BTS Update & Rewards Shipped for $20 Tier (Patreon)

Hi everyone,

First up: We just sent our shipping team the manual shipment requests for the $20 Reward tier dating back to September, so you should be getting a tracking email in the next few days if you've been waiting for one. On the upside, Patreon now has an export CSV function for addresses. Believe it or not, I've been personally gathering the addresses and emails for all those Patreon shipments because there was no clean integration, but Patreon has updated its CSVs to include everything we need now, so we should be able to get these out faster going forward.

Also, we just filmed 2 Patrons Ask GNs and a behind-the-scenes video, with hopefully another soon. Those will be going up for Patreon backers this week and next.

Secondly: If you're not in the GN Patreon Discord yet, you can join by following this link: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/212052266-Get-my-Discord-role

Finally, some updates:

We're currently finalizing the Gallahad 240 testing. The 360 is done and results look good so far. It should be in the top 3 coolers, on average, and is right alongside the EK 360 and Arctic 360. That's your Patreon early look at the data. We've noticed that both Gallahad coolers have loud pumps, but that turning them down manually gets it under control. Running the pumps at full speed out of box is probably a little noisy for most people, so we have some testing with slower pump speeds as well. Mike has been running these tests -- he's our test technician we've been training on coolers for a few months.

As for what Patrick is working on, it's been cases, mostly: The Corsair 4000 series is now live, but the 4000X is next on the table, and we have some NDA'd cases coming in from a few other manufacturers. Patrick will be switching back to CPU testing shortly for the upcoming AMD Ryzen 5000 CPUs. We'll be completely rerunning all the tests in our CPU bench to get a fresh set of data, which means we'll be ditching our last few months of data to move forward with a clean set. This is always a painful move to make, as it costs a couple hundred hours of time (spread between the team, fortunately) to rerun everything, but it's worth it. We don't like to transition into wholly new generations on old data, just because Windows updates and GPU driver updates start to get screwy. We'll likely be moving to RTX 3080s for this testing and leaving the 2080 Tis behind.

For what I'm doing: I've been working on finalizing the last few partner model 3080s we have, including the MSI 3080 Gaming X Trio and hopefully some Gigabyte cards that we're waiting to receive. We have a request out to ASUS for the Strix, but it's been hard to get. There aren't many samples available for media, so partners have been spreading what they have out across all regions to ensure even coverage in other countries. We're OK with that, but we wanted you to know that there will be delays on some model reviews as the manufacturers wait for enough inventory. While waiting on that, I've been reading up a lot on volt mods for GPUs to try and learn more about how to control NVIDIA's extremely locked-down voltages. We're looking at both memory and core mods. I think we've figured it out, with thanks to Elmor, but I'm not sure if we'll do the mods. They get into territory where it's not as easy to reverse as a shunt resistor mod. Otherwise, I'm writing more standard operating procedures to document all of our testing for the new CPU test suite and GPU cooler test suite. Behind the scenes, I often write SOPs (typically running 50-70 steps) for our testing so that we don't screw things up and so that anyone here can run a test if we really get slammed with review cycles.

The biggest thing I've been working on, though, has been trying to figure out how to get my hours under 100-120 per week. It's not sustainable or healthy, but I don't want to slow down GN's pace, so we're working on putting some new processes in place to hopefully reduce my hours by about 10-20 per week by end of year. The goal is to mostly reduce my hours spent on non-public-facing stuff, like doing office dishes and trash, for example, which can be hired out or tasked to someone on the team. Not that this costs a lot of time, but it's worth maybe an hour a week. Find enough things like that, and maybe more sleep is in the future.

That's about it for now. There's plenty more going on, but that covers the most interesting stuff. We're expecting Ryzen 5000 CPUs soon for testing, but aren't sure of the embargo lift date yet. We'd expect launch day, if not just before. Launch day is November 5.

If you've been waiting for a backer reward, keep an eye out for a tracking email. We'll be combing through the messages on Patreon today as well.

Thanks again for your patience and support!