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The EK story goes a lot deeper. It's going to take some time to put together. A lot of tips and good leads going down rabbit holes. If you also have one, send to tips at gamersnexus dot net.

UPDATE/EDIT: There's a lot to get through for all this information, so we'll be parsing it for the next day or two and putting together a follow-up. We have accumulated some new business documents that shed some more light on the situation. Also had a lot of outreach from other former staff. EK will undoubtedly point to the fact that many employees have been paid, but in our eyes, not paying some contractors, shaving OT from employees' clocks as claimed by multiple TX-based staff, and not paying suppliers, is unacceptable and can't be rectified simply by having paid other employees. We received word this morning from a factory with complaints as well.

Will keep you all posted! Wanted to share this update as we have a mountain of documents to crawl through, but they're very interesting. 

OK, with all the big handheld reviews behind us (although we have more on the way - including the MSI Claw), time to get a gauge for how everyone feels. Very simply asked: Do handheld gaming PCs interest you? Like usual, not much nuance here. Do you think you'd actually use one? (We're not counting the Switch as a PC, but feel free to comment with thoughts on that!) 

I tried to read a Tom's Hardware article today. I couldn't find the article on the page. I also couldn't click anywhere in this minefield. 

What interests you more? We're making both of these, but the answer here will affect some of how we're finalizing this edit. Pros of each: For construction, as far as we're aware, there isn't much (or maybe any) media out there really showing footage of how a fab is built, but it's also less core to the hardware. For inside, it's more technical and core to the hardware you end up buying, but is also more documented. 

The amount of spambots on YouTube has continued to be unbelievably bad for a company so invested in "algorithms" and "AI," yet it still hasn't figured out that lewd profile picture plus emoji equals bot. As a heads-up to our audience, we just added several more emojis to the blocked list for comments. Emojis are a common linking trend with bots where they almost with 100% certainty will use one, and it's normally a group of about 10-15 they choose from. Just wanted to give a heads-up that several more emojis are on our block list to massively cut down on the bot spam since YouTube is still failing here. 

Devices like the Steam Deck, Ally, Legion Go, and others have become enormously popular. Our question: what name do you consider most accurate these devices? We keep seeing both and it seems yet undefined. The Switch is clearly a handheld console. Does the use of a more conventional OS like SteamOS or Windows change the name for you? 

Spent the last two days completely rebuilding our ATX case testing & reviews methodology. We actually began taking notes for this overhaul back in November of 2022, then started seriously working on it early in 2023 (which is why we paused ATX case reviews). There are a lot of massive overhauls and improvements to the testing to modernize it, introduce new types of data presentation, further improve accuracy and repeatability, and upgrade a lot of limitations of the approach that date back to 2016 on the old ATX testing methods. In fact, ATX case testing methodology was the first that I built with intent of others on the team executing on way back then, so there was a lot of room to grow. Really excited for these changes. No ETA yet on the first review to drop with it, but we will have a full long-form methodology video that'll establish and define the approach for years to come. Some quick notes on improvements:

- We are using the acoustic chamber for this! All future ATX case reviews will have acoustic testing done in the hemi-anechoic chamber. For reference, the old method for it dated back to when we were still running the tests out of a spare room in the old house!
- We've moved to a flow-through style video card and have studied its performance both blocked and unblocked to better understand the impact to CPU thermals. This seems to be the direction of most modern GPUs, along with thicker cards, so all of that is reflected in the new bench! Should help differentiate cases further.
- We are increasing the focus on noise-normalized testing, which was a bolted-on test to the old methodology that has now been fully defined and fleshed-out
- Benchmark charts now have more thermal numbers we can present. We are now logging VRM thermals, additional video card thermals, and more areas of the CPU than before. This will allow us to better itemize the impact to thermals from each case layout (for example, certain top fan configurations could benefit or hurt VRM thermals).
- Tests will be conducted with even more test passes (and better logging) now, giving more precision on the results and better error checking capabilities
- For internal use, we're improving data export and logging capabilities. As far as external visibility into that, it basically means we'll have a lot more easily accessible ways to visualize data or pull interesting results and present them for you all.
- We also have a lot of internal data for calibration of the bench over time to help avoid concerns of 'result drift' with time.

TONS more going on, but that's enough for now. This will be a work in progress for probably a month or two, but we're moving quickly on it now and putting together a methodology piece to fully define everything.

As always, the test methods are a living subject matter and will get updated with discoveries, ideas we have, and requests from the audience -- but this is a strong start that really takes what we learned from our CPU cooler overhaul and our old case reviews methods, then builds on it with massive improvements we've worked on over the many years of testing cases. Looking forward to sharing more, but wanted to give a brief preview!

Which (relatively) new cases do you want to see tested first?

Oh, we'll also do a full send-off for the old methodology when it's heading out the door! 

Time for your input! We're preparing a big Mega Charts update for the site to include a bunch of data for GPUs and CPUs. This time, it'll include the gaming/production tests (we've already published power tests). We need help identifying older CPUs that the most people in our audience have so we can run numbers for you. We're planning to include new ones, of course, and that'll include updated testing of CPUs like the 14 series, 7000 series, the 5600X3D, 5700X (non-3D), the 12 series, etc., but we want to know what pre-2021 CPUs you all have in your computers. Let us know. It'll help us prioritize. Please vote each other up if you have the same CPU in your build as someone else.

As you all know, there are dozens and dozens of options and we want to provide the most helpful information for as many of our viewers as possible, so this will help us choose beyond the usual suspects. Thanks! 

We're debuting some GPU power efficiency charts in our RTX 4070 Ti Super review going up today! They're similar to what we did for our Intel vs. AMD CPU power efficiency testing, except for GPU gaming. You'll get to see our first tests for FPS/watt with a handful of GPUs. Will be up shortly, so keep an eye out and check the channel. It also includes new power consumption testing for games, rather than the typical full power workload (only) that we've run. Can't wait to get this live! Cyberpunk ray tracing was also added in, by popular demand. 

We need some help identifying the name of a machine (just the type of machine, not the brand name) for our factory tour that goes live tomorrow at 8 AM GMT-5! This factory makes fan bearings, including ball bearings and fluid dynamic bearings, and this machine cuts the metal rods to the size that'll eventually be used for the bearing housing. Can any of our machine-inclined viewers tell us the name of this style of tool? This one was lost in translation and I don't have machining experience. Thank you!