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Ask Slashdot: What Review Sites Do You Consult For IT Equipment? 129

Posted by Soulskill from the throw-darts-at-a-part-catalog dept.
JackAcme writes "Searching for product reviews via Google mostly turns up sales sites masquerading as review sites. Consumer reviews on Amazon and other big retailers are suspect since so many manufacturers are paying for positive reviews. Where do Slashdotters turn for reliable, informed reviews of new hardware and software?"
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Ask Slashdot: What Review Sites Do You Consult For IT Equipment? More

Ask Slashdot: What Review Sites Do You Consult For IT Equipment?

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  • Newegg (Score:5, Informative)

    by BingmanO ( 1365957 ) on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @10:12PM (#45534169)
    Newegg. Usually has the most honest reviews and manufacture responses if it's because of an RMA or a neg review.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      My problem with the Newegg reviews is just about everyone claims their knowledge or tech level is a 5 but many of their comments clearly do not reflect that. Someone claiming they are a 5 bitching that the could not get their unmanaged switch to work with LACP and the $25 switch with the metal case runs better then the $20 one with the plastic case because it stays cooler. What is the obsession with some computer geek end users and the temperatures that their things are running at?

    • Re:Newegg (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 ) on Wednesday November 27, 2013 @02:13AM (#45535411) Homepage Journal

      Geek reviews for geeks!

      I agree - look at the reviews of sites like Newegg and other similar sites is useful, but the most useful reviews are the reviews that contains some presentation of the disadvantages of the product in question. A review that is all the way positive is pretty useless, I want to know the limitations of the product I buy to know if it's worth the money. All products have limits, but not all limits are a problem for me as a user.

      It's like shopping clothes - you can of course buy XXL clothes to have a spacy solution that you can use everywhere, but it won't look good and can be a disadvantage in some cases. I want clothes that fits my lifestyle.

    • Yes, definitely Newegg. Then read mostly just the negative reviews, filter out the nit-picky ones and look for a pattern.

  • HardOCP (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ragnar79 ( 826792 ) on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @10:17PM (#45534205)

    http://hardocp.com/ [hardocp.com] is a good one for reviews on hardware performance and overclocking for gaming.

  • ArsTechnica (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @10:21PM (#45534225)

    Ars for computers, GSM Arena for phones.

    • Re:ArsTechnica (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ifiwereasculptor ( 1870574 ) on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @10:27PM (#45534259)

      This. I usually check Tom's Hardware, too, but keep in mind they mostly care about gaming. Also, Phoronix is the only site AFAIK that does Linux HW reviews.

      • Thank you for the Phoronix suggestion. I want to get back into *nix stuff and the old websites are gone.

    • XDA-Developers for phones. Find out if the developers are creaming their jeans or shitting themselves, because that determines what the aftersupport will be like after your manufacturer stops updating the device in a year to focus on their new devices.

  • My top sites (Score:5, Informative)

    by PurdueThumbs ( 1126001 ) on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @10:24PM (#45534241) Homepage
    Tomshardware.com
    Anandtech.com
    smallnetbuilder.com

    And every now and then one of the others, but those are my three go-to sites.
    • Where's slashdot on this list? Oh, right, it only posts news that matters.
    • I second this list. Tom's Hardware and Anandtech are probably as unbiased as you are going to find. I don't know smallnetbuilder so I won't comment on that one.
      • SmallNetBuilder is like another anandtech or tom's hardware but they only care about wireless equipment, routers, NAS's, etc. They're built a great comparison tool to view the results of the same tests on the gear and sort them, etc.
    • Hopefully things are better, but years ago, Toms was under a lot of scrutiny for false reviews, test scores and bullying smaller sites. Much of which they accused Intel of doing to them just a few years earlier. I haven't relied on them for much since.

      While I trust a few sites for the most part, after working at a dotcom and seeing the bosses pay for reviews as well as work at a review site getting paid for such reviews, I take them all with a bit of hesitation. There is a LOT of money and free product f

    • Re:My top sites (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Trax3001BBS ( 2368736 ) on Wednesday November 27, 2013 @02:09AM (#45535397) Homepage Journal

      Tomshardware.com

      Problem with Tom's hardware is they pull from the Usenet, a trick to make
      one think a server is used more extensively than it really is. They have made a name for themselves now
      but still pulling from the Usenet. They also pay to be on top of the front page results.

      I can't remember the number of times I've searched for something only to find I'd written it years earlier;
      for the newsgroup 24hoursupport.helpdesk, Yet it's accredited to Tom's Hardware. Where you went to
      read it, If a member replied to such a post it would go unanswered, and none to a very few have a clue of what's going on.

      Hundreds of forum topics yet maybe a hand full not gleaned from the UseNet and actually from Tom's hardware's registered members, of which I'm not one

    • LOL. I came here to post exactly those three sites.

      For laptops, I would add NotebookCheck [notebookcheck.net]. It's an English translation of a German site, but their reviews are incredibly consistent and thorough. They even tell you how hard it is to take apart if you want to replace/fix some of the components.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

      Tom's has been full of shit of years, obsessed with useless benchmarks. Ars has an Apple fetish but can sometimes be good.

      You can't rely on a few sites. You have to read a selection, and equally as important do some googling and read forum posts from owners. If you are interested in phones or tablets xdadevelopers is always worth a look.

    • Re:My top sites (Score:4, Interesting)

      by PPalmgren ( 1009823 ) on Wednesday November 27, 2013 @09:54AM (#45537393)

      I like these sites too, and I'd like to give a special shout-out to Toms and Anandtech for their investigative approach. Anandtech was first to provide the reason the signal attenuation issue for the "you're holding it wrong" iPhone and I beleive Toms was the first to break the 'microstutter' issue on AMDs previous generation of graphics cards (correct me if I'm wrong on either of these). I think one of these sites was the first to address monitor input lag as well, and Anandtech addressing the recent benchmark cheaters.

      They both have their black marks though. Anandtech used to be very hardware focused for the open builder, but now spend a lot more focus on mobile and especially Apple, so you can't use them as a go-to source for a total comparison of top performing products since they don't review enough competitors. Toms had some kind of bias scandal I think, but I still find them to be a good source of gaming information and their charts and 'of the month' are great tools to get the best bang for your buck when shopping for a new system.

    • I wish there were more sites that doing Linux benchmarks than Phoronix.

      Or if not, I wish more sites would benchmark workloads that are more than some synthetics, office/browser use, transcoding and games.

      What about the things software developers have to deal with day-to-day? Application/web server performance? IDE performance? Compiler performance? Database performance? LibreOffice performance? Interpreter/VM performance for different languages? Latency/performance of variuous desktop environments, GNOM

    • I find Toms not all that useful, usually not as technical, and sometimes dubiously biased. Never visited smallnetbuilder. There used to be a ton of reputable sites, however I see less now. I admit I will use Ted's charts however as they are easy and quick way to look at a more comprehensive list of components. I look at it as more of a general rule as opposed to specific testing.

      I would second Anandtech. They have stood the test of time. Whenever I see an article from them I give it added weight.

      I would add

    • These sites were great 5 years ago...

  • Honestly... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @10:29PM (#45534275) Journal
    I tend to figure that (so long as I don't cling to the bleeding edge, where even the honest reviews are of inferior gear for high prices, soon to be replaced by more mature gear at lower price), it tends to matter a lot less. Do PR flacks buy good reviews? Yes, it seems likely. Should they be first against the wall when the revolution comes? Well, probably not first; but I'd gladly make room for them in line. Can they crowd out the mass of reviews once the early-adopting suckers pass and an item becomes subject to mass judgement? If so, that's some serious cash being dropped on buying reviews.

    All blathering aside, if you aren't trying to ride the bleeding edge, the stakes are lower and the odds of, at very least, ending up with 'good enough, and crazy cheap' are good.

    It's the early adopters who really face a difficult problem, when the goods are at their least mature and most expensive, and the flacks outnumber and control the actual buyers and actual reviewers to the greatest extent. Simply practice a little patience and you can easily avoid the greatest trouble. Leading the bleeding-edge by the nose, by controlling who gets per-release and super-early gear just isn't that difficult, and even if the reviews are real, they reflect mostly early-adopter fanboy optimists. Just sit back, fuck around with whatever tech you already have (take comfort, for it is no doubt greater than that which inaugurated the internet) and wait a month or two. Lower prices, greater clarity, and general sanity await you.

  • Buy it all, figure out what works, return what sucks... that's what return policies are for (and incidentally is what happened to the last Belkin product I purchased, and why I'll never purchase another one).

    That, or if you're buying for a business just remember: No one ever got fired for buying IBM, F5 or Cisco. Or HP for servers. ProLiants really do kick ass, although I hear Dells tend to use a little less power for equivalent performance... probably because they skimped on the redundant fans or some ot

  • Reviews so in depth your mind explodes!

    Ok, so maybe not explodes, but certainly well informed. They go into more detail about electronics than any other review site I have come across. Their reviews are generally as un-biased as they come too.

  • Slashdot. Seriously (and how about Apps too?) (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rueger ( 210566 ) on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @10:42PM (#45534345) Homepage
    I honestly trust opinions here [slashdot.org] more than most other places. Seems to me that most tech sites, though good, are so enthralled with the latest and greatest cool thing that they lose sight of the needs of mere mortals.

    Now, my pet peeve isn't with hardware reviews, but with the various App stores. I've pretty much given up trying to judge any app on Google's Play site based on reviews. As often as not they seem to fall into two categories: "Wow! Cool App! Best App Ever!" or "Crap App wouldn't work on my phone."

    The former reached a new pinnacle of uselessness when one guy posted "It hasn't finished downloading to my phone yet, but I'm sure this is the coolest thing ever!."

    Yeah, most apps only cost a few bucks, but I'd still like to know if the damned things will actually work, without crashing, before I bother downloading it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

      Play now has a useful feature where it filters reviews from people who have the same devices as you, so if there is a device specific issue you will at least know about it. Those are rare these days but even so it can be worth a quick glance at the top three reviews.

  • I figure, perhaps naively, that I can filter the fakes on Amazon. I usually click on the one star bar and start with those.

  • You can use the reviews on every major site if you know how to read them. It's actually fairly simple; the best reviews are meaningless. Aside from the obvious shill risk, they also don't usually tell you much.

    No, the best reviews are the lowest reviews, possibly the "middle of the road" reviews too. Read those. Those often will have real data that you can use ( failed after a week, has annoying click, doesn't work with x, ect.. ).

    There's a bit more to it than that, but that should get you rolling. As

  • But it is not a public site. You need to know the IPv6 address in order to see the home page.

  • Laptop Reviews (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I like notebookcheck.net for laptop reviews.

    • I love that website. Tuck the laptop name and "site:notebookcheck.net" to Google and you have good chances of finding a very detailed review of that machine. All the way down to measuring display contrast ratio and color reproduction.
  • But now I just stick to Amazon.com, NewEgg.com and the like to see the reviews. Once Tom's Hardware traded hands way back when it followed the rest of the industry of just regurgitating vendor claims and I quit reading it, maybe I should check it out and see if it's improved.

  • Ask the Internet? You've already lost. (Score:3)

    by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @11:19PM (#45534565)

    If you consider your stuff "IT Equipment" then the last group you want suggestions from is the million monkeys that make up the Internet.

  • I'm a network architect so I tend to check out more enterprise related sites such as Network Computing, Network World, and Infoworld. That being said, most vendors are willing to send you a demo unit to play with and most software vendors have VM copies of their demo software. Also, don't underestimate the advice of other professionals in your field. If you don't have any contacts, there are usually local professional groups that you can join.

  • Generally I just post a search for the item name and the string "problem with" and scan the list for clangers. Not so much a way to find, but a way to avoid.

  • "Hey guys, where should I be spending my marketing resource dollars?"

  • AnandTech.com, TomsHardware.com - Beware! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JakFrost ( 139885 ) on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @11:48PM (#45534753)

    Be aware of even reputable web sites for hardware reviews because they'll keep recommending the newest and fastest hardware since speed is easily quantifiable and testable but will completely ignore the difficult to quantify things like reliability, customer support, warranty service, etc.

    One example that's relevant to recent Slashdot stories is how all the top review web sites raved about OCZ for years and the speed and low price and only paid a little attention to the huge failure rates, terrible customer service, and overall dissatisfaction of the users of the products.

    How many years of reading about amazing OCZ Vertex 1, 2, 3, 4 reviews and high recommendations and now we see that OCZ is nearly bankrupt due to the crap they were selling and the review sites were helping them all along just to be on their preferred reviewer lists so that they could get pre-release hardware to test with buggy firmware and crappy chips.

    • buyer beware (Score:4, Insightful)

      by bzipitidoo ( 647217 ) <bzipitidoo@yahoo.com> on Wednesday November 27, 2013 @02:55AM (#45535581) Journal

      You can't even be sure reputable sites won't be gamed, and fall for it. And not just astroturfing either. Been a while since I've seen the old switcheroo, but that's still done. Manufacturers aren't above lying on occasion.

      You think you're getting a great product, but what you didn't know was that the manufacturer totally revised it and cheapened quality everywhere. I'm thinking especially of the venerable Linksys WRT54G wireless router. Revision 4 was a great router with a great reputation. When I bought one, unknown to me was that Linksys had just rolled out revision 5 with totally changed insides. They replaced Linux with VXWorks, and cut the RAM in half. It was total crap, and it was so different it should have been given a different model number. As it was, you couldn't tell which revision was in the box until you'd opened it. After struggling with it for a day, I took it back, it was that bad. Couldn't even reliably ping through it. Later, Linksys put the good one back on the shelves under a slightly different model number, the WRT54GL.

      There was also a stunt TEAC (think it was them) once pulled with a CD burner. The version they sent out for review was not the version that got put on the shelves, though it had the same model number and specs. They deliberately deceived the reviewers, and gave them a much higher quality version than consumers got. Not surprisingly, it received rave reviews. But it wasn't long before the deception was uncovered.

      Whole classes of hardware are pretty junky. For instance, many consumer grade routers fail early because they are so marginally designed they easily overheat and burn out. DVD burners are another troublesome piece of hardware. On both of those on several occasions, I've had to try several brands and models before I found one that would just work adequately. Ink jet printers are of course infamous for being not only high maintenance and expensive to operate, but programmed to give the users FUD as if they weren't troublesome enough without that. There have been many low end economy hardware ideas that were just too cheap, not worth taking home. Pretty much any Intel CPU designated as SX had such reduced performance that they weren't worth the savings over the DX version. Integrated graphics that co-opt some of the main memory became quite notorious for awful performance. Recently, Intel has finally made some decent integrated graphics chipsets, but they have 10 plus years of bad reputation to overcome. Then there was the junk known as the Winmodem.

      Even if all that's avoided, can still be caught by systemic defects. Remember the Capacitor Plague? Many devices made in the early 2000s-- motherboards, graphic cards, monitors, even power supplies-- were built with flawed capacitors that failed in under 5 years. Manufacturers were saved from big trouble on that front by the typical rapid obsolescence of technology, though they didn't escape entirely. The poor review site simply has no means of catching a problem like that.

      As a rule, mechanical devices simply aren't going to be as reliable no matter what's done to improve their quality. Even when manufacturers aren't trying to pull something, mechanical will never be as good as solid state.

    • How many years of reading about amazing OCZ Vertex 1, 2, 3, 4 reviews and high recommendations and now we see that OCZ is nearly bankrupt due to the crap they were selling and the review sites were helping them all along just to be on their preferred reviewer lists so that they could get pre-release hardware to test with buggy firmware and crappy chips.

      The nice thing about OCZ is that there was plenty of opportunity to know they were bad at making hardware before they even sold SSDs. I had one of their flash drives fail when I plugged it into my head unit, which provides plenty of power for a flash drive, and it erased itself. When I finally bought an SSD, I bought one from Intel. The next one will either be from them or Kingston, someone like that. Someone competent.

      All the reviews that I read were pretty clear that the OCZ drives were flaky...

    • Obviously anecdotes mean nothing, but I'm always puzzled by comments like this. I've got a several year old Vertex 2 that started as my win7 OS drive and is now doing duty as a Plex Media Server app drive. I also have a Vertex 3 as my win7 OS drive. Finally I have another Vertex 2 in my laptop, though I admit right now it gets very little use. Both have been operating with no trouble to include a number of trouble free firmware updates.

      Yes OCZ does seem to have a higher rate of failure than most other SSD'

    • That is precisely the opposite of my experience with Anandtech. When I was shopping for an SSD 18 mos. ago I investigated thoroughly which one to get. The site's negative reviews of OCZ products and their failrue rate jumped out at me. (I ended up getting an Intel 520 Series one, which had stellar reviews from every site I visited)
    • OTOH, Tom's does monthly reviews of CPU's and Graphic Cards... WRT these reviews, they often stop at around the $300 mark, especially in CPU. They will explicitly say that buying a CPU higher than their highest recommended CPU is governed by the law of diminishing returns, and that essentially you should only go to a more expensive CPU if you are "compensating for a shortcoming" shall we say? I'm often building fairly low end machines, and Tom's does a fair job at giving such configurations a fair shake.

    • Multiple reviewers, including myself, took note of problems with OCZ hardware when we covered the company. Tech Reports review of the vector 150 explicitly called out these problems,.

  • The Tech Report (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    techreport.com is probably my #1 review site. They don't have a huge volume of reviews compared to some of the bigger sites like Tom's but I find them to be much more thorough and unbiased.

  • As a hardware reviewer: (Score:5, Informative)

    by Dputiger ( 561114 ) on Tuesday November 26, 2013 @11:55PM (#45534799)

    Full disclosure up front: I currently write for ExtremeTech and Hot Hardware. In the past I've written for Ars Technica (2007 - 2009) and briefly Tech Report (2H 2005). Before that, I wrote for a now-defunct site going back to 2001.

    Obviously I could be biased and plug the sites I write for. I write for them for a reason, after all. But since no one is going to buy me telling you to read my own work, here's where I go, personally:

    For in-depth, excellent analysis (in alphabetical order)

    Anandtech (Anandtech.com)
    Ars Technica (Arstechnica.com)
    Tech Report (techreport.com)

    For ultra low-level analysis:
    Real World Tech (www.realworldtech.com)
    Agner Fog's CPU blog (www.agner.org)
    Lost Circuits (www.lostcircuits.com)

    All three of these resources update only occasionally. But the information is second to none.

    For spot-checking or specific issues:

    TechSpot.com does great CPU/GPU scaling articles. LaptopMag or NotebookCheck are great for their particular areas. CPU-World has good general database information, VR-Zone often has interesting scoops, as does wccftech -- if you're willing to filter out a lot of rumor / speculation from the latter. Tom's Hardware has useful dynamic databases for product performance. So does Anandtech.

    Don't be afraid to read a review on a site you haven't heard of, or with a layout from 1999. While established names and high-quality writers tend to go together, they are neither exclusively matched nor guaranteed. A good reviewer will document issues, give a thorough discussion of the topic, and won't come off sounding like a marketing employee.

    • One more vote for your choices.
      Aditionally i would add to the first list (in alphabetical order):
      ExtremeTech :)
      Hot Hardware :)
      Tom's Hardware

      BTW Real World Tech is a wonderful resource. A pity that it is not updated more often.

    • Ars is not the site it used to be.

      • Ars covers a different spread of topics then it used to when I wrote there, that's true. But it's still an excellent site. The coverage mix has shifted, the quality of that mixture (in my personal opinion), has not.

        Your tone implies you think differently, which is fine. It's still on my personal short list.

  • store.apple.com

  • None of them (Score:4, Insightful)

    by futuresheep ( 531366 ) on Wednesday November 27, 2013 @12:08AM (#45534845) Journal

    There really aren't any sites that do reviews of Enterprise class hardware. At best you'll find reviews of SMB hardware like what StorageReview does, but that's really about it. The other problem is the reliance on synthetic benchmarks. We've run into a few cases where hardware has performed as expected while doing test runs, but then found bugs and issues when put in a POC lab environment.

  • It depends on what I'm looking for. One excellent place is the support forum for your favorite Linux or BSD distro. I'll go to the OpenSuSE or CentOS forum, for example, and ask: "has anyone tried this with a Dell Poweredge?" I get some really good responses from people who use my software, on similar hardware.

    I Google, too, but I did have to learn to recognized the obvious junk sites. Far more useful to me are the user reviews at the Websites that sell the equipment. It's really not that hard to sort out t

  • Kind of depends on the "hardware" we're talking about. For workstations and servers and I just order stuff from Dell without worrying about reviews. I know and trust their specs and support (business support is great). For individual components, like GPU's, I generally stick to tomshardware.com if for no other reason than they seem to be consistently thorough.

    In fact, I'd say I almost never bother with reviews at all, for business stuff, because the ones that have reviews (laptops, desktops, etc) are fai

  • I have a large back catalog of 1990's Computer Shopper.

  • StorageReview (Score:5, Informative)

    by Pav ( 4298 ) on Wednesday November 27, 2013 @02:01AM (#45535375)
    I haven't seen StorageReview [slashdot.org] mentioned. These guys were the first I'd seen who seemed to have a real clue about storage eg. they concentrated on latency rather than sequential transfer back in the day - latency is a much more interesting metric for most use cases. I don't follow their reviews as religiously as I used to, but they are the first guys I turn to when something new happens in storage technology.

  • 4chan /g/

  • I guess there's some irony is wondering how many of the sites being recommended here are being posted by shills for those sites.

  • Is there any problem with this brand/model of somestuff ?

    This is much more important than any performance review.

    Last time I bought a printer, I almost went for a 5 star review model and I changed my mind after looking for problem reports about this model.
    I decided to buy an other brand, a model for which there was much fewer problems, yet a good amount of positive feedbacks.

    Usually reviews are based on a few days test of new products, maybe sent by the maker itself. They don't report anything that happen

  • Techreport, Anandtech and once StorageReview (Score:3)

    by AbRASiON ( 589899 ) * on Wednesday November 27, 2013 @07:42AM (#45536623) Journal

    Methodology is all that matters, those 3 were the best I found by far. StorageReview is not really applicable anymore - my SSD reviews are at TR and AT now.

    If I'm interested in a particular part I'll google a HEAP more places - but those are the definitive ones for me. Dislike HardOCP for their awful, terrible benchmark graphs they introduced 5 or so years back and the owner can be an ass to people too.

  • If you need gadget electronics, none of them! If you need PC, laptop for home, some listed above but still be careful. If you need enterprise hardware, get an eval unit from the manufacturer and test it yourself for what you need then read reviews of their customer service and support. Nothing beats first-hand product experience and your own judgement when it comes to high ticket items. Also, ask people that are support persons for your organization's IT department. We/They unwittingly test products in the
  • Apparently Soulskillet is taking posting lessons from Timothy by not posting an Ask Slashdot story to the Ask Slashdot section. Hey Soulskillet! They put those sections there and allow readers to filter by section for a reason. Quit being a fucking tool and post the stories properly. In other words, do your job.
  • For phones: www.gsmarena.com (great device overviews, specs and reviews), www.phonearena.com.

    For PC components/misc: www.anandtech.com;

    For tablets: all of above and also www.engadget.com, www.techcrunch.com, popular newspapers;

    For laptops: www.notebookreview.com, www.notebookcheck.net for amazingly up2date CPU/GPU benchmark lists;

    For professional software: anywhere but developer-affiliated websites

  • I'm an invite-only special EggXpert reviewer for Newegg. They send me stuff for free and let me keep it if I thoroughly test and benchmark it and then post an honest review. A lot of times it's really good gear but once we got a not so great item and all 10 of us tore it a new ass on the review. Newegg demands that we not always post positive reviews just to make the vendors happy. They chose to participate in the review generation program with no guarantee that it would be good. It's just to get revie
  • Anandtech, Ars, and Tom's

  • I have already commented on a bunch. However I would add this:

    User reviews, obviously depend on the qualifications of the person making the comment. It also depends on the person reading it knowing enough to tell if the poster is full of BS or not. However you can get a general idea, and it will sometimes give you common known issues.

    As for "general" sites:
    Tomshardware: I have had mixed results from. Some of it seems like industry fluff, other times it is useful. About the only thing I use consistently ther

  • Innovation in benchmarking (Score:3, Insightful)

    by nadamucho ( 1063238 ) on Wednesday November 27, 2013 @01:29PM (#45539833)
    My go-to sites are those which go beyond the benchmark and get real-world data beyond a 3-minute number crunch.

    HardOCP had their custom heatsink with the thermo-probe for more reliable temperature measurement.

    Techreport has been phenomenal over the years in this. They built a custom PSU tester to test the loads of any or all of the rails at once. Then they had their "inside the second" articles diving in to frame latency, which led to better Radeon drivers. More recently, and still running, is their SSD deep-cycle test, which is already showing blocks beginning to fail on SSDs.

    The innovation factor and time taken to really dive in are things I don't see elsewhere.
  • I typically ask friends who own that product, or have used it in the past. If I can't find anyone else, I'll check CNET. Most of their user reviews have been pretty spot on.
  • OP Paraphrased:

    I want to buy fake product reviews for my awesome product. But everybody already knows the reviews are fake most places, so my fake reviews will be ignored. Can you please tell me what places remain that people won't know the reviews I plant are fake?

  • review sites will be filled with shills, astroturfers, dogs and idiots, this is the internet after all, I talk to real people who's opinion I trust... and even then take it with a grain of salt and cross reference with other's opinions then make up my own mind from the available evidence. if I went for review sites I would probably own an Iphone and a surface tablet by now. yuck.

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