Why you shouldn't use Tom's Hardware

[mattclary]

I see people reference the Tom's Hardware site here every now and then. At CGTalk, it's a given that they suck. Below are 2 articles about them.


http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=72555

referenced artcle from above thread:

http://www.amdmb.com/article-display.php?ArticleID=243

http://www.vanshardware.com/articles/2002/03/020317_THG_Slander/020317_THG_Slander.htm

[garg]

Well, I partly agree with you... only partly...

Any articles, are subject to partiality. As those articles are written by some human which always have some preferences. So to have some preference of the autor is normal.

Exclusive rigths for some events are also somehow normals, because if everybody write the same staff, then how can you take market shares ? At the end, having a website like tomshardware is not free, you will have to pay a lot of things (people working on it, hosting, etc...)

I think if you realy want to have a neutral opinion, you need to read a lot of different articles.

Beside that I think (IMO) tomshardware is doing a good job of testing and giving a lot of hints.

I think also most people complaining about tomshardware are comming from the AMD world because lately reviews didn't put a good light on AMD CPU.

Alain Bertrand

[mattclary]

From what I'm hearing (and the article above indicates), TH is in bed with AMD.

And granted, take it with a grain of salt, just go in with your eyes open.

[garg]

Well actualy it seams to me in latest articles Intel went better than AMD, but you are right, when someone read some articles, he still need to think and compare to other sources.

Alain Bertrand

[meatycheesyboy]

It seems pretty weird, although the article does suggest that Tom's is in bed with AMD, there recent articles and benchmarks concerning AMD have been very critical of it as garg said.

For example, this article from Feb is pretty harsh on AMD. http://www4.tomshardware.com/column/20030214/valentine-05.html

I'm just as disturbed by the second link on that article about the byline changes as I am about the whole in bed with AMD thing.

Honestly, I think it could be a little of two things. One, THG is making some serious journalistic integrity mistakes. Two, AMD and NVIDIA fanboys (THG has been critical of both companies lately) are feeling cheated and are lashing out at Tom's and purposely showing it in a bad light.

So, I think I'll keep reading Tom's for the benchmarks but I agree with everything that's been said so far, check two or three or ten different articles, don't rely on just one source.

[Stewpot]

Alternatively, if Tom's Hardware has advertisers who pay by the site count, then an exclusive story/review would mean more hits(?)

Which would make a bit of sense of THG trying to enforce blackouts on other media groups.

Though there still may be other kickers!?!?

[Verlon]

As I have been pointing out recently.....

In THG Comparison of the Athlon XP3000+ vs the P4 3.06Ghz, the Intel trounces the AMD in almost every test.

Using the same basic setup for his Video Card roundup, the Athlon XP2700 beat that same P4 3.06 in every single test. The XP3000+ is faster than the XP2700+.

Also, there was the issue where he burned an AMD CPU up by removing the heatsink (testing the thermal protection systems in P4 and Athlon). He made a big deal about this (apparently heat sinks falling off during transport of new systems is a real issue in his neck of the woods). Other hardware sites called BS and put videos up of them doing the same thing to AMD processors and not getting the same results. It was around this time that the Intel ads started showing up on his site, so a lot of people suggested that the 'test' was bought and paid for by Intel.

I feel he has lost something since the early days of Pentium and Pentium 2 versus AMD K5/K6.