Advertise on podcast: The Hardware Asylum Podcast

There was an article posted recently about how a 3D artist bought some RTX 5090 cards from the second hand market only to discover that one was an ultra-rare 30th anniversary ROG card signed by Jensen from Nvidia. Makes you wonder how it got there, if its real and if it is really worth the asking price.

We often talk about building the ultimate gaming PC and the importance of the right video card selection or picking the best motherboard but, none of that matters if your physical gaming environment cannot make you comfortable enough to enjoy your games.

In this episode Dennis dives into his usage and research of OpenClaw the locally run personal AI agent that is really only as powerful as the LLM you have running it and even that is questionable.

In this continued Podcast extra the duo continues to discuss the death of physical media and provide some opinions as to why the market has shifted from physical to digital. Most will be quick to mention costs but, there is more to it.

There has been a major change in the world of media with companies and consumers actually preferring to have everything cloud ready. For companies it gives them an additional revenue stream and more control while consumers find it more convenient. What isn’t being talked about is the complete loss of ownership and silent guidance to obsolete certain new technologies.

When it comes to trade shows for the computer hardware enthusiast there are two major ones. First is the Consumer Electronics Show followed by Computex in Taiwan. While CES is not a showcase for computer hardware the Computex show puts computer hardware front and center, so much that now it has started to become a spectacle.

For the past few weeks Dennis has been testing the Looki L1 wearable AI device. This proactive wearable AI was making headlines during CES and has quickly become a talking point in AI circles. The real question isn’t what it can do now but rather what it could do with good software and a strong agent behind the glass.

Streaming games on Twitch has become really simple with the variety of tools available, capture cards and streaming software. In this episode the duo talk about the involved process of streaming retro games using period correct retro hardware

We get gaming PC questions quite often and decided to revisit the process of building a budget gaming pc for the most popular games of 2025. As of this Podcast we are still in the middle of a memory shortage which can alter prices considerably.

It is not uncommon for board games to become a video game, one famous example is Dungeons and Dragons where the tabletop experience and adventure were ported to the PC to extend the universe. As it would turn out, quite a few games have been ported to the Board Game genre including titles such as Doom, Pac Man and Slay the Spire.

Recently there have been changes to the import rules for routers due to prolific security issues that shouldn’t have been there to begin with. Of course, this issue is not new but there is finally a governmental regulation in place to minimize the risk.

Over the past several years we have watched as the motherboard audio solution slowly started to become less advanced in favor of a two-port analog USB solution that nobody uses. Creative stepped up with the Audigy Fx Pro sound card as a solution but, does anyone want it?

One of the constants in the enthusiast PC world is that builds change and in this episode the duo discuss the recent cooling upgrades made to the Podcast and Stream Machine used in the Hardware Asylum Labs followed by an introduction to a new keyboard project for the cyberdeck build.

While the Retro PC projects have slowed, we still get excited for when old hardware happens to show up. In this episode we do another blind unboxing of a Retro PC care package with some interesting hardware from motherboards to coolers.

One of the biggest challenges related to AI is finding something to use it for. The most popular option are chatbots but many find success with machine learning or system automation. In this episode the duo talk about building a local LLM voice assistant with a Raspberry Pi Zero and some open source software.