The latest podcast from Hardware Asylum is up and as ever it’s well worth a listen. In Podcast episode #75 Dennis Garcia and Darren McCain chew of several topics including the Intel Optane technology, the issue of forced obsolescence and the impact that AMD’s Ryzen processors have had on the PC enthusiast market. Plenty of juicy topics.

Forced Obsolesce Redux - When Intel launched Kaby Lake and the Z270 chipset there was a little known technology called Optane that had several people scratching their head as to what it was and why it was important. In March 2017 Intel released the new memory technology which, at its core, was nothing more than an SSD cache drive.

While that is an over simplification it is designed to optimize your pc performance by speeding up your storage subsystem. It sounds great however there are three fundamental problems; A)Optane is only available on Z270, B) Optane consumes a M.2 slot and C) Optane works best with slow storage unlike the fast SSDs you would normally use to build a Z270 system.

In this segment Dennis and Darren discuss the pros and cons of the new memory system and look at a few other unused technologies that were available and yet completely worthless at the time of their release.

AMD Ryzen 1700 - By now most everyone has heard of Ryzen, or that new CPU from AMD. Whatever way you look at it is quite impressive. So the question is, should you upgrade to Ryzen. That is the subject of this segment and goes well beyond basic performance and looks at things like cost and available features.

Listen to the Hardware Asylum podcast here.