Leo Says Ep 45: Tech roundup of 2019!

Today Leo is back with a special end of year episode of Leo Says, where our grumpy hero takes a look back at 2019 and provides his opinion on the best hardware of the year. For some bonus content, other KitGuru editors told Leo what hardware they were most impressed with, and there's also a look ahead at what may come in 2020.

00:15 Merry Christmas!
00:29 AMD Ruled 2019 – but we know that already
01:00 AMD RX 5700 XT graphics on 7nm with PCIe 4.0 costing less than £400 and now we need Big Navi
02:57 Netgear AX12 – WiFi 6 has arrived and it’s fast
04:04 Deepcool did a great job in offering competition to the Noctua NH-D15 high end Air cooler.
04:37 PCIe Gen4 SSD. 2.5/5GbE NAS units for home as well as SMB. 96 Layer NAND, 128 Layer hitting 2020
07:17 AMD has crushed the CPU market
08:57 Leo shamelessly plugs KitGuru Merch. Get some for the New year !
09:18 New Apple Mac Pro priced up to $50,000. Half the money is allocated to 1.5TB of memory
10:58 The Winners and Losers of 2019 – Leo goes on a rant about Nvidia, AMD and Intel
13:38 Controversial thoughts
18:34 Cinebench no good any more as a benchmark? eh?
19:53 Intel problems illustrated with Microsoft Surface
21:57 New Surface launching Christmas 2020 – Intel Lakefield
22:27 ‘Intel beats everyone’ – Intel marketing extraordinaire
23:01 Where is Intel going in the future? We talk to Steve Burke / Gamersnexus – ApeSheep!
24:47 We hope Nvidia will cut prices and launch Ampere graphics! and Intel XE Graphics
26:00 Trends in Computer Chassis. Whats happened to airflow?! do we still need optical drives?
29:57 Happy Christmas! – Leo will see you from CES in Vegas in Jan 2020!

LEO'S NOTES

Heck, it’s the end of the decade!

Happy Christmas to KitGuru’s readers and viewers

Dominic Moass Says
AMD RX 5700 XT graphics on 7nm with PCIe 4.0 costing less than £400 and now we need Big Navi.

James Morris Says
Netgear AX12 – WiFi 6 has arrived and it’s fast

James Dawson Says
Deepcool did a great job in offering competition to the Noctua NH-D15 high end Air cooler. The Assassin III outperformed the D15. All the latest Deepcool AIOs seem to perform well too and are completely their own designs.

Simon Crisp Says
Arrival of PCIe Gen4 SSD
2.5/5GbE equipped NAS units for home as well as SMB
96-Layer NAND with 128-layer fast approaching for early 2020

Luke Hill Says
AMD has crushed the CPU market.
Ryzen 5 3600 is best overall, Ryzen 7 3700X is well balanced, Ryzen 9 3900X is good value and Ryzen 9 3950X is truly impressive
Ryzen 9 and Threadripper 3000
Will we see Threadripper 3990X at CES?

New Apple Mac Pro has launched with prices up to $50,000 when you spec to the max.
Half the money is allocated to 1.5TB of memory

Winners and Losers in 2019
Nvidia dominates with RTX however Ray Tracing is currently irrelevant.

AMD’s Engineers have done superbly well in the past few years and especially in 2019 however, the AMD Marketing people keep claiming clock speeds that are fanciful. They have superb products

Intel’s engineers have had a terrible time while their Marketing People have done a superb – if dirty – job.

Intel has been obliged to ‘prove ‘ that 10nm is not broken and that product is shipping. Technically this is correct, however to my mind 10nm is effectively unavailable.

Instead the marketing effort has pushed the idea that benchmarking with Cinebench is wrong and single threaded performance is king.
In the meanwhile Core i9-10980XE pushes its AI features, as if any enthusiast website such as KitGuru could possibly test AI.

Microsoft Surfaces with older AMD Zen, new Intel Ice Lake, ARM and an announcement about Surface Neo and Intel Lakefield a full year before launch.

Two views of Intel fabrication process road map.

Intel’s view:
2019: 10nm
2021: 7nm
2023: 5nm
2025: 3nm
2027: 2nm
2029: 1.4nm

alternatively:
2021: 14nm
2072: humanity is torn asunder by climate change and ape-sheep from deep space
2073: 14nm+^9

When asked, our expert (Steve Burke) said “Ape-sheep will happen”

Nvidia has delivered Super versions of its existing GPUs however Ray Tracing is currently irrelevant. RTX 2080 is over priced and unimpressive compared to GTX 1080. We have to hope Nvidia will cut prices with Ampere but why the heck would they when Nvidia rules the graphics roost.

Perhaps Intel will save us with Xe graphics. That seems most unlikely. Intel graphics in 2020 will be headed to the data centre. Will we see a consumer Intel graphics card in 2021 or 2022? Perhaps but right now my expectations are very low.

Trends in cases
We have seen a great many with the emphasis on glass fronts and RGB lighting while pretty much forgetting about airflow.

At Computex 2019 I was talking with Gordon from PC World about PC form factor

KitGuru uses a variety of equipment to produce content:

Panasonic GH5 and GH5s Cameras
Panasonic GH4 Cameras
Panasonic G7 Cameras
DJI OSMO Pocket Cameras
Canon Cameras
Various PC builds

Final output – colour grading/titling etc:
iMac Pro 18 Core/Vega 64/128GB
iMac 2019 9900k Vega 48/64/1TB
Adobe Premiere Pro CC (PC)
Davinci Resolve Studio 14/15 (Mac)
iPad Pro 12.9 inch (2018) machines with LumaFusion
Final Cut Pro (Mac)

KitGuru says: Be sure to let us know your thoughts and if you agree (or disagree) with LEO. Love him, or hate him- he says it, cause he means it!

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