You know, this is some shit that I expect when dealing with some shady asshole on ebay, but LMG?
Bro… Are you ok?
I always wondered if Linus was actually a slimy POS, but this Billet Labs situation has cemented it for me. If you haven’t watched the Gamers Nexus followup video, definitely watch it.
I’ve been seeing this news article circling around the internet all day, and I have yet to see anyone mention what the monoblock actually is. It’s starting to feel like some kind of mysterious primal artifact, like maybe the master computer from which all flavors of Linux originated.
I saw the video on it. It is an extremely overbuilt water cooling system that LTT completely fucked the review on. I don’t really know if the cooler was any good since the testing was far from complete.
It’s an expensive novelty item and completely useless for practical purposes as much cheaper blocks can perform the same task just as well. It’s like that one time when LTT build an Xbox controller out of gold, nice bling-bling, but it doesn’t make your gaming any better.
I don’t think that’s a fair assessment. Comparing to a traditional loop, it has marginally better thermals, one less set of tubing (i.e. places for leaks to spring up), and a smaller form factor. Wether or not those are “worth the money” is completely subjective. As someone interested in custom SSF builds I thought it was interesting.
…much cheaper blocks can perform the same task just as well.
We don’t actually know this since no one actually test it, just to be clear.
Unless you are going the “My minivan works just as well as Ferrari for driving to work” angle, which isn’t what the high-end tech segment is really about.
The monoblock is a prototype water-cooling block, like in just the thing that actually makes contact with the thing you want to cool, not the piping, not the pump, not the reservoir, just the block. What makes this block a monoblock is that it covers the entirety of the gpu, so not just the actual graphics processors, but memory and power delivery, too.
Or so it appears to me.
It’s a cooling block for the GPU, and apparently it can knock off up to 20 degrees. However, it is crazy expensive, like 900$.
3-5 degrees compared to EK’s equivalents. Jesus people, even Billet labs says this and they are the manufacturer
That block is the internet, Jen. It’s incredibly important that you protect it or the elders will be irate
It is a water cooling block designed for a specific graphics card. It is a new type of design and Billet Labs sent their best prototype (as in, the only one they had) to LMG for review. Linus proceeded to strap it to a video card where it didn’t fit, so bad that there was a 1mm gap (which might as well be a million miles when you’re talking about cooling). Of course the performance sucked due to it being strapped to a card it wasn’t designed to fit, linus trashed the block and the company.
And here’s the part that just fucks me off. Billet Labs SENT THEM THE CORRECT CARD WITH THE BLOCK! There is literally no valid excuse for putting it on the wrong card, Billet Labs sent them the correct one!!!
And the thing that a lot of people aren’t understanding is the Billet Labs is not some large corporation, it is two guys putting hard work into a product. Unless I’m mistaken, they have regular ass jobs. People talking about them being able to sue… With what imaginary money? LMG is a 100,000,000 dollar company (at least). Their sloppy, misinformed, shitty, shameful, video basically has the power to cut them off at the knees when they did absolutely nothing wrong.
There is so much more to this, but whatever. Linus is a garbage person. I feel as though Luke is a decent guy but afraid to give Linus the reality check that he desperately needs.
Anyway, the first sentence answered your question I think. I rambled and ranted.
Thanks, the context you provided was important. If it was just the first sentence I would have been left with “ah, it’s a water-cooling block… wait, why is it such a big deal that it got auctioned off and lost? Water cooling blocks aren’t unusual. I have one in my computer right now.” The rest of the comment explained why this particular block was at the heart of such a fiasco and why losing it is so harmful.
Aside from that, when people criticized the video because he was essentially bashing a small company made by 2 dudes^1 , he then went on a rant on a WAN show saying that he wouldn’t review the thing again because he is not going to waste employee time and money into doing a proper review. And that he does’t really care because, ultimately, he thinks it’s a product that nobody should ever buy because it’s too expensive, even if the performance was great.
All said by the dude that used to make the weirdest shit and pay a shit ton of money for garbage, but god forbid someone made a waterblock for water cooling enthusiasts (you know, the kind of person that likes spending money on these products just for funsies, like audiophiles).
- This is funny because he always tries to avoid bashing big corps, like when Nvidia fucks up a product release, but they still find something positive to say about it. But a small company composed by 2 dudes that is lending you a prototype, which is not even their final product? A prototype that Linus himself (because it was him and one more dude) couldn’t be arsed to review properly and decided to complain all throughout the video? Let me step on them and destroy their business if possible.
Okay, would we be even talking about Billet Labs after a month if they didn’t fuck up this video and selling off the prototype? This situation has been probably the best case scenario for them. This isn’t to absolve LMG’s part in losing the prototype and selling it off but if it worked as intended we wouldn’t be talking about a 900+ waterblock for a gpu right now. It would be a long forgotten video because most consumers don’t give a shit about boutique water cooling solutions, wow what a filler ltt episode. There is a market for it but and I continue to say this what super water cooling enthusiast is going to follow the words of local idiot/“funny” youtube man who does stupid watercooling projects in the dumbest ways possible.
if it worked as intended we wouldn’t be talking about a 900+ waterblock for a gpu right now.
It does work as intended. LMG fucked up once again by using the wrong card. Billet Labs sent them a compatible card and LMG lost it.
I feel as though Luke is a decent guy but afraid to give Linus the reality check that he desperately needs.
I honestly don’t understand why Luke puts up with him. I’d have left years ago. Although I have never been friends with the pompous tit to begin with.
Probably because it’s the best paying job he can ever get. What’s he gonna do when he leaves? Which other podcast/YouTube channel can he work for that’s in the Greater Vancouver Area? If he leaves his live would get upended, he either needs to move or switch careers and in both cases probably takes a salary cut. This is how shitty bosses like Linus retain employees. Just look at other shitty companies where employees don’t have transferable skills that only apply to one very specific industry, like for example the gaming industry. Employees don’t leave even when the bosses behave terribly, like Riot Games
I get it.
Imagine you start working with your friend, and you start to get successful. He starts acting like an asshole more and more, the friend part shrinks and the boss part grows, and he’s oblivious to that.
But he also trusts you, would happily fund you building new things, and has an enormous audience. He’s only willing to share a small slice of the pie, but it’s a very big pie
Now either you leave and get a normal job, or you stay, get lots of autonomy, minor fame, and maybe a ton of money down the line, but you have to handle a narcissist.
Also by staying, you can steer the narcissist now and again - and that ripples out into the viewers
It’s a novel design of watercooler, on one side you screw a CPU, on the other side you screw a GPU, in the middle you screw the water pipes. So you get an i7-13700k + rtx 4090 in the size of an ITX motherboard, and because everything is screwed together is super rigid.
is a super niche and super expensive stuff that cater to 0.000001% of PC users, but seeing him shitting on the product like this (“it’s a shitty and expensive product that doesn’t make sense and nobody should buy it”) is painful
After all isn’t he always buying expensive and niche stuff for himself like insisting on having the monitor, keyboard and mouse cables converted to fiber optic because the PC must be in a custom rack design in the basement cooled with the water of the swimming pool. That instead is a cheap idea that everyone can do?
It’s a an $800 water cooling block for a graphics card made completely out of copper. One that Billet has preorder open for and expects to ship in “September-November 2023” to customers, yet somehow has only this single prototype of that they decided to ship to LTT.
I didn’t see the video, but it seems weird that they only have one prototype… It’s like the script from Grandma’s boy.
I didnt see anywhere that it was the “only” prototype. I believe it was their most complete or their pre-production prototype.
So likely a hand machined and finished item as opposed to something made with production tooling or in batches to reduce manufacturing cost. Something that could also be sent to reviewers as its essentially what the finished product will be. So not only are they out their best prototype, but the opportunity cost and the potential that someone like EK could have bought it and reverse engineered it to release a competing product with little to no R&D cost.
This incident has made me reevaluate some things. I could see this being a one off thing. Like an inventory error or a communication error. But the rebuttal was wild. Cancelled my floatplane subscription for now. Maybe they’ll turn it around down the road, but this one was a big mess up.
I have seen a ton of LMG videos and it’s very obvious that Linus doesn’t handle conflict very well and will just immediately dig his heels in if he feels that he is in the right.
Here is the way I see it: Regardless of who is right or wrong, this is a series of unfortunate events that happened. Small mistakes or misjudgments don’t always show themselves immediately. However, give it enough time and the floodgates will open and expose everything all at once, for better or for worse. When this happens to people who truly intended no malice, it’s a fuck of a thing to deal with and usually gets worse before it gets better.
When all of your mistakes are gathered in one place for everyone to see all at once it can seem much worse than it actually is.
Am I justifying the actions of LMG? Hell no! They need to fix their issues immediately only because they have such a large fan base that listen to their every word.
Regardless, I have sympathy for them.
These are not “mistakes”, these are willfully evil acts.
I’m just going to quote another comment here:
Billet Labs sent their best prototype (as in, the only one they had) to LMG for review. Linus proceeded to strap it to a video card where it didn’t fit, so bad that there was a 1mm gap (which might as well be a million miles when you’re talking about cooling). Of course the performance sucked due to it being strapped to a card it wasn’t designed to fit, linus trashed the block and the company. And here’s the part that just fucks me off. Billet Labs SENT THEM THE CORRECT CARD WITH THE BLOCK! There is literally no valid excuse for putting it on the wrong card, Billet Labs sent them the correct one!!!
Combine that with the image in the OP, and there’s just no excuse. These are not the actions of someone that “intends no malice”. This is not an “accident”. This is not a “learning opportunity”. This is not a “mistake”. This is a person doing everything in their power to selfishly extract every dime they can from both their viewers and this startup.
They intentionally lied to the viewers because trashing a product gets more views. They intentionally lied to the startup because they got more money from selling the prototype.
They do not deserve any sympathy.
Except this “series of unfortunate events” appears to be entirely self-inflicted.
We’re not talking about a couple of hobbyists making YT videos in their spare time; LTT/LMG are by this point a huge media content factory whose unrelenting drive to produce the next hot slice of monetized infotainment means they are making constant (and often quite large) errors and not giving these products the time and attention required to assess them properly.
If you have the time, Gamer Nexus’ initial video critique where they matter-of-factly listed all the reasons why LTT need to seriously reevaluate how they do business is a very interesting watch.
https://youtu.be/FGW3TPytTjc?t=99
Edit: wow, it seems to have finally sunk in - LTT posted this video not two hours after I posted my comment.
(Piped link because apparently the apology video is monetized 😑) :
They made a bunch of mistakes that were callous and might’ve smothered a couple guys starting out.
But then the lack of empathy - “it was a bad product, no one should ever buy it, and so my fundamentally flawed testing is actually valid”, “yeah they asked for it back multiple times and we auctioned it, but it was for charity so it’s fine”, “we agreed to compensate them, but it’s been months and we did that real quick after we got called out, but we’re going to make it seem like we didn’t need a scandal to do the bare minimum”
It’s all excuses, it’s all justification for why “this looks worse than it is, and actually we’re still the good guys”. It’s narcissist mental gymnastics, he still just doesn’t understand what he did wrong - besides being mostly excuses, every “apology” is totally off base on what they did wrong
Wait they sent a 3090 too? Why Linus tried it with a different GPU then?
Because they’re a disorganized clusterfuck and he couldn’t be bothered to slightly delay filming to get the proper card. Because for whatever reason they’ve decided they must churn out content at such a high pace that everything they do is like this now.
Honestly the only videos from the last year where I remember things not being totally jank were videos with Emily, but she’s barely been in anything since coming out a few months ago.
The logistics team is like four people and they have a gigantic warehouse of mess. They sometimes show it in videos, I’m surprised they can find anything.
The thing I don’t get about them is they keep going on about how they want to do all this professional grade testing. Ok cool, but that requires careful planning, and that does not go long well with their 10 million videos a day at any and all costs policy that they are currently pursuing.
The company I work at has an almost identical type of chaos and a good chunk of colleagues going in, taking something and not informing it was taken until we do inventory and have 30k of stock missing in some corner someone forgot to count.
We are currently in the process of doing it but we are only ~15 heads, 6 of which are currently not on holiday, we as 1st/2nd level helpdesk need to support our customers and it’s just a mess.
Now multiply that by the many employees has and how fast it needs to process it and I am kinda surprised how they havent folded yet in that regard alone.
Because he’s a fucking cunt. Always has been. No screwdriver on the face of the earth is worth $70 and no backpack is worth $250, but if it was it should have a goddamn warranty.
There’s a video of them reviewing email clients of all things and they shit on outlook for companies… Anyone who’s ever used outlook vs Gmail in a corporate environment knows that outlook destroys the competition because rules > tags.
Nothing they do is rooted in reality.
Hoodies should not be $100 unless they also come with a hooker who gives great head.
Fuck LTT.
To be fair, I agree with you, however I do have the screwdriver. I am a glazer and my screwdrivers get tortured to death. This screwdriver is honestly the best one I have ever owned. They did an excellent job and it absolutely is worth 70 bucks. I think they deserve some props for this, it’s very clear that they put a lot of work into it.
I do have to wonder though, they wanted to have 12 bits in the holder, but the holding area wasn’t large enough. Normal screwdriver bits are 40mm, The shorties that they use are 20mm… They designed the fucking handle… Just make it 40mm longer and then you can use regular size bits. I don’t understand why apparently literally no one thought of this.
Regardless, it is an absolutely fantastic product and it deserves phrase.
That said, fuck LTT.
Fuckin meh. A snap on is around the same price, but if the snap on breaks they’ll overnight a replacement to you. If the ltt breaks you’re sol.
Meanwhile, I can buy a kobolt from Lowes for $25 that has the same warranty as snap on but I just need to go to Lowe’s for it.
Or for $70 I can buy 10 ratcheting screwdrivers that are pretty dogshit from Harbour Freight.
For the price point it’s in the LTT screwdriver should be compatible with standard bits. How long until you’re bits break or get lost before you need to replace them? Will they be available at that time in the stupid fuckin custom size?
No screwdriver on the face of the earth is worth $70 and no backpack is worth $250
I don’t own either of these products from them, but let me tell you, that is wrong.
I own a 200€ backpack from Samsonite and it fucking rocks, it’s a different league from Amazon crap.
Also, sports gear exists, including backpacks.
Ackshually, professional grade tools are very expensive and they’re of different quality than what you get at Home Depot. Materials, thicknesses, manufacturing tolerances are different and more expensive. As a result they last longer, sometimes drastically. The MegaPro screwdriver LTT got theirs influenced by is around the same price as the LTT one.
Still fuck LTT.
…I’m fully aware of the cost of professional tools. I own a few festool products.
However, for a goddamn human powered fucking screwdriver, $70 is INSANE. My co worker is wearing the hooding rn, has the backpack and screwdriver, and will not shut the fuck up about how amazing it is, so trust me, I’ve been hands on with it. And for the price, it’s not worth it. Is it nice? Yes. Are there criticisms of it? Also YES. For $70 is should have a lifetime warranty.
I thought you were joking about the screwdriver until I had a check.
Christ alive. I saw the other items you mentioned as well. I’m impressed how they’ve managed to extort their fanbase for generic items.
For what it’s worth, I can get a set of 8 screwdrivers in the UK for £5 (set of 42 for £21), a laptop backpack for £30, and hoodies for ~£30.
definitely not generic. not sure about their clothing but the other stuff is darn good quality. The laptop backpack you get for $30 DEFINITELY won’t match the quality of theirs, the screwdrivers you mentioned are 1. not professional grade and 2. probably just a regular set and not ratcheting or compact.
Just because something is cheaper doesn’t mean it’s better.
Must nice to have all that time to care about YouTuber drama
Honestly I could care less if it was just YouTuber drama. The reason I care and the reason it makes me so angry is because Billet labs is just a couple of guys trying to make a product. They aren’t some big company or anything like that, it’s just a couple guys working on a passion project. But then Mr Big money YouTube star does literally everything wrong, doesn’t even bother to use the product properly, and proceeds to take a giant dump all over Billet labs.
Yeah, I’m going to be a little pissed off about that. Not because I care about some whiny bitch on YouTube but because I feel for the poor guys who got dragged through the mud and our potentially going to take a massive hit in their business once they finalize their product.
I am not defending LTT. They are innthe wrong.
But they sent a unfinished product to one of the most influencial tech youtubers, say that a couple of times and you realize it was naive.
There is many people working on prototypes right now that we do not know off. Because they are prototypes, not products. They played and got burnt. Again, LTT did wrong with them still.
With how bad it is to send an unfinished product to a reviewer, the reviewer could at the very least use the right equipment to fairly review it. If it’s such a terrible idea it surely doesn’t need the additional help of rushed incompetence to highlight any flaws in the product.
LTT have made tons of videos with prototype CPUs, GPUs, and preproduction versions of pretty much any other hardware one can imagine. I don’t think it’s naive to send such a reviewer that kind of hardware.
What LTT has done though in this case, with the making of the video, misplacing the GPU, selling the prototype, then the attempts at coverup and shifting blame… is beyond pathetic.
Look, I can’t say that I don’t understand the sentiment, but people calling YouTubers out on their bullshit is strictly better than ‘Nobody ever cares about anything outside of their 60 hour a week jobs that they work to pay for an overinflated cost of living in this hypercapitalist dystopia hellscape that they don’t have the emotional capacity to care about because of said 60 hour a week jobs.’
I want to hear about this because it means somebody still cares, somebody is still paying attention to the injustice, however trivial or removed from daily life it is.
It’s not just “YouTuber drama” though; LTT have positioned themselves as The Grand Knowledge on all things tech, so a good number of people turn to them for recommendations. And their recommendations are questionable.
Grand knowledge? I’ve never seen a single one of their videos that told me anything I didn’t already know about a tech item.
Mostly they make super edgelord cringe thumbnails and generally just have an idiots approach to the work they do by breaking things (the famous iMac Pro incident) or approaching things with the grace of a baby elephant.
He’s the computer guy for the 14 year old. It’s wild that the internet looks to them for anything other than shitty low effort product reviews and yammering on about whatever to fill up podcasts.
We get it, you don’t know who LTT is or their relevance. You can ask directly if you want to learn.
you’ve been stalking my profile and like replied to me on 5 different posts
Yeah, that’s not what this is. I’m relatively uninvolved, but after going through a few videos on this, they’re calling out ltt and lmg because they’re actively harming a small start-up and fairly directly misinforming consumers. Now that they’re branding themselves as professional tech reviewers instead of entertainers, the bar is a lot higher and it seems that they are NOT clearing it.
