on we've had Dom on we've had who else I'm blanking I know we had a intern Mike yeah we have an intern Mike who else from the CS team have we had how we had on it's nine and episodes you can go through it but yeah yes yes we are on Spotify did say Spotify Apple podcast Google podcast Spotify and SoundCloud I just if you say it in the order right just like the alphabet you'll never screw out once you start deviating from that it misses everything up Monday through Wednesday through Friday just streamed the builder house here pretty much yeah

all right then so with all that fun stuff excited to be on Twitch finally let's let me make sure this doesn't break I might break this studio mode let me see here today episode is really a test right it really would be test okay so I like how we're testing one episode before our big 100 episode extravaganza. Yeah, I mean, to be honest, like a lot of these things really shouldn't be that hard. But, you know, getting into, you know, what we've been messing with for a little bit now is some news stuff. Ivan, do you want to go through this, this Dell article on PC Gamer? Sure, Dennis. I would love to. All right. So, yeah, I guess the big news of this week was that

not just Dell, but a lot of computer companies affected by this, but Dell went out and said, canceling alienware gaming PC shipments to several states in the United States of America, and including where our headquarters is, California and Hawaii, which in my opinion should probably be its own country, not really a state, but that's another topic. I'm not talking about that, man. Forget computers. Let's talk about Hawaii. But yeah, this is all due to like new power consumption regulations. I guess the laws have changed. I actually never knew about these laws and regulations until NZT started building computers a few years ago. You know, we weren't always a computer company.

We were a PC Harbor manufacturer for most of our existence. And I think when I first learned about this was I actually went in the old office in our old marketing room. I went back there one day. And I think it was Harry. And he had like this. Oh, no, it was Eric. with Eric, Eric and Harry, I think. They had like this crazy, like, like, a machine.

It almost looked like it was from, like, without exaggerating. Like, it looked like it was like the 1940s, like the 1940s, like, Army military base or something. They had, like, all these knobs and dials and gauges and things. And they were plugging these little cables into the computer. I'm like, what are you guys dealing with that? Yeah. So, oh, we have, like, every pre-build we sell has to get, like, like measured with this like voltage regulator or something

because it can go over certain limit. And I guess every, every hardware configuration outputs different power. So like the same computer, you know, you swap like the CPU or the RAM or the power supply or anything else in there. Like it could give you like a different power outage. So you gotta test literally every single configuration.

And yeah, I guess with these new laws, you know, Dell has some computers here that, or gaming PCs that don't meet those requirements. So at least in these four or five, no, six states. Yeah. So yeah, it's kind of weird. I feel like, like, it's, I mean, I'm all for, like, saving the environment, which I'm sure is part of the reason why. But it's also kind of weird that's like, like, it's gaming PCs, right? Like what else is could it possibly be sucking up power?

You know, what's next? Like air conditioners, you can't plug in like a portable air conditioner or, you know, your toaster's out is sucking out too much juice, you know. I don't know what's next. What do you think, Dennis? Yeah, I was looking into this and there's a, you know, again, I always know, J's two cents because he's just so amazing at like really being on top of his stuff. And like it's really funny.

I saw a couple of people made comments on several like subredits and you know other articles saying that like the power draw for computers really isn't that high compared to other devices that like people have in their houses right and that it's kind of funny and this is something that kind of happens a lot

I think in the US in the US in particular where you know I'm pretty sure my computer you know and my partner's computer and your computer and everyone else's computer isn't really going to cause a much of an issue there are there are things things that we do as a country, as a state that use way more energy that are super, super inefficient. And it feels like just another case of like these like burdens being passed on

to the consumer to the regular person, right? When like, you know, there are giant corporations who are literally polluting the planet, right? Like, this happens all the time, right? It's like, oh, you know, make sure you don't use plastic straws. I'm like, yeah, but this company just dumped like a million gallons of oil into like the Gulf Coast. Like, you're not going to talk about that for a minute? Like, like, I'm pretty sure the straw I'm going to do nothing. It's like the people who Who You know make Reddit threads about companies stealing their data

Not realizing that like You know they're giving all their data to Reddit Or Twitter or whatever They're complaining about that stuff Yeah, that's always the funniest part It's like I'm not going to use this program because you're looking up my info Is it dude you're on Facebook like What do you want bro?

Yeah I mean it's, you know, I think overall, though, right, it is good that we do have regulations on power, just in general, right? Just like, broadly speaking, it's good that we are, you know, you have some energy standards so that we don't, you know, burn out our power grid and whatnot. But I do feel like it's kind of, it's kind of misguided. And I think from when I read, and I may be wrong on this one, that I guess like gaming

consoles are an exception to this rule. and from what I believe they don't they don't they don't they don't they don't uh they don't uh they don't they don't uh they don't really just like computers and stuff I may be wrong on this someone in the chat wants to correct me on it uh please do but yeah from what I from when I read because I was reading a bunch of uh I was reading a bunch of comments here we go Ripcore Jack says high end and self-built PCs are also exempt right I wonder so like I actually I'm actually curious like we have this this computer in this podcast room, it's not on.

Yeah. But I feel like it's probably one of these computers that should be illegal. I was looking at the specs on it. I'm like, where the heck did we build this computer? It's like a, it's like, I've never seen a computer this beefy. It has like eight sticks or RAM, like a I-9. The graphics card is literally the size of my forearm.

I don't even know what it is. I think it was the computer that was, that we were using for the podcast we were doing in here. Yes, it was. And it was very overpowered for what we were using it for. It's like 20,

80 or something in it? Like we haven't used it for like two years. Earlier this week, I actually plugged it in and I updated all the drivers. It took me like three or four hours to update everything. And then I installed Super Mega Baseball on there

and played it for like 30 minutes and it was like super cool. It was super smooth. It ran at a 137 FPS and it burnt your your RtX card I was like oh wow this is what this game is supposed to look like I've only played it on a 970 Oh really? Oh boy

Yeah I'm just looking at this article here on VICE I'm a big fan of VICE by the way I don't care when it says Vice is hilarious dude Their YouTube is so good They have the wonkiest ridiculous most crazy content There's one video I saw like way way back in the day When it first started watching Vise where this dude went to, I think it was Bolivia,

to basically like, like, trying to think of the best would award this, to investigate, like, what's up with, like, cocaine and the coca leaves and stuff like that. And apparently, like, the coca leaf in general is just like a natural stimulant, right? That they refine through what kinds of chemicals to make into drugs, but just like,

in and of its own, just leaf itself, like, you'll have people who'll chew it, they'll put it in teas, stuff like that, right? it's like a caffeine or coffee. And this dude like, takes like this tea and he's never had it before. And he's like walking around. You can tell us feeling all night. He's like, he's got like a little pep in his step and stuff.

And I'm like, I'm like 13, 14 years old watching this on YouTube. I'm like, this guy is drinking drinking drugs. He's getting high on the internet. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. Like, I mean, not to like derail this conversation into drug talk. Let's do it. Like, apparently like the cocoa leaf itself. like it gives you energy it's like not like something that like I guess gets you high but I guess the

the thing with cocaine it's like a coffee right like it's like they put in like a bunch of chemicals in there yeah that's that's that's what that is it's not necessarily to leave so yeah yeah I get people in in in South America like the natives they're like they'll chew it and they'll go like on these long hikes up in the mountains just chill right I'm not chill I mean they're literally working all day, you know, like, they need energy. It's like, for them, it's like a Red Bull. It's just something that kind of keeps you going. Yeah.

So, yeah, you know, we can sell computers. I mean, we can sell most of our computers. I think, like, we had a conversation with this in a meeting that they're just saying that, like, that we're testing stuff. I'm like, oh, like, I didn't know this was a thing that we had to test for. And then this article comes out, and I'm like, ah, this makes a lot more sense of why we're testing these computers because... Yeah, we have a whole room here, actually.

Yeah. I should probably go back and take a picture of it and show you... This we're testing here. It's literally just for testing. A lot of a lot of activity going on in there right now. It's weird for me because, like, it's just going to go back a little bit. When I first read about this, I'm like, don't computers just use it around the same mission, random energy?

Like, is there really that much of a disparity, like, where if I have, like, a really high-end system is going to, like, use too much, too much for California. This computer's too crazy. I told Ivan the, that we should tweet out, like, this computer is so illegal. We can't sell it in California. or something like that. Illegal in 50 states. Yeah.

Illegal in 50 states. Come get this illegal PC. Break the law right now. Gamer, run that Minecraft. See what happens. Crank up all the clouds. Fancy clouds. Makes your computer illegal.

I wonder that'll be a thing. You know how there's like illegal street racing and then like illegal, illegal gaming becomes a thing. It's like you like meet your homies at some like under some bridge. Okay. Like have like an underground land party. I get an idea. Illegal gaming PCs and you see you gets the most FPS.

I get an idea. I get an idea. Okay. So we start a film franchise, right? Where this young detective has to go undercover in a illegal gaming ring, right? And you has to basically find out, what's a plot of that first stupid movie? Someone die? It's drugs.

Oh, yeah. So someone is, someone, some group, some organization is high, jacking computer part shipments, right, using fancy computers to shut down these self-driving Tesla trucks, right? And let's say young Ivan, right, from the FBI, has to investigate by becoming one of these illegal gamers, right? So if he shows up to the land party, equipped with, like, the sickest computer, right? It's like super modified.

He went onto that one website that everyone on our subreddit uses and he got to customize H710 with all like the holes in it, right? So it goes super, super fast. He's got twin 3090s, right? TIs. You know, it doesn't even exist yet. He just has it, right? And he starts gaming super hard, right?

But eventually he becomes like really into the culture. And he lets the dude who's responsible go. Right. And then something happens in the second movie. He goes to Miami for no reason. But in the third movie, he goes to Japan. It's called Tokyo, Tokyo, uh, Tokyo, uh, taraflop or something,

terraflop drift or something. And then we just keep on going. And then something, something happens. And then by like the ninth movie, they launch a computer in the space for some reason. And then there we go. And I don't know what the name of the movie franchise is Ivan.

Maybe you can help me with the name. But I think we should work on this. I think this would be a good idea. Provided they don't like peel back these like regulations or something. Thoughts and opinions. Yeah. Something, something family. We game as a family.

All right. Next article. So this is something that we've kind of debated talking about, but I feel like at this point is ridiculously unignorable. Like it's all over the internet. It's on every feed. I heard about it on like NPR. It's super, super huge. So obviously, there we go. Activision Blizzard employees walk out of work to protest rampant sexism and discrimination. So I'm sure everyone's already heard the news, right? It's like nothing new. It's just something that I feel like we can't really. ignore. But yeah, you know, TLDR, working conditions at Blizzard were super, super terrible. And that's like a giant understatement, right? And they staged a walkout, I think as of yesterday. And funny thing, actually, I read last night that Ubisoft employees also sent like an open letter to their leadership, pretty much about the same thing. Because I think last year, this was a, what, this is a like during the summer right some stuff came out um which really really sucks it just it just seems like an issue is prevalent just like the industry like as a whole right i mean after this news with like blizzard came out um you know there are people talking about you know like esports events and

other companies and all kinds of stuff it was really really bad you know um on the type of a family yeah and it's it sucks too because i mean like who doesn't love blizzard games you know they've made some of like the most fun and exciting video games of all time. That's what hurts. Yeah, that's a hurts. Yeah, they like to find out that like, you know, like all this, all these crazy allegations and how employees are, are feeling and, you know, what's going on over there. It's really sad to see.

Yeah. Especially because, you know, it's the gaming industry, but also just in general, it's just that there's, you know, like it's 20, 21. and like this is still happening you know it's like at what point is enough enough i was actually really hoping that um the pandemic would kind of be almost like a a reawakening of sorts where we all just realize you know what we all got to like work together because we're all on this planet together and we all need to survive together and not be terrible people to each other yeah let's just be nice to each other and treat everyone equally oh ivan and just be nice and

and fix the planet, basically. But it's a lot easier said than done. I would love to fix the planet. That would be the best thing if you could fix the planet. Yeah. Yeah, you know, it's just a bummer. You know, like I was telling you yesterday that, you know, this news is really disheartening,

for a multitude of reasons, right? But also because, like, you know, I kind of held up this company as like, as like a hero for me, right? You know, like I grew up playing Blizzard games, like one of the first games I ever played on a PC. and like really got into it as like as like a young kid was StarCraft 1 you know I would spend hours and hours on my dial-up modem right using the phone lines to get onto the the whatever internet was at that point in time and I would yell my mom to not pick up the phone because I'm playing StarCraft you know and I'm trying to get these winds in like Hydro Ranch or whatever and you know like I always saw myself at some point like maybe you know it was like oh maybe I'll end up working up

a blizzard one day, right? And I'll work on like the wow team or something and I'll, I don't know what I would do there. I'm not smart enough to be like a developer or something or code or stuff, right? But it was always something that like I would, you know, I saw it as almost like, you know, if you can get there, like you made it, you know,

if you can get to here, if you can get like the valve, you know, all these other really huge companies, you know, you're like really doing it, you know. And it's kind of sad, you know, to maybe think that that's never going to be a reality because of all these things that's been happening, you know, like I would never want to insert myself into a situation where, you know, I have to like see these things happening, you know.

Yeah. And it's just going to go as a show that, you know, that the matter who you are, where you are, right, like, you know, these things are potentially happening. And, you know, I would say that it behooves every one of us to speak out and, you know, assist when we can, you know, and do what you can, you know. And I was as much easier said than done, right? right, but, you know, because particularly, like, in this suit. So, so for those who don't know, Activision Blizzard was sued by the state of California.

They're the Department of Fair Employment and Housing over just all this stuff happening at the company. So this isn't like, you know, I'm suing NZXT because, you know, I've been saying something weird to me, right? Or whatever. This is like the state of California is saying, this is way too crazy. You guys are doing too much. This needs to be stopped. you know, we're going to take you to court. So this, you know, hopefully, you know, it gets, it gets fixed.

I figure where was going with this, but, you know, it's, it's like this, more and more news is happening. It is coming out, coming out about this stuff. And, I mean, it's like, you know, it's like disproportionately affecting, like, women in particular, right? And that's a big thing. Like, I think in the past, however many months here at NZXT, we've hired, so many women in like management positions like VP positions and they're all super

amazing and like the most they're way smarter than me right pretty much right like they got the job because they're amazing hands down just like full stop there's nothing else about it they're just great right um and like you know i i look up to a lot of them you know like you know i talk to tally you know every other day or so and you know she's an amazing person and i really look up to her you know and like you know i see her as someone you know like i kind of aspire to be at like a certain point in my career, you know, and like just to know that, you know, some of this stuff could happen to her, you know, or, you know, other people on our team, you know, or like my sister or my partner or like, you know, all, all kinds of stuff. It's, it's a huge bummerty. Like, it's,

like, it's, it's just, it's just, you know, for the lack of a better word, you know, it's just bullshit. Like, it really is. Like, stuff shouldn't be happening. It makes me mad. I even, I smack my hands on the desk, but it would screw this microphone up. It would knock down. it makes me scared too because I have a daughter yeah I know for sure dude like you know like even for me like as a adult man

who's almost 40 years old I don't even like turn on voice chat when I play video games because I hate hearing people be jerks yeah they're just like everyone's just mean to each other for some reason depending on the game you know there's some games that are so bad

but there's other games where it's just like, you know, people calling each other the most filthy and offensive thing you can possibly think of. Yeah. And like it's like accepted by a lot of people, you know, and it shouldn't be. And you know, and that's me as a man. Like me as a 40 year old man like doesn't like that.

Like imagine if, you know, you're a 16 year old girl who just wants to play a video game, you know, what's, what, what, Sheaf going through, you know. So I think about my daughter a lot because, you know, she's, she's only three, but, you know, she likes video games. She likes watching me play Mario Brothers and things like that. So I know she's going to be playing video games and one day she's going to probably hear something or someone's going to tell her something that she probably shouldn't have to hear. And it sucks. I just hope that this is like almost like the like I mentioned earlier about the pandemic. Hopefully this is a wake up call too for. for everybody industry yeah companies but you know gamers like people who are playing games and involved in making games and

people who go to events and you know people who stream and all that like you know it's time to stop this you know it's nonsense basically it's like there shouldn't be any sort of sexism or racism or discrimination or anything like that going on

in the year 2021 yeah Um, and like, rainy year, but especially now, I mean, you know, like the civil rights movements, like, you know, that was 60 years ago. Yeah, I was, um, I was reading something online where someone was saying that like, if you have like a daughter, right, and she's expressing like, you know, she's expressing, like, you know, that she has like an aptitude for like technology, right? And she wants to work in like the tech industry. Like, would you be like, yeah, totally go for it? Or would you be like, maybe you don't because. people suck and all this news is coming up right like I and that's like one of the worst

things right is like we we we talk about and like we is like a society right we we talk about how there aren't enough women in XYZ industry and then this news comes out right where they're being treated like absolute crap and then you wonder you know well no duh right like I wouldn't want to work in that situation I wouldn't want to be there you know if that was happening to me you know and then not just that but like then you know you report it things don't get fixed right it gets to this point where, you know, it's like, it reaches, like, the most, like, ridiculous conclusion. And it's like, how do you, how do you support, you know, like, your daughter going into,

like, into an industry like this when you know this is the potential to happen, right? Like, it's scary. Like, I couldn't imagine it. Sorry to put more fear in here in your life, but, you know, but this is something about, like, when you have kids, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's scary, man.

I am not looking forward to going through it, but, I, you know, but. I'm going to do my best to be a good poppy. You got to be the best poppy you can, right? That's all I can do. Yeah, so other than that, there really isn't a whole lot of new stuff to go through. Like, we've been looking. We really been searching. It seems like a pretty light news week.

So if you guys have any suggestions, anything you want us to touch on or to talk about, let us know. If it asks any questions, we're here, we kind of keep the show pretty open. You know, we try to talk about our main thing in the beginning. But, you know, for those who are here from Twitch, first. time, you know, feel free to ask us any questions and we'll try to answer them at the end of the show. And yeah, so first question, do you like beans? Evan, do you like beans? No. No. I love, I love beans. Oh, got them. Yeah. Someone actually, so this whole thing on social media is going on right now, you can pick two crops, or is it, two animals and three crops

on your farm to survive. And my three crops were beans. Corn and cactus. Cactus? Yeah. Very nutritious, man. Why not just get rice? I would rather have beans and cactus and use the corn to make tortillas.

And then my animals would be a cow for the milk and eggs for the eggs for or sorry, chicken for eggs. I think I'd be good. I love beans. Yeah. Bees are delicious. I would do beans, rice, and corn. That's what I said. Except for the rice, I guess.

Yeah, yeah. Cactus, I've eaten cactus. I'm not a fan of it. I think it's gross, right? Just in general. Like, why the heck would you eat a cactus when there's other things that you don't have to put so much work in? Like, like, if you have to, like, get rid of, like, the spiky parts to eat it, why the heck would you

would you do it someone asking who's who so on top is Ivan he's the older gentleman the guy with the uh how there are you the

uh the homie with nzzy see shirt is isn't me Dennis I'm I'm the desk top and Dennis is a desk bottom exactly which is true you started something with that

by the way can we talk about that for a minute it was actually on on a couple of subredits man yeah a lot of there was like one

it was on the our unexpected insult subreddit. I thought that was funny. Oh, yeah. So, yeah, I guess you want to talk about it. So one of my biggest pet peeves of all time has been people who put their computers on the floor because, like, my whole philosophy behind that is if you're going to build an awesome computer, you know, like this one right here. you know why would you why would you put this on the floor yeah like like why even bother putting in a crack in why even bother you know like making it look nice or whatever you know you

know you're just going to put it on the floor you might as well just you know not have a side panel and apart from that it also collects a lot more dust and dirt and that is true that on the floor That's true. And then also, it just, I mean, I just think it looks ugly to have a computer on the floor. I don't know. Unless you have, like, a giant NZXT Phantom, I can get it. I understand. But if you don't have space on your desk, they get a bigger desk.

That's it. I don't know what to say, man. Yeah, like, I mean, obviously I know. Just get a big desk forehead. Yeah. People literally, you know, can't have a bigger desk. desk and you know whatever it's fine it's like it's not it's not the end of the world but uh i do prefer being a desktop over being a desk bottom i think that having computer on the floor is perfectly fine

because if your computer looks nice enough it's like a nice piece right it's almost like having like a nice base right you know it's like a nice tall base or something or like a nice shelf or something you know i think just because it looks nice doesn't mean he can't go on the floor right um in my opinion, right? But you are right on the, you know, it just collect more dust, it's get a little bit dirty, you know, but just clean it.

I mean, you should be cleaning your computer. It should be, like every two weeksish, so anyway, right? So that really shouldn't be that big of a deal. You realize what? I rather just look at,

I don't know, I'd rather just look at my computer on my desk and on the floor. That's just me. Do you actually look at your computer? Like, I never go, wow, look at this computer.

It looks nice. It's done. I've had it here for like a year now. I don't, I'm not looking at. it every day. I don't care if it's in the floor or it's on top. It's perfectly fine. For cable management, I think actually having on the floor might be a little bit better because one of the things that really sucks about cabling is like making sure that they go down

and all the way over on the on the desk. I'm doing hand signals and no one can see because like the cameras every trip, but like you go down and around and then things pop up, you know, just put it on the floor and it's perfectly fine, right? Especially if you have like really nice hardware floors, right? And you have like, say like a really nice white case. It kind of has a nice contract with the dark flooring. In my opinion, right? I think computers on the floor can have a very aesthetic purpose. I think it's very underrated. I think people who put it on the floor do it out of necessity, but they don't do it out of like function. And I think if someone actually built a setup, right, with the computer on, on the floor in mind aesthetically,

it could look really, really good. Don't use computers a foot for Seth, Rich. Get out of here. Get out of this chat. Do not do that. It's a bad idea. Bad idea. All right. Any of the questions? Are the air headphones still happening?

Check out nzicc.com slash. I don't know if that's even up anymore. Do you know if that's still up? Yeah, I just dropped a link in there. Did you? Let me see. I'm going to check the website. It's happening, but we don't know when.

We're still working on it. Perforals. Yeah, audio, yeah, the audio site's still up. Yeah, so it will return. At some point in time in the future, it will be a thing. Just not right now. When we make it better? Cold winter's night, just open the side panel, put on the floor and start playing a game with extreme graphics and stick your feet in there under the GPU.

It feels like your computer would be really, really stinky, you know, really stinky computer. Does N60 plan to bring out GPs in the future or no? You can listen to the past 25 million episodes where we talked about products coming out. We will never announce a product on this podcast, as far as I know, because we have other methods of getting the word out, especially when we have 30 people viewing, right? We have a 900,000 follower or Twitter account,

which will probably be announcing stuff in. But in general, I would say just the answer for it if we're bringing X, Y, or Z out is, you know, If we can think of something that can make that component or that piece of hardware or whatever easier to use, solves a problem, then maybe we'll think about doing it. I don't know if just putting out GPU really solves a problem other than now we make a GPU, you know, especially now with like the current, the current shortages, probably the worst time to be putting on GPUs. I'm actually using an NZXT GPU right now. Are you? Yeah.

She showed off. No, I can't, man. Unrelease. It's illegal. It's illegal in 50 states. It is. Family. It's all about family, right?

If you have family, you have everything. Someone is asking, where I should probably look at their name. Probably. I think it's, is it a, Jasper 848. He wants to know where they can buy the Pucci. So Pucci is,

not for sale, but he is available for free if you join our Discord server and rank up. So Discord.g.g slash NZXT if you want a free Pucci. Yep. Yep, yep, yep. That's it. Pretty much. Just get it for free there. Keep asking questions, folks, guys. We have a, we have, still got some time left. We can answer any questions. Ivan, you still just playing Super Mega Baseball? Nothing else? Yeah, for me, it's the perfect game because I can pick it up and play for 5, 10, 15, 30 minutes, or an hour or longer if I want, you know. And believe it or not, Dennis, there's a thriving online community for that game.

Super popular. It's really fun to play online. What's cool, too, is it has voice chat, but it also has text chat, and it has these funny little, like, baseball things. So I love, I love, like, hitting a home run and then telling people, like, you know, chew on this or belly itcher or, hey, better, batter, and things like that. So it's really fun. I love baseball in case you guys didn't know. I even have my Tommy Lasorteur baseball card right here by my desk, keeping you company. Okay, so here's a question. I've always wanted this about baseball.

I'll see, like, managers and dudes who don't play wearing, like, uniforms for the team. And I feel like it's like the goofiest thing ever because, like, bro, you're not a player. No, actually, that's one of the things I love about baseball is that the coaches and the managers, they wear the uniforms because they're a part of the team. And I love the fact that like the bench they sit on is called the dugout. So it's like they're like almost like in the trenches with their team, you know, like they're going to battle with them. And it's not like other sports where. the managers are wearing a suit and tie and like the briefcase or whatever like bossing people

around it's like in baseball the coaches are part of the game like they're with you and they're they're one of use so i love that about baseball but they're not though they're not playing yeah they are but well actually dennis did you know that there's such a thing as a player's manager that could potentially play what's that it's a manager that plays in the game it's uh it's actually a thing has that ever happened yes how many times a lot of times when's the last time that happened where a player's manager hopped on to play. 1842. Not enough.

It's just one of the cool things about baseball. I think, I mean, obviously, you know, not everyone loves baseball, but for me, it's the perfect damn best game for many reasons. I can give you my list of reasons if you want to really hear them. I'm good. I don't need to hear more about baseball. Maybe next time we have Andy. The reason of baseball is so great.

Someone asked, what about F1? F1 the game, F1 racing in general, I don't know, I find I find a boring dude Yeah, I'm the same way Like I I don't care how I don't care which car's faster

So that's pretty much what it is for me right It's like which car went faster That one faster that one won't faster that one won GGs right That one got through the track better So it wins the game This car turned left faster than the other car And that's why it won

Yeah exactly Yeah That's why that's why I look at NASCAR it's like yeah but it's based on points I'm like who cares like points I'm the same way man I think that's really boring I can't do it man I can't do it I I've I've tried to look at it it's just that's cool I guess you know

I just I can't do it but there's a lot of listeners right now death rage is asking what are our thoughts on the Olympics and after watching them I never watched the Olympics ever I don't. I watch him. I'm not watching him this year, though. No? Are you not watching in protests or just because you use some character?

Kind of a little bit of both. Like, I really wish the Olympics were not happening in the middle of a pandemic. Yeah. It's kind of irresponsible to do so, especially knowing that, you know, this pandemic is not over. And it's actually getting worse in a lot of ways right now. Yeah, yeah. So the fact that we're having the Olympics after post-a-old. born in the last year.

It just kind of irk me a little bit. I wish that was not happening. But apart from that, you know, it's just, I guess, yeah, I'm not really interested in people, like, participating in some of these sports, to be honest. Yeah. You know, it's not my thing. At the same time, like, I feel like some of these sports are really, really weird, right? Like, you look at, like, the Winter Olympics and see, like, curling and stuff?

I'm like, what the heck is curling? Shot put, right? Like, think I'm wrong. I'm sure these things take skill and they take effort and they take a lot of training. But like, who's really like growing up being I want to be a shot putter for life? Like this is my thing. Like I don't like, what? Like I don't know.

I can see someone want to be like an NBA player or, you know, being the NFL or, you know, soccer or whatever, whatever. But like, you throw a ball really hard, right? Pretty much. I don't know. It just seems really funny to me. But as somebody asked about. Dr. Doctor, I think, or DRDR, how you decide when you choose new creators, just sponsor, and how it works in general.

So we touched on this last episode. So I would listen to that one because I actually went in pretty in depth on it. Actually, more than I should have, to be honest, because it was way too long. But in general, sponsorships are a partnership between a company and a creator, where there is usually a monthly dollar amount, given. into that creator in exchange for space on their stream or space on their content, right? So any company is going to want to make sure that they're maximizing the amount of viewers that they're getting while paying as little as possible, right?

That's just economics, right? You know, that's just how it works out. So if you have an audience and it's big enough that you think it can sell something to a company, then you should probably start reaching out. But if you don't have a viewership, then you'll probably never get a sponsorship. Because why would we give someone a computer for literally nothing, right? I actually just did that the other day. Did you?

Well, that's different. That's different. It was his birthday, so I sponsored him. I was like, you know what, man? He was gaming on a ninja PC that I helped him build like in 2016 or something. Nice. I was like, yeah, this guy needs an upgrade. So I sponsored him, but out of my own pocket, not as the company.

I'm actually sponsoring Ivan right now. If you guys don't know, he has a pretty big reach. But yeah, like, I think it's funny when people will reach out on like Twitter or Instagram or Facebook or whatever, and they'll ask us like, hey, you know, can you sponsor me? I want to be a big streamer. I'm like, that's an automatic no, right? like why would we give something to somebody, you know, especially with computers, I mean, just to, you know, like memes aside, computers are not free, right? Computers cost money. A GTX, what a, I don't say GTX. I'm old, dude.

My dream is to become a professional streamer and support my family, which is a great dream to have. But, you know, like, you know, my dream is to go to the moon, so should Jeff Bezos buy me a rocket ship? Because it's my dream? Probably not. Oh, did you hear what happened? So the, I don't know what's called, but things like the like the aircraft commission or some group or something that basically determines like terms and stuff, they, they strip the titles of astronaut from bases and the dudes who flew up because they, they redefined

what an astronaut is supposed to be, which is someone who like is in charge of flying V-craft, who like go up to space for like a reason to do like space stuff or whatever. So like if you're literally just going up in a space To get launched it to a rocket to go look at something for like 13 seconds And then you come back down you don't qualify as an astronaut You're just a tourist you're a poser pretty much Technically we are all flying through space right now Dennis That's true

Yeah but I just thought it was hilarious that they're like Let's not give them that title Which I thought it was pretty kind of a Almost like a petty move to do right Like take that away from them Which I'm totally down for like forget these people they can suck it, like I don't care. Yeah, but, but to go back on that, yeah, I mean,

3090s are $1,500 at MSRP, right? If you can provide more than $1,300 of value to a company, then they will sponsor you. But if you are asking for a computer because you want to be a streamer, then that makes zero sense. You might also just go buy one, you know? It's like, it's like LeBron, right? Being like a baby or whatever is like,

I want to be, you know, in the NBA. a, I want to be a big star and like the top scorer. Give me a spot on the team. It's like, do you score now? No? Okay, then no, right? Same thing. You know, like, you wouldn't go up to the Dodgers and be like, you know, I want to be

your pitcher, you know, I want to be the biggest pitcher in the world, the best pitcher ever. Do you pitch now? No, but if I get on the team, then I'll be a pitcher. Like, it's not how that works, dude. Yeah, but listen to previous episode. It's near the back where we talk about. how that stuff works. It's a thing, you know.

Do your thing. Stay on that grind gamer. Don't neglect your family in the process, though, right? You know, all things in moderation. Captain Cheese wants to know if we're doing something special for podcast number 100. And the answer is yes. Yeah, actually we are. I'm doing something pretty cool.

we're going to have probably the biggest guest we've ever had on this podcast Elon must I'm kidding I've never had you on it actually I would have you on just to make fun of them and just like asking them real ridiculous questions but yeah you would clap on you yeah we yeah we're gonna have a very very special guest next week it's gonna be pretty great I'm pretty excited for it it's gonna be a good episode we get it be a good episode My computer was 2K. Companies won't give money away if there's not a way for them to make money in exchange

if you don't bring something more to a company. Yeah, you know, and there's obviously cases where like, you know, we, like there is that one dude who, I'm assuming he's a guy, you know, assuming he's gender, who basically was tweeting at us this like custom and I'll find him right now. Sorry. Or click on the wrong thing here. I'm trying to go to Twitter. I'm typing it so incorrectly.

I'm like talking in. and doing this at the same time. This guy who was tweeting at us this custom Assassin's Creed Valah case that he made. He made it himself. Before the game even came out, he was so excited for the game.

He's like, I'm going to make this thing, so he made it. And when we released our craft ball holocaise, my first thought was like, we got to give this guy one of these cases because this guy obviously loves the company. He loves the game. It's like the biggest fan ever.

You know, in that situation, I would give you some. for free because this guy obviously has passion he's not asking something for free for something for free right like I'm pretty sure 99% of people who are asking for free stuff on the internet would take it from anybody right they don't care they just want something for free they just are just happening to ask us in that moment in time but for you to go out and like custom build your own case in the theme of a game and then we actually make that case I mean it just got to do

it right it's a no-brainer I'm sure if I If I just hashtag Bahala It'll It'll pop up You hear my nice typing here In a second Let me see

Valhalla Maybe not I find it for a second But Evan You want to answer some more questions While I'm finding this case It's like a show it for the stream Which is cool

To be that now People are asking Who's actually the guest for next week And the answer is a surprise It's they're asking is it a YouTuber is it a B

the answer is stay tuned to find out Potato Boy wants to know when we're making an NGXT keyboard well surprise I'm actually typing on one right now look can you guys see that

you can't see that even I don't know you don't have the quality on your camera to do it it's a limited edition number one out of 150 it's a Ducky it's a Ducky Shine too right

Ducky Shine 3 Ducky Shane 3 yeah How long How long ago was it that we made that? 2013 And we made it in black and white 150 of each And I have the black one at the office

And the white one at It's a really good keyboard I love Ducky keyboards Like Ducky keyboards are my favorite keyboard So I think it's funny when people always ask When are you guys going to make an N60 keyboard And I'm typing on one

Seven years ago All right I found I found the guy's tweet or his account. For some reason, it's not sending me in here, but let me find his original one so you guys can see how cool it looks. He tweets a lot about Euro Truck Simulator, too.

I don't know what. What's up with that? Okay, so here we go. On the stream, he made a custom 8,710 Valhalla case. It's actually really cool. Actually, looks kind of nice. This guy, I mean, you can obviously tell this dude loves this game.

I've never seen somebody love a game so much more than this gentleman here. So here's 8-7-10, right? There's a little screen in there. And then this is great for radio, by the way, you know. But then there's the panels he made for the front. I think it went to the top two. So, yeah, this dude really loves this game.

He's a big fan of it. He would tweet us all the time. Just really excited to have it be a thing. It's made out a real wood, I believe. It looks like it's real wood. Yeah. You went out with that thing. Yeah, so, you know, when we were coming out with the

case, right? I was like, hey, we should probably give him one. You know, it just makes sense. So then we sent him this brand new NXT, craft which craft is it? Craft 8. Oh, yeah. It was funny too, because we were like, let's send him one

and we're like, sure, where do you live? And then it was Croatia. We're like, really, how are we going to send it there? But we did it. Yeah. So now he has his old panel up on the wall with his brand new computer chilling there, which is super great. I'm happy that I that I mean, I'm going to say it, right?

By the way, that's also like, that's a, that's like a desk top top the way he had to sit up there. I know, right, it's like floating up in the world. It's above his desk. Yeah, and this do a little bit of, to be honest, I also don't like that look. I like that. Oh, really? I don't know. Well, first of all, I don't think it's very safe to do so.

I mean, as long as it's not earthquakes, you're fine, right? Well, I don't know, but if someone just slams the door really hard. I feel like it could just fall down and like smash your monitor or something. You imagine getting a free NXT, Kraft-08 while Hollocase, and then still using Coursair fans? Hey, man. That's funny. It's funny. But yeah, no, it's great.

And I'm just to say it, right? Like, this was my call. This is something that I decided to just reach out to the team and do. And we're like, yeah, you know, we have an extra one sitting in our product marketing sample. So, you know, we'll just, you know, if you want to give them one, totally cool. and I made it happen. So, you know, just, you know, I, I will occasionally send out things to people who I think are cool and not necessarily deserving, but, like, you know, have a passion and then I want to, like, reward that passion, you know, as opposed to, you know, accounts are like, you know, day 500 of tweeting for a free computer. I'm like, okay, cool.

Like, dope. Good for you. Anybody can do that, right? But, yeah. So, dude, so, do you. What happened to on Instagram the other day? Related to that,

like someone commented, can I have a free PC? And I replied, no. And then they replied with, can you at least follow me on on Instagram? It'll be a big flex. And then some guy jumped in

and I started, started clowning on him. He's like, STFU dummy. They're not going to send you anything. They're not going to follow you. you have like no followers. Why would it,

why were they ever like give you any support? Yada, yada, yada. He's being a jerk pretty much, right? So then I went in there and I was like, just for that, I am going to follow this kid. And then you put it on his Instagram story. It was awesome.

That's going to have we operate, right? We're just like a little petty, you know, a little. You think that's petty? It's, it's, it's,

it's petty to the dude who is being a jerk, right? It's like, okay, I will do it then. You know, forget you of being a, you know, being a giant ice. Yeah, I was like, I felt bad. I was like, man, this kid, like, I wish I could, dude,

honestly, I wish we were in a position where we could give a free computer to every single person who asked for a free computer. Like, I would love to do that. I mean, that'd be awesome. If we were like, if we can just say, like, you get a computer and you get a computer, like, why not? Like, it's ridiculous. But we're obviously not in that position because, you know, we have to sell computers

to make money to be a business. So yeah, it sucks. Like, we can't do that. And, you know, but it's, what sucks even more is that, like, people being mean to someone, I guess, just because they're asking for ones. Like, just leave them alone, you know. Yeah, like, another situation of that happening is where we were tweeting out Pride stuff. This is during Pride last month, right, last month. And someone was being a jerk to a trans individual on the timeline.

And they tweeted this and like, you know, oh, this is sucky that's happened, you know, blah, blah. And I was like, yeah, you're right. It is sucky. So I went into the thread. I found the dudes and I told them all off. Like, hey, like, shut up pretty much. You know, like something can jerk away, you know, block, block. And then I reached out to the person.

Like, hey, sorry, that happened. You know, like, this is not the kind of audience that we want to cultivate, you know. So, you know, as like an offering, you know, let me send you some like N60 swag. So I send them a full setup of like all the, all the, all the, all the N60 stuff, you know, the stickers of lanyard, hoodie, you know, the poochie, everything. Because, like, you know, it sucks to have to endure abuse online in the comments of a company that you enjoy, right? Like, this is really crappy.

And I feel like, you know, that we do have, you know, we have almost a little bit of responsibility to make sure that the audience that we're cultivating on our social media aren't giant jerks pretty much, right? aren't assholes. I don't, you know, I'm, I come from a time where, you know, where we're like jerked to each other. But there's like, you know, a gentle ribbing and just being like a butt to someone. And then there's being an absolute like just discussing human being and you can like go away. So yeah.

And also it's kind of brings back to another question someone asked earlier. I think we skipped it. It was from a felon, I believe. They said, uh, who manages the social? It's me and Ivan. Both of us manage the social. and we use the word manage lightly yeah we're just on there yeah managing having a plan right I have a question could you answer honestly do you charge MSRP for your GPU pre-bills

we can't we do when we can't pretty much well I guess it's a weird question too so we charge what we pay for him basically so like let's say a graphics card comes out and the MSRP is a thousand dollars and then all of of a sudden, you know, you can only buy graphics cards for, that's in graphics card for like $1,500. And if we have to pay for that $1,500 for it, we're not going to charge $1,000 for it, right? So it depends what we get them for. Yeah. Sometimes we do get him for MSRP. Sometimes we don't, you know, it depends where we get them from. Yep, pretty much. That's, that's the state of harder right now in general, you know, so we do our best to not pass on the cost to you guys,

but sometimes it happens and, you know, anything we can do about it, to be honest. I could also honestly say that we're not, like, marking them up to make a profit like that. I can honestly say that as well. Yeah, for sure. Does that mean you make less profit on certain builds? That would be a question for our finance team.

Actually, I have no idea what we make on them. But, you know, it's like I said, you know, like, sorry, Evan? I was going to say, I don't know how the profit stuff works, like, you know, how that stuff works out. But what I do know is that, that because we make the majority of the hardware that goes in the computer, you know, like the case, the coolers, that sort of stuff,

like we don't have to really, because of that, we don't really have to mark, we don't have to mark up our computers like a lot of other companies because a lot of other companies they buy computer parts from other manufacturers, including NZXT, and then they have to figure out how to make a profit from it, right? Because we're selling them a case

for our MSRP and then it's up to them like, okay, well, if I bought this case for $100, do I want to sell it for $100 or do I want to sell it for $110, $125? And for that is, you know, we're, you know, our case, we don't have to like worry about marking it up because we're already, I guess, quote unquote, profiting because we're, our, the cost of the case

is the cost that it costs to make it, not the cost to buy it. So it's a little different, I guess, in that regard. Yeah, this is a little, Let's just to quickly throw in here, a gross oversimplification of how it works because we're not on the finance team. We know how that stuff works.

You're just kind of like just kind of talking really, really generally. We'll get long on here to talk about that. Yeah, he can explain it all, so he can get angry at him. We're literally just the messenger. And Kennedy is asking, so the prices on the website aren't completely stable. They fluctuate.

And the answer is, yes, prices, hardware, all that stuff changes on a regular daily. basis. We try to keep the prices though like as stable as possible but we like tennis said we don't control the PC hardware market like if all of a sudden tomorrow it becomes impossible to buy RAM sticks and the price of RAM shoots up a thousand percent and all of a sudden we're we're having to buy RAM like you know like significantly more than what we're currently paying for right now. Yeah. And you know we're gonna have to raise the

price of the computer just because of that fact alone. Yeah. And there's other things too like that that impact the cost. Like sometimes it's not necessarily the cost of the hardware, but the cost of like tariffs like an importing hardware from different parts of the world. And that impacts not just NXT, but like that impacts, you know, companies like Apple, you know, anyone that's using like any sort of computer part or even like your, your smartphone, right? it'll make the cost of that go out.

So like, you know, Dena say we're not in the finance team. We know enough. I'm just, yeah, I know the basics, I guess, of what determines the prices. Maybe we should get long on here to talk about that stuff. Could be interesting. Yeah, actually would be.

Also, I also want to note to you that like, compared to like what happened the last time we had a shortage in GPUs, which was the original like Bitcoin mining boom, The difference is that that only really affected GPUs, right? Where right now, what we're experiencing is affecting literally anything to use as a microprocessor or capacitor or whatever the heck the word is. It's a given a brain right now, right? So because of that, supply is extremely, extremely short, right?

And it's not like, you know, Nvidia is putting out or whoever is putting out, say, 500 GPUs and one person is buying out 500. This is, they're trying to put out 500, but they can only get out 200 because they can't get the parts for them, right? So because of that, the pricing changes everywhere, right? So in the past, when we had that original, you know, situation happened, we didn't have to worry about increasing the price on people because we were still paying the wholesaler price, right? Because everyone was still selling the parts to the SIs, to the retailers for the same price. it was the people who were buying and scalping the computers or the the component. So that's a little different, right? What's happening now is that distributors now have to jack up the prices, right?

Other people have to jack up the prices because, you know, if your, say, you know, if your profits are dependent on selling a thousand RTX 3070s, right, whatever the price is 500 bucks, right? But now you can only sell 200 or 50 or 30, right? you had to keep your business going, right? Even if you paid whatever you paid from like the manufacturer or whatever it costs you to actually like make them, you have to make up that that profit

that you would normally get in volume by changing the price on that component and going above the MSRP. It's a really weird situation. I don't think this has happened before in like the longest time. I don't think we experienced a shortage like this in forever. But that's what it is, right? I don't remember ever experiencing this. I remember when build first started, actually.

That was when the Bitcoin mining craze kind of took off. And like you said, back then, even though that was happening, the prices of GPUs didn't skyrocket. It was just hard to get a GPU. And that's what happened back then. That was like, what, three or four years ago now. But now, I think with the additional, apart from having the Bitcoin or the cryptocurrency mining, you have the chip shortages.

And then you also have a super, super high increase in demand because of the pandemic, because now everyone needs a computer because everyone's working or going to school from home or starting businesses from home and things like that. So it was like a trifecta of things that just made it really a bad time for anyone. who's a PC gamer and wants to get a new computer because it became pretty much impossible to do so for the time. Yeah. And for those who are wondering, like, I'll give a little bit insight as to how it used to work, right? So you kind of get an idea of how, like, how it's all screwed up now, right? Every component had an MSRP, right? Every, every, you know, hard drive, motherboard, RAM, whatever, right? So for things that we didn't make, right, say,

like a video card, we will buy it from a distributor, right? Or we get them directly from a video, depending on what card is, right? And then we would pay whatever the wholesaler cost is, right? And then we would just charge you the MSRP. So, you know, same thing as like if you were to go buy it from like a Best Buy, right? Same thing, you pay whatever price that they're charging based on the MSRP, but the wholesaleer price is different, right? So we would make a profit on just the general selling of that component

and putting it to the computer and the built fee, blah, right? But everything was the same price, right? So no matter what happened, you know, if there was like a sale or like, you know, a crazy rebate, we would just charge the same regular old MSRP to keep everything consistent and standard for everybody. And we would have the sale maybe like once a year during Black Friday and that was like it, right? Now that's all out the window pretty much, right?

That's essentially how it is. It's all crazy, topsy, chirvy upside down. But normally, right, that's how we would do it and there would be no markups on stuff. Even like if there was like a sale, you know, I would tell people on social, oh, if you can find it for cheaper on like PC Part Picker than build it yourself like seriously like it's just you know we would never tell people oh well you know this is special it's the same it's the same computer right we just built it you know so you know so either you have us build it for you and you pay a little bit and you have to worry about all the computer building stuff and you get your to your warranty we can bug us

for whatever you want or you do it yourself you save some money and you have your own computer right so it's pretty much up to you um I'm sorry I was going to say Kennedy 98 is it's saying uh he's asking in your own opinion working firsthand in the industry how long do you see this going on for so i guess uh to be honest i have no idea because even though i do work in this industry like i'm not like i'm not involved at all in regards to like purchasing hardware or like securing hardware for anything like that so i cannot give you like a a real good opinion in that. But my personal opinion, as someone who

posts memes on social media here at NXT and does a podcast, I feel like it's probably going to be like this until this pandemic is over because I do think that a huge part of the reason for this is because the pandemic, just because the supply or the demand is so high that it kind of just contributes to the fact that people are using computer hardware

for things other than gaming and contributes to the fact that crisis keep going up for things like GPUs and whatever, things like that. So my personal guess is like once the pandemic is over, things will start getting back to normal. But like I said, I don't work in the finance department, so I have no idea that's true or not.

I hope that that's the case. Yeah. I mean, it's going to be a while before, before everything stabilizes, you know. This is something I talked about before, too. Like, when you have such a tight, tightly wound supply chain, anything that screws it up for one group or one person or one organization screws it up for everybody, right?

That's part of the problem with, like, you know, kind of capitalism as it is, right? You try to be as efficient as possible. So when you're so efficient, if something ruins that efficiency, it has a huge ripple effect. And that's just the way, it's just the way things work. So yeah. Yeah, pretty much that's it.

Any other questions, folks, before we go in and call it a, I wasn't say a night, call it a whatever. We just call it. Any other, I don't know, topics you guys want us to talk about. Let us know what you thought about, just us doing this on Twitch in general. Did you like it? Did you hate it? Is it better than Discord? Is it worth than Discord?

Do you find it easier to find? Is it more fun, less fun? Let us know. Yes, that is a poochie mama behind me right now. It is definitely a poochie mama. Big old, big old black poochie. I'm not going to pick it up to know. I don't want to get up and not go with the microphone and wake up the dog.

He'll be mad if I do. Personally, like this format. You should do both. We cannot do both. So that's the thing. We kind of have to choose one. Doing both would be way too much. But I think that for our next,

episode. I'm not sure if we're going to be doing it on Twitch Ivan, right? This is kind of like a test. Because of the situation with the 100th episode. Yeah, we got to talk about that actually. Yeah, because this is actually kind of a cool format. So we got to tell Mr. Mr. P. as I'm going to call him if he's, wants to do it like this. We want to do it on their other Discord. I love what a 420 gram OG Cush, I just said here. Like every other. week do a different format. Just confuse everybody, right? I like that idea, actually. It would be cool to just mix it up and just do a different thing every week because it just so keep it interesting. I think it'd be cool to do like some sort of like trivia episodes, maybe like some live, live

builds or something like that. It'd be cool. Yeah, that'd be kind of dope. I'd be down for that. Or just go live and walk around the warehouse and just ask people questions. Yeah, I mean, that could be, I mean, that doesn't have to be, you know, a Twitch thing that can just be an Instagram live, you know. You can go do that right now, like right afterwards. Yeah, too lazy. Yeah, there you go. Got to be some of my favorite content creators at an N16 meetup in Anime Expo. Oh, yeah, that was our pop-up.

Will you guys be doing more of those in the future? Ooh, that's a good question. I mean, I think a love time has passed. We can kind of talk about that. Ivan, do you want to talk about the hop-up a little bit? Hopefully, hopefully we do more meetups in the future, but the state of the world today, like, events are still a big question mark.

You know, like, for example, like the next event coming up is QuakeCon and that's going to be online for the second year in a row. I know I think Pax West is having their event in person this year. Yeah, they're physical, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I would love to do more, more meetups and more just events, at events, people do come hang out, hopefully one day soon. Yeah, as to whether it'll be like the pop-up last time, I probably don't think so, just because it's like a lot of work and effort.

Like, I had to work that thing. I haven't had to work that thing. I don't want to work events like that. You know, I have an office job, so I don't have to work live events like that, you know, I've done a lot of it. But it was really cool to see. It was awesome to have all this, like, NZ. 60 branding, like, type of store thing, you know.

Yeah, it was awesome. It looked awesome. Like, yeah, it was a lot of work, man. Like a week straight working, what, 18 hours a day or something. Yeah. That was very much a startup type of culture thing, right? It's to have a pop-up. Because I think a quote-unquote big corporation would have just had people hired to do

all that stuff and we'd just sit back and let it happen, you know, as opposed to. How would they move over? over computers and like, you know, you know, like, I don't know, assemble chairs and stuff. Friggin, stabb yourself, you know, like, she got hurt. Like, it was just like, you know, like, we're not professionals, you know, so it's kind of funny to have us do that. And that was like the first, like, months I was working there.

I'm like, hey, by the way, you're not going to Los Angeles and you're going to be building stuff. I'm like, oh, okay. So that was interesting. Yeah. Um, yeah. Other than that, uh, yeah, thanks for coming up. Appreciate it.

Is renewing the warranty an option? I don't believe so. That would be a cool option. How much should we charge for a renewed warranty, Ivan? Uh, actually, I can sell you some, uh, poppy insurance for, for an additional 13, 37 a month for the next, uh... Six and nine months? Yeah, the next, the next thousand, thousand months. I'll give you bonus insurance.

I wonder, is there sort of, is there computer insurance out there? I don't even know that's a thing. I'm sure. So I'm sure if you like go to like a mom and pop, right, they'll probably offer something like that to you. That reminds me of something funny that just happened recently. What? So NCXT's long lost son, shout out to LLS. He lives in Canada and they're having like some crazy wildfires.

over there right now. And he sent me this picture of not where he's currently living, but like where he used to live. And like, yeah, everything's up in flames. And he asked me, he's like, do you know if my, if my NXTPC has fire insurance? And I was like, I don't know, but I'm probably gonna assume that, you know, your computer doesn't have like some special

fire insurance attached to it. Like I know like if you have a home or I guess even an apartment, it doesn't really matter where you live. So you can purchase fire insurance and it covers things like your computer and whatnot. But I just thought it was funny that he asked, like, do you know what my computer has fire insurance? It seems like it seems like it would be a good business to have, actually. Just so insurance for different types of things like computers or your Nintendo Switch or something. So I just looked up, you can buy computer and laptop insurance from Progressive.

for $8 a month. But it covers. Water damage, including liquid spells and submersion, damage from dropping or stepping on your laptop. I've never said a laptop. Power searches due to lighting. Yeah, saying,

Brunches Insurance, yeah, it doesn't really cover that kind of stuff. It mostly covers like if it explodes in a fire or something or it gets like, you know, caught up in a, and like, I don't know, it's stolen, right? But I think like,

but I think like personal physical damage probably isn't covered by one just insurance. Unless you have like really comprehensive insurance is like super great. What it doesn't cover though

is computer viruses wear and terror corrosion software issues or blatant neglect. I don't know what that means blatant neglect. That pretty much eliminates like 99% of all

all gamers. I mean so to be honest I would say it's probably not untrue because I don't think people actually like take care the computer most people do not take care of their computer let alone like their workstation and I feel like I do I think I I've always kind of been really proud that I have one of the cleanest like work areas in the office I actually try to keep my computer clean and dust free and things like that but yeah most people

don't most people don't worry about dusting their PC or making sure that the cable management even though you don't see it on the back is actually organized because it does improve performance somewhat you know keeping things nice and organized and cool yeah it's like most people don't do that sort of stuff so if that's called if that's if that's what's qualifies as blatant neglect I think most gamers will offer luck when it's insurance yeah yeah so there you go

if you want to buy an extended warranty for your computer you can not through us but you can and yeah that's that's it I'd be interested

to know like what they categorize the blatant neglect lots of things insurance companies right they don't really tell you I wonder if I can find them see actually if I can find

the actual whole policy let's see here um oh that kind of You didn't put no RGB in your computer that's blatant neglect. Yeah. You don't care about the fancy lights. Clint's emissions doesn't say...

She's looking extended. I mean, it's only $8 a month, right? So it's probably just like really basic stuff. You should run out of poll on Twitter. Like, do you have insurance for your computer? Yes or no? See what happened. Do you have aftermarket insurance through a major insurance company for your computer?

Or the person would be like, would you be interested in purchasing some insurance for your computer? If you did that, people would be so pissed. No way, would I buy a warranty for a computer? Or maybe it's like... I just saved $13 by switching to NZT computer insurance. Imagine though that people actually do want that, right? They're like, hey, if this thing breaks, I just want a new computer. I'll pay however much a month.

I mean, you know, if you get enough people, it's not that crazy, man. I pay insurance for my phone. Why not for my computer, you know? That's true. For my phone, it's like $5 a month or something. And that's why, like, I'm one of those dudes. Like, I don't care if I drop my phone, if it gets scratched,

that'll put a case on it. I don't care about any of that stuff because I pay that $5 a month, right? And if I drop it and it breaks, who cares, I just, you know, put it in the mail and they send me a new one. But probably not the best idea with, for the environment, but that's like it, it makes me not care about, you know, taking super good care of my phone.

So I wonder if I bought computer insurance, if I would kind of have the same idea where it's like, ah, who cares about my PC? I don't have to clean it. If it breaks, it breaks. I'm covered. Yeah, I, uh, you know, now I'm kind of thinking people might actually,

I'm actually buy that. I, we should actually tweet it as the poll and see if people say. Like, would you buy, you know, PC insurance asking for a friend? Let's see what they say. And imagine we just become, like, an insurance company? That's like, it's a good big thing. Because, I mean, like, if you think about it, right?

If you get, let's say, okay, let's do some math, right? You would be the flow of NZXT. I know, right? Okay, so let's say, I feel like $13 a month is a good price, right? So you have, like, a high-end computer. And maybe it's based on the price of your PC, right? So let's say it's like a thousand, let's say it's a $300 computer, $13 a month, right? Times that by 12, right, which is the entire year, it's $156.

Let's say we have 100 subscribers, right? Or 100 people who have this thing. That's $15,000, right, every year that we're getting. So that's a couple computers. Is peace of mind for your PC worth $8 a month? All right. Let's see. And let's say, I don't know how many computers we sell in like a month, right?

I'm just going to ballpark it pretends. More than one. Yeah, more than one. So I'm going to put, say, we're super successful, right? N60 is doing great. We're selling 500 computers. And let's say every single one of those 500 computers is paying $13 a month for insurance. That's $6,500, right?

Per computer a month, times up by 12, right? That's $78,000 every year. we're getting in this bucket for insurance. And we know most people won't use insurance, right? Because 99% of people don't use insurance. That's how insurance companies work, right? They're banking the fact that you're not going to actually use it and just let it go, right? On the out chance, someone actually, what?

If we automatically enroll people into the insurance plan. It comes with your computer. It comes to the computer. If you want to opt out, you have to download an app. Okay, but think about this way, right? let's say we just increase the prices of your computer by $13. Right? For no reason other than to enroll people in this insurance.

And it's a feature. It's on an upcharge, right? Because if you have a problem with your computer, next, you know, you just call us up and we'll just get you a new one, right? Like beyond the normal warranty, right? Which is like, you know, parts in labor, if you break it yourself, hey, darn, you're covered, bro. You're good to go.

I got the tagline. Got. You have the PC. now get peace of mind with NZXT insurance I like that I like that's really good

I'm hit you one of these hold up I'm going to hit you one of these can you can you can you say that again you have the PC now get peace of mind that's good that's good

yeah and like I said we'll automatically enroll people so they'll be insured and they'll be safe and then at the end of the first year, we'll send them a notice in the mail, physical mail, that says,

physical mail. Yeah, it'll say something like, your NZXT insurance will automatically review for another year unless you scan this QR code and install this app and opt out and see how many people are you doing that. There's a thing, right? You have to log into an account to opt out, right? Your insurance, your NZXT, account, right? And it's not the same as your, as the account that you, that you bought

the computer with. It's a whole new account. You get to register, right? This is adding another barrier to it. So make people less likely to actually cancel this as insurance. Yeah. I think, I think it could work. I think we got this, you know. I see a few people in the chat saying that they like the idea. They're sold on it. Yeah. I would draft up the proposal and pitch it to Long and Johnny and we'll see what happens. We should ask for some profit share off this though.

It would be good a deal. Do like podcast 100 is being announced in the 16 insurance plan. I would pay for it, to be honest. I would pay for it. It makes sense. I mean, like I said, I pay for my phone. Why not for my PC? right yeah PCs break stuff happens yeah and and I think that to be honest like I mean I really

rarely ever hear people say like I dropped my PCA and this is that right but I know it does happen so I think like you know like a like a computer that um like a phone that you carry every single day right and they like potentially fall at any moment right you're more likely to hit up the insurance for your phone than you are per computer so From like a profit standpoint, it makes a lot more sense for us to just offer PC insurance, right? It seems like a no-brainer, to be honest. I know. It kind of has a no-braining to be.

I'm surprised we don't actually offer that as a service, like an extended warranty. Like, what the heck? But maybe it's just like, you know, it's just too weird, you know? I don't know. Another thing we can do is we can start the PC gamer pension fund and then just make every PC gamer. send us, I don't know, like, like $10 a month or something, and we put it in this big collective fund,

and then we take that fund and we finance, like, casinos or something, make even more money. And when PC gamers retire, then we just pull money from the casino and give it to them. I think the next big service, should do would be your own personal nxxxt customer support agent right actually funny you say that

dennis oh because it has always been like i don't want to say it's been a dream of mind to do this but it's probably been something i've always like thought would be really cool is if we actually had like a nzxte geek squad that would go to your house you know like the same your best buy does and it helps you build a PC or builds it for you or sets up your computer and just like imagine like a little purple car shows up and it's like a little poochie logo on top or something

and then yeah some guy comes out and it's like or gal comes out and I was about the same like yeah I mean where do you want your PC and like you know it just helps you set it up it'd be cool yeah and then and then does your uh does your cable management right

all that stuff. So there's everything going. All right then. I think we made a lot of progress here. I think we made some big strides. I think Johnny would be happy with the money we're about to make him with his brand new idea. So yeah.

Any parting words, Ivan? Before we go ahead and just call it, call it to call it? Yeah. Actually, I do have two parting words. All right, let's do it. What do we got? Hit me with it. Well, first I want to thank everyone for tuning in on Twitch.

I hope that you guys enjoyed the video Let us know If you guys want to You know Change anything on the podcast, we'll do it Just let us know But second thing I want to mention too Is we did have a product launch this week

We unveiled some new NZXT pre-built PCs So we expanded our H1 mini PC line And our series and our streaming PC series. So now we have more options for more gamers, Dennis. We have plus and pro models now for those builds. So yeah, it's pretty cool.

It's cool to see that the options are growing, and now it's like people are not necessarily stuck with like just one type of mini PC or one type of streaming PC. And hopefully we can keep making more computers. for more people. Yes, sir. Yeah. They look really cool.

I would buy one if I already didn't have a monster rig, so. I would buy one if I was a gamer. Yeah, I'm not a gamer, fortunately. I just play gotcha games on my phone. I just try to get wifu, that's all I want.

All right, let me pull this sucker up. It's for everybody here, just to hang out and chill enjoy ourselves all right everybody thank you for joining us everybody here on twitch and thank you to everybody who tuned in okay i see i see we're scooted up here because we don't have a guest thank you for joining us guest and thank you to everyone who tuned in every to tune in next week at 10 10% percent of time of the official n66d discord server and actually no uh well actually i don't know we'll let you guys know what we're going to do next week you're talking about that right we figure that out i guess uh

You can still go on the Discord server and you'll get the, you'll get the announcement. You'll go on Twitch, I guess. Yeah. You know where we're at. Yeah, so I'd say, just remember to tune in next week somewhere and follow at N60 on all relevant and irrelevant social media. We got to figure that out.

But I would say what we do next week really hinges on what you guys want. So let us know, tell everybody to let us know. I think this should be, you should be saving Vods, right? as far as I know. But if not, we'll, we'll fix that. Yeah, I guess send an email to Clubcast at nixc.com. I don't know if people will actually use it. I never get emails there.

I've been bugging you all to send emails. No one does. And don't forget to listen to previous episodes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud. So, yeah, with that, guys, thank you very much. And we'll see you next week. Bye. Hi, guys. Boop-Boo-Bop-Boo-Boo-Boo-Boo-Boo-B-B-B-B-B-B...