well hello good people Eber here from Hardware Canucks and this is because here too
this time yeah he's back so today we are gonna be discussing about the best and
worst PC hardware of 2019 but what was 2019 for you like Mike was it better
this year compared to last year in terms of PC hardware from a PC hardware
perspective because I do a lot of the benchmarking I think it was a great year
it was the year that AMD came back they were already back but this year
they just put the screws to Intel and Intel had absolutely nothing to respond
with and of course we do have a lot more items to discuss so let's go over them
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now with that out of the way I did want to mention something very quickly we
haven't reviewed every single item that's on the table or that we're gonna
feature within this video but we've used every single one of them extensively
either in build or personal systems so I think that gives us a little bit of a
different perspective so let's start with the first thing and for me that is
really 3rd gen ThreadRipper and yes zento has been rolling out throughout
the course of the year but I'm going to say exactly what I said in that video or
in that review video and that is threadRipper 3 was the icing on Amd's cake
it was offering amazing performance Intel doesn't have anything that they
can respond with for the foreseeable future it offers high IPC high clock
speeds everything that AMD needed to be completely dominant in the consumer CPU
market yeah it was just amazing to see the performance especially compared to
what they were able to do with the 3960X another 90s compared to the previous
generation W x-series chips and the massive leap in productivity benchmarks
and all that kind of stuff I'm still blown away by the performance of it I
think that's another thing that we should bring up to is last year when the
W that series was around they had some issues
due to windows but now windows to a certain extent has improved itself
absolutely and am Diaz also improved their own architecture
so both the OS and the CPUs are talking to each other better and the result is
just amazing so my first pick for the best PC hardware in 2019 actually ties
in again for AMD because they have been they've been they've been killing it
this year it's the Ryzenn 3000 series and the whole family I'm gonna start
with the budget in stuff the 3600 3600X and what they were able to offer and
then we've kind of slowly moved into the 3900X which was a 12 core processor
that blew my mind and of course we have to talk about the Ryzen 9 3950x
because 16 cores 32 threads I mean it was it's the first AMD processor
with many cores and I personally built myself an ITX rig and it's flying like
performance is just off the charts it's crazy I can't believe how aimed he was
able to cram all that power into a fairly powerful package and the
temperatures were mind-blowing too yeah and I think one of the biggest things
for AMD is how they were able to preempt what info was doing with their own h EDT
processors right like I mean the 1098 exe wasn't a bad processor by any
stretch of the imagination it was just thoroughly outgunned by something that
was less expensive on a cheaper platform and to a certain extent on a better
platform - than Intel's own high-end desktop all right how do I want to
approach this because I have it here and if I knock this over I'm completely
knackered but I was just blown away by when he presented it to me or the first
time so I just want the motherboard oh yeah well now you just I've killed it
right oh no so I think this is not necessarily the best piece of hardware
in the world but it's more representation of what a company can do
when they just throw everything at the wall including the kitchen sink
so this right here is the TRX40 or ass extreme and it's a threadRipper
motherboard it's XL ATX and it is just balls to the wall crazy
now what I wanted to show him first of all is the fact that they actually they
properly space their PCIe Gen 4 slots there's enough room for four double slot
graphics cards without too much of a problem and not only that is every
single one of the connectors is at a right angle on the side
yes that's gonna take up a ton of space in your case but Hank if it's extra ATX
you know what you're getting into the other thing is this that comes with it
and it's a not a graphics card I thought it was a graphics this is not a grass
car it's actually built better than most graphics cards I wish it was because
it's what this is is a PCIe Gen four by sixteen card that has four Gen 4 nvme
SSDs in there it is absolutely nuts and we are gonna be posting some video
about this very very soon my second pick for the best PC hardware is actually a
memory kit from Corsair it's the Dominator platinum RGB it's the one that
was released this here is the all matte black version it comes with the cap Alex
LEDs that looks gorgeous I mean you guys were talking about I think that
basically took away the whole portion of the video which was insane but I love
those RAM sticks I mean the finish the performance I mean the fact that he can
get a 32 gigabyte kit or even a 64 gigabyte kit and get it as far as 3600
megahertz is really really good its overall fantastic kid highly recommend
it for someone who's looking to build a kick-ass gaming PC yeah I decided like a
lot of these things it's not the cheapest it's not like it really made an
impression on us and I think that's the important thing here speaking of
something not being the cheapest but at the same time providing good value I
wanted to talk very very quickly about one of my other picks and that's the gtx
660ti and to another extent a 1660 super neither of those is the cheapest GPU
that NVIDIA has but at the same time when the 1660 ti first came out the bang
for buck it provided was excellent excellent especially in a market or at
least a Nvidia product stack that was dominated by overpriced r-tx cards with
features that a lot of people just weren't gonna use now the 1660 super
came out and it provided about the same amount
of before it says the TI I had a lower pricepoint I think it's at about 250
bucks right now and for me when it comes to building an affordable gaming PC
something that's under a thousand dollars were in this case maybe even
under seven hundred and fifty dollars maximizing the GPU performance is the
way to go and these allow you to do it without completely breaking the bank I
think it was also the time when in videos
n Bank technology became a big thing where if you had a 16 60 TI and if
you're a streamer you actually be perfectly fine using the GPU instead of
relying on ray-tracing because you don't really need ray tracing to stream but
that was really cool to see that come into action my third pick for the best
PC hardware of 2019 goes to an nvme drive and it's actually my current
workstation pc it's the Saban 1 terabyte Gen 4 and me me drive this drive is
crazy I mean I ran a crystal desk benchmark this morning and guess how
fast the read speeds were 5 gigabytes per second read and write speeds as you
can see by the screen shot it is wicked fast pretty sure it's faster than what's
available on the Mac Pro but nonetheless what well it's it is what it is but this
is what this is an additional accessory that comes with the drive and that's a
heatsink it looks like a CPU cooler but if you think of the analogy
it comes with copper heat pipes it's got an aluminum heatsink this is the most
craziest but the most unique innovative piece of tech or engineering I've ever
seen for an SSD my last award for best hardware isn't really a award at all
it's more like that kid in class who gets the participation award you know
for showing up and for just completing the test so that goes to the rx 5700
series and I don't know if here agrees with me on this but they were certainly
not the best out there and they aren't the flagship GPUs a lot of AMD fans were
hoping for but they provided a glimpse into what na'vi can provide or what it
should provide as it cascades down through the aim delino now that gives me
a lot of hope but at the same time limit with the 790 meter manufacturing process
and how quickly they could get out chips really put a damper for me on that
launch there was a lot of potential but aim D just missed the final landing on
it now with with that transition of the participation award let's go towards
some of the hardware that we didn't quite appreciate this year and let's be
honest here this was a great year for hardware and we didn't review a ton of
items but these are more things that we found could use some improvement or just
came out at the wrong price or at the wrong time or just with like a weird set
of features so I'm gonna let a bird kick this one off
I think the first or my first pick for the worst Hardware of 2019 is Rison 3000
in the notebook space I remember taking a look at the issues Zephyrs GA 502 d
use it came with a rise in 537 50 H it was a fork or a thread processor but it
just couldn't deliver compared to what Intel had to offer in the notebook space
and this is no book that we're talking particularly now with desktop but on the
positive side these CPUs were actually power efficient I mean the battery life
I was about to get with that notebook was a lot higher compared to some of the
notebooks from Intel so I guess that's a good thing but performance just didn't
really do that great but I think that also shows that Intel has been focusing
so much on their mobile in notebooks side AMD usually cascades down their
architectures after the dead side where as Intel does it completely differently
now Zen to I think has amazing potential on the notebook side and I think both of
us we can't we can't wait to see that yeah I can't wait to see that now we now
I start we get to throw someone else under them all right this is that this
this will be thrown under the bus and we will back up the bus over this one and
this right here is the 9900 KS and for me this is probably the most pointless
processor that came across my desk this year the reason for that is that we've
got a pretty good 9900 K and it boosts to some extremely high clock speeds on a
normal basis this processor could not keep up with that at its default
settings and overclocking well you know what it couldn't overclock as far as our
99 okay either so for me this was almost
Intel being the AMD of two years ago just launching a processor in a
desperate desperate attempt to remain in the news cycle and to me that is the
worst possible way to approach a product all right so my pick for the worst PC
hardware of 2019 you guys knew it I'm pretty sure you probably know it it's
ice Lake but let's kick things off with the naming strategy it is absolutely the
worst possible implementation from Intel and we're throwing them under the bus
again they just didn't deliver the performance
that they needed to on some of these notebooks I think a great example of
that would be the blade 13 stealth with the gtx 1650 Massacre GPU ladies it
really wasn't transparent about the TDP on the i7 processor on that laptop but
at the end of the day it just it just didn't deliver at least compared to what
whiskey lake had to offer so yeah it's just it's a complete no-go and I think
they could do a little better I'm probably gonna have to challenge evil a
little bit on that one because we just recently uploaded a video hearing up ice
lake with an external GPU dog and isolate over performs above and beyond
my expectations but again that is in a very very narrow area if people were
gonna buy a thin light notebook and then hook that up to an external GPU not so
there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon yeah I mean it's it does it just
just make any sense because you know how comment lake ice lake people are
shopping for a notebook they wouldn't even know what the difference is between
a commonly processor and a nice Lake processor this is an average person that
we're talking about not this tech enthusiast like like ourselves for us
exactly I'm gonna transition back to Andy oh because we have to remember that
in 2019 Andy also launched a little GPU called the Radeon seven and I think the
Radeon seven is in a lot of ways comparable to the 99
yes it was launched in order for them to stay in the new cycle to have something
out when everybody was talking about nvidia and video and video i can't say
that it's the worst GPU for everybody because for people who were using
computing it ended up being bang for buck an amazing amazing solution but at
the same time on the gaming side and they released it it was supported for a
little while and then they discontinued it like six months later like six months
later but in it to a certain extent that was understandable because here came
na'vi which ended up beating it like a lazy donkey but this still remains a
very valid solution for people who need compute if you're buying one but
unfortunately it was marketed to gamers where it wasn't a gaming cart maybe
that's my problem with it i think i'm gonna double down on that too to bring
this into the equation and this is the 5500 XD and i'm so sorry Andy to be
ragging on you about this one but this goes to prove that there aren't a lot of
bad products there's just bad pricing and I think what AMD had to do with this
is they brought it out at such a time when Navi still in short supply so they
have to charge a little bit of a premium for it the only thing is with the RX 580
still on the market and they still have the nails sell through the stock's of
that card well you have an 8 gigabyte card that's more affordable and more
capable than the 5500 XT and yes we still haven't reviewed it we're still
waiting for an 8 gig card but from what I've seen so far it's just not a great
solution and unfortunately na'vi hasn't been able to roll out at the speed or at
the price that we were hoping it to be so here's hoping that in 2020 we see a
real top to bottom na'vi lineup at really really competitive prices and
hopefully by that point they'll have sold through their old GPUs - well guys
that pretty much wraps up our best and worst PC hardware for 2019 let us know
what you think about in the comments in fact do you agree with our picks or not
I'm curious to know and if we've missed anything I'm also curious in about that
as well yeah and speaking of missing in 2028 hardware canucks is gonna be going
a lot further back to our roots and covering a lot more PC
where this year we are a little bit slow on that slide but we're gonna be really
picking it up in 2020 and hopefully our our top picks for 2020 are gonna be a
lot wider than this and if you're interested in us covering a particular
category let us know in the comments down below doesn't have to be PC
hardware in general but anything else we're more than happy to take a look at
it so I'm Mike signing off and wishing everybody a happy and safe holidays and
a Merry Christmas me too I'm Eva with harder Canucks thank
you so much for watching we'll see you in the next one in the next one order
next year next year maybe yes maybe it is yeah take care