- I think everybody in the audience who's ever built a computer would be familiar with the pain of trying to connect those stupid front panel IO headers. I hate those pins, they're terrible. That's probably the biggest challenge at this point. Other than once you get into extreme overclocking like handling liquid nitrogen or things of that nature. The table is very cold now. Hey, I'm Steve Burke and I run Gamers Nexus. And today I'm responding to my top 1000 YouTube comments. Yikes. [energetic music] The following comments came from your most popular video on your YouTube channel. What video is it? It's got to still be the Walmart video, I think. It is the Walmart video [laughing]. Yeah. So 4.2 million views. All right. What do you remember about making this video? I remember while working on it we were trying to figure out, okay, do we do true out of box experience like more reaction style to the build, or do we do all the benchmarks first and then come back to it later and talk about it? So we went with a hybrid where the first half was kind of reacting, because we were really trying to make sure we addressed people who were genuinely interested in buying this thing and not just trying to see a train wreck from the enthusiast audience. Then later we did some of the benchmarks. And then later we came back with follow up videos for testing the case, the power supply which actually wasn't bad, one of the best components of the system. That's the main thing I think I remember about it. Other than the fact that when I opened the box it was actually the wrong computer. They have three models, DTW 1, 2, and 3. And we bought the most expensive one. And then they shipped us the cheapest model instead. The customer service agent we called was extremely good, handled it very quickly and they did replace it. So that part they did well. Customer service, good job. Building the computer not so much though. Here's one of the first comments on that most viewed video. This is F dash up. If someone doesn't know about hardwares then they are going to be screw. Wow. Eli, you are a hundred percent correct. If somebody doesn't know about hardware they would definitely be screwed if they ended up with a computer that was completely different than what they thought they ordered. When did you start buying prebuilt PCs and consoles strictly for review and not personal use? And how often do you buy those things now? I started buying hardware for review in probably about 2012, maybe 2013. I want to say 2012 or so. Consoles I want to say the first one I bought for review it was probably a Switch or a more recent Xbox or PlayStation, maybe like an Xbox 1X I think I worked on. But those actually we we bought later and it was for tear down. So it was after I started feeling a little more confident taking components apart, which did take quite a while. This next video is your earliest video to reach over a million views. And your second most popular video. Do you know what it is? Maybe thermal paste. I've seen that meme going around a lot. Is it the thermal paste video? It is the thermal paste video. And that is exactly why I thought it was probably the earliest video over a million. So that was pretty funny. I really liked that one. We took a tube of thermal paste and I just shoved the plunger down until it emptied almost all of the thermal paste into the CPU. And that has become meme worthy on Reddit and Twitter. So I think that's probably what got it over a million. We used to do more PC builds. And one of the most annoying comments that we would get when doing a PC build was regarding the application of thermal paste. So we would show it, originally it was, here's how you should do it. And then later it was, well I'm just applying throw paste anyway and I'm talking about something else and we're filming it. And eventually we got to a point where I would ask the editors or a camera operator to do it in a way where we just wouldn't even show the friggin' thermal paste because there were so many comments about it. And it was always there's too much or there's too little. Typically too much with how I do it. I was getting sick of those comments and I was pretty sure thermally it did not matter. So that's why we decided to just, well, let's just benchmark this comment. We benchmark everything else. Might as well benchmark what the viewers say and see what we can find out or prove. Please reply to these comments from that video. We're getting meta now. So imagine someone actually trying to build a PC for the first time and then watching this intro. I remember this comment. I think we made it pretty clear in the video. But if someone is trying to build a computer and they're like, hm, how do I apply thermal paste? They type in thermal paste. They click on this video. And then they watch five seconds and they go, "Oh, okay. I get it. I don't need the rest of this however many minute long tutorial." They would have a pretty messy CPU socket, I think. What do you think is the best way to apply thermal paste. Just to empty the whole tube. No, I would say generally speaking, I like to do just an X. So we do a lot of extreme overclocking. There's liquid nitrogen on the table. That's gonna make some noise on the laptop. We do a lot of extreme overclocking and I've found that so you can manually spread the paste. It does help a little bit with XOC. But once you're talking just a normal PC build, doing an X on a CPU and applying the cooler allows me to get CPUs up to 5.8 gigahertz, six gigahertz sometimes. No problems at all. You're really just going for full coverage. You're just tryin' to make sure there's full spread of the paste. This is by far your most painful video even to this day. It's an absolute masterpiece. Thank you. It definitely, that's what I was going for. I was going for. So it's kind of fun with YouTube. So behind the scenes is you're always thinking about how do I make sure we get people interested in the first 15 seconds? Because if you look at your attention charts for almost every channel it's to be like a plummet right around the 15 second mark. You want to get people interested so that they get to the good information and don't give up too early. So I'm glad you thought that it was painful to watch because that's what I was going for with that intro. Why do you think people had such a strong reaction to this? So paste itself, the topic prompting the video, it's something that pretty much everyone has had experience with in our audience where most people have built a computer in the audience. Some people are brand new and that's awesome. But most people built one. And so they think they have a pretty good idea of how to apply paste. And so whenever they see someone else apply paste they try to correct it. As for such a strong reaction to the video we made? Well, I think we used Kryonaut so it was probably like $15 a thermal paste that we dumped for that intro. So that's probably, that's a pretty good reason to have a strong reaction. The following comments came from your third most popular video on your YouTube channel. What is it? Is it the AMD factory tour? I hope it is. Oh yeah, no, that makes sense. That's a very new video. The Stop Doing It Wrong about the closed loop liquid cooler orientation. We were speaking with some manufacturers and they had seen a surge in builds that were doing a bottom mounted radiator for a closed loop or AIO cooler with the pump at the top of the loop. And that's actually very bad. All of the manufacturers of closed loop liquid coolers and AIOs that we spoke to which is a lot of them, like half a dozen or so, basically unilaterally disagree with a pump at the top of the loop configuration. So that's the real encouragement we got to make that video. What are some other ways that gamers can get their system to ideal temperatures? Buying a case that doesn't completely obstruct the airflow is definitely number one for this. And you do get into the territory where there's noise and then there's thermals. And those are really the two key aspects of a case. And there is sort of frequency spectrum, too, with a case, where you start talking about whether the type of noise is more annoying than perhaps the noise volume. So if you have a lower frequency but higher volume noise for a lot of people that's not as annoying as a higher frequency lower volume whining noise. But anyway, you're normally looking at noise or thermals. Generally speaking, if you focus on thermals and you get a mesh fronted case or fairly open case, you can manually bring the fan speeds down to get equivalent temperature or equivalent noise, either one, to a noise focused case while reducing the opposite. So if you bring down, if you're noise normalizing you can end up with better temperature in a lot of instances with a more open front panel. And if your thermal normalizing, you can often end up with better noise levels. The one aspect that you don't get there is frequency spectrum. So depending on the type of noise that you have in the case like from coil whine, that may be a concern. So definitely case is number one consideration. And then other than the case, I would say undervolting is a really good thing to do. But you do need to validate the performance after to make sure you haven't brought down the performance by accident, because we've seen a lot of people do that too. In this particular video, we had a really cool demo that I was pretty proud of. Of a cut open AIO that we could use to actually show what was happening rather than me just saying what the information was. The one thing that I was unhappy about with that despite being overall very happy with the performance of it and the reception of it was extremely positive. Biggest downside with this video was being used basically as a weapon to hit other YouTubers or new system builders and say your AIO is upside down. And probably 80% of the time the comments saying your AIO is upside down or your AIO configuration is wrong, those were actually incorrect. Somewhere in there there was a disconnect where people just, I think got confused about which orientation was really the ideal or the correct one. And then they would go take their TLDR and tell other people you did it wrong and use our video. And it's just not really a nice thing to do to people especially who are new builders. It's really discouraging for them. And it's especially discouraging because that builder will probably go watch our video, read the con, and if there's a disconnect between the two of them, they'll be really confused. So that's where you get people who, like this person, like Ryan S, might be afraid of buying an AIO because it's too confusing what the message was. This is one of your first videos. So it is indeed one of the first, it's not the first. There are a couple of others like this one that are hidden because I was making them before I knew anything about what I was doing. And I would use like backing music and things that would get copyright claims, stuff like that. So there's a few other ones that are secret. So I never I never went to YouTube. It was a website first, like I said. YouTube was secondary. And I never went into it really with a goal of quote unquote becoming a YouTuber. That wasn't as much of a thing first of all, in 2008 or '09. The goal was really just, I don't know. I just started the website reviewing games and doing feature pieces on games. Really fun stuff like that, that I just enjoyed from a purely gaming, non hardware standpoint. So my plans for the channel, I think, were basically to use it just as like a dump for trailers and things like that but have the article written content be the focus. And then we'd embed the video. As far as could I have imagined what it would become? Definitely, no. This is, what I'm doing now is what I do really enjoy. And around 2009, 2010, I did have a job working in a testing lab for a major computer OEM. And that's all public and out there. But I worked for them and I really enjoyed working in the testing lab. I don't think I left that job thinking I wanted to build my own testing lab. But now that's kind of where we are. So it took a little while to grow into it. Definitely didn't think it would go this direction. I think I was always looking at it more from a doing gameplay analysis or let's plays, things of that nature, not really computer hardware as much. This is one of the first comments on your channel. I don't know what to expect. It's from Kushan and who says nice breakdown. Here's something you might have overlooked though. The experience bar. More importantly, the one at the very end of the video is different to the rest. Could this be a different game mode? That's an excellent observation. If I had continued working more on the game side of things then I think this probably would have been something I eventually picked up on was paying more attention to things like that. That's, I'm, I'm happy to see that was one of the first comments, because that's a an actually real comment. This is one of the most liked comments on this video. You gotta appreciate the skill required to make a 2009 videos seem like it's from 2001. That's funny. I think there was probably a reason to that. I'm almost certain it's because I didn't know the encoder settings to use. What were some of the biggest lessons you learned over the course of your career? Definitely still learning things every day, especially as we grow. Linus from Linus Tech Tips was previously in the series with Ars Technica. And I talk to him pretty regularly now, just about how do you deal with the scope of the operation, the core audience, the original audience versus the new audience, especially with a very quick period of growth for the channel. So we just went through one of those where he picked up a couple hundred thousand subscribers in a month or two. And that's 10% of the total channel size in like a month. That means 10% of your audience or my audience in this case now doesn't necessarily have the history of the channel or know what you've done. So they're forming an opinion of what kind of content you should be making based on one or two videos. As soon as you upload something that's a little bit different than what you've uploaded in their tenure versus the history of the channel's tenure, there can be kind of a, "Oh, I don't like this. This isn't the gamers nexus that I know" type of response. So biggest thing I've learned from that is just framing the videos, especially at the beginning, as we increase the reach to new people, framing them correctly so that people understand this is something we've done for a long time. Here's some past examples of it. Here's what we're doing this time. That way everyone's on board and on the same page. I think other big lessons I've learned, definitely knowing. So I talk about this a lot with other YouTubers. Channels that blow up overnight versus channels that take over a decade. We're one where it took over a decade. I think I've been doing this about about 13 or so years. It took so long to get any amount of success or being able to actually pay myself or other people that I was able to learn in a pretty safe environment, where if I make a mistake no one even knew about it. 'Cause no one watched or read my content. Whereas now if we make a mistake, it's a huge deal. And there's a lot of anxiety associated with it 'cause you have to figure out how do you deal with it. This next video is your earliest video with over 300,000 views. Do you know what it is? I'm not sure. I really hope it's not the how to flash ASUS bios one. Okay, good. All right. I'm good with that. We're cool. So that's Basic PC Troubleshooting. I forgot about that video. I bought like a folding card table. I put a white bed sheet over it and that was my set. And that was like a big deal to have that because before I was filming computer builds on the floor. So that's, I forgot this video existed but that's actually a really good performance. Why do you think out of all your earlier videos this one has so many views? This, I think this is around the period where I started doing a good amount of tutorials. So we did stuff like this and we had a couple of outlets cover some of our earlier videos like this that helped get them successful. This particular one I think is probably a matter of Google searches. A lot of people had a power supply they were trying to figure out if it was that are not. Please reply to these comments from that video. Lol, so what if all of my wires are black? What then, mate? This is a good point. I probably didn't even consider that. I will answer that though. If the wires are all black, then you can look up a pin out diagram for the cable. And as long as it's the side that plugs into the computer, it's completely standardized. Another thing you can do is take a digital multimeter and probe one side versus the other and do continuity checks. But pin out diagrams work great. My power supply just moves a little and the CPU turns too for like one second, and it stops. Does this mean the power supply is broken? I'm assuming they're talking about the power supply fan. Almost definitely. If the power supply itself is moving you should probably get rid of it because it's possessed. But if the fan's twitching, I'm guessing that this particular user probably didn't have the EPS 12 volt cable plugged in. I've made that mistake a lot. That's exactly the behavior. It could also be something like the power supply, yes. But back to the other point, though, when we talk to power supply manufacturers, they tell us that their most common reason for RMA is because people think that the fan's dead, when it's actually a feature. It's supposed to stop spinning so that it doesn't make noise under certain loads. So they started adding this other feature where the fan will twitch every now and then, to tell the user like, hey I'm the fan and I'm alive but that has also caused support ticket issues. So it doesn't seem to be a great solution to a silent computer that doesn't make people worry that the fan's broken or something. What do you wish companies would do to increase power supplies' reliability? This is a pretty fun question, I think. The most common RMA reason, I've asked a lot of the PSU makers this, most of the large brands, including some of the factories that we've been to, like in Taiwan and China. And the most common RMA reason is dead bugs in the power supply. Normally, dead roaches. How do you increase reliability with that? I have no idea. I don't know if they, they pre-install traps or if they have to try and close it off more. The following comments came from your Tour of the New, Empty Office: GN Moving Vlog Part 1 video. The new empty office that is now the couple of year old completely filled office. Please reply to these comments from that video. Rare appearance of Steve's legs from API Cars. Now and then people will joke about in the comments about, like take a shot every time Steve takes a step back. I think I do that so much because I didn't have the freedom to actually move in the old set 'cause we were right against the wall. How has the channel and your onscreen presence evolved since you started? The channel has evolved a lot. And that one relates back to some of the earlier questions about starting with games, moving into computer hardware over time. That's the single biggest change where we went from, I was really proud of series I made like, we had this Greenlight Spotlight Series that was about Steam's Greenlight program. We had one that I called, um, Heat Signature. That was the first one I had a custom animation for. Actually by Andrew, who now works here on product design and development for the store and on video editing. So heat signature was cool. But these were feature pieces we're really proud of where it was just talking about cool indie games coming out that we thought deserved more attention. I say we out of habit, but it was me working on those pretty much exclusively at that point. And then later on we started getting into the computer hardware. But early on it was reviews of games. Like I had Martin Baker on the team doing game reviews that were really good. And then we sorta hit this period where I went to PAX prime 2012, and I met some of the hardware manufacturers. And that was really the turning point. I went back. I decided to drop out of school and basically committed to this full-time and started working with all the hardware companies I had met at PAX. Is there anything you miss about the original set-up? Yes. The set wall in the background. I really liked that wood set wall. I still have it actually in the same spot in that house. And once we eventually moved to a bigger space my plan is to bring it back in and set up another set. You definitely lose some of the, I don't know if it's like, what exactly it is. Some of the character I'll say, As you get out of like a house environment. But we couldn't do stuff like work with liquid nitrogen overclocking where I get 180 liter tanks delivered to an office. They won't bring that to my house, believe it or not. Snowflake, my cat, who has still appears in videos for B roll. She is not in videos as much now because we don't film at the house. So I do miss that because that was a lot of fun to have like there's one video where she grabbed the script out of my hand and started eating the paper because I talked about Nvidia and we dubbed her the senior AMD analyst at that point. So that stuff I missed but we found ways to make it all balanced. But definitely there's a few things I miss about the old setup, yes. We've learned a lot of behind the scenes stuff for efficiency. Andrew was the first employee. He still works here and does all the, like I said product stuff and editing videos. Andrew and I both have really messed up sleep schedules. So it worked out well where I would tell him, "Hey, I'm gonna have this video ready at about 7:00 PM. Can you come in and edit it?" And we would be done editing at maybe five or 6:00 AM. And that's really true, like small company. That's just how it works sometimes. So that is obviously not sustainable for anybody. So as we got into this office we're able to speed up the efficiency enough where we could have videos ready kind of as people are already working. So now I'll film, let's say a section of charts that I have a pretty good calculation on how long it will take someone to edit those charts. How long it will take me to voice the amount of words that there are. And we'll film that. So while the person is, normally Keegan, working on editing I can work on the next piece. We couldn't do that at the house. It didn't work that way. Wasn't enough space and we couldn't get more people in there. So that was the biggest problem. Speed Round. Answer the following comments as quickly as possible because otherwise we'll be here all day. A hundred percent true. So this one is from Celeritas from 2019. It says RGB. The word that transcends all known bounds of language barriers. Yes, that is from our Huaqianbei SEG e-market tour in Shenzhen in China. I was trying to communicate with the shopkeeper. I didn't understand a lot of what she was saying but then I heard RGB. I was like, I know what that is. That I know. Oh, it's great to see Windows XP still kicking around in 2019. Also from a factory tour. Windows XP very popular in factories. I'm only here for Steve's 2014 hair. It's almost angsty. By Tech Inspected. I mean, it was fine for then, but we'll stay away from that haircut for now. Dave R says Yaskawa robots! Good to see the robots I program on a daily basis are featured in a GM video. That's so cool to hear. Why did they make BIOS updating so complicated and potentially dangerous? It's ridiculous. I tried updating BIOS wants and my computer went haywire. Fortunately with modern dual bios and with bios flashback it's gotten a lot safer. There's a lot lower risk that you'll break the system. Congrats to you. Been here since 5k subs. If you've been here since 5k subs, you've seen pretty much the whole evolution of the channel. So I'm always curious what people who've been around that long think about how things have turned out. If they're like, I'm mad it's not just games anymore. Or if they like how it worked out. Final Questions. What are you excited about these days and what's on the horizon? Definitely expanding the testing operation is the thing that I'm the most interested in. The most excited about. I'm currently looking at some really expensive like thermal chambers. I want to build a semi anechoic chamber. We would need more space for both of those things. They're huge. There's a fan testing, a fully automated fan tester that I really want to get. We would never make money back on it. Or if we did it take several years, but it'd be cool. Which video or series of videos has been your favorite and why? For sure, it's the factory tours. They are some of the coolest content. We spend a lot of time working with a lot of experts on the ground at each factory. There's normally translation involved. So, it takes quite a bit of time. It's easily a day to get through a complex factory. And it might be like half a day to get through fan manufacturing, which is another tour we did. That's my favorite series. It did extremely well in 2019. 2020 in March, right before things got crazy, we did another tour and ended up having a ton of logistical challenges because stuff started shutting down all around us. So we barely got out of Taiwan before they closed the borders. But we do have some videos yet un-uploaded from that series that I've been kind of holding on to. So keep an eye out for more of those. How does it feel looking back on your career and do you have any messages to your fans who have supported you? It's interesting because there's so, I'm still at a stage where I think Louis Rossmann has the phrase about, he calls it hamster wheel work versus real work. You have to keep running or the wheel stops spinning. So we're still in a stage where that's a lot of my job, but it's getting less so that way. I'm really happy with how we've been able to really take that core, literally the first ideal I had for this setup, take the core of I want to be sort of journalism focused to the extent possible. This is why I respect Ars Technica and all of their peers in the space where you kind of focus on the reporting of it. Telling a good story. Telling a fair story. And then you build the rest from there. Having viewers who support us directly even if it's just watching and sharing the videos that's what makes it possible to do all that. So thank you. [energetic music]