Jay Mattison from TekEverything with Mini-ITX Cases, PC Gaming Builds and Audio Gear – HGG435

Jay Mattison is back with us as we look at Mini-ITX builds with a lot of attention being given to the Lazer3D LZ7 XTD Mini-ITX which Jay reviewed in January 2020. We then spent some time discussing what it takes to build your own gaming rig these days and finished up the discussion with a look at the Focal Elex Headphones and compared them to the industry standard Bose Quiet Comfort 35s.  Jim spends some time with some quick updates on new hardware and his Unraid build. I think you will enjoy the show.

Full show notes, transcriptions, audio and video at http://theAverageGuy.tv/hgg435

Join Jim Collison / @jcollison and Mike Wieger / @WiegerTech for show #435 of Home Gadget Geeks brought to you by the Average Guy Network.

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Podcast, Home Gadget Geeks, Jay Mattison, Icy Dock, TekEverything, Focal Elex, Lazer3D, Phillips Hue, Ebay, Unraid, cases, headphones, sound, audio, review, pc builds

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Jay on the Web – https://tekeverything.com

Jay on YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/tekeverything

Jay on Twitter – https://twitter.com/TekEverything

Audio Gear 

Focal Elex – https://tekeverything.com/focal-elex-headphones-review/

Koss Mod: https://tekeverything.com/koss-ksc75-wireless-mod/

PC/Laptops

Lazer3D LZ7 XTD:  https://tekeverything.com/lazer3d-lz7-xtd-mini-itx-case-review/

Gigabyte Aero 15 Classic 

Jim

New Unraid box on the way – Fujitsu Primergy TX100 S2 Core i3 540 8GB RAM 2x 1TB and 120GB 

Phillips Hue Hub v2 unboxing

Broke a power switch on a PC – the fix

Ebay – LSI SAS 9210-8i 8-port 6Gb/s PCIe HBA RAID SATA Controller

Icy Dock Info – ICY DOCK FatCage MB153SP-B in place. Icy Dock will be sending over a TurboSwap MB171SP-B that will replace the DVD and hold a drive currently in an external drive.

Jim Collison  [0:00] 
This is The Average Guy Network and you have found Home Gadget Geeks show number 435 recorded on March 5 2020.

Jim Collison  [0:22] 
Here on Home Gadget Geeks we cover all your favorite tech gadgets that find their way into your home news reviews, product updates and conversation all for the average tech guy. I’m your host Jim Collison broadcasting live from the average guy TV Studios here in a beautiful Bellevue Nebraska Mike. Like it was so it was a little windy today. But pretty great. last two days, right? I mean, oranges

Mike Wieger  [0:42] 
in the 70s. And it’s just beautiful here.

Jim Collison  [0:45] 
Jay, where you’re in? No. Where are you? Are you looking at

Jay Mattison  [0:49] 
Billy? Yeah, you’re right on Philadelphia.

Jim Collison  [0:51] 
Yeah, you’re in Philly. And maybe that warm weather hasn’t quite got to yet but it’s common.

Jay Mattison  [0:56] 
We’ve been mid 50s low 60s. So it’s been warmer for sure. Really nice, sunny. So it’s getting there. But it’s been nice this week, surprisingly, so yeah,

Jim Collison  [1:06] 
no, I think I think we’re in for an early spring, by the way, I watch all these YouTubers, and when they say fake degrees in Fahrenheit, they always put the Celsius. I’m not going to do that. So Google can figure that out. If you’re if you’re in a place where they’re Celsius, I’m not Fahrenheit bias or anything. What we do here in the US, okay, so anyway, we post the show, and there’s gonna be some really good show notes tonight. So you won’t head out to theaverageguy.TV and then this one hgg435 if you want to get right to the show notes. also wanna let you know, the easiest way to join us live is on our mobile app. And we want to thank our Patreon subscribers who kind of make that available for us as well. And not to Home Gadget Geeks. com iPhone Android, you can download it best way to do it on the road of streaming, it is streaming only which for some of you may be okay. And so you can get it Home Gadget geeks.com Big thanks to Kevin Schoonover from last week. Every time Kevin’s on And I think Jays gonna have the same effect. But every time Kevin is on here I start spending money Mike like, I don’t know like this week we’re going to talk about it at the end of the show I bought a bunch of stuff this week I don’t know did it but big thanks to Kevin did you pick up anything this week Mike?

Mike Wieger  [2:14] 
Oh man, it’s taking everything I have not pulled the trigger on that switch that he brought up with the 410 gigabit ports on it for 69 bucks I just never seen him that for powered for p o he managed it was so I’m, I’m this close, but then I keep but the good part is he warned me about looking at the 10 gig cards and the cables I would need to run and I’m like, okay, it’s it gets pretty expensive pretty fast. I want to switch over a 10 gigabit. All I want is my own raid server and my main machine here to be connected. So I’ll just do a direct connect instead of getting the switch, save a little bit of money. But then he got me thinking about 2.5 gigabits like Yes, yes, I’m going to be spending money I just haven’t yet. And he was ahead of the times he’s talking about 2.5 gigabit I linked in the discord. A video that Linus tech tips did on 2.5 gigabit they actually Get a follow up video that was released today on 2.5 gigabit in the home. I swear they were listening to Kevin last week and thought, hey, yeah, that’s a good idea for a video. And so so Linus is obviously watching the show, which is, which is pretty cool.

Jim Collison  [3:11] 
Yeah, no. Jay, are you have you internally but last week we talked about gigabit in right for from an internet speed. Then we talked about 2.5 and 10 gig behind. Are you into that at all? Are you thinking about speeding up your internal network?

Jay Mattison  [3:29] 
Yeah, I mean that that’s always the debate. I have internally here right now because I’m an apartment, everything is wireless. So it’s, you know, limited returns for that sort of speed. And I have Comcast, which is always a nightmare trying to get these from so I’m at about I think I’m actually getting around to 50 down 10 up which is terrible what in the future but yeah, I would love to move get faster. And then I want to do for sure when I buy a house, which is something I’m thinking about doing in the next year. So whole house wired with everything. Yeah. And go that that route. For now I’m struggling in an apartment and just just do what I can.

Jim Collison  [4:15] 
Well, you know, you got to do what you can. It’s all right. No, no networking shame. In any of that I’m kind of a mix. I’m a mix of wired and wireless. Just kind of depends on what I need, and what’s the right way to do it. Anyways, Big thanks to Kevin. At the end of the show, I will mention that at the end of the show, we’re going to talk a little bit about So hang tight. This box behind me and this box above me this old windows seven launch party. There’s a reason we got that back. So stay till the end. Got a few things to talk about that a new Philips Hue bridge came in. I’m going to allude to that we’re going to talk about that here in a week or two. So just hang tight on that one. I broke a power switch on this computer that’s behind me. One of these ones. Yeah, I guess you can see right there little harder to replace. than you think. So we’ll talk about that here at the end of the show. Jay, you may be able to give me some advice on that the next time. And then of course, Kevin had me, I bought this. I did, I did buy this. So this this the LSI, we’ll talk about that. But in the end, and, and we should a shout out to Icy Dock. So last week, we had you guys go on Twitter, and say, Hey, I see to @ICYDOCKUSA, you should pay attention. And many of you did. Now, if you’re listening to this a week or two or three after the fact, still do this, we want you to go out this week. So vincit from icy dock, he got a hold of me and said hey, let’s talk about this, which was awesome. And so they are sending over one of their turbo I should know this really quick. I think I wrote this down somewhere. They’re sending over a turbo swap. It’s an MV 171 sp dash because it can’t come up with good, like good model numbers right? But the short version is turbosquid j you know this You do a lot of hardware right? Some of these hardware companies come up with some crazy names right for their hardware.

Jay Mattison  [6:06] 
That’s what you see the loudest for sure, yeah, they just called it like the turbo two but now let’s give a 42 names at letters and named after that. Yeah,

Jim Collison  [6:17] 
well turbo swap is what’s coming It’s basically just a single drive that’ll go it’s going to replace the DVD that’s in here I don’t think we need DVDs anymore. There’s a story behind that as well. It’s here at the end of the show. And in we’re going to we’re going to send it over for review bring that in I’m going to actually put that in one of our mining rigs and and get some get that working off some some hard drive mining. So stay tuned. We want to thank Icy Dock for that as well. You can still tweet at them. So here’s what I want you to do go out at Icy Dock say thanks. You know, just appreciate the work that they that they’re going to do. We’re going to kind of feature them through the month of March here on Home Gadget Geeks and just kind of work with them. Many of you and let me Let me show you this just really quick cuz Gavin Campbell, who’s been a longtime listener for the show, and he put out let me get the Twitter window open. I think we’ll be alright to do that. So he I asked you to send me some pictures and he had gotten a multi Bay drive that is a six by two and a half inch and he’s got those full of SSD drives in his box. Yep. And so he posted that to me, he said it’s not the best pic but I have it my in my Unraid server thanks to Mike. Yes, couple drives are configured for the cash. The others are running VMs and Dockers on them had a small spinner in there as well, but it recently died. So Kevin, thanks for our I’m sorry, yeah, Gavin. Thanks for doing that. I didn’t get too many other pictures. But these were all the tweets that we got kind of based on that little tweet storm over the icy dock. So let’s do that again this week go out there jump in @icydockusa is who that is who you want to kind of pull up points your tweets to and Jay is going to talk about some great hardware tonight is to you as well if you’re not already following Jay Madison he j what’s on Twitter what’s your everything tech right?

Jay Mattison  [8:21] 
Yeah techeverything.com still website tech everything Everything is @techeverything because that’s a long name that no one else is able to lock that up. So you got ek everything easy to find there.

Jim Collison  [8:35] 
And I have I tweeted out earlier, the show and his his Twitter handle is there as well. You want to follow him follow what he’s doing on YouTube. Got lots of lots of great videos. That’s where I found Jay as I was going through all these hardware videos, and they’re there you were doing those as well. Hey, let’s spend a second we had you way back I think summer or spring of last year. Yeah, anything. You were just moving into the apartment. I was super impressed that you moved all that gear in any any big changes since you’ve moved in, in your hardware?

Jay Mattison  [9:06] 
Hmm big changes. Um, there haven’t been big changes to the world, the actual office but hardware wise my computers have switched to a new case which we’ll probably talk about in a second there. Some upgrades to audio that’s probably the biggest change of kind of overhauled my, my desktop audio setup. I think everything else is pretty much pretty much straightforward there. So yeah, more just like a little minor changes the spaces with the certainly well I’m loving it. It’s it’s a great room. I just love it.

Jim Collison  [9:38] 
Cool. Good to have you back. Let’s let’s jump in. I’m going to open up one of your posts here. And let’s let’s throw that in pointing at the wrong thing. course I’m pointing at the wrong thing. Let’s stop that and bring it up. Talk a little bit. While I’m pulling this up. Talk a little bit about your YouTube channel. But in the last year what what do you focus on On what do you like to review any favorite companies, those kinds of things.

Jay Mattison  [10:04] 
So I typically like to stick to many itix pc builds. That’s, that’s my wheelhouse. That’s why I kind of started the channel to cover a lot of those small cases, really compact cases, that a lot of people just want covering, you know, that that just didn’t really get a lot of play. So I like to do that a lot. I also do audio cover headphones, starting to do amps, I do more written for that than I do videos, because usually my audience they’re like, Hey, we don’t want to see that because you’ve been doing PC bills for three years. But I do cover that stuff as well. I do love audio. I do a little bit of home theater here and there but but very rarely, it’s primarily just the PC and audio stuff yet.

Jim Collison  [10:46] 
Anything at being a YouTuber, I mean, it’s it’s a super interesting space right now to be on YouTube. You just mentioned one of the things that drives me nuts, like it’s your YouTube channel, and I know you have lists. You have watchers, right? Then you go to change the subject a little bit, and they almost come back like, Hey, we don’t like, we don’t want that crap. We want that, right? I mean, you get you get you get some of that kind of feedback, right? How do you in this case? Did you just kind of give in and say, Okay, I’m going to I’ll do something different or how do you handle it?

Jay Mattison  [11:19] 
Yeah. So, I mean, I’m not the kind of person who says, Well, I’ve been doing this, I have to keep doing this. But I do think at this point, as people have started to follow, and they’re expecting a certain thing, I should at least give them most of that, you know, it’s reward them for their loyalty to the channel. And I still love maineiacs x PCs. It’s not something I’m ever going to stop covering. I don’t I don’t think so. But I just want to try and sprinkle in more more things as we move forward. But I want to keep the people who support me who give me likes and and really love the content. I want to give them an outlet to kind of come see the stuff that they want to see and also I’d still love doing it. So hasn’t really been that big of an issue. It’s not a situation where I’m like, Hey, I hate this now and I really want to do something else. I could always just start another channel, you know, so I’ll keep it in that sort of wheelhouse. I’m not gonna worry too much about it. And if I get tired of it, then I’ll make one of those. I’m tired of this video.

Jim Collison  [12:18] 
Do whatever I want. After I was watching a YouTuber, I watched this guy think he’s called handyman ha and D man, he died. And he does. He’s building this home at down in the desert of Arizona. And so he’s doing, you know, a lot of construction and in ICF wall builds and all this, you know, I’m never gonna do it, but it’s interesting. So he had someone just show up on his property. The other day, he was out building and somebody just drove up under his property and was like, Hey, I’m a YouTube, you know, I’m one of your Yeah, I’m one of your one of your, you know, your watchers, your followers. And he saw he put out a video. This he was like, Look, I’m on YouTube. Don’t come to my like, I don’t, I don’t want to see you. You know, one of those kinds of things and it’s it’s, it’s, it can be difficult, right as you think about. You’re putting yourself out there. You’ve built an audience. They respond and I’m sure do you leave your comments open? Or do you moderate?

Jay Mattison  [13:20] 
Oh, wide open? I love it. It’s the Wild West. I love the good. I love the bad. Just give it all to me. I read it. I interact with people I interact with the trolls. Sometimes I it doesn’t bother me if you have a positive or negative comment. It’s all the same to me. So I enjoy that.

Jim Collison  [13:36] 
I moderate my comments. Like I don’t I leave them. You can they all have to be for review? Right? They don’t get posted until I review. Do you think that the YouTube penalizes me for

Jay Mattison  [13:47] 
a I don’t think so? I don’t think so. I think it’s probably smart. And if you look at the bigger channels and also the moderate because it gets out of hand. I’m still small enough, relatively that I can I can do that and kind of review manually. Yeah, I don’t think there’s a

Jim Collison  [14:01] 
penalty for that. How many followers you have now on

Jay Mattison  [14:04] 
I think 52 ish

Jim Collison  [14:06] 
around 2000 So yeah, that’s a good number. Yeah, that’s good enough to get out of hand

Jay Mattison  [14:12] 
yeah some of the bigger videos I mean I had one video I did a couple months back where I reviewed a case that was similar to another case and people were getting like up in arms and saying they were copying and How could you do this? I didn’t make the case guys it was sent to me for review like you know so it’s just you just kind of have to roll with it people are going to people so to speak.

Jim Collison  [14:33] 
I love let’s let’s talk about cases since this is your your bread and butter yeah the laser 3d all z seven x DT many

Jay Mattison  [14:46] 
powerful.

Jim Collison  [14:47] 
When you when you approach reviews, do you do you try to be methodical about the way you do each one of these cases? I mean, if I was going to come over to your site and kind of look at them, would they all be very similar?

Jay Mattison  [14:58] 
Yeah. So particularly with the case Because that’s probably if I look back, the thing I’ve covered the most I tax cases. So it tends to be very similar in terms of what I cover. So I can compare go back now for two years ago from just smaller cases, bigger cases and make like temperature comparisons, sound comparisons of mine the same tests using the same equipment. So yeah, I do try to be very consistent with with the way I cover them. Yeah.

Jim Collison  [15:24] 
And what do you when when you’re doing a build like this, or you’re reviewing a box, what are the things you really look for in that you really like to see? And

Jay Mattison  [15:33] 
so I think for one, if it’s it x, I look for the best efficiency when it comes to the use of space. So how are you using the leaders that you have available to you in this case? So for example, the exedy here is one of the best uses of space that there is out there. There are a lot of itix cases, their tower cases there are really compact cases. They work to varying levels. of effectiveness because of the way that the components are positioned. So this is by far one of the more unique ones this STD here simply because it allows you to fit pretty much everything you could in a normal tower itix case, but including a tower cooler, or a half hour cooler. And but in a very compact 10 liter case, which is rare. I don’t think there’s another case out there that can do specifically what this one does. This may be one who you want to come to the video for. We’re showing a picture kind of of your table layout. That’s not I mean, besides the board, that’s not small gear that you’re putting in there, right full size, GPU, full size, CPU cooler, I assume, in some, in some regard, what else is on what’s the what’s the fan over to there? What’s that over to the right, so it has it accommodates 140 or 120 millimeter fan so that’s 140 millimeter fan there. That’s the intake so that pushes air directly over the mother board which allows everything to stay super cool which is rare for a case that’s this small and having coolers up to I believe it was 135 millimeters which is most mid height for a quarter is you can get very creative with with the coolers that you put in there were most cases have like a 70 millimeter limit etc like the cool you see on the right there under my arm is a 70 millimeter cooler and that’s previously probably one of the better ones that you could fit in most cases. But now this case allows you to go go a little crazier.

Jim Collison  [17:31] 
So power supplies. I’m sorry, where’s the power supply?

Jay Mattison  [17:35] 
The power supply you can see on this you see that there? The bottom right hand corner there in the area. Okay, I don’t think I have a picture of the top open but if you watch the video if anyone wants to see how it actually looks internally, I have a picture of what it looks like with everything obviously set up I do a full time lapse build of it takes FX power supplies. Normal it also has support for two SSDs or to 2.5 and stripes of your choice. And then obviously full length dual slot GPUs so you can get super powerful systems. I’ve got a 590 900 k five gigs in there, and it runs. Yeah, it’s it’s amazing, honestly, it’s actually quite amazing. It’s

Mike Wieger  [18:17] 
the best mobile editing rigs, right? Like if you were going to like a big conference and you’re a YouTuber, and you need to pack up a computer that you can go back to the hotel room and edit on. Yep, I mean, that’s a beast of a computer that’s better than most people’s, you know, full desktops that they have in a small form factor.

Jay Mattison  [18:33] 
Yeah, absolutely. The thing is, the thing is a beast and it’s, it’s laser cut acrylic, so it’s not metal, so it is very light. If that was something you wanted to do, can you certainly do it? There’s a smaller version of this as well, which was the case I was using prior to this one. It’s just the laser delsea elzy seven, not the exedy. And that had similar properties, but it only had support for half length graphics cards. So this is kind of the big brother of that. It’s just, it’s just A really cool case now not cheap. Definitely similar to other itix offerings. It’s it’s fairly expensive, but that’s what you get with limited run cases like this.

Mike Wieger  [19:12] 
acoustics pretty good on this.

Jay Mattison  [19:13] 
Yeah, acoustics are surprisingly good. So the intake, the side intake allows you to run the fans at reasonable levels. If you’re doing like, renders, well, overclocking, the fans are going to spend up on the CPU cooler, but it’s nothing that you wouldn’t expect their

Jim Collison  [19:29] 
decibel levels that you’re 45 it’s totally reasonable. You know, I have no issues on your site. And on this post, you talk about the you got the system noise listed there as well as temps that are in there. So folks want to know, do you have a favorite so you have a motherboard that you go to for these mini itix builds? Is there certain brand or certain motherboard you’d like to put in here with some that are better than others?

Jay Mattison  [19:52] 
I would say for it. If you’re going Intel, or AMD as rock is probably Go to for me right now, simply because of the way they handle cooling of the chipsets and various components on the board. I think they do an excellent job they use actual heat sinks that pull heat away as opposed to just pieces for show that you see on a lot of other shiny beautiful motherboards. The the asou stuff is pretty good too. But I would say that second place, they’ve got a really strong bias and I like the features of the boards, but they get a little cartoonish sometimes with the way that they’re laid out and the visuals of it for me. So I think the asrock boards are really killing it and they seem to be really strong across the board in the small case space I mean there’s a huge movement right now and it’s it’s probably not as new as I think it is but that we got out of control on RGB lighting

Jim Collison  [20:47] 
like it is just like is just insane. And now on the boards. It’s coming kind of standard and every slot is got RGB. Are you seeing that same trend in the small form factor? space or is that kind of being limited to the bigger spaces?

Jay Mattison  [21:03] 
Unfortunately or fortunately

Jay Mattison  [21:06] 
exports by how you look at it like the board I have in here has a strip of LEDs the last one I had had to strip abilities it’s it’s fine you can disable them and they all have actually the the jack or the mounting point for internal LED strips so the trend isn’t isn’t going anywhere they’re making those boards for everyone I think in the right case it can look pretty cool so I’m not a all around led hater but as you can see, I’ll have them running.

Jim Collison  [21:33] 
Yeah, we’re gonna have we have Ryan and Bob coming on next week from think computers and they they review the big cases. And and of course that’s kind of the space where this these this kind of RGB craze has gone and man when you watch a YouTube videos, there’s a bunch of YouTubers that are covering these and it’s just lights. It’s lights everywhere, it’s like New York City, which again, no hate on that, but just It seems like we’re doing a lot of it like

Mike Wieger  [22:02] 
but what I hate about it as you guys know how I build my computers, it’s the eBay special right like I’m all using all his old gear. I’m like I don’t want LEDs in here lighting up. You don’t want to see what’s in here I need I need a no panel on this case it has a panel and a nice led that just shines on this old blues style Intel motherboard like and we don’t want to see that we don’t need any highlights there. So at least it’s a blue LED so that it doesn’t like yeah, I don’t need those highlighting my system.

Jim Collison  [22:28] 
I guess I can’t talk I’ve got eight monitors on my desk. So everybody has their everybody has their vice mine just happens to be monitor space. Jay even building computers for a while has the has the actual stuff that you have to do to build a PC changed much. It’s been a I think it’s been four years actually since I built my last rig and I used to do a lot of that haven’t done much of it. Is the is the industry changing much or is it kind of still the same If you did it four years ago or five years ago, it’d be okay now.

Jay Mattison  [23:03] 
Yeah, I think it’s it’s pretty similar. There are a few differences, the big, the biggest difference in terms of building would probably be, for one, I think the coolers have now have better mounting hardware. So it seems to be pretty simple to get any cooler on pretty much any motherboard. I would also say that the M dot two drives are different. So now that they’re on the motherboards, that eliminates a lot of cables and simplifies systems, so I think that was probably the best change, obviously, speed wise and in terms of ease of ease and building, it really kind of sped things up a lot. Now you’re jamming a lot into a little tiny space. And so an M dot two is advantageous to that. But if you had a choice between me to and going just kind of with a regular SSD drive to desert when you choose every time or is it based on space, I would never use a standard SSD again, if I could really only do and I would go all out to in this system now, and I only have SSDs because I need more storage.

Jim Collison  [24:11] 
Just overall space it consider I mean overall speed considerations then at that point for

Jay Mattison  [24:16] 
space speed, obviously the speed is like night and day, not that it really matters for doing regular tasks like gaming, I think it’s people, you don’t necessarily need NVMe SSD for gaming. But having the speed when you need it is helpful. And just the simplicity of it not having cables running. It’s multiple cables. It’s a power cable and also a static cable going to your motherboard just eliminates all that. So I really love them. And I would love to do a system that has only end that two drives and go with all external storage. But that might be something in the future. We’ll see if we can,

Jim Collison  [24:48] 
yeah, actually icy dock who we’re working with has this nice little enclosure where you can get a couple of those in the enclosure and get them external. So that that may be one of those little things I have to have to say hey We got this guy over there who you might you might or they try to give it to me I it’s interesting and Mike for you have you done much into

Mike Wieger  [25:10] 
this because like I said with my motherboards I’m always using like old motherboards Yeah. And there which all do not have enough to

Jim Collison  [25:17] 
know. But anything, anything new today, right? anything, any motherboard you buy today is gonna support that price wise, I haven’t priced him and not to over a regular SSD drive, or are they about the same now? Or is it still a little more expensive?

Jay Mattison  [25:33] 
It’s definitely going to still be a little more expensive. The good thing is that and this is what I tell people all the time we’re doing budgets systems, there are obviously the best one right now would be traditionally considered the Samsung 970 evos. Those are fantastic drives, or the pros, whatever have you Those are pretty much the standard go to you can get a 256 gig one of those for probably around 80 bucks, give or take. So I usually recommend people Hey, if you don’t have the legit to get like one terabyte or you want to do something else, get one of those for 80 bucks as your boot drive, you’ll speed everything up and get a secondary hard drive. You can even go with a platter drive to store your games, files, all that fun stuff. If you have to reboot windows, it simplifies it and it just speeds up your whole system. So you can mix and match. And I think that’s probably the thing that most people are doing these days. Yeah, I’d agree. And

Mike Wieger  [26:23] 
also, if you’re helping someone who’s not as techie, build a system, make sure you mentioned them to that there’s a difference between like end to NVMe or indot to seda right they look the exact same plug in the same beer not gonna get the same speed benefits when you go to say to him got to drive compared to an NVMe drive. Something that I mean, I even I think a lot like I didn’t realize that until not too long ago, right? Something you don’t think about, hey, it looks the same, right? You plug it in. Same thing as like SSD standards data versus a spindle drive, right, same connector, just different speeds. things to think about.

Jay Mattison  [26:53] 
Yeah. So people up sorry. No, go ahead, go just tell people. One thing that I do I’m a big I’m a big fan of is buying the end to satta version of a drive if you need a standard 2.5 inch and then using an enclosure to then convert it. So in the future if you want to use that per se, like a laptop or a computer system, you can just pop it out and then just go and you know, just use it so I mean you can get I use these sabourin closures for like 10 bucks. So yeah, pop it in there and it works just like a standard platter drive or 2.5 I didn’t realize that

Mike Wieger  [27:29] 
they have those for internal as well.

Jay Mattison  [27:32] 
Yeah, yeah, these these are internal Yep, I have actually I have external ones and internal ones. These are they literally just look like sabourin or a regular 2.5 inch Yeah,

Mike Wieger  [27:43] 
that’s all right Stan.

Jim Collison  [27:45] 
So Mark was saying in the chat room he says he built a system for a friend over Christmas them too and all USB storage. It was strange not wiring up drives, right yeah. On the on the inside, picked up a USB three dot 110 external m dot enclosure today so yeah, that would be and I’m assuming that’s if it’s three dot one is that USBC

Jay Mattison  [28:07] 
it could be it could be a still to

Jim Collison  [28:09] 
this it’s such a weird it’s a weird space. I think I’m going to find myself all of a sudden that cut the hardware bug and again, it comes about every year about this time. I don’t know why. But uh, changing some things out I like Mike end up and we’re in talking about this end of the show repurposing some older hardware to do very storage things. Jr, you and as guy at all are you keep in storage, kind of off the PCs then in an ass.

Jay Mattison  [28:39] 
I think we touched on this last time. So I haven’t asked I have a forebay NASS but it’s still isn’t I haven’t hooked it up since I moved in. Honestly, I was using it to do a lot of media streaming before so I have probably, I don’t know 800 movies from over the years and a ton of music. And with like Netflix, Amazon, I haven’t needed Much I just haven’t needed it. So, since I moved in here, I haven’t even hooked it up. So it’s just kind of sitting in the box. If you can see, I can probably point to it. But wait this way. There we go. There we go. There’s my little Western Digital 10 gigabyte backup crappy USB 3.01 and I know that’s gonna kill you guys but that’s what I’ve been using the back of my video.

Jim Collison  [29:20] 
It does if it does the job right? It does make me a little sad that you’re not

Jay Mattison  [29:26] 
It makes me sad too. But I truthfully don’t need the Nash currently in the future like so when I move and get everything set up. I’ll definitely be looking back into that. Unfortunately, right now I’m

Mike Wieger  [29:40] 
on that trend to the like, I go in these waves of like, I need the best everything got to be amazing. And then like recently I’ve been in a Hey, let’s consolidate because I go through the phase of building up like I got so much extra stuff. You know, for example, consolidating everything into my one unbraid server instead of having a machine for the camera and VR for you know, for untangle for Out of my can we consolidate the stuff you know? Okay, do I really need the super fast internet speed from Cox? No, I don’t let’s, let’s bring that down a little bit. Let’s, you know, I’ve been kind of trying to see, okay, what am I bare bones? What do I really just need to run my day to day. And my wife and I are kind of like you, we, you know, we’re all Plex, we used to be like, everything was Plex. And now, I kicked all my friends off, kick the family off. And that was a freeing moment where as soon as I didn’t need to keep it up and running for other people. I was kind of like, we started watching more Netflix in the last year. And we got into some of those shows, like maybe we really don’t need all the flex stuff that I was, you know, kind of laboring over to make for a good experience for family and friends. And that was kind of a freeing moment. So I definitely did like the consolidation, like use what works, right. Why complicate things? It doesn’t need to be complicated.

Jay Mattison  [30:48] 
Absolutely. So I have Netflix, Amazon, and Comcast between those three, I mean, I’ve access to

Mike Wieger  [30:54] 
most things so are you affected by the whole Sinclair thing for cable access driving me nuts so they like YouTube TV is who we use for cable and demin Sinclair who controls the Fox Sports regional channels, they haven’t been able to come to an agreement so if I lost my regional Fox Sports Midwest it’s like the Creighton game that I was watch Creighton basketball yesterday couldn’t watch that now I can go to watch my Royals baseball because that’s all fox sports news I you know, it’s one thing that Sinclair has been struggling to come to room with a lot of cable companies where I didn’t know if you were affected by that too.

Jay Mattison  [31:28] 
We’re not because at least locally because we have Comcast SportsNet in this area so they carry all the games Luckily, but I don’t know I’d have to look at some of the other channels to see if we’re missing anything yeah, no, we lost stars. We lost it we lost a couple channels because you know, it’s getting more expensive and they can’t keep up. So similar similar issue just probably different channels

Mike Wieger  [31:51] 
you have we’re going to start having to go like full on car like we were trying to go all a card out of convenience. Yeah, and now we’re gonna have to go all a card out of necessity because Okay, these People on these channels these don’t hopefully even some of the big cable companies right they’re not going to have everything you’re gonna have to go start looking for other solutions. It’s interesting.

Jay Mattison  [32:08] 
Yeah so pretty soon streaming will be more expensive than cable and it’s gonna get it’s going that

Jim Collison  [32:13] 
way it’s going to yeah and then what will we say we’re reattaching the cable I reattach the cable I soldered it back pretty good now Mike remember jail is in the city that threw snowballs at Santa so nobody wants to like nobody wants to do that. So it’s great. That’s my that’s the only joke I know about Philly. So, so Jay, thinking about if I’m, if I’m doing a build today and you do a lot of this so if I’m doing a build today, whether it’s going to be on a small board or full size board, I’m really thinking in you just said this I’m really thinking about a 256 or larger m to NVMe drive right that’s that’s price wise that’s still going to be pretty reasonable right? I’m I am going to want it Where do you land? Where do you land on on on memory? So do you go 816? You just max it out what it Where are you at with? How much memory Do you like to have in a box?

Jay Mattison  [33:10] 
So that would be depends on what you do. Right? That’s, that’s what I tell everyone. I would say a minimum, try to go with 16. Just in case. If you really are stretching the budget short, go eat, make it work into your budget. But I usually recommend 16. That’s the sweet spot. Even for gaming, there have been a lot of reports that there is benefit. There are games that can chew up a lot of RAM. And obviously chrome by itself can have a lot of RAM. So it’s definitely something I recommend anyone doing content creation, even if you’re just streaming. I say pop 32 it’s it’s just better if you do any sort of video editing, anything like that. compiling 30 tues is kind of the jump off point for that. I’m running 32 I’m thinking trying to get 64 at this point. So that’s that’s really where I stand. But also if you’re running rising, I would say go faster. Ran over more capacity because it benefits from from actually faster ram with their infinity fabric. So it really depends on what you’re doing Intel not as much, but AMD go faster ram if you can. So if it’s the choice between 16 gigs at you know 2600 which I don’t know well that’s not really 2400 or, or eight gigs at 32 you probably want to start with eight gigs and then kind of roll from there.

Jim Collison  [34:25] 
Yeah, are you are you overclocking anything at this point and your builds Are you leaving at standard,

Jay Mattison  [34:30] 
I’m overclocking and underclocking everything so that’s, that’s we’re under volting everything that’s where I’m at. So I got lately been heavy into unbolting, which is for mobile and desktop has some pretty distinct advantages. So GPU under volting specifically, is something that I’m kind of touching on more lately. I have a 2070 Super and my current rig and under volting and I was able to drop the Temps by around five to 10 510 degrees which is great while still overclocking it at the same time. And my GPU or I’m sorry, my CPU, right at five gigahertz at I think one thing. There’s some great guys out there that people can show you how to do. So.

Jim Collison  [35:09] 
There was a big run during the Bitcoin craze from 2018. And GPUs, do you have is your building systems? Are we to the point now where you put at least some kind of hefty GPU and everything? Or do you have you know, is there kind of a reasonable because the, you know, the jack the prices way up on both companies came out with these monster GPUs that are like $1,000. Right? So where are you at today? On the GP side, what do you what do you kind of recommend if someone’s doing a build,

Jay Mattison  [35:41] 
if you’re doing a build before you even say, this is the GPU I want? What kind of games do you play? And what monitor Do you want to use? Those are the those are the two considerations. So if you’re say, Hey, I play eSports titles I play for night and stuff like that. That doesn’t take a lot of horsepower. Grabbed Like a 1660 ti you’ll be fine you’ll be able to play that pretty much all day on most monitors. If you play triple A titles you want to play like tomb raiders, those kind of games Metro with ray tracing, then obviously you need to bump it up a little bit. So I say for sure for entry level gamers people people doing eSports a 1660 ti is a fantastic card like you really can’t beat it in 2016 is too but a little more expensive. Obviously, I try to stay away from the AMD stuff simply for power consumption reasons with compact builds. But if you want to do 120 hertz gaming 144 240 hertz gaming, then you want to start thinking of moving up to 2070 Super at minimum and then obviously it goes up from there. For 4k gamers. There’s really no GPU still that can handle 4k Gaming properly to be perfectly honest so not for triple A titles at least but so I think the 20 att eyes those kind of cards are a bit of a waste in my opinion. 2080 supers probably where I would stop In terms of performance, and price, but it really depends on what you want to do. I know these are kind of like not answers but

Jim Collison  [37:09] 
I think well in the audience here is going to dig in and figure it out anyways but I find it to be a good starting spot like people always kind of asking me like where do I start and then they want to do some homework on it. You spend a lot of time doing this and talking about it we I really haven’t bought a GPU now in maybe two years. Yeah. And you know, I bought a bunch of 1060 s back in the day and got him a card now they made their their you know, three gig cards they do great. I don’t game I don’t PC game. Okay, so I don’t have to worry about that. I just want you to so you know, works great for those

Jay Mattison  [37:45] 
entry level that I’d say just flat out entry level 1616 ti fantastic card.

Mike Wieger  [37:50] 
That’s the card I want to jump up to. I’m on a 1060 right now. 1060 sC so it’s a six gigabyte card, I’m able to play and stream off that you The NVMe coding or Nv NC codec, codec, whatever that that little extra chip on there, right. So I use that for processing for encoding the stream play off it. Now, what’s important for me I’m super glad you mentioned it depends on the monitor too. Yeah, I’ve seen some people get like a, you know, a 27 D, and they’re still running a TDP 60 hertz monitor, Mike, you’re kind of feeding the purpose there. You can’t even go about it. But so I play at 1080 p 60. And that 1060 is perfect for all the games that I’ve tried right? Play Escape from Tarkov, which isn’t even optimized very well. All the esports things like that. And it and it works just fine for that. Now, the the the 1660 that you mentioned, what I like about that as as the touring technology in it. So your encoding, if you are using it for streaming, it’s going to look a lot better. It rivals the H 264 encoding for any sort of streaming so I agree with you that is like the I think it’s a sweet spot for cards, especially for people who are kind of maybe just getting into it. Maybe they have a 144 hertz monitor. We just got it but they’re still okay with TDP Have you been able to do 1440 on that? 1660

Jay Mattison  [39:05] 
i, it depends on the game, you can do 1440 but I wouldn’t really recommend it. If people are looking for that resolution, I’d probably recommend jumping up to get 16 or 2060 you could start doing 1440. But really, if you want to comfortably be able to do 60 hertz at 1444 most titles probably want to do it. 2070 Super, probably really where you need to be. So it depends for sure. But I mean, yeah, if you jump up to a 1660 ti, you won’t be you won’t be sorry. It’s a great car, for sure.

Mike Wieger  [39:37] 
Genuine for a great price to

Jim Collison  [39:39] 
Yeah. Am I sacrificing anything by going late with the mini it x, you know, going small with gaming? Am I sacrificing anything over a full size built today?

Jay Mattison  [39:51] 
It depends. Yes, I would say if I’m gonna be honest. Usually Yes, you are sacrificing something. So it’s typically heat and noise. Those are typically the biggest trade offs. And also overclocking headroom, since obviously, the parts run hotter, there’s a lot less room, there’s less room for cooling as well. So you’re not putting a 360 mil radiator in one of these cases, you know. So that’s typically what it is. This exedy case is a rarity in terms of what it can do. But even that has its limitations, I wouldn’t be able to put like a thread Ripper CPU in there and go crazy or anything like that. So you have to pick tailored components to fit these cases, as opposed to picking a case and then filling it with whatever you’d like. So it really does take a little more care, I guess you’d say and planning to find the right power supply the right GPU, the right fans that will be quiet but still cool, etc. So you aren’t you’re also sacrificing sanity because it can really drive you crazy. Trying to build some of these systems.

Jim Collison  [40:52] 
You have you started to build and realized as you’re getting it put together like Yeah, not the wrong thing. On this

Jay Mattison  [41:00] 
Yeah, so there’s a case this one that I’m pointing to right there. It’s like a vertical case it’s it was a nice case I tried to fit an ultra compact 92 millimeter AC tech liquid cooler in there and I was like all pump I ordered from eBay wasn’t a bit I was so excited.

Jay Mattison  [41:22] 
So you run into stuff like that when you’re dealing with actual millimeters of space as opposed to inches. Yeah, it sometimes just doesn’t work out. Yeah.

Jim Collison  [41:30] 
So temperature in in and volume or sound or here, right are the two. Do you Are you also overclocking your GPUs then when you put them in as well, so under voltage overclocking on those,

Jay Mattison  [41:42] 
yep, so I run I push everything as far as I can without murdering the components inside the heat. So GPUs typically are a little tougher, I would say nine takes cases than CPUs. The coolers are a little larger, more heat fans more space, so they tend to call a little bit better, but I haven’t really had any any major issues there. Obviously, if you’re going to run the compact cards, the it x versions of these cards, there’s not really a lot of overclocking headroom at all. So in the lot of the cases of you, if you guys check out my channel and go back, most of the builds I’ve done have compact GPUs in them. So there are some real trade offs there when it comes to overclocking performance and overall heat. So So for that, yes, for cases I can take full full size, full length cards, not as much, but yeah, I do like,

Jim Collison  [42:32] 
Yeah, well, and then how do you do when you’re, when you’re kind of testing the temp? The performance? Do you? Do you use a kind of a standard piece of software? Is there something you use to kind of get the measurements so you know, the, you know, you’re getting what you want plus temperature and sound?

Jay Mattison  [42:50] 
Yep. So I used for mark for GPU Berlin testing, that basically just pegs 100 and gives you a nice, even stress test numbers gives you that Like I have Saracen, if you’ve ever seen it on your screen, it’s going around. And then I use probably 95, the stable version for for the CPU. Those are pretty straightforward. pretty consistent, just make sure you’re using the same version because of the different versions of prime and 95. And for Mark do different things. So just have to be consistent with that there. And then for testing the actual performance, I’d like to one time spy loops. So that’s 3d Mark software that does automatically generated scores essentially, I just run endless loops of that to see what actual gaming performance you get in terms of temperatures and clock speeds over time. And you can just track everything with Fraps for like frame rates for actual game data. Yes, that’s pretty much it. That’s that’s the typical sweet I’m trying to think that I leave anything out. No, I think that’s about it. And you just keep you just do that the same for every build that you do and then keep track of it to report it on your on your site. Have you found

Jim Collison  [44:01] 
are do you think more people are building than built two or three or four years ago? Is that community getting smaller staying the same? Because it’s I don’t feel like there’s as many system builders as there used to be. Yeah, I’m not in that space anymore. So what

Jay Mattison  [44:18] 
I think, I think when the 10 series cards came out, and the cores jumped from four to six and eight, I think that kind of gave it a kick in the pants. I mean, if you look at in video stock prices, I would say yeah, absolutely. Yeah. But I think that the YouTube community has had a huge role in keeping it alive for sure. There are a lot of really, really popular channels that do a ton of PC building. And and there been a lot of great games released on PC lately, so I do think it’s pretty strong. I haven’t noticed any decline in viewership or readership. So those numbers I mean, obviously that’s an anecdote point for me, but I it seems to be pretty consistent. I haven’t seen any drop off. I don’t know if it’s necessarily growing like it was, if anything, I think the pricing of current arts, you know, 20 series cards, the new generation of CPUs, maybe pricing a lot of people out. But people are pretty much done with the last gen systems in terms of gaming systems, Xbox, and PlayStation four. So I think they’re kind of going back to the PC because we can get better graphics. And we can do a whole bunch of other cool stuff. But I also think the PC laptop market gaming laptop market has chipped into some of the desktop stuff, certainly. Yeah, I do. So yeah, there have been a lot of really good powerful laptops released in the last year or so year two, that can really do most of the things that desktops can do if you have a six core laptop with, like we mentioned the 1660 ti. It can pretty much do what you need to do unless you’re you know, rendering constantly or compiling code all day. So for casual users game It can do what you want it to do.

Jim Collison  [46:02] 
Yeah. Did you also review laptops on your site then the gaming laptops,

Jay Mattison  [46:07] 
I reviewed? I think the only laptop I reviewed was the Surface Book to just because I was so enamored with it when I bought one a couple years ago, but I will be reviewing laptops soon. It’s just honestly kind of boring. So and there’s like a million laptop review sites. I don’t need another one. But if there’s something as if anything, if there’s something that no one’s covered, and I think it’s really cool, like the laptop, I just got the air 15 Classic. I’ll probably eat at least write an article about it.

Jim Collison  [46:34] 
Okay. Okay, how do you like that laptop so far?

Jay Mattison  [46:37] 
Oh, I love it. Actually. I have it right here. Yeah. This thing, this beauty right here. Air 15 Classic. It’s very thin as you can see. Let me close it for you guys. It’s very thin. Less than less than I think it’s point seven, four inches and around four pounds. 15 inch screen 4k. This is the 4k model that I got. Because obviously I create 4k 60 hertz, matte black, beautiful 94 watt hour battery and two m dot two drives loss. So this thing is loaded. The only bad thing I guess would be this webcam but I really

Jim Collison  [47:15] 
down there. Yeah, you would want to. Yeah, yeah, you’d want to plug in webcam for that, what’s the retail on that?

Jay Mattison  [47:21] 
So that’s another thing. So this current model that I have here has a 9750 h which is the Intel six core CPU. I think it goes to 4.3 gigahertz, great CPU for gaming and for creating fantastic it also has a 1660 ti and it came with a 256 gig NVMe SSD so I got this for 1300 dollars, which is a fantastic deal. I mean that’s great with the 4k screen. Pantone certified, one of the crispiest most beautiful screens I’ve seen on a laptop probably better than my actual 38 inch ultra wide monitor screen. If I’m honest, Thunderbolt has everything USB three, it really has everything a powerful machine that I’ve been really pleased with so far.

Jim Collison  [48:09] 
And you said that’s a gigabyte, right? That’s a gigabyte arrow. Yeah, era with Taro 15. Classic.

Jay Mattison  [48:15] 
So there’s a classic. And then there’s just a newer era 15 they have the newer model has, or I guess the newer body has also an option for an OLED screen, which is fantastic, but kind of kills your battery life. So there are some options there in terms of what do you want it to look like? And what do you want it to do specifically, but this is the model I chose because for creator, this is pretty fantastic and has a number pad which for me, someone who does write code at times, and also just likes having numpad that’s that’s really great. No, that’s, that’s a beast.

Jim Collison  [48:47] 
Yeah, that is a big one. And what was the weight on that again? It’s around four pounds.

Jay Mattison  [48:52] 
I think it was 4.24. Don’t quote me on that.

Jim Collison  [48:54] 
Do you take it with you much or does it pretty much stay there for gaming?

Jay Mattison  [48:58] 
Yeah, I actually I bring work with me every day. So because I have a work laptop of evil book, which is fine, but it’s a work laptop, it’s underpowered and if I need to, like use any of the Adobe Suite, you know any of those applications or anything I’ll just have that are from a second and just play game or something like that. I do like having it just around.

Jim Collison  [49:20] 
So that sounds cool. You know, you mentioned we were talking about video cards and how expensive like they they somehow took that from And I remember thinking the $300 video card was outrageous, right? And then they somehow took that to 1000. Another thing and you alluded to this early are in the program. The other thing that’s gotten a little out of hand are our headphones, like, like these went from, you know, we just things we just wore and they were maybe 25 bucks to you know, now we’re you know, we’re buying Bose stuff for 350 404 50, Sennheiser and stuff like that. Are you seeing you reviews? You like the audio Art, is that the truth? Am I saying the truth? Is it getting out of control? It’s

Jay Mattison  [50:04] 
so the funny thing is it’s actually always been out of control if I’m honest. So speakers and audio gear historically have has been some of the most overpriced stuff ever. There’s a lot of snake oil, there’s a lot of this does mystical things, when it really just sounds bad. There’s a lot of that and audio space. And because it’s so subjective, it’s hard for people to just say, what you’re saying is nonsense. So for years, I mean, we’ve had high end speaker systems, high end headphones that were just okay. And recently and to be perfectly honest, mass drop or drop had a lot to do with this. Bring a lot of high end products to mainstream customers for more affordable prices. And we’ve seen an explosion kind of in the audio space where we’re having new high quality amplifiers, new high quality headphones like this, which previously would have cost several thousand dollars probably. Now under that that thousand dollar price point now still not cheap. Still not super affordable but I would say you do get what you pay for if you’re looking for high fidelity audio in the 500 to $1,000 range, there’s just so much good stuff.

Jim Collison  [51:11] 
I find a lot of folks with earbuds and they’re traveling or you know the noise cancelling when they’re in an airplane. Is there you know, is there a space we’re looking at the I don’t know if you said this phone call come in, but that what are we looking at on screen here and why do you what do you like about

Jay Mattison  [51:31] 
helix is what we’re looking at here. So this is a pair of I will say it’s a $700 pair of headphones, it’s not cheap, but it for what it does, it’s incredible and a great value as as crazy as that sounds,

Jim Collison  [51:45] 
what do you the manufacturer or what

Jay Mattison  [51:49] 
so I mean there that is well price for the performance that you get, I mean, they’re an open back pair of headphones, super good build quality, and they’re they’re really quite impressive. Obviously, they They look like art. If you kind of look at them a little bit, like metal metal all over the place, leather ear cups, everything’s super soft and they’re ultra comfortable. But more importantly, they sound incredible. They really like blow you away in terms of the sound quality that you get. If you listen to high quality flat files, even regular bad music, mp3 that you’re streaming from Spotify, everything sounds really good, crystal clear. And they almost sound like you have speakers in front of you as opposed to just listening to some generic headphones.

Jim Collison  [52:31] 
Yeah. When when do you like so? From from when you listen to them? Or when you use them? What are your habits for? You know, for that kind of price? I think they’d be around your neck 24 seven. But when do you When do you listen most?

Jay Mattison  [52:45] 
I listen, usually late at night. So when I started getting to around, turn off the speaker’s time around eight, nine o’clock and I’m still kind of, you know, jamming out, listen to whatever, that’s when I try to do it like to unwind you know, late plug them in, sit back in my chair and just kind of relax. I don’t want anyone to see me with these on either because they look ridiculous, but like, you look ridiculous.

Mike Wieger  [53:11] 
Okay, now I gotta change my.

Jay Mattison  [53:14] 
Now your ears are fine. I mean, they look kind of bulbous. Like they’re a little ridiculous. Yeah. Public right, like,

Mike Wieger  [53:20] 
so many different out in public and yeah, I wouldn’t be wearing these out in public that’s for sure.

Jim Collison  [53:26] 
More and more of that though, with, you know, folks out exercising and they got a pair of cans on and you’re like, I don’t know, I’m still not used to that, right. I mean, it is. It’s a different day. Do you for for the for the average guy. Like if we’re talking, uh, you know, from from a value perspective, a pair of headphones, or what do you like in that in that kind of value price ranges, we think you know, hundred and 5300 bucks.

Jay Mattison  [53:54] 
Uh huh. Hundred and 50 probably, I would look at some of the Audio technical stuff. So it really depends on what you’re looking for for sure. But Audio Technica has some very good headphones, I think it’s the K 371. I think that’s the model. I’m just pulling that off the top of my head, I know that you’re doing really well for pulling it off the

Jim Collison  [54:17] 
top of your head.

Jay Mattison  [54:18] 
Yeah, so I think that’s one of their new models that came out that’s around 150 ish dollar mark. They make great stuff, if you’re just a general user in that 150 to $300 range, the Sony 100 Mx three, which is the noise cancelling model, that’s what I use for travel, those sounds really good for that price range and the wireless or wired the pretty flexible. So that’s a great bargain there as well. There are a lot of lot of just good headphones in that range. And obviously, if you want to go a little bit lower anything from costs, I’m a big fan of them, and they find out what they do and like the budget sector.

Jim Collison  [54:52] 
You had, you had put a cost let me bring that up. You had put a pair of costs You call these? What do you call these?

Jay Mattison  [55:05] 
These are so there’s a funny story. So I did it, I did an actual video on these. These are the cost Casey 75 model to be wireless. So the KC 75 is like a literally a $15 set of headphones. That sounds incredible. It has like a wide open back soundstage that you would get from something like the folk out that I just mentioned earlier, but it’s super budget, and it’s very late, just a clip one that sits on your ears. Again, you look silly wearing them, but it’s worth it, trust me. So these are one of my favorite pairs of headphones. I used to use them at work casually because they’re super late. You can still hear people talking, just pop them on and off. But I wanted a wireless pair. And so I just made myself essentially and when I did that I cos actually commented on the video and said a thank you for your support, blah, blah, blah. But I think we have something you might like in the future. They reached out to me and then they actually sent me the Which are a version of their existing headphones that basically do the same thing that I built. One better. So they’ve done it better. These are the kP 38 or 30 I believe this was called wireless. So these are really fantastic headphones. They’re only about $40. But they clip right onto your ears. And they’re one of the best sounding budget headphones, especially in the wireless tech sector that I’ve ever heard. So you just clip them on. And no muss no fuss. Yeah, they’re super cheap. You can also get a wired version for around 30 bucks as well. They have them on Amazon anywhere you want to get them. They’re really great. So people always ask, Hey, I just want something I can work out in or something casual. I want that audio file sound but I don’t want to spend a ton of money. Just go for these. Just trust me. Trust me if you take anything from this video. These are quality quality. Yeah, yeah. 40 bucks. 40 bucks. Yeah.

Jim Collison  [56:56] 
Wireless in and and how did you Charge.

Jay Mattison  [57:01] 
These are micro USB still still in the Stone Age for that but you can make it work. Yeah, it’s five hours for their for charge.

Jim Collison  [57:12] 
And it gets you through a workout. If you’re doing a six hour workout or longer you you have bigger problems.

Jay Mattison  [57:18] 
Unless you’re the rock it

Jim Collison  [57:20] 
Yeah, and you can afford it. What? What do you like from an earbud perspective? What do you like? Do you have a kind of a go to that that you use often?

Jay Mattison  [57:30] 
So I typically hate earbuds I hate I don’t like that close off feeling for whatever I don’t know. It’s just a pressure thing. It’s not my thing. I like more of a I guess a bud style where like the the apple EarPods that would be more of a bud style. The problem is those don’t typically sound good. So what I came with the compromise so I had this set here. This is the razor to wireless. These are 100 bucks. They I’m not gonna lie, they don’t sound great. They I’m sorry, that’s not the goal, but they’re black. They look cool. You can put them in their water resistant, you can work out with them all day. They sound good for podcast, etc. and the music is acceptable. So I use these for casual listening, sitting in the office listening to podcasts, and working out and they slip right in your pocket. And they’re $50 cheaper than AirPods. And they don’t they’re not goofy looking. So I mean, these if you’re looking for true wireless earbuds, most of them simply do not sound that great. I wouldn’t recommend recommend it. You get better or better audio from like something like a 10 t to something that’s cheaper and sounds better all the time. But if you’re going to do it go for convenience. And that’s what something like this provides this razor model specifically. I really have been a fan of

Jim Collison  [58:47] 
nice. Yeah, that’s a good it’s a good I actually bought a cheap pair of I’m trying to remember I reviewed these on the show maybe knocked off AirPods Yeah, those knockoff AirPods said they weren’t bad. It’s shopko And yeah, they’re like 30 bucks and they look just like it in fact, I’ve had people like comment you know, they always make the air pod snob comment when you have those and you know, oh air father, like Actually no, I paid 30 bucks for these on clinics. You’re right the sound isn’t great but when I’m doing a peloton workout or I am it’s it’s good enough right exactly for what you’re doing. Those charge I get maybe I think I probably get four or five or six charges out of them then have to recharge them and you know, put the plug the bass in and and get that done, but good enough. But yeah, you’re right. I think airpot or EarPods in general, not the greatest out I’m with you. I can’t wear them when they plug up my ears like that. That just does not work for you a mic does that. Are you okay with that when

Mike Wieger  [59:46] 
they well, so it used to but the one saving grace that I have found. So I moved over to the air pod pros. And they have a transparent mode, which so when you put them in, it’ll go into if you don’t change it, it’ll go into Full noise cancellation mode. And that’s where you get kind of like that again with like pop your job because like, it’s all but you turn on transparent mode. And also it opens up. And I really like that changed AirPods for me on a sealed in earbud, like the air pod pros are, it has a microphone on the outside, so it’s still air pressure a little bit type, it opens up the microphone, so you can hear a little bit from the outside. And if you lose that pressure sensation, and that was the saving grace from Allah, those have been my new favorite wireless earbuds to wear. Mainly cuz I mean, like, audio quality is not amazing, right on the sound. But I would say more than acceptable. And the microphones on them have gotten a lot better people I got because I’ve asked people on the phone like hey, do I sound good? like yeah, you sound great. And I’ve even done some AV testing a little bit. I’ll switch over to my old air pods, and they can definitely notice a difference. I don’t know what they’re doing with maybe the noise cancellation around me or what it is. It is interesting though, on those air pod pros. It doesn’t even look like there’s a microphone. You can’t tell where it’s at so I don’t know if the speaker microphone the outsides the same but yeah that that I think they call it transparent mode is what makes those a lot better for me because I’m the same way I don’t usually like the fully clog up style.

Jay Mattison  [1:01:14] 
I think the Sony in ear buds have a similar feature where they let the sound and as was amazing a lot I haven’t heard either one but now you’re making me want to check them out.

Mike Wieger  [1:01:24] 
Yeah, wait, yeah, try it out because it really did change the game because I do like how secure they are in the ear, and they fit a lot better. And when you do need noise cancellation, you can switch to that mode on the phone. And it’s it It works great. But I have those in almost all day at work at least one so I can answer phone calls real quick. I’m on the phone a lot and I use my iPhone and then but I keep it in transparent mode and it also helps because you can hear people a lot better it actually it’s almost like a hearing aid. It kind of amplifies your hearing a little bit you can kind of kind of feel like you have superhuman hearing because it’s a digital microphone that is picking up is just amplifying it into the speaker Your button

Jay Mattison  [1:02:01] 
Have you uh Have you had a chance to travel on a plane yet? The noise

Mike Wieger  [1:02:04] 
I will this next week I have not yet so flying out this next week I’m really excited to see how will they compare so I’m gonna bring my Bose quiet comforts and then those as well. I still have the really old school quietcomfort bows that are still wired so they don’t have Bluetooth so I’m hoping that the air pods are good enough because I hate being tethered to a wire although I did also just get a Nintendo Switch that I’m going to be probably taking them playing some Zelda on the flight out and that only has a wired earbud port built in you can buy a Bluetooth adapter but they do not support Bluetooth.

Jay Mattison  [1:02:37] 
That’s the most modern and also the Stone Age system ever made.

Mike Wieger  [1:02:41] 
That is what I’m finding it is. So it has a USB C port. Right That’s how it connects everything yet they do not open up the Bluetooth to accept bluetooth headphones. It’s just the weirdest like device you’ll ever see.

Jay Mattison  [1:02:53] 
I have I have a Swiss I love it but it’s just like it’s so Nintendo. It’s such an It is

Mike Wieger  [1:02:58] 
me and I is an astrologer right I opened that thing up like Oh this is so much fun we had some friends over we played Mario Kart and smash and I was like these like the good old days we were having the best time at I don’t think the four of us you know we’re adults now we’re married and we’re born we have kids and like man we have not laughed this hard or had such a good time in a long time so it was a lot of fun getting that switch out.

Jay Mattison  [1:03:20] 
Yeah, they nailed the joy part of it. They did

Mike Wieger  [1:03:22] 
and they nailed the party mode aspect of it and what I’m excited for is even like my buddy and I on our way back We’re flying back together you pop that thing up on a stand hand him one of the joy cons it’s already on there you like you’re built for to place in person party Yeah. with just the device not bringing anything extra right. Have off the cons hand him one and him and I can can raise some Mario Kart on the plane ride home.

Jim Collison  [1:03:47] 
Andrew, the chat room said wait, there’s a discord there’s have they’re having a discord conversation. I was like Andrew, do you not listen to the 8000 times I say the average guy TV slash Discord. And it’s actually I didn’t say it tonight. So we’ll we’ll let that one In one slide if you want to join us in our discord group the average guy TV slash Discord. I was when I was on the plane to London I had the 30 fives on I had been sitting down I think I watched a whole movie and I got up to go to the bathroom and I went to put my headphones off and it was one of those moments like you know you got the headphones on. But you don’t you kind of forget how loud it is in the plane and then you take them off and I’m like, Whoa, that was almost shocking. You’re like whoa, yeah, I am on a plane. And I had been wearing those I kind of put them on as soon as I sat down. And so I never really even heard us take off or you know this this the the regular cruising sound and it does make a huge difference. I was like now I don’t right now I don’t want to fly anywhere. Do anything right you know with what’s going on but it sure makes a big difference to have a really nice pair of headphones do that jr they’re better when we you know the both the you know the 30 fives are kind of the industry standard. Are there better in your testing? Are there better noise cancelling headphones that are similar in price to the buffs that you’ve come across?

Jay Mattison  [1:05:08] 
I haven’t heard anything better at the noise cancelling aspect like I think I mentioned earlier. I’m the Sony version, the MX or the 100 Mx three. So it’s basically the direct competitor. They do a decent job but the bows are still better at noise cancelling there’s just they just are so and the new seven hundreds that they came out with are decent as well. But the 35 seems to just be like the ultimate sweet spot for people like it is go to for years and years and it still is so I mean, I’ve heard some of the Bowers and Wilkins stuff I’ve heard a lot of them and the Bose still just if you’re flying there’s there’s nothing like it.

Jim Collison  [1:05:45] 
Yeah, no, it’s it’s great to have I it makes me want to fly more just so I can learn. You know you when you drop 350 bones on him you should probably use these to mow the lawn or something right. To get more time Jays you’re looking Head on your channel and some things you alluded to this a little bit earlier. But what are you looking forward to for the rest of the year? Anything? review wise, you doing anything new? If folks were going to follow you on YouTube? What could they expect coming up here in the next six months or so,

Jay Mattison  [1:06:14] 
in the short term, I have a few cases that I’m going to be revealing some nice new ITEX faces that are actually from larger manufacturers, which is a new thing. So we’re having, we’re seeing an influx of itix cases from major manufacturers now, which is something that I’ve been wanting for a long time so it can drive the price down, for sure. And we can get new designs, you know, custom pre built stuff with custom cooling, all that fun stuff. So I have a few cases that I can’t honestly, there’s a box behind me you can probably see it. That is in the a case which I can’t talk about sorry.

Jim Collison  [1:06:49] 
We don’t want you to do when

Jay Mattison  [1:06:51] 
you have a couple things coming up in that sector. And also I’m really excited to see the new rise and laptops. I’m definitely Going to be picking up some of them. We’re gonna have some eight core laptops, which is going to be crazy, just like, I mean like eight to 12 cores and mobile laptop that’s less than an inch thick, and three and a half pounds. I mean, that’s crazy. So I’m super excited about that as well. I’m also Nvidia 3000 series cards when they come out. So the new round of cards should be releasing at some point this year. So look out for that as well. Those are the things that I’m most looking forward up in the short term for short hammering the cases. That’s that’s my bread and butter. come from some itix bills in cases and stick around stick around for

Jim Collison  [1:07:37] 
now. Sounds good. Or have you are you hearing any wins of you know, China kind of shut down for three or four weeks somebody told me the other day that they’re seeing blue skies in Beijing for the first time in 10 years. Like that’s how much things have shut down. I mean, that’s that’s how you know they’re not doing anything because they blue sky right. Are you in Are you seeing Any effect of that on getting parts in or, or reviews or any of those kinds of things? Are you feeling that that slow down effect at all?

Jay Mattison  [1:08:08] 
Not yet in terms of parts? I don’t know if you guys remember Do you guys remember the Ramsar shortage? Tell us that. Yeah. I’m just hoping that that’s not what happened to Jim Crow sport. I don’t know if it’s gonna affect steel, metal, you know, aluminum prices, case materials like that. in precious metals. I’m not sure. I haven’t seen anything yet. But all the stock that’s currently in stock has been there, you know, it was built, actually shipped a while. Yeah. So this summer is when they’re saying it’s really going to hit, you know, ramp up here in the States. So we’ll probably see it around summer fall. That’s when we would probably feel some of the shortages.

Jim Collison  [1:08:44] 
Yeah. Yeah, I think you’re right. it’ll it’ll probably take a while. Let’s see. So I was talking about the line. He said, Andrew said, I thought you had a robot that mowed the lawn. So I didn’t have to go and put earbuds in to get it done. No, I never actually Got that bill I started putting it together and it was like this is too hard. It’s I just kind of I kind of gave up on it. Um, yeah, you know, Jay I think you’re right. The delay will be solid in the summer and it may be now maybe a time to start acquiring some things just before right if you can do a PC build now might be the time to get it if you’re going to buy toilet paper you in the United States you might want to do that like right now I don’t know if you follow this but Costco is selling out of water and toilet paper and rice. I don’t know I don’t know how you feel about this but it’s kind of that’s a little that’s a little much I said to my wife is like hey, like we don’t have to go buy cases of it but we might want to just make sure we have some there may be none there and Walmart and even jack the price up until until the paper so it’s great.

Jay Mattison  [1:09:51] 
It is mass hysteria as usual. That’s what you can come to expect from Yeah, like this. The hopefully they can get attainment somewhat. Hopefully it doesn’t get too crazy. Because it’s not great. It’s not a great situation.

Jim Collison  [1:10:06] 
Obviously. This is the quote I wanted to get from Andrew a second ago makes you wonder whether working from home will become the new normal for some industries in China, in I know it’s happening right now. And we just did a show I Dave Jackson, on from school, podcasting. And we did a show I don’t know a couple of months ago about using podcasting technology to as audio for working from home because it’s just so much. Like it’s so much better when you get on a call and you can hear people and they can hear you right deal. And now I’m kind of wondering like, we’re we’re going through some things and I don’t know about where you work, but we’re starting to think through those contingencies of what if we have to send everybody home and say, Hey, two weeks, We’re shutting the doors. Nobody come in. Yeah. All right. Have you guys are there any conversations going on where you work about that?

Jay Mattison  [1:10:56] 
Yes. So actually, I work from home pretty regularly. I work in tech. So it’s That’s pretty standard. I’m actually working for them tomorrow. Again, a little prep. But we’ve talked about internally, obviously Philly’s a large city, and we do our downtown offices downtown. So if they shut it down, we’ll probably be working from home. Like you said, Now we use Google Hangouts and normal stuff. But to your point, I mean, I hadn’t even considered using podcast software. That would make it a lot. lot easier. Yeah.

Jim Collison  [1:11:27] 
Yeah. Well, or, or at least podcast techniques, right? We we do everything we can have the best sound possible, the best presentation possible, and create community. So like, how do we do these things? Like what if you ran a meeting, like you’re on a podcast, where it’s just not everybody sitting around, you know, you know, how meetings go, everybody’s like, how’s your day was your weekend like, whatever. And you can have some of that, but you kind of need a moderator and someone to kind of lead the conversation. And absolutely, you could have a meeting of 50 people like like we’re doing tonight. So we probably have, we’ve got 10 or so out there in the chat room, you could have 50. And that could be the three of us leading the meeting in the conversation and getting input from those 50. But if you ever been on a zoom, zoom, call a 50. Like, it’s awful. It’s a nightmare.

Jay Mattison  [1:12:13] 
It’s just terrible. It 10 people is ridiculous.

Jim Collison  [1:12:16] 
Everybody’s trying to talk over each other. And so it’s just, you know, and we weren’t thinking about six months ago, when we did that podcast, we were thinking about it, but it may come to that point where, hey, you’re working remotely is not just working from home. Like there’s a bunch of things that have to go into it to make sure you can get the systems in there supported and then the meetings and then it’s really important as humans that we do things together. You can’t just in you know, you can’t just be isolated at home. Right. That’s a bad experience. You get disengaged really fast.

Jay Mattison  [1:12:47] 
Yeah, right. Absolutely.

Jim Collison  [1:12:49] 
So you know, as you know, you do some days from home to you need those days in the office, to connect with people right to connect with humans. Yeah. So I think I think Think tech could be at the center of this when we think about if the whole of all of the United States goes home. Now, China covers a ton of our manufacturing right now the world’s manufacturing is happening in China, when they shut down. That’s pretty severe. Right? Yes. In the United States, when we go home, chances are we can be pretty close. Yeah. To being just as productive in a lot of cases. Right? Absolutely. Unless you’re obviously the any sort of manual labor or features or construction. Yeah, those kinds of things, right.

Jay Mattison  [1:13:32] 
Most of our workforce, most of the skilled labor jobs for sure, can probably do some sort of, you know, be productive at home for sure. Like, we all have our files internally. Well, you know, like client deliverables and stuff like that we keep in the cloud. So you can access all this everything. Everyone’s everything from home at this point, at least with our company, so it’s pretty flexible. You could be anywhere really sometimes I go to coffee shops, and I mean, you can really be flexible with where you work. So yeah, if you put the systems in place ahead of time, they could probably help mitigate some of the potential damage from from a shutdown. At least.

Jim Collison  [1:14:11] 
Yeah. Well, I we’re in it’ll be interesting. I think we’re still here in the United States trying to figure out Mike it. Were you work? Are you guys having these conversations? yet?

Mike Wieger  [1:14:22] 
It’s mainly just wash your hands people. know we have we haven’t talked about yet. I mean, obviously, we all at our work would have the ability to work remote. So it’s if it needs to happen needs to happen.

Jim Collison  [1:14:35] 
Yeah. Well, I think the question is not can we work from home? I think most people can. The question is, how’s the productivity when this is extended? So how do how do people feel and where does the productive the productivity level go? When it’s two weeks of everybody at home? I don’t think we’ve ever tested that. Yeah, right. And it’s a different it’s a whole different world of remote working when everybody’s remote. All the time. We interviewed a couple years ago, we interviewed a guy and he worked for a company that made software as a social networking site for dogs. Okay, so they exist, they’re out there. Okay. The unique part about it wasn’t that they created a social media. By the way, he said people went nuts over the dogs. They were it was like, so think about Facebook for dogs and they would the owners would post like the dog is talking kind of thing. One. Yeah. And they would like anyways, okay. All right. So he said it was wildly popular, like posting pictures of the dogs. Oh, yeah. dog owners? Yeah, yeah, for sure. So anyways, he would say they were all remote and they had created some software that had a picture. So you put a sidebar on your monitor and it had a picture of your webcam during office hours. And no matter what was happening every 15 seconds that webcam took a picture. And it was gave them an opportunity to have that contact with people throughout the day. That gave them different looks. And then So employees started dressing up differently. They would come in costume. So they make a funny face. Are they? Right? And it became the water cooler conversation virtually. Yeah, that because of every 15 seconds whether you liked it or not that camera was going to take a picture.

Jay Mattison  [1:16:15] 
There’s a business idea, the work from home, just all in one software, online service for file management, video conferencing, everything that there’s a business, we just will.

Jim Collison  [1:16:28] 
I think it has to be more it has to be it’s more than just services of connecting people. It has to have that same human Yeah. How do we connect people like we’re connecting now? You got to do more. It’s got to be more of that kind of stuff. Right. And, and so I think we’re coming up. We’re coming up on an interesting time. Jay, anything else I missed from you? I want you to comment on some things to share. But anything

Jay Mattison  [1:16:52] 
that we missed from looking around my desk for fun things. I think we covered everything we do we do a good job that we do you as

Jim Collison  [1:16:59] 
always Fantastic. Well, there’s nothing better than interviewing a YouTuber because you’re ready. So So Jay. Thanks for doing that. Hey, if you can stay around for a little bit while I talk about some gear. Are you okay with that? Okay, so in last week’s show scoon over we were talking about so the go back to this so the PC behind me this is a this is a Fujitsu. I bet you didn’t even know Fujitsu made PCs. They know Well, it’s really server grade is what it was. But it’s a back in the day of the micro servers and they’re still making micro servers but HP makes a bunch of them but Fujitsu got into space as well. This is a primer g 100 dx, I think and it’s an old Core i three 540. So that’s third or fourth Gen, I think or a three that came out. It had been and the reason I have the windows seven box you know we did a launch party for Windows 710 years ago. On this I still have the box. I don’t know why but I do. We just retired the box because casera was using it as a media center and of course Media Center guy data died. And let’s just be honest media centers dead so I’ve been begging her like, hey can can I get that box back? Like you know I want to use it you’re not using it anymore and and so finally we swapped the Xbox so she said why need to have a DVD or a blu ray player. So I swapped the Xbox with it brought it back in I wanted to get more hard drives. So Kevin, we talked about this last week Kevin got me this LSI this I’ll show it an LSI eight port six gig raid seda card I got it off of eBay. 25 bucks, like these things have gotten so cheap, you know, we we do a lot of spinner drives here because we’re creating a lot of storage space for it. And so Kevin gave me that recommendation. I’ll have the link to it in the show notes. If you’re interested in doing that. He’s going to send me it doesn’t have the right I need a you know, I need the PC. And he’s gonna he’s gonna hook me up with a PC end of that. for it, this is more for server case. But Kevin, thanks for that recommendation as well. That was really helpful to get that done. So that came in during the week. I broke I was mentioning it on the same on the same let’s go back to them on the same PC is I was taking this cover off. I’m sure you’ve never done this, Jay. But as I was taking the cover off, I broke the wire to the power switch. It was tight in it. I know I mentioned this a little bit earlier. You can see I just ripped. I just ripped that wire right out, right? That’s all crap. Now if I was smart, I would have known to have an extra case in the garage and I just could have salvaged it. But I went on.

Jim Collison  [1:19:44] 
I went on

Jim Collison  [1:19:46] 
Amazon in a day they sent me new, you know just a new switch cable for it. You could just tell me right just by that and so I just cut the end off spliced it in. wire that in went down to I couldn’t find yours. like where do I get those Let me ask you to I needed that shrink you know the shrink tubing yeah where would you go to get that anymore like Radio Shack is

Jay Mattison  [1:20:11] 
if you have one I don’t have I’m Allah lows

Mike Wieger  [1:20:15] 
lows right and their electrical department

Jim Collison  [1:20:18] 
that’ll that’ll be a choice Walmart had it but oh they didn’t have they didn’t have it they didn’t have it in stock here of course got it O’Reilly’s that’s right at the auto parts stores Smart City. So I went down to O’Reilly’s $3 picked up some shrink, some shrink, you know the heat shrink stuff, spliced it together, put it back in. I’ve never fixed wiring in a PC in my life. I just have never done that. Wired it all backup switch work rate. It came back Mike and I had been working on an Unraid box with it. So somehow last week, I got convinced to create an I’m so excited for your journey to

Mike Wieger  [1:20:55] 
start with Unraid Jim.

Jim Collison  [1:20:58] 
We had the guys we had john from FromLlime, the makers in the supporters of Unraid on a year ago I asked him to come back on. So perfect Unraid box right Core i3 doesn’t need a ton of power. We’re not doing a lot of processing on it. I guess if I wanted to use VMs or Dockers for those kinds of things I may want to throw more power at the future but it just got me kind of started on that so 120 GB cache to one terabyte drives just something to get it going. I got I got mocked a little bit on Twitter when I put that out there that one terabyte drive.

Mike Wieger  [1:21:33] 
Yeah, but you see the whole community like came to your defense on Twitter. There’s some troll like trolling, like and in the whole of the whole community here. It’d be like for tweets telling the guy to pretty much pound sand.

Jim Collison  [1:21:45] 
Dude, like sorry, I just was getting started. So that that has been that’s been and you get to do this Jay all the time, but I haven’t built in a while. I just haven’t been I just haven’t had time to kind of work on those things. Are my car’s got broken into? Really we left them unlocked and somebody went through. And so I’ve been spending a bunch of time doing home home automation which is kind of filled that building niche. Have you done JV done much home automation stuff yet? You’re an apartment so you probably don’t care. Right?

Jay Mattison  [1:22:15] 
So I have a I have a more of like a personal stance on automation that I don’t trust any of it. I get utility, but I truly do not trust. I really have to get over that. But

Jim Collison  [1:22:30] 
that’s kind of how do you so you don’t know Alexa? No or none. No Amazon device, no Google device. Sorry.

Jay Mattison  [1:22:36] 
It was crazy. No one with as much tech as I have. Yeah. I go as far as I unplug my webcam from my computer when I’m like I’m one of those guys.

Jim Collison  [1:22:49] 
It’s okay. You’ll come to it. Eventually. You’ll have to give in right? You’ll want something that that does it. We so I’ve been spending a bunch of time putting up cameras. We put a bunch of green cameras and then Philips Hue, which does my lights decided to stop supporting their v one hub. And I gave in and bought a v two hub. So that came in, I got a refurb deal on it 30 bucks, which isn’t terrible. And that came in this week. And it’s everything you expect, right? You know, they send you network cable, they send you the power cord, and then the old one was round. And this one square. Thanks, Phillips, you for changing from ground to square. And I’m sure there’s some new things in it. So we’ll be setting that up. I’ll be talking about that here in a future show, as well as that cut over to the Philips Hue. And then let’s see if there’s anything else broken eBay will be working on some of the icy dock pieces as well. So we have some updates for you guys. On those coming. Sure. Mike, I’m going to be asking you on the especially on the unread box. Okay, what’s next, like what do I need to do next? So you and I in future shows will be spent a little bit of time that

Mike Wieger  [1:23:58] 
shows what are you doing? What are you doing tonight?

Jim Collison  [1:24:02] 
Well, I know what you’re doing. I’ve

Mike Wieger  [1:24:03] 
got mine. Yeah, I cut off connection of mine trying to reconfigure the network a little bit. Mix in here.

Jim Collison  [1:24:09] 
That’s what I’m doing afterwards. So awesome. Well, so it’s been a busy I’ve got a bunch of stuff to do. Get these things set up. Get them done. It’s kind of fun to be back fixing this. I’m sure Jay, you enjoy the you wouldn’t do this if you didn’t enjoy the process of putting this stuff together,

Jay Mattison  [1:24:24] 
right? Oh, yeah. It’s like adult Legos.

Mike Wieger  [1:24:28] 
That’s a perfect way to describe it. Yes.

Jim Collison  [1:24:31] 
Yeah, it really is. I do. I do find great joy and read. And I think this is why Mike and I get along so well of repurposing stuff that has lost its life hundred percent to make it to make it work for something else again. So that’s kind of fun. Do you do any projects? I mean, you work on so much new stuff. Do you have old stuff that you try and kind of make work? Are you more like no, I’m kind of on the front edge of things.

Jay Mattison  [1:24:55] 
So that’s one thing where I do want to get better because I Historically covered like brand new, whatever’s just came out kind of stuff. And I realized I can do that because I’m a 34 year old man with a job. And like, a lot of the people who watch my channel can’t just go out and buy those parts. So it’s something I really have been thinking about long and hard lately. I definitely want to start doing either Craigslist builds or eBay builds because you can get a lot of great use parts. I mean, there’s tons of fantastic use parts that are still going to be reliable. So it’s something admittedly that I haven’t done in the past, but I’m going to definitely be doing that this year. Great channel. I don’t know if you guys have seen Ozi talks hardware. He does all budget stuff. So it’s, it could be like it’ll be like $300 Gaming bill, you know what I mean? Like something like that, where he finds super budget components from Craigslist or eBay and just does really awesome systems that are still super effective for games.

Mike Wieger  [1:25:57] 
Yeah, that’s my build right here. I 730 770 1060 and on old motherboard and it games streams, like you know, full TDP 60 so it’s not bad. Yeah, I mean all the older components quote unquote old still work very well. I mean,

Jay Mattison  [1:26:15] 
it’s not like you’re losing a ton unless you’re doing something crazy. Jamie I’m not gonna build edit 4k on this thing.

Mike Wieger  [1:26:22] 
But you know, for for what I needed to do. Yeah, gaming and podcasting and editing together some simple tinetti videos,

Jay Mattison  [1:26:29] 
gets the job done. Exactly. And you’ve saved like $2,000 a year from upgrading. Right, but

Jim Collison  [1:26:35] 
it is kind of fun to have the latest greatest No, yeah, trust me, I, I think you need to be on both sides. Like I think it’s good to have some stuff that’s cutting edge up front and some stuff where you’re just piecing it together on them

Mike Wieger  [1:26:47] 
and it costs you two sometimes more to do it this way. Because like, if I want to update the CPU to like a new CPU, this old, you know, the 1135 socket doesn’t even work with me anymore, right? So I’d have to swap out this entire thing if I really want to Any more upgrades this thing? It’s an entire swap. Whereas if I had spent just a little more money I could have gotten the new you know, so there’s pros and cons if you just need someone to right now that I works and you don’t worry about upgrades, but sometimes you can actually put an old trap which I realized too late

Jim Collison  [1:27:16] 
What was it? What was the name of that channel again that you

Jay Mattison  [1:27:18] 
sent? Oh yeah. Oh z so z like oz talks hardware?

Jim Collison  [1:27:23] 
Yeah. Okay, super good. You are at Tech everything on Twitter. You are I’m sure youtube.com slash Hey to we should see like a in your youtube.com slash tech everything. Yep. You are at Tech everything.com as well. In let me encourage you to go out follow Jay do all those things. His your videos are great. I mean, I just I really you’re kind of straight to the point. Now you’re straight to the point. That’s why that’s why I liked him. So go out there. Subscribe. Watch them as well. We’ll remind folks we’re live every Thursday. 8pm Central nine Eastern out here. We got around. kershner Bob’s coming back from think computers and we had to cancel that show because my internet didn’t work Jay we’re just really glad your internet actually came back because

Jay Mattison  [1:28:10] 
it literally like 755 like seriously

Mike Wieger  [1:28:14] 
come on and in stream yard quit on me halfway through internet because everything just everything nothing else seemed to be offline just well we offer a brief second we got it done

Jim Collison  [1:28:27] 
you know we did get it done a couple reminders you can join us in the discord group, the average guy TV slash discord in our Facebook group, the average guy.tv slash Facebook both groups are very active if you want to get it done. We want to thank our Patreon subscribers as well for helping do what they do each month is the beginning of the month and, and and I just got the check, appreciate Well, it’s not a check anymore, right? Nobody does checks in. My wife apparently still does checks. I just did the budget yesterday and she’s still doing checks but we appreciate you guys on Patreon you help us kind of keep all these things running. And so we appreciate if you want to join us in the Patreon group in West The show the average guy.tv slash Patreon gets that done. We also want to thank Maple Grove partners they do secure reliable high speed hosting for the average guy TV. So both media and web hosting plans start as little as $10 a month and you know, it’s Christian. He does it really, really well. And very, very efficiently. And so head out to Maple Grove if you need anything. Maple Grove partners.com. We will be back next week. Next Thursday. Actually, Mike, I think you’re out right now sadly, I’m missing mobbin more hardware, Jay, you’ll have to maybe join us in the yo you may like that one cuz these guys do the big RGB massive fans cooling everything. You might want to come in and just talk some crap over Sure.

Mike Wieger  [1:29:47] 
She says yeah, it’s okay Mike, you’re gone.

Jim Collison  [1:29:49] 
We don’t really need you by the way. We will be back next Thursday. 8pm Central nine Eastern. Thanks for joining us tonight. That will say goodbye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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