Digital Foundry at E3 2018! (Patreon)

Hey everyone, Rich here with a quick update on what's happening for E3 2018. Well, on Wednesday, John and I sat down to shoot the videocast embedded on this page and you'll get some idea of the prep we've done behind the scenes to get as much material from the show as possible.

Tom and I are staying back in the UK, while John landed in LA yesterday, loaded down with his Panasonic GH5 camera (so good I had to buy one too), wireless mics, Atomos Shogun 4K capture unit, SDI cables, SD cards, SSDs and a ton more. 

Last year our 4K ProRes captures caused a bit of an issue - specifically that they were too large to transmit home over the internet. The solution I came up with was to build an i7-6700K based mini-ITX system which had to be undervolted (!) not to overheat while it crunched down those 1gbps files to something a bit more manageable.

This year, we're trying out a rather more elegant solution - the beautiful MSI GS65 Stealth, a 15-inch thin 'n' light laptop with a six-core/12-thread Intel i7 and a GTX 1070 Max-Q. CPU Cinebench R15 score comes in at 1063, meaning it outperforms a desktop i7-7700K by about 11 per cent, which blew me away. 

Gaming laptops have truly come of age not just as desktop replacements, but also as a viable alternative for machines like my tried and tested Retina MacBook Pro 13, owing to a mooted eight-hour battery life. It's something we'll return to after E3 because this overall package is genuinely a game-changer. 

On top of that, thanks to a wonderful assist from one of our Patreon supporters who came forward in our hour of need, we've got access to plenty of upload bandwidth, meaning that we can get more assets to you more quickly. Last year, John was limited by a horrific hotel internet connection of just 3mbps ('lol') meaning the amount of material we could cover back home was limited to say the least. It should be a different story this year.

So, what we aim to do is to get as much high quality material to you as possible in addition to our usual tech analysis videos. Plus, John and I will be recording more videocasts like the one above, reacting to the new games and announcements.

Any way, many thanks for your continued support - it should be a fascinating week!