Actually, if you take a look at a longer time span than one year, I'm sure that Mozart has far outsold Britney... :p


Like I posted earlier, if I want criticism, I'll put it up here: that's what I got. Some of it was relevant, some not, so I'm left to sort it out for myself, and use what's constructive.

What's sad is that most of it was useless...:( Oh well!

And if you looked at Procooling's total history of writing articles and reviews online then more people have read read our opinions than Ion's site. Your point? I have one: I don't go waving my dick around and bragging about it.

What is really sad to me is that the comments about objectivity and running websites for the benefit of consumers and not mfgrs IS the useful part of this thread. I doubt that you guys will hold it in the proper regard though.

Reviewers should always stop and think whenconcluding "Would I be happy if I had just paid for this product out of my own pocket? Would my best friend who I see every day be happy with me if he bought this based upon my recommendation?" as well as "Is the mfgr going to be upset with how I say this?". When you don't, EDUCATED consumers (you know the ones that Ion would rather not have read his previews) can see right through it.

Credibility is a website's only real asset. Keep that in mind. If perception is you are in mfgr's pockets or simply not doing quality reviews, then it will hurt you in the long run.

hey, why not me too ?

a MAJOR goal of mine is a dead quiet computer
so I read about everything I come across related to such, most of which is European or intended for the European market

unfortunately manufacturers' descriptions are fluff and hype, and many 'product announcements' are vaporware
- are review sites any better ?
seldom
so what was this 'preview' ?
an infomercial, not suggesting it was paid - but little hard content to analyze

so we/I will have to wait, no biggie
but Martin
when you DO get one, please sort out the heat load capability of each part of the system;
not just a gee whiz, works just fine

Thanks guys! Those last two posts were the most usefull yet! ;)


Did anyone catch the pock shot taken at the unit, on the last page?


I too, would have liked to see the line: "it's dead quiet, it really is!". I consider the preview as something to make me aware that the product exists... hum... that's what a TV commercial does to me... Ok, but I didn't have to watch 20 hours of TV to find it! :p Honestly, I would have never found out about this upcoming product, if it hadn't been mentionned in some of the forums I visit every day.

Whats your point? You know nothing usefull about it now anyway. :shrug:

Just aswell not know about it at all and save 127,000+ viewers time. Interesting stats BTW. I would be asking yourself why you have 127,000+ views on a article yet your forum topic of it is at 92 views. Here I will post a link and give you some extra hits being thats what your after anyway: http://www.nordichardware.com/forum/...pic.php?t=1351

That's all I will bother saying. Point made take it as you wish.

Ion: Your post has proven what many have thought about you and your site. Quantity vs Quality is a bad way to run a site... but does fit the form of most other scam review sites on the web. Dudes who have to claim some rather insignificant and arbitrary number to justify the validity of a "preview" (aka : Paid Advertisement) dont impress anyone.

I mean I think most people know that Zalman needed a lil reach around handjob (ie: the multiple page ad banner) in order for them to give you the first real review. But then again based on this 'preview' I think I could extrapolate the results before you even post them. "it rox0rs!. WE LOVE ZALMAN!. PRODUCT OF THE YEAR! EDITORS CHOICE!". Because actual temp measurements (based on past reviews your site has done) wont be calibrated, or relational in any way to real performance.

But with 127k reads how can that be wrong!!! tripled your readership in one day!. We must be nutz!

Just another leach site helping burn away the rest of the remaining credibility in the industry.

1. Please find the parts of this preview that makes it look like a commercial. Don't say "all of it", but please seriously try.
"This case is not for everyone - NordicHardware.com" will probably _not_ look good on Zalman's awards-site.
You have absolutely no reason to call this a commercial any more than any other preview ever written.
Sure it contains a lot of nice pictures, you don't like them? Disable them in your browser then.

2. You are never forced to read previews, you do so to find out more about a certain technology or product. Tell me what you did _not_ find out in this preview, except for the performance, which we for previously mentioned reasons _can't_ write about. If there is anything you want to find out, I'll ask Martin of it and he'll probably add it, right?
You wonder whether the case is quiet? This is a prototype of a case with the HDD as only moving part. The HDD is mounted using a lot of rubber, coupled with a massive metal design. Also, HDDs of today are very quiet. Now if you can't draw conclusions from that, wait for the full review.
These lines are from the first page: "This is a prototype of the case, hence we are not allowed to publish any benchmarking results with this system. A review of the final version will be done later on, but until then you'll have to settle with this preview."
If you read that, then why complain at all?

3. My post demonstrated that you are 5 whiners and that 127,000 other people thought that this was interesting enough to read more about. Nothing else. Some love new technology, and a small minority likes to complain on other peoples' reports on it.
If you want to read better articles, then help improving them by thinking of ways to do so. If you just feel like whining and can't come up with any positive or helpful feedback, then why do you even try to call yourselves superior? If you can't do it better, then you aren't better, only more prone to whining.
I wouldn't call other sites bad if that was what I was trying to achieve with my own.
Perhaps credibility comes from complaining on others, or perhaps it comes from providing readers with what they want: helpful information. To do so, there is a road to walk, no one is perfect when they are new.

4. Please tell me how you want previews to be written, and by previews I don't mean reviews, because then no one would ever write any previews. Obviously, this preview didn't fulfil your needs, so you must be missing something.

5. Perhaps I read this preview in a different way, but the conclusions I draw from it are these: It is quiet, it will cool you computer at _least_ enough for it to work, it is heavy, it is large, it is expensive, and Martin likes it. Do I think he will use a lot of CAPS LOCK in the full review? Probably not. Do I think he will still like it? Probably. However, I can't help to think that I can draw my own conclusions. At that price, I won't ever buy it unless I get very rich.
You realize that there are expensive, heavy and large things that still are good? Look at your car for example, no one forbid you to say it's good or to like it just because everybody else might find it too large, too expensive and too heavy.
I think I can extrapolate the results before we even post them: This case is nice, but you may be too weak to carry it, have too little room for it, and not enough money to buy it. Do you want to buy it? Then that is a question of how you spend your money.

6. Temp results are important. If you expect great results, Zalman explain in the manual that overclocking might not be so wise without using a fan to cool the case. That should give you a hint, wait for the review.
I guess people will be more interested in dB though, if they want to overclock and cool their computer, they will probably invest their money in a Vaporchill or the likes.
If you feel that your own temp-tests are more accurate, go ahead and test the case yourself. Please share the results with us.

7. You are not Mozart. You are the critics complaining on Britney. That is so because you bring absolutely nothing to the table. You did not produce anything on your own to compete with.
Britney tries to give her listeners what they want. She "makes" popular music. Unless you can make music that's better than Britney's, I suggest you try to help Britney so that you can enjoy her music, try to perform better than Britney, or perhaps just refrain from commenting.

8. Our forums have not yet become popular, we are rather new as you know, and there are quite a lot of other forums to compete with. Thank you for linking to them though.

9. This is irrelevant, but none the less: www.alexa.com, the company that measures how popular a site is by page views and visits, ranks NordicHardware.com on the 12,741th place in the world, and procooling.com on the 71,300th. Perhaps that is correct, perhaps it isn't, doesn't matter to me. Anyway, NordicHardware.com is just our english version of the site, 8 months old, and still much smaller than our Swedish site ranked 8,186 in the world.

10. Yes pHaestus, that is absolutely correct, that is the main reason for being a reviewer.
Just in case anyone forgot though: This is a preview, and no, you find absolutely no sign of us saying: buy this case. If Martin concludes that in the final review, then may it be so.
However, Martin will have that in mind when reviewing the case and no, if you read any of our reviews, you'll see that we do not suck up to mfgrs and yes, we do always try to be honest and think of our readers as most important.
That is just why all your whine about us not being objective makes me so irritated.

Nothing to compete? We posted an article at the same time:

http://www.procooling.com/articles/h...haestus__1.php

Note the purpose and the tone: to help readers make educated buying decisions.

//edit removed personal attacks

I guess that I just can't argue with alexa rankings. Clearly I was wrong to have an opinion about your website and to suggest that you could improve things by being more consumer minded. I will work on improving my alexa ranking so that one day I might be qualified to have an opinion.

**** I wasted all that time in graduate school getting a technical education. I should have just concentrated on total page views!

And my comments about your objectivity come directly from the content you post. I read a waterblock preview where the reviewer could tell a block would be a great performer just by looking at it! In this preview we have all this discussion without the need for any testing or data. No matter how many people visit your site, you are either sloppy, incompetent, or in the pockets of mfgrs if this is modus operandi. You pick.

There have been a number of reports on the inaccuracy of Alexa. You may prefer to base the definition of quality of your site by some number some website gets without using real traffic data. I prefer to look at the content to base quality and such. But that's just me.... I'm crazy like that.

I mean being a webmaster of such a lowly ranked website on some arbitrary stats page obviously makes any comment irrelevant compared to the god like status that your site ranks at. Infact I am going to shut down procooling and just make it a mirror of Nordic hardware just cause we cannot even compete with such a powerhouse of testing and content elite.

I do believe that people can read... they do know its a preview.... but its wrote like a half assed, no backing data, review. Which bears great similarity to other items called 'reviews' on your site. That could be the reason for the confusion.

Joe if you shut down Procooling I guess I'll just have to start a Nordic Hardware fan site!

Seriously though it doesn't look like anything productive is coming out of this thread. Perhaps it's time to just let it die? And next time that Nordic Hardware posts the definitive review or preview or whatever of an amazing new product, perhaps they could just keep it to themselves and off our lowly little no traffic forum full of whiners.

Ion

What I have gleened from this thread is that I will never be going to your site, regardless of its content.

Each succesive post of yours is just continual word-vomit, and is not furthering your cause.

Take some time to sit back and reflect on what has been stated here, and make some coherent posts after you have cooled off.

BTW is was one of your guys who posted the link not one of us.

it's funny when either Jaydee OR Joe get involved in threads like this then they escalate.

//edit: smartass comments removed

Gotta be good at something :)

Second that! :D

Actually, I'm very interested in heatpipes.

We reviewed a (Zalman?) VGA cooler, but it turned out to be big, bulky, heavy, and didn't perform all that well. We also reviewed a CPU heatpipe cooler that actually worked very well (not Zalman).

Zalman went with heat pipes everywhere, which is probably why the case is so heavy.

So what I know is that it's going to be heavy (not that I care), expensive (a no-no for me), and that Zalman doesn't have a good record with heatpipes, so page 9 of the preview was clearly indicative of what this product is going to need: a fan. Kinda redundant for a fanless case.

So if I was a music afficionado, and really wanted complete silence, that's what I would pick, but otherwise, I'd stick to more conventional solutions. This is something that gmat would be all over.


As Cathar pointed in a thread over at OCAU, heatpipes will eventually add to the total heat resistance, so they're handicapped from the beginning. It's still possible for a heatpipe to work reasonably well though, but that's something that's really, really hard to do. Info on heatpipes is pretty scarce.


As for Alexa, I don't know anything about it, other than the name and the general function. If anything, I'd like to see the total individual hits for all nine pages of the preview, to see how many people read the whole thing.

Hit stats can be used to interpret many things, it's just like any statistics. One could say that ProCooling has less hits because it's more specialized, and so may not necessarily fall within a broad and general interest. How many times have we been called "anally retentive"?


What I don't get is why we're wasting this thread in endless chatter, and not discussing the product itself. Gmat, where are you?!?:cry:

WTF Ben? What is there to discuss about the product? A bunch of heat pipes that may or may not work in a big black case on wheels. :shrug: We all know about heat pipes Ben. Not like this product is revolutionary, unless of course it performs better than anything else, which we don't know. There is nothing to discuss.:shrug: I see a big black case filled with individual heat pipes that they have been working on for at LEAST 6 months that has yet to be proven to work or not.

Ben, when we know if that damn thing works or not then we can discuss how to make it better or what made it work well and if the idea is worth looking into on a hobby level. Untill then it will be nothing but speculation and usless banter. Well you know, like a 9 page preview... :rolleyes:

I simply do not understand your thinking on any of your replies in this thread. Do you want to discuss heat pipe technology in general, or this products use of it? If in general then start a thread abhout it, if this product then whats to discuss if we know nothing more than what the exterior if the thing looks like.

Well whatever.

Try to focus on point 1, 2 and 4 please. I clearly marked the point about traffic as irrelevant.
If you want anything productive to come out of this thread, you are welcome to share your opinions on how to make a preview better.
What do you want to know except for what you can already read in that preview? And again: benchmarks can't be had yet.

If you feel that previews are a waste of time, then that is your opinion and you seriously don't have to demonize a whole site and it's other contents because of that.

Jesus! Seems like all the procooling regulars have got foresights on the ends of their noses nowadays! What kind of mindless, whining, childish, elitist, jealous sniping passes for 'replies' here nowadays?! This used to be a good place for no bullshit facts. Now it's a fact it's just BS opinionated sniping at anyone and everyone who is'nt one of the 'anointed' few who are 'too clever to even try' or a campfollower...

This site gives nothing to H2o users anymore, it has nothing but an imaginary 'high knowledge mark' of unusable info (used to 'rationalise' it's condeseding attitude towards all other sites!) It's constantly slagging everyone off without giving anything itself. It gets old and repetitive real quick...

'ProCondesending' Where the completly predictable come to look down :rolleyes: ...

What a waste of a once good site...

Maddogme: Sorry we are no longer meeting your expectations. If my writing is currently "useless info", what would make it more relevant to you? Perhaps editor's choice award icons? Or maybe make the average article 6 or 7 pages longer and remove all the testing results?

I am somewhat surprised to see such comments from you directed at me; I seem to recall always being helpful with you in the past.

No worries. To be honest, I write articles for the interested, and I assume that they will pick up the technical background needed to read things I write. Perhaps learn something of larger utility. Guess that makes me an elitist prick; I should perhaps keep teaching in the classroom and limit procooling writing to "OMG check out this new stuff I got from a mfgr! 10/10 editor's choice I can tell by looking at it!"

Ion: If traffic is irrelevant then why did you bring it up? To start shit.

I haven't demonized your site, but I have certainly formed an opinion based upon you and your actions. When someone comments on the quality of writing on your site you make personal attacks. In my experience, people are normally defensive when there is something to hide.

And while I am thinking about it, I occasionally do previews as well. Here is a World Exclusive Preview (haha) for the Swiftech MCWChill TEC-based water chiller:

http://forums.procooling.com/vbb/sho...&threadid=8126

Not many pictures, no marketing spiel, not much fanfare, and unfortunately full of useless information (like how it performs) and condescending tone (like unabashed technical discussion). Of course it was only posted in my worklog as the review is a work in progress. That's how things are done here btw; not just talking out of my ass with nothing to back it up. Now it could be complete garbage; only 6700 views which are the real mark of a man.

ah pHaestus, here you go again
you are comparing yourself to their "Watercooling Expert", and he can tell by just looking

and you know that at least 3000 of those pageviews were by me, the Swiftech troll

but I have to ask, of all the piss poor sites out there - why does this one deserve so much commentary ?
- returning to the well known theme; most are not interested in analysis, an opionion of whatever sort is quite sufficient

and yes, they write for their audience - not this one
let it be
do you not recognize that Ben is trolling this site ?

Fair enough Bill. Perhaps I should just implement a redirect on the Pro/forums where when a Nordichardware link is posted that it replaces it with a random link to a site with large breasted women? That should both improve the response to their content and quell any complaints of being too highbrow.

yes, YES, YES
now that is relevant !

BTW, there are some very good looking NORDIC women

See? This is why they pay me the big bucks around here!

Seems that almost every thread I read from here is nothing more than bitching or bashing a product/person.

2 Years ago I loved procooling. You guys were top notch, but ever since then it has gone downhill

There is also a similar forum like this.. called the Hardforums.

Moderators, do as you must, delete this post, ban my ass, whatever.

There is no more reason to read the bullshit that comes from here anymore.

Later/

We don't typically delete, ban, or edit posts (unless flagrant personal attacks are made). Sorry to see you go Maddog and MSCooling. If you find another water cooling site with the same breadth of experience and technical discussion then please let me know. There are a bunch of assholes around here and I have been looking for somewhere else to hang out for a while. :) The overlockers.com.au forums aren't bad and would be my second choice I think after proforums.

Also you know what MSCooling? Hardware websites in general have gone way downhill. The tech sector crash and decline of ad revenues made a lot of sites deperate to find enough money to keep going. And the manufacturers got a lot shrewder in manipulating the online media with NDAs and conditions and only providing products to those that promote. And Joe was as far as I know the first to comment on this publicly a year or so ago to a huge backlash among other webmasters. And that's the same thing we are saying here; hardware sites aren't run for consumers any more but as a marketing tool for mfgrs. It's not a popular thing to say but it's true. And what do we get when we make these comments? People call us bitchy and leave the site to go to places where the opinions of readers don't even matter. Yay logic.l

unfortunately I had to give up my OCAU habit after more than 3 years of posting there
some adept people, a few very much so, but if you criticize one of them
- stand by for they will all gang up to attack the 'attacker'
- the issue becomes quite lost
the Aussies protect their own at the expense of objectivity

MScooling
I have 3 posts in this thread- all fairly mild,
to what were you referring ?
or were you just stirring up some shit ?

I have been here on and off for some years
if you did not like me before, what has changed ?
true, there are several on the hunt all the time (ignore the issue, go after the individual)

and as I type this I see your point
yes, there are proportionally as many dickheads here as on the hard forums
no more argument on that issue

"When someone comments on the quality of writing on your site you make personal attacks. In my experience, people are normally defensive when there is something to hide."

Sure.

"OK... I got a few observations to make.
First. DONT CALL IT A PREVIEW. its a Commercial!
Second. those seem to me to be all Zalman produced PR pics NOT yours. But you say its in hand?
Third. How the **** can you have a "Conclusion" portion of a PREVIEW?! How can you conclude ANYTHING without reviewing it?
I call bullshit by a site desperate to claim a "world exclsuive" on a product that either it doesnt have or isnt allowed by the company to "review" it.
Whats next? Late night infomercials hawking knifes on the Home Shopping network?
Lame."

That made me defensive, call me wicked but it's true. The creator of this great site calls our preview a commercial. Still no one has been able to support that with quotes.
He claims, without any reason or cover, that our nice pictures are from Zalman. He still hasn't said that he's sorry for that.
He wonders how we can have conclusions, instead of reading it. I mean, it's one page long, it doesn't go: 0110100010101, there are real words in it.
He calls it bullshit after having just used bullshit to accuse us on 3 different areas.
He then go on by accusing us of previewing the case without zalman's approval. Why would he say something like that?
Then finally, after some dark prophecy, he calls it lame, without giving any advise or hinting of ways to improve it.

That must actually be the most rude, impolite, offensive and at the same time stupid post ever made by a person. I don't think posts like that should be used to comment on any news people post here. If the Joe the owner write like that though, I guess the rest of you should too.

Still, not a single one of you has yet been able to find any ways to improve the preview, or even ask a question you think you need an answer to. This is the third time I mention it.

I admit that I have been impolite as well, but really, there are limits.