There won’t be a big WAN Show segment about this or anything. Most of what I have to say, I’ve already said, and I’ve done so privately.
To Steve, I expressed my disappointment that he didn’t go through proper journalistic practices in creating this piece. He has my email and number (along with numerous other members of our team) and could have asked me for context that may have proven to be valuable (like the fact that we didn’t ‘sell’ the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication… AND the fact that while we haven’t sent payment yet, we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype). There are other issues, but I’ve told him that I won’t be drawn into a public sniping match over this and that I’ll be continuing to move forward in good faith as part of ‘Team Media’. When/if he’s ready to do so again I’ll be ready.
To my team (and my CEO’s team, but realistically I was at the helm for all of these errors, so I need to own it), I stressed the importance of diligence in our work because there are so many eyes on us. We are going through some growing pains - we’ve been very public about them in the interest of transparency - and it’s clear we have some work to do on internal processes and communication. We have already been doing a lot of work internally to clean up our processes, but these things take time. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but that’s no excuse for sloppiness.
Now, for my community, all I can say is the same things I always say. We know that we’re not perfect. We wear our imperfection on our sleeves in the interest of ensuring that we stay accountable to you. But it’s sad and unfortunate when this transparency gets warped into a bad thing. The Labs team is hard at work hard creating processes and tools to generate data that will benefit all consumers - a work in progress that is very much not done and that we’ve communicated needs to be treated as such. Do we have notes under some videos? Yes. Is it because we are striving for transparency/improvement? Yeah… What we’re doing hasn’t been in many years, if ever… and we would make a much larger correction if the circumstances merited it. Listing the wrong amount of cache on a table for a CPU review is sloppy, but given that our conclusions are drawn based on our testing, not the spec sheet, it doesn’t materially change the recommendation. That doesn’t mean these things don’t matter. We’ve set KPIs for our writing/labs team around accuracy, and we are continually installing new checks and balances to ensure that things continue to get better. If you haven’t seen the improvement, frankly I wonder if you’re really looking for it… The thoroughness that we managed on our last handful of GPU videos is getting really incredible given the limited time we have for these embargoes. I’m REALLY excited about what the future will hold.
With all of that said, I still disagree that the Billet Labs video (not the situation with the return, which I’ve already addressed above) is an ‘accuracy’ issue. It’s more like I just read the room wrong. We COULD have re-tested it with perfect accuracy, but to do so PROPERLY - accounting for which cases it could be installed in (none) and which radiators it would be plumbed with (again… mystery) would have been impossible… and also didn’t affect the conclusion of the video… OR SO I THOUGHT…
I wanted to evaluate it as a product, and as a product, IF it could manage to compete with the temperatures of the highest end blocks on the planet, it still wouldn’t make sense to buy… so from my point of view, re-testing it and finding out that yes, it did in fact run cooler made no difference to the conclusion, so it didn’t really make a difference.
Adam and I were talking about this today. He advocated for re-testing it regardless of how non-viable it was as a product at the time and I think he expressed really well today why it mattered. It was like making a video about a supercar. It doesn’t mater if no one watching will buy it. They just wanna see it rip. I missed that, but it wasn’t because I didn’t care about the consumer… it was because I was so focused on how this product impacted a potential buyer. Either way, clearly my bad, but my intention was never to harm Billet Labs. I specifically called out their incredible machining skills because I wanted to see them create something with a viable market for it and was hoping others would appreciate the fineness of the craftsmanship even if the product was impractical. I still hope they move forward building something else because they obviously have talent and I’ve watched countless niche water cooling vendors come and go. It’s an astonishingly unforgiving market.
Either way, I’m sorry I got the community’s priorities mixed-up on this one, and that we didn’t show the Billet in the best light. Our intention wasn’t to hurt anyone. We wanted no one to buy it (because it’s an egregious waste of money no matter what temps it runs at) and we wanted Billet to make something marketable (so they can, y’know, eat).
With all of this in mind, it saddens me how quickly the pitchforks were raised over this. It also comes across a touch hypocritical when some basic due diligence could have helped clarify much of it. I have a LONG history of meeting issues head on and I’ve never been afraid to answer questions, which lands me in hot water regularly, but helps keep me in tune with my peers and with the community. The only reason I can think of not to ask me is because my honest response might be inconvenient.
We can test that… with this post. Will the “It was a mistake (a bad one, but a mistake) and they’re taking care of it” reality manage to have the same reach? Let’s see if anyone actually wants to know what happened. I hope so, but it’s been disheartening seeing how many people were willing to jump on us here. Believe it or not, I’m a real person and so is the rest of my team. We are trying our best, and if what we were doing was easy, everyone would do it. Today sucks.
Thanks for reading this.[1]
Check LinusTech’s profile for further discussion and comments he’s had.[2]
The communication re: the auction of the billet product appears to be a genuine fuck up, and LMG needs to do as much as it can to own that.
The review, and subsequent doubling down on WAN of [sic] “do not buy this product” , however, is down right negligent. Billet are a start up and every review or demo of their product is absolutely critical to their success. To say “we want you to eat” is borderline offensive. LMG must recognise the majority who watch LTT are often casual and will forever just remember “Linus said no” and not question it further.
While I commend the attitude of not being drawn into an online pissing contest with GN, I think the least they could do is remove the video, retest and evaluate, and offer a sincere apology for the previous efforts.
Everything else is a QC issue. Do less with more, and you won’t have to spend so much time putting out very public fires such as this.
So they are casuals primarily but you expect some subset of them to be willing to buy a $900+ waterblock? I feel I’m going through brainrot right now with this shit. Any enthusiast is probably not going to take the youtuber “funny” man, who thought it would be a good idea to watercool his PC rack with his pool with no heat exchanger in between said rack and the pool installation or really any other dumb watercooling project they have done (that typically end in failure), as a person you should go to for your boutique custom water cooling needs. Like even in the video they were pretty blatant on how its going on the wrong gpu.
As Linus said, think of it like watching a Top Gear/VIN Wiki video about a super car. I just want to see it at its best, and going fast.
Yeah, talk about some downsides but recognise this isn’t a product for everyone. His attitude of “don’t buy it at all” was really bad faith.
3-5 degrees is the difference between this and its ek equivalents as posted by the manufacturer. This drama has been going on for a fucking month now. In a fucked up way, LTT covering this waterblock in the worst way possible has probably landed more eyes to Billet Labs than a proper one. Whoopie fucking doo a new custom boutique waterblock that cost nearly half the price of the card its meant to cool. I’m not here to defend the recent thing with the auctions since that is horrible and there is really no defense for it (I can understand how it could have happened but it should never have happened). I just think if there wasn’t drama this would have just been a filler episode everyone would have forgotten about since there is nothing to this block beyond it basically being made of solid copper and cools both the cpu and gpu at the same time. Its a nice work of milling and I applaud Billet Labs on their workmanship. This beyond the most recent revelation feels like such a nothing burger that has continued to grow pointlessly.
Edit: Which has only continued to grow because Linus never figured out to stop putting his fucking foot in his mouth.
While Linus’ handling of the situation is terrible, I agree there is nothing this waterblock could do to change that conclusion for the price that it costs, so the drama around that does seem silly to me.
But that’s missing the point of the product isn’t it? I agree with the super car analogy here. Linus was reviewing the thing like it was a car to bring the kids to school or go grocery shopping. Yes it’s wildly impractical, the kids don’t fit and the gas mileage is terrible. But that’s not the point of the product.
They should have tested it properly, praised it for the extreme engineering and beauty and then added as almost a footnote it’s super expensive and impractical.
And this coming from the guys that made a $100,000 dollar desk recently. I’m sorry Linus your desk sucks, it’s way to heavy, way too expensive and super impractical. But they didn’t say that, instead showing off how beautiful it turned out and what an awesome thing it is.