NZXT PODCAST - #190 - Our New Kraken Elites! (Ft. Amanda)

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

On this week's episode of the NZXT Podcast... We have our CAM Product Manager, Amanda, guiding us through the CAM features on our new Kraken Elite CPU coolers! Catch the replay at twitch.tv/NZXT!

Hello everyone and welcome to episode 190 of the NCC podcast, the official podcast of the NZC community. This podcast is recorded live every other Friday at 10 a M. Pacific Center time on the official NZC Twitch and is available to stream on demand on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud. My name is Mike. And with me as always, is Ivan. How are you doing, Ivan?

How I do, baby boo? Excited for another fun-filled podcast with the NZXT community today. Before I introduce our special guest, I do want to make one quick announcement, and that is for those of you who are tuned in live right now on twitch.tv slash nzxte. If you type exclamation giveaway in the chat, you're going to be the first ones to get access to our unannounced giveaway for a brand new NZT Crackenelite. And if you stick around to the end of the show today,

you will get a secret word that will get you a bunch of bonus entries into the giveaway. and most of the time, the people who use these secret words do end up winning, so you should definitely stick around. Yeah, and without further ado, I already said the magic word, which is Crack and Elite, and today we have someone who's been on the podcast a lot of times, almost as much as Mike and myself. Her name is Amanda. I like to call her Camanda because she works on the cam team. Amanda, welcome to the podcast. Hey, what's up, everybody? Thank you all for having me on, and nice to see everybody.

again. For those who do not know who Amanda is, please let us know who you are and what you do at NSXT. Sure. So my name is Amanda York. I'm a big sports fan, big gamer, and I also work at NST. I'm a product manager for NST camp. So my role is working on the features that we're going to show you all today, building cool software features and bringing them to life so everybody can use cool stuff. And what did you do before you joined NST? Before I started at NST, I worked at Blizzard Entertainment for a couple of years, doing some operations and personnel management roles. Then after Blizzard, I worked at a League of Legends Statistics website.

Then I came over to NST. Before I started working on CAM, I was the project manager for the design org. Then I popped over to CAM when the opportunity came up and been in this role for about two years. Nice. And I know we have, we've asked you this before on the podcast, but I wanted to ask you again, because I feel like every time we have an employee on the podcast, we get the same exact question, and I just want to get it out of the way. So what advice do you have for someone who wants to do what you're doing?

Sure. So obviously, I think right now most jobs out there, there's a ton of information out there in terms of podcasts and information on Reddit and people posting about things. Product is a super interesting role. Aside from researching and understanding what it is and kind of looking at the skill sets that are needed for it. I definitely recommend just reach out to some folks on LinkedIn,

reach out to people on Instagram, Reddit, whatever. A lot of people are very willing to help people get into product. It's a very unique role because there aren't a lot of direct ways into it. Like there are very few college programs that prepare you for it. Most product managers will say product found me. So yeah, if you want to find me even on LinkedIn, I'm really easy to find Amanda York. I work at NST.

Hit me up. I'm happy to help people work through it. Biggest tip that I can say to everyone, all the people I've worked with on that question. No matter what job you are in right now, there are ways that you can learn skills to put yourself in a good position to be in product. It doesn't matter what your job is now.

There are things that you can do to prepare yourself. It's just about using the opportunities you have around you. All right. Since you said product, let's talk about a product. Let's talk about our brand new Cracken Elite. And, you know, I might be a little biased, but to me, this is like the coolest all-in-one liquid cooler. No pun intended.

I've ever seen it's massive. I didn't realize how massive this thing was until I was right in person. It's almost the size of a 120 millimeter fan, to be honest. It's really cool to see in person. And we announced it a few months ago, but just this week, actually, they really became readily available all over the interwebs here. So let's get into it, Mike. Yeah, you pulled it up or they'll show up and you cracken.

All right, guys. So I'll kind of just first where there, there, I know there's a lot of confusion on every single crack. Because I mean, how many crackens have released by now? So I'm just got to kind of go over a little bit of like the, the differences between what this cracking elite from was it, 2023 versus the cracking elite to 2024. I'll kind of go over a little bit of the stuff that's different. So I'll show off the 360 R2B, which will actually show off later today during the podcast, just stay, and it will go for it.

Barking commands. Yeah. So basically, the Cracken Elite now has a new LCD screen, which looks super good. Like, it looks amazing. I mean, I have the Cracken Z. And then I just upgraded to the Crockin Elite 360 and it is insane of how big display panel is. It is now a 2.72 inch LCD display.

And then, oh yeah, actually, let me go ahead and actually show off the launch video. Actually, I'll do this after. But let me pull up the YouTube video, actually. That's actually a good idea. I mean, I completely forgot that we actually have the video. I was like, wait, shouldn't we just show the video? I guess that's what we always do. Do you want me to talk over it while it's rolling?

Nah. Nah, we got to let people listen to the music. Music is a banger, yeah. It's a banger. I love that we do these like videos. They're so cool. Yeah, they're awesome. Yeah, so these Cracking Leats are like pretty awesome.

So it's a 2.72 inch display. It has a 640 by 640 resolution and 60 hertz, which is, is awesome. So it has like this wide viewing angle. You can put all your GIFs on it. It's GIF support guys. So remember if you're saying GIF, it is wrong. And we can we literally have the creator saying it's it's GIF. There is this new and I can show you this photo right here. There's a new RGB ring on it. So there's even more RGB, which is, didn't even think that the Crackets could have even more, but now there's this ring that you customize. You can use dynamic lighting.

You can sync it with on-screen content or other R2B devices. So if you have like fans that are doing like the breathing or anything like that, you can sync it up with that, which is, I did not think was something that we needed to add. And then after adding it, I'm like, holy, this is like the coolest thing because all my stuff, I use a fixed breathing, so I use like the purple breathing, and the ring does it too, so it's so cool. And then we also have a new pump system. So I explained this in, I watched the,

I made a video about installation, but as you can kind of see right here, there's no cables around the AIO anymore because the cables actually plug into the radiator now. So you, when you install Ivan's thing, was he hated the old crackets because the cables would come out of it. And he hated that. I was saying a white build.

I don't know those black cables coming up. Complaining about all our products in the office. Because people always show me their build and I always point one thing out that I hate about it. And whenever I would see like someone's build, I would always say, you know what? I hate about your build. I hate that cable sticking out of your crack in there. That's just going over the motherboard. So even though I had nothing to do with it, I will take all the credit that I'm the one that inspired that, I guess.

I'll just take the credit, even though I had nothing to do with it. Yeah. Ivan's, I've seen the cables. You need to do something with the cables every single time. So guess what? We just got rid of it. And now it's just the AIO, which is awesome. And it's actually really easy and solve too because you can just hook it up with the cables and just round into back.

So much easier. holy cow i didn't even notice the cable doesn't come out of the pump it will clean all i build so much that's right pnw it's it's i i didn't realize it and then i look at it now and i'm like you know what i i get it now i understand i've been you're right as always and uh it's not just a cleaner i look too i just dropped the blog post that we published this week um about the the new turbine pump uh so it it it does it is more efficient so there's a dual chamber design it keeps things cooler we have some performance testing results on that blog post so you can see how it stacks up versus the previous crack-ins.

I know some people in the chat are already asking, like, you know, what's the difference here between this one and the other one? And so it's not just looked, it's also performance. So take a look at the blog post. I'll drop the link again. And if you are not tuned in live, not in the chat, just go to nvdh-h-h-h-h-com and then click on the blog, and then it's our last blog.

Yeah. Someone in the chat, Pro Overdrive said where the cable go? It plugs right here into the radiator. It's just like another, it kind of looks like another tube and just plug it in and then you just run into the back.

Real easy. Let's see. Yeah, so the turbine has a 10% boost in CPU performance compared to the old Cracken. So this new turbine pump is way, way better. The new rubber tubing and braided sleeves, So there's no more cable. So that's a huge thing.

I think that's pretty much it. Is there anything else we need to add into the cam before we go into a cam? You have a picture of the cable. I don't have a picture of... Actually, wait, I can show up the... I can do the... Let me show the manual. Where's the manual?

So it will look... like this. Let me zoom in onto this. Mike also just did like he said earlier an installation video for this. So if you go to at NZXT on social

you can see the video of what the cable looks like in real life and see how it install. It's just like a thick. It's like a smaller version of the tubes and you just plugs it in right there, and then everything else plugs right here. Really easy.

Okay. I guess Amanda, since we're here to kind of talk about CAM and all the cool things that we can do, I guess we want to kind of go into all the super cool features that you've been working on, working tirelessly. I want to make sure tirelessly working on. Before we get into that, I have one quick question for Amanda. For Amanda, for those who have no idea what the heck, Cam is, can you explain exactly what Cam is?

Yeah, so Cam is actually an acronym stands for customization and monitoring. So what you can do in Cam is you can see just pretty much every statistic you need to see about your PC in a nice, clean, simple, and sleek panel. So even if you don't have any NZT products, you can use CAM. It's a free software on our website. And it'll just let you see your temperatures and your load percentages and just be able to very quickly see what's going on your system. Obviously super important as we get into a Call of Duty launch today, you want to be checking those GPU temps and making sure you are taking breaks when you need to be taking breaks. But then on the NST side, if you own our NST hardware, CAM is how you configure and control your lighting profiles, your keyboard settings, your cooling

profiles. It's where you go to control NSXT hardware. And you said the magic words there. It controls NST hardware there. And I think when people, when a lot of people think about Cam, they associate it with the Crackin because the Crackin is essentially the one piece of NZXT hardware that I think has the most Cam customization, right?

You can obviously use it on your keyboard, your mouse, and things like that, but you know, a lot of people just associate Cam with the Cracken. So what did you have in mind for Cam when you were working on these new crackings. What was your thinking there for making changes?

Yeah, for sure. So there's two major things. Number one and most important, both on the hardware development side and the software development side is performance. So on the cams side, performance, essentially the easiest way I can boil it down is having reliability. So when you click a button, it does something and it works correctly. And then also

keeping system resources low. So over the last year and a half, not only just for this Cracken Elite V2 or 2024 version, for our prior crackens as well. The entire pipelines of the crackens have been rebuilt over the last year and a half. So we've moved off of using primarily CPU render graphics, moved into GPU render graphics. As you can tell, a graphics card is built to render,

so it is much more performant. It takes that usage off of your CPU and puts it onto the hardware that you have that is built to render things. We also rebuilt all of our critical pipelines in terms of how devices initiate and how they come into cam. So number one was performance. We did a bunch of overhauls and refactors over the last year. shout out to our community for giving me a little patience when some things went sideways on that. It's very difficult to do refactors of that nature when you're overhauling everything. It's a lot at once.

So thank you to our community for being understanding and working with us through that. But then number two, on the hardware side, the focus from the start was always ease of installation. And that's what you're hearing these folks talking about quite a bit with the cable and the way that's changed with the unibody fans, the reduction of the amount of screws that you have. Honestly, our brackets are very simple to use in comparison with our competitors. It was important to me on the cam side that that ease and simplicity also came through in software to really have a nice through line from the hardware side into the software side. So you see that ease and simplicity.

As soon as you open that box and you install that crack in, it's very simple to install. You get into cam, boom, it's real simple to set up. Nice. Well, let's just show people what we're talking about here, Amanda. Yeah, let's show it. I actually, I need to stand up for a second. I need to go turn on my camera so folks can see this. I'll be right back.

Mike, did you know what Cam stood for before she said that? Yeah, it's control and monitoring, yes. Customization and monitoring. Oh, it's customization. Oh, that was control. Never mind. And by monitoring, she was referring to monitoring your website searches. We like to keep track of all that stuff.

Our customers are looking up online. All right. All right. So let's roll. So for this portion, I'm going to be showing Mike in on this camera. Mike's going to be showing you the CAM UI. So there might be a point where we're a little bit disjoint, but we'll try to sync these up the best that we can.

But here, what you're seeing is just our triple infographic mode. This is the mode that you probably just saw on that marketing video that you watched. This to me, this was a mode that we built early on. So right, we try to have a marquee mode that we're going out there and sending pictures of. It was super important to me. me like these guys were talking about earlier that screen is much larger honestly it was a little scary up front because you're like wow this is a lot of screen real estate to work with um so up front the goal was let's make sure we capitalize on that screen space as much as we can

the triple infographic came from just sitting here and thinking about what do you want to see when you're gaming what is it that we want to see most games these days are really going to push your gp u your gpue temperature super important but it to note and cam you can change whatever figures show in all of those positions that are on the screen right now i just have it in the default showing the default gradient that we have there on the radio bar around the edge and then the default setup for the different configurations that display. But you can change all of those slots. That was a change that we made through.

That was refactoring pieces I was talking about earlier. You can change all of your slots and change what is displaying across all of the modes, across all of the crackets we have with the screen now. All right. So that's our first mode. That's what you'll see when you first load into cam. That's the default that will show up. So I'm going to go ahead and pop over to another display mode that we have.

This is our web integration mode. Right now it's just going to show a screen for a second here. And now I'm going to show you just some of the web integrations that we have available. You're going to see some of my family members pop up on the screen. Right now I'm going through a Google Photos integration. So these are pictures of people very near and dear to my heart. Honestly, this is a mode I use when I'm having kind of a stressful week. I'll throw up the Google Photo slideshow so I could just see some of my family members

and remember why it is that I work so hard. Why it is that I do what I do and just keep a more positive spin. And this one's cool because I just, I was looking at those frames, you know, those frames you could buy where you could put an SD card on there and it shows pictures. It's like, why don't we do that on the Cracken? I'll let people be able to have these streams of their family members directly from their Google photos. And then next up, now I'm going to show you the Spotify here for a second. I don't have any music playing. I'm going to have to play music.

This is going to get brutal for me. We got to see which songs you're going to play. There we go. Sorry, it's a little bit blasted out there on the camera. It's a unique background there. But yeah, so this will show your Spotify now playing information. This one's cool if you're just kind of chill and playing some games and just want to look up and see, oh, who's that artist or who's that song?

Now, this one, this one I really like, this is our YouTube integration. Let's pop a video in here. So this is going to directly stream a video from YouTube. This is where you really start to see how nice the screen looks. I know it actually on camera. I'm sorry, it does look a little bit grainy. Sorry about that in person. and it looks a little bit better, sorry.

But you can see, this is where that really nice screen display with that 60 hertz performance, with the performance improvements we have in terms of frame rate, really starts to come through when you bring these types of videos that you know what they look like and you see them and you put them in your cracking and you're like, wow. It looks great. It's super performant and super fast.

I really like streaming sometimes like a Red Bull video and just putting up there, like somebody jumping off of mountains and stuff like that. I like to watch the B movie by Crack. the B movie you have to do the B movie but every time someone says B it like double speed and then eventually it just like

it goes from like one minute then just it starts to just start getting faster faster and I think the total movie time I think it's like two minutes I think it's like eight minutes or something like let me see I got to find it you should have told me that before and I put the B movie up there we can get it rolling

You can get the whole B movie in like one one quick gift. Here it is. The entire B movie, but every time they say B, it gets faster, and the whole thing is about seven minutes. All right. So pop it over to another mode here.

Yeah, I'm moving through these pretty quickly. You all obviously work on this stuff a lot. If you have questions, for free to drop them in the chat here. I am using our profile system as well. So that's how I'm able to quickly change through these, change these lighting modes at one time with the screen modes.

I've got profiles set up to sync up with my games. Here, I'm just manually changing them over for the sake of the podcast. But when I go into Call of Duty, I'll have a specific profile that will launch for that. And then I'll go into Valheim. There's another profile that launches for that. So profiles are really powerful way to just change all your settings at once and be able to completely change the way your system looks. All right, so we're going to pop over to the next one.

This one is honestly one of my personal favorites. I'm going to turn my music up in my headset so you can see how this looks. And what you're seeing here on screen is our audio visualizer. So this is responding to the music that's playing in my headset right now that y'all can't hear. I'll pause this here in a minute and let Mike and I even talk for a minute so you can see it respond. Blah, blah. In the background there, oh, I'll pause it. In the background there on my fans, what you'll see is that my fans are synced up to that lighting ring and synced up to those screen contents.

So this is what Mike was talking earlier about the integration that we have, where you can sync up your lighting accessories to the screen display contents. honestly it's super fast and super performant this feature turned out awesome it's really fun to go in here and just get your entire case just rocking on a Friday afternoon I'll do this a lot of Friday afternoons I'm just chilling and getting through some work and just throw on some music put on the audio visualizer and just have a little party in my office it's it looks so cool because as you can see right now it's responding to my mic look hi like is that so cool Let me try it.

Alexa, place skibbidi toilet. I'm glad I have a headset on. Yeah, we had the headset on. And there I just changed the color pattern too. So I flipped over to a blue-green color pattern. Everything you see here in cam is going to be customizable. All these elements can have their colors changed. And in this audio visualizer, you're seeing there's a sensitivity bar.

You can turn off our logos on all of our modes now too. So totally can customize the way these look. We're rolling through them pretty fast. but you can make adjustments to these color patterns. I love, was there like a, like a process into doing this audio visualization thing? Like, was it like difficult to implement? Because, I mean, it's literally responding to my sound and my mic.

It's like. Yeah, so this mode was honestly very difficult. I'm very blessed and fortunate to have some amazing engineers at my back that are able to do phenomenal things. The hardest part of this is essentially this works very similar to like FPS on your monitor. You have frame data that's sending from CAM to these devices that it needs to decode and place on the screen. So getting it to work very fast and perform it is honestly very difficult, but I have amazing engineers that are able to work through those problems and bring these things to life and perform exceptionally well.

Can you ask when those engineers why you're echoing right now? It's probably my camera. No, no, no, I muted it on the stream. Ivan, you haven't muted it because of a test. So you go ahead and mute it in Discord, and you should be fine. Mute what?

The screen share. Oh, gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, I already muted it for stream, so you guys aren't hearing this, so don't worry. God, it's so cool. I can literally see, like, my... It's so cool. It just, like, reacts to it.

Sadly, my third monitor blocks, my screen so I can't use the audio visualization that much. That is so cool. It is really cool. Yeah, it gets your whole case just rocking with whatever color pattern you want. Yeah, Super Dupa Bill says, yeah, that's dope. The fans in the background, too. Yeah, you can sync it up with your fans as well.

Cool. All right. So let's flow on to the next one here. All right, so these, honestly, these are our most popular modes. These are the modes where we have both an infographic with a gift on the background. Sorry, I say a gift. And here you're seeing that RGB AutoSync also displayed

so you can see that screen those colors are being taken from that screen. There's a border around the edge where we take those pixels. Very similar to like the way that ambient lighting kits work on the back of a TV. And then it's casting it onto those fans behind there as well.

I'm going to show you one here in a second. Again, all of these colors can be customized in here. All your font colors can be customized. I have this logo shut off as well. So you don't see the NZXC logo. But if I do enable it, you'll see a little bit of a shift there where we'll slide those contents and re-centered them back up. I'm showing them on screen that you can kind of see like when I enable and disable it.

It'll like kind of ship it down or up based on what's available. For sure. Let's take a second here on the triple infographic mode. I want to ask you all and folks on the podcast here, what do you think is the most difficult part of building this screen display mode? Which one of these elements do you think is really difficult to accomplish? and I think

I'm gonna go with Are you talking about like the physical like what it is computing like the is it the JIF or the temperature or is it just like kind of like how it looks just the display how it looks

I think it's it's gonna be something to do with the frame rates I'm gonna yeah I'm gonna go with something that the visuals are actually, you know, not choppy.

Yeah, I'm going to go with just the numbers just sinking up correctly. I want to go something like that. Yeah, so, I mean, technically Ivan's correct. If we were starting new, the actual screen performance would be the most difficult part. Like I was saying earlier, we're in a good spot on that. So when we came to build this one, the most difficult part actually is that line that you see, that white line that's in between the large reading and the two on the right. that line is it's difficult to center it it's difficult to get in the right spot it's kind of interesting

in engineering because there's like designs and things that you make that don't actually exist so even like our radials where we have those circular bars circle doesn't really exist in in when you're when you're talking about engineering you have to build that out of a bunch of different triangles and different shapes so things like these little lines and whatnot are actually really difficult to pull off i'll be very honest and say this is why you don't really see a lot of competitors who kind of go into these things. One of the requests I have a lot, which we will build, is to have like four infographics on the screen.

I chose not to make that our marquee mode because it's pretty easy to just put four things in a quadrant and be able to roll with that, to actually be able to build things like this and have them space nicely and have them look great, have them size correctly. It's a little bit more challenging and much more fitting to our brand as in ZXT.

How long? So I know there's people in the chat that would ask for like, oh, can we get So let's say you never have made the triple infographic plus the GIF function from like start to finish. How long would it take to like make something like this? Something as like complex. When we talk about just like from the inception of an idea to it's built and it's ready to go in the app, you're usually looking at about a good three months, which I know sounds absolutely bonkers to people.

But it's because when you first start, you got to design it. That's the most important part, right? You got some designers going to need to sit down and be able to space all these pixels out and be able to space how these things look. Then you need to get into edge cases and you need to say, okay, some people are going to run Celsius, some people are going to run Fahrenheit. So we need to have triple digits. Some people are going to roll over into, hopefully this doesn't happen to anybody, but you might roll over into 200 degree readings. And so that type of work is actually where a lot of the work is at. It would be very easy to put out just something that doesn't work well across all of the different figures and numbers that are out there.

but to do them well does require that you spend a good amount of time designing for edge cases and then looking at the way that fonts place and space themselves when they get to those digits that's really where the real work comes in is in the different layouts that you actually have to make work someone asked me to put the pedro pedro pedro pedro meme on and i will do that right now for you i'm not doing that but you can do that pedro pedro pedro all right cool so i'm going to pop over to another mode here. I just want to point out one of the other new features that we've added a little bit of a oh oops I made a boo-boo there. There we go. All right so I know this one probably looks super bonkers on camera. Sorry about that. It's very much intentional. This honestly is more helpful for our crack-in product where we have the

smaller screen. When you have the smaller square screen where you don't have this full space, you can tend to hit assets and pictures where it's tough to see the contrast of the the different numbers and values that are here. So one of the things that we added through this development was an option to be able to put outlines on text. So here you'll see I've got different colored outlines available here. I've got the green on the CPU readings and the black. This just really helps with readability, especially on those smaller crackens where you might

have some contrast issues. It just makes it a lot easier to actually read those settings and be able to run things to be able to just essentially read them. can we hypnotize our audience right now with this image here I'll go back to audio visualizer for a little bit I know I kind of set that one up bio cracking bio crackin

I'll hypnotize you with RGB Auto Sync yeah I'm just want to let everyone know like how crazy and like I love the idea that every crackin out there is like made for that person so like for someone that wants like the audio visualization like right here they can just be like oh yeah i want to see like you know every time i shoot my gun you know it like lights up my room and and you know you turn off all the lights and stuff or like for something like me where i like to have my personality on it so i have like my snow run i have pedro right here i have the chinchilla like you can kind of customize it to how you want it and every single one of these cracks and is like different based on each one, which is so cool.

It really is. Yeah. This is snow. I mean, the flexibility that you get too of, you know, if you're running in a white build to be able to set the white backgrounds on there, they look really nice. They just look so, so clean. Be able to just entirely flip that color pattern and now that crack is yours. Yeah, that's great.

I think my favorite, my favorite crack in mode is probably probably the most boring, to be honest. I just like the clock. The clock. I like the clock. The time on my crack in. I like the clock too. Because I like hiding the task bar on my desktop. Just like I can have like more space and not deal with like a million notifications all day long.

And I just like looking over and what time is it? Oh, I see the time there. There may be some younger people in the audience right now. Can you guys read? The, can you guys read this one? Because I remember that there's a, there's a thing where they pretty much are outdating this clock and just replacing it all with the digital. Okay, I am 12. I can read it. Okay, okay.

This grace, I can't read it. I'm not even sure if I can read it, to be honest with you. I don't think I can't. Yeah, I will also. Okay, okay. The other thing I'll say, if you, on the triple infographic modes, you have this opening. and flip back over to a trim blue photograph. You can see kind of there at the bottom,

there's a little bit of an opening there between the radio lines. Probably throw a clock in there at some point and be able to kind of combine some of these different things together. In the meantime, carousels are really nice mode. If you're kind of a flip between multiple different display modes, maybe you don't want to always see a clock, but you have a problem of playing games too long, or you've got to get the dogs fed or get to dinner or something.

Nice to run the carousel and be able to kind of get a little bit of differences in there and go between multiple different screens. I'll give you a million dollar idea for the next update. Okay. You should track gamers fitness activity. How many calories they're burning while getting sweaty playing video games? Oh, you're playing games? Okay, because I'm not trying to.

I got my Apple Watch on my wrist. It's always telling me stand up. It's always telling me, Amanda, you're behind. I don't need more alerts about how behind I am on my fitness. That would be pretty cool, though, Ivan. I do like that idea. Yeah. Speaking of ideas, I think another cool feature, not just with this Cracken, but all our

crackens, or not all the Crackens, but most of our Crackens is the web integration stuff. So I know you mentioned Spotify, which is technically web integration, Google photos and the videos and things like that, but there's also a lot of really cool community-generated integrations that we've seen. Can we go over that a little bit? Yeah, so this is in the web integration panel in CAM. I'm showing one of them right now. It's kind of a Zelda-themed GPU temperature screen.

These are web integrations that are built by people in the community. They can submit them to us. We can take a look at them and review them and just make sure that they work and then expose them into the application and give them credit on their web integrations, be able to get some feedback from the community as well. So this is a newer feature for us. And honestly, right now it does require that you have a little bit of engineering knowledge. You've got to be able to use GitHub and be able to do some coding.

In the future, we might be doing some more things to kind of bring some folks together. Again, remembering the hardest part of this is usually getting to a design. So there's some engineers out there who want to build crack in modes, but maybe don't know how to build them well or want some assistance on design. In the future, I'm hopeful that we are able to kind of bring those communities together and be able to work through that, bridging that kind of gap there. But in the meantime- If someone wanted to make a web integration, where do they go get information for that? Yeah, so we have a public, we have our API available on GitHub. So if you have a Cracken, you can see it in the Web Integration panel.

Otherwise, it's a GitHub page. If you just search for NZC Cracket or search for, search for, yeah, just really anything around NZXT, you'll be able to find that section on GitHub to be able to see those instructions. So I know sometimes folks are a little, I don't know the right word to say, but sometimes folks, you know, want us to open up the crack-in and let other, you know, companies and whatnot control these. This is a really good option for letting people be able to build things. It'd be really difficult, actually, for us to open up those crackens to be able to let them be controlled open source.

But we also understand, you know, there's a lot of people out there that want unique different options and maybe want a color pattern or maybe want a font type that doesn't necessarily fit our brand approach. And this is how we can go about letting people use those modes. Must have comics fans. No. No. Did we go over the Carousel mode? No, we haven't got over Carousel mode yet.

We just went over it. Yeah, we did it a little bit. Yeah. I just saw someone in the chat said, can I add the clock and temp in the same screen? I said, coming soon, but as like a kind of for now solution, you can do the Carousel option. So you can have like your temps here.

And then you can change a door. duration from like five, 30 seconds. And then you can have the clock for this. And then you can have your GIF after something like that. So we can switch every five seconds. So just it's like for now you can do that. Gangster Soros in the chat is asking. Can we see more of Amanda's hot, all caps, husband on the Cracken?

Sure. We'll get that. What was the name again? That's from a gangster story. There you go. There's my hot husband. You go. There you go.

You're welcome. We appease our audience. Thanks. That's really interesting. Actually, part of the reason why these pictures are in there is because if you look, there's a lot of color depth on those pictures. There's a lot of different shades of colors in there. And when you do that, you really push how far the performance of these products can go.

So a lot of these pictures are actually in there because they are actually very high quality images that push and test these crackens. Oh, so I want to ask, look at that doggo. What is your dog's name? That's Baxter. Yeah, he's the best dog in the world. Sorry, everyone. There he is again.

That's a great name for a dog. Yeah, he barks twice if he's in Milwaukee. The barkster. Barkster. And for those that don't know or don't know how, like, can you explain how the Cracken can sync up with all your other NZX2 hardware? So like your fans and whatnot. Yeah, so the biggest way is going to be through a profile in terms of like making a mass change throughout.

Cracken, like you're referencing here, Cracken is typically for most, you know, the system is going to be one piece within an ecosystem of other NZXT products. So your profile system is how you're able to change all of these things at once. You can change your cooling profiles as well. This is I think a little bit of a little known fact. So when you go in and you're setting up your cooling profiles, you can say, I really want this profile to launch whenever Call the Duty launches, for instance, if you've got maybe a GPU centered cooling profile that you want to launch just for Call of Duty. And then when you get out of Call of Duty, it shuts off so that your fans aren't just running higher

and you're able to get back to kind of having a more silent profile and being able to be in just more of an idle state or more of a productivity state. So profiles are really how that ecosystem comes together and where the Cracken, honestly, this Cracken becomes the centerpiece of it. and where the ecosystem shines. Beautiful. I will also say we will have some work coming up around profiles too. I know some folks may not even know where they're at or how to access them. We're going to have some work coming up on profiles in terms of the way that they're laid out.

And then I'll at some point have some additional usability features that go in around profiles to make them a little bit easier to sync up to games. We have a ton of questions from the community. We are going to ask you those. But before I ask you those. Okay. I want to ask you a very philosophical question here. Oh, boy. All right.

What's something you want our audience to know about Cam? The biggest thing is that we do actually test Cam. So I say that kind of jokingly. Our community is absolutely amazing. I love working with the folks that we work with. But by the time anything actually gets released out to the community, it's gone through multiple different hardware and software setups. It's gone through multiple different people.

So unfortunately, it's tough for folks to understand that if there is some kind of problem that happens after we update, it means that that system is within a subset of a subset, usually of a subset, meaning there's some kind of BIOS version with a specific driver version, with a specific piece of hardware, with a specific detail set on it, that creates a problem. So I can guarantee you a little known fact about not just CAM but all software. There is not a single software provider in the world that has coverage across every single configuration that's out there. there. It's an exponential amount of actual technical setups that are out there for people between different versions and different Windows versions and different BIOS versions and all kinds of things

out there. So we do test extensively and that means if you do hit an issue, we really need a lot of information from folks because if you're trying to replicate the parts of that system that create a problem. And what's the best way for someone to reach out to the camp team if they have feedback, suggestions, problems, et cetera? Yeah, honestly, anyway, like, we're, We've got folks on the team who really focus on checking out Discord often. We've got folks who focus on Reddit. I spend a lot of time on Reddit. We have an Ideas Portal as well where you can go upboat and downvote other folks' suggestions.

That is a very helpful tool for me, especially as we go into working on a new product line. I'm taking a look at that and kind of see where exactly do we land in terms of community requests. So the Ideas Portal is a great place for voting up other people's ideas. If you've got a new one yourself, you can make one. But honestly, we'll find you. Put a ticket in too if you want, right? We'll find you for not to put a ticket in. because our agents tend to need to focus on other things.

But just get it to us anyway and we'll find it. How would people access that ideas portal? Yeah, there's actually a link in CAM. So if you go into Settings Support, you'll see a link in CAM in the top right corner. Yes. And if you submit a ticket in the Settings tab via CAM, there's also an option there. You tick a box and it'll upload your CAM logs with that ticket,

so the team can take a look. So if you are having issues, you know, that's a really quick and efficient way to share. share your system information with the team so they can take a look. And the reason why that's important would always tell people too that have issues is that, you know, no one, there's basically no two identical PCs out there. Like there's like a million different configurations that are possible when people build PCs. So it could literally be anything that's going on.

So uploading those camelogs is crucial to figure out what's going on. For sure. Thank you for saying that. Yes. All right, let's get into the community questions. Also, just real quick on the log thing, I just want to be really clear. There is no personal information in those. We don't have a login system. We don't have an authentication system.

We don't have any of your data unless you're nervous about us knowing which motherboard you have. There's no personal information inside of those logs. Crossing your fingers while you say that, Amanda. That was a joke. All right. Community questions here. DevTech 86. And you make the CAM software control third-party hardware like RGB RAM lighting.

That is a great question, and we'll talk more about that in the future. So, yes, nobody only will me do the fire on dates right now, but we are working on a couple of different things. Honestly, mainly targeted around our pre-built systems and the hardware that we use extensively there, but you will see some things coming out here soon, TM, around this topic for sure. Cool. Next question is from Sininspira 21. Can y'all show a side-by-side comparison of the old crackens and the new crackens in person?

Oh, in theory I could, but I wouldn't have it powered on. I don't have two crackens I can put side-by-side powered on. Actually, you know what, Mike? You know what we should do, Mike? What? We should post that on social media later, since you have both crackens that, at the moment. Maybe just take a by side picture.

Yeah, I have the crack and actually in the back right there. And then my new one side, we can actually do that. All right. Michael, Michael, uh, post that later today on social. All right. Next question from Nati Kuiki. What are the differences in new features compared to the 2020 model? Yeah.

So in terms of, I'm going to speak specifically about software on this one. terms of hardware, to be very honest with you, almost everything is different between those two and obviously in a positive way. On the software side, the biggest difference is that RGB ring and that ability to sync up your lighting channels with the different screen contents. Our goal, though, when we start at any crack in development, I'm going to put every single screen option in display mode that I can on every single crack and that can support it. I'm never going to say, oh, well, this is only for the newest one. So technically in CAM, the last version, the 2023 version, and the 2024 version from a software perspective are exactly the same. So there's no new features

that are explicit just to this newest crack-in. That's just against what NZXT does. It's not what we do. If I can give it to older generations, I will give it to older generations. So for instance, triple infographic, triple infographic plus gift, those are available on the prior generation. generations as well. Okay. Next question from Sid and Spira. Does it still only support GIF because 60 Hertz doesn't make sense for GIFs when most are like 30 FPS

max. Yeah. So for right now it is just GIFs. I think we're saying GIFs today. It is just GIFs right now. I would like to add some additional file formats in the future. That's not something that's on the immediate roadmap right now. But you're absolutely right.

Usually a GIF is going to actually be limited. That's where your web integration modes are going to show more of those 60, 60 hertz, 45 hertz kind of display modes. So absolutely right. Whomever that was that asked that very intelligent question. And eventually I'd like to have some additional file formats, but that won't be certainly. You have a follow-up suggestion. They said they would like to see support for MP4s. Yep.

That's exactly where my brain goes to. More efficient than a GIF. Yeah, that person's awesome. You're great. You're absolutely right. All right. Prime Gaming Black Cloud asks, will you guys ever consider making crackens in other colors than just black or white? Because I think a red or blue cracking would look great. I would, this is the easiest way I can phrase this is that every single product that we work on,

it starts at, you know, obviously we talk about performance, but then we talk about the industrial design, the color material, and the finish. we talk about different colors and different materials on every single product that we launch. So it is a constant conversation that we have. It's about making sure that if we do use different colors or different materials, they're able to, you know, we're able to sell them. So there are some colors that are very self-selecting that only a couple people would want or some materials and finishes.

It tends to change a lot too. So it'll kind of ebb and flow. So for instance, like wood panels and whatnot are pretty popular right now. These things kind of ebb and flow. So part of it is you're looking for something that's going to take off and then be able to honestly jump on it whenever it's getting into its peak. So I would certainly not say we would never release anything new. I just would not guarantee that we ever would either.

I don't know. It's also not my decision, but in the rooms during those discussions for sure. Alexa Patrick asks, Is it possible to mount air RGB fans on this Cracken? Yeah, it's possible to mount, honestly, pretty much any fan. When you're talking about mounting, the positions of your screw holes are going to be consistent. Those are generally never changed unless you have a very unique fan or you have a very unique kind of layout. The biggest thing is going to be if it's going to fit inside of your case.

That's what you want to be checking out is most fans are going to fit on there just fine unless you've got some kind of funky fan going on. But it's how does it going to work inside of your case? How's it going to look, obviously? But will it work with your case compatibility? Will you run into any kind of clearance issues? Yeah. Next question is from Nati Quiki. They ask,

do the fans and pump turn on when the computer is turned on, even though cam has not started yet? Yes. Yeah, great question. So there's defaults inside the firmware. So obviously we know not everybody's going to be running cam. You might run into a situation where you don't have cam running at all. There are defaults that are baked into that device.

It obviously needs to. It needs to run by itself without cam. It will turn on as soon as your system. turns on it will immediately get powered because those things are stored on the device and in firmware you don't have to boot into the software layer to have those the pumps and the fans running they will run on their system defaults next question is from PR Dover Drive it's a great question because I was thinking the same thing here is there any way to tell Cam to use audio from only one app or service for example I only wanted to react to Spotify songs and not whomever I'm talking with on Discord. Yeah, for sure. So not right now.

Honestly, I need some more folks to use these modes for me to go invest in them. So yeah, I would absolutely love to do that or just have it respond to a game instead of my friends in Discord. So folks go out there and start using these modes and talking about them a little bit more. I'd be able to invest a little bit more of my resources into doing things like that. Anything is possible, right, Amanda? Anything is possible. Absolutely.

All right. Next question is from true villain Manny. Can you trigger particular? displays, for example, if my GP reaches a certain temperature and it switches over to show that temperature. Yeah, another great idea. Right now you can't do it on the actual display. It is something that I do want to look at in the future. Right now, we have temperature monitoring modes, actual lighting modes. So what you could do is you could set a temperature threshold around whatever configuration point it is that you want to see. And then that color pattern is displayed on your accessory so you can see when those temperatures are

getting hotter. Next question here is from Cardboard Android. Why is there no default octopus animation surely given the name that would be standard? That's a great idea.

Yeah, yeah. It is a great idea. I it's a good idea. I think that there is some opportunity to make some adjustments there. I think the biggest thing I'll say is when we do things like that, it takes storage away from the device. We have to, you know, obviously store it on board the

device. So a lot of those things come down to how the hardware is set up and how much volatile storage they have versus persistent storage that they have. So those types of things require that we do some funky stuff on hardware. So it's a matter of is, is that worth being the thing that we go into and we do or is there something else that's a little bit more valuable for us? You're right. I always wonder why we don't lean into like the concept of a crack and we just We say it, and I understand where the name comes from, but we don't really lean into the coolness of the actual concept of a Cracken. Another million-dollar idea for you, Amanda.

Million-dollar idea. Let's hear it. Put tentacles on the Cracken tubes. Put tentacles on there. There you go. There you go. Stick them onto your glass panel. Get them stuck on there. Prime Gaming ask. Can I...

Not Prime Gaming. This is PR Dover Drive again. Can I overclock the display? I'm sure you could. I'm sure you could. I don't know exactly how much extra performance you would be able to get out of it if I'm being very honest. But I'm sure you could. Calvin Games Twitch is asking, will you ever add a speaker to the Cracken? That would be kind of cool, to be honest.

Yeah, that's one that my engine. joke about pretty often adding. We just add a speaker in there and be able to play things out of it. I don't think so. But perhaps, perhaps. I think in theory, there's probably something cool there around like a usability speaker of almost countering sound waves. Sorry, I'm kind of a nerd.

So that piques my interest when we hear ideas like that. I don't think a speaker would be on our kind of short-term roadmap, though. No, you probably could hear it because it's going to be inside the PC, right? Yeah. So you'd get pretty muffled. And inside there, there's quite a bit going on inside that cap. So I don't know that a speaker we're going there. It'd probably be pretty crummy quality as well.

You love dark in the chat saying you should add a touch screen to it. It's the same problem. If you have the thing inside your PC, you're going to take off the side panel. Yeah, I don't know about touchscreen. Yeah. All right. That was it for the community questions. I know we have some rapid-fire questions here,

but I only want to ask you one before we get into the announcements. Okay. Okay. All right. Is it GIF or GIF? I mean, I said, I said, what did I say GIF? I say GIF. Okay.

Why? That's how it looks to me. I'm reading the word GIF. All right. Mike, can you pull up what? the inventor of Jiff Rader of Jeff Listen, I know

I know it's just a habit at this point I say it a lot too I want you all to know I have to say it a lot I'm gonna make this nice and pretty just for everyone here watching This is from the inventor

Steve Wight Wyatt we like And I feel like if the person who Whatever you invent, if you say this is how you pronounce it Like that's how it's pronounced, right? Like NZXT is pronounced NZXT. It's not pronounced Niz-X'd, right? So that's it.

It's, uh, there's no debate. If the creator says it's pronounced JIF, then Jif it shall be. I will just give you all a pro-life tip. If you're talking with somebody and you understand what they are trying to convey, just don't correct. it's okay it doesn't matter if you understand what they're saying it's okay now i'm especially sensitive to this in software because there are so many phrases that i do have to use accurately or else i will confuse a lot of people but if you know what someone is saying just roll with it yeah how do you

pronounce graph by the way all right my get to the announcements here okay we'll go ahead and get to the announcements uh let's see what we got here okay so i by the way i'm wearing my Seattle Cracken Hat so just want to let you guys know that Cracken Elite is available in our stores now they're available at nzc.com or nzcc.com slash retailers if you're outside the u.s. or you just want to buy it from like retail like amazon or best buy it whatever uh these things are awesome new display i saw someone in chat like what's the difference between the old one and the new one better display better cooling no more cables in the aio which ivan loves and uh just It's just better in general and everything.

And Amanda is going to be... What was it? No more 32 degrees. No more 32 degrees. Let's see. Oh, our pre-built PCs now have our latest and greatest cases. Some are award winning, which we can physically say now, which is pretty dope. You can take a look at ncc.com.

Check all of our new cases. There's the H5FLO, H6, 87, H9. Super cool. Take a look at nzix.com. H6 is the best, though. Just real quick. Check out that H6. I love H6.

I upgraded A7 for a video, but honestly, I do miss the H6. It's right there in that little box right there. I miss it. We have the newest Intel Core Ultra processors in our custom build section now. So you can guys build with the most powerful

and efficient CPUs right now at ncc.com and in the little custom build section. You guys can use the new Intel Core Ultra Processing. Super cool. Oh, the NCC Discord server. Enter our monthly setups and wallpaper contest. So you can win a Poochie plush.

A little Poochie plush. And we also have competitions with the Pucci. So enter those. We do a giveaway every single month. So join it. And honestly, I actually got my wallpaper from I got my wallpaper from the thing. Oh, actually, let me show it.

I got my wallpaper from the actual Discord server. So just saying, pretty dope wallpapers. I also want to just give a quick little spoiler. If you do join the server, you're going to get a very special announcement really soon. Oh, yeah. Join the server. Ivan's been cooking, cooking something for the past couple months now, right?

I've been cooking. I've been in the kitchen, Mike. Yeah, he's been, he's, he's been chefing enough. So just, just, just keep an eye out. Uh, I guess, just really quick. I just want to say thanks to all the people who make those wallpapers. It's such, it's so cool every month seeing I even share those out and seeing people engage with them.

They're just, it's awesome to see everybody's talent out there. So thank, thank you all for making those. It's just a highlight of the, the month for sure. Yeah. Amanda, do you have anything, uh, you want to add before I give the people the secret code? give them the code like it's go time and i got to get i got to get my work wrapped up i got to get things done around the house so i can go play call duty oh yeah Blackup 6 is out. We got to get it going.

All righty. So for those that are here, remember, we are doing a cracking giveaway. You guys are actually in early because we're not even announced it yet. So you guys are lucky. You guys get the first dibs. But go ahead to Exhibition Point giveaway. It is NCXC.com slash crack and elite if you're listening live. And there is a special code that gives you 500 extra entries.

This is our way saying thank you for those that are live, joining us asking Amanda questions, participating in our community. This will give you 500 extra entries into the thing. Good luck to everyone in the thing. And the code is, what's crack a lacquackin? Nice. How do you spell that? Let's crackleckin is the code for 500 extra entries.

I have to see how the cracking hat because the cracking are also doing really well, even though I am a duck fan of heart. But what's crack and lacking is the code. Thank you, Amanda, for. seriously doing all this and spending your time telling all these people to like, you know, explaining all these new custom cam features and everything like that and being really awesome.

Oh, is there a link to your stream? Amanda? What? Is there a link to your stream, your con stream? I'm not streaming. Come on. These are private moments in the comfort of my home. Yeah.

You just leave the stream up right now. Just start playing. start playing it. Yeah, actually. All right. I got 30 minutes of updates. Yeah.

But that's pretty much it. I mean, do you have anything before we go in End of Stream? I just want to thank Amanda for joining us again. It's always awesome to have her on the podcast for a variety of reasons,

but she's always she's always really great because she's a lot smarter than us, Mike. She like breaks down things out. That's a no-brainer. We can't really explain. So thank you so much, Amanda.

Thank you for answering all the community's questions. Also, thank the community for tuning in live and joining us today. Really love you all. Yeah, thank you all so much. All right, guys. Have a safe weekend. Please, if you guys have, are you guys watching this, or listening to this live on, like, Apple Podcast, Spotify, SoundCloud,

please give us a positive review if you liked what you did. Or even if you didn't like it. like it. If you have any questions for us, you guys can email podcast at nzicc.com or tag at nzicc on social media platforms. Keep it crack and lacking like suba bill, super duper bill just said in the thing. And have a good weekend. Enjoy cod. You too, Amanda. Thank you. See everyone. Bye, everybody. Thank you.