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Zogthetroll · 03-20-2003, 08:57 PM

this is really nothing more than me venting my annoyance at what has recently become a pet peeve of mine, vague or less than helpfull hardware reviews. a saying i like that could be applied to these is "if you're going to take the time to do something, at least do it RIGHT". i'll explain what my ramblings are about. in searching various sites to do research on computer hardware, i would read the reviews/comparisons to try to get a feel for how a particular piece ranked, unfortunately, a large number of sites tended to consistantly do a few things which made the review have little to those looking for a good comparison & didn't have much of a knowledge base to work with. take heat sink & fan combos for instance. in one review of a thermaltake volcano 9, the author proceded to write a fairly decent article and ran tests of the HSF at different speed settings & at a few different clock speeds, which is quite informative (as long as i have the same hardware, case, & fan setup).

rule number one for accurate graphs/charts, always include a baseline, in this case, another HSF. another slightly more informative review (and the more common type), the author compares the HSF to his "stock" HSF (please, a few more details would help), which could be any number of a differant variety of HSF (from really crappy, to stock hsf that perform suprisingly well, again, not a good baseline).
in retrospect, i'm probably being a bit harsh here, but i'm looking at this from the perspective of someone who's relatively new to aftermarket cooling products & doesn't have a lot of experience to draw from, & i'll be the first to admit it. so i guess its all a matter of how familiar you are w/ the hardware or not. regardless, it would be nice to see a bit more time invested in some of them. btw, my hats off to BillA & others who do turn out quality, indepth product reviews. i'm not really expecting any responses to this, i just felt like expressing an opinion to those w/similar interests. (my wife gets this glazed look after a certain amount of talk about computers)

03-20-2003, 08:57 PM	#1
Zogthetroll Cooling Savant Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Ohio, U.S.A. Posts: 177	Hardware Review rantings this is really nothing more than me venting my annoyance at what has recently become a pet peeve of mine, vague or less than helpfull hardware reviews. a saying i like that could be applied to these is "if you're going to take the time to do something, at least do it RIGHT". i'll explain what my ramblings are about. in searching various sites to do research on computer hardware, i would read the reviews/comparisons to try to get a feel for how a particular piece ranked, unfortunately, a large number of sites tended to consistantly do a few things which made the review have little to those looking for a good comparison & didn't have much of a knowledge base to work with. take heat sink & fan combos for instance. in one review of a thermaltake volcano 9, the author proceded to write a fairly decent article and ran tests of the HSF at different speed settings & at a few different clock speeds, which is quite informative (as long as i have the same hardware, case, & fan setup). rule number one for accurate graphs/charts, always include a baseline, in this case, another HSF. another slightly more informative review (and the more common type), the author compares the HSF to his "stock" HSF (please, a few more details would help), which could be any number of a differant variety of HSF (from really crappy, to stock hsf that perform suprisingly well, again, not a good baseline). in retrospect, i'm probably being a bit harsh here, but i'm looking at this from the perspective of someone who's relatively new to aftermarket cooling products & doesn't have a lot of experience to draw from, & i'll be the first to admit it. so i guess its all a matter of how familiar you are w/ the hardware or not. regardless, it would be nice to see a bit more time invested in some of them. btw, my hats off to BillA & others who do turn out quality, indepth product reviews. i'm not really expecting any responses to this, i just felt like expressing an opinion to those w/similar interests. (my wife gets this glazed look after a certain amount of talk about computers)