No flame intended: what's wrong with Tom's Hardware?
Ohh where to begin? To start with they seem VERY fickle about who
they like and very often draw ridiculous conclusions from their
results just so that they support whatever company they want to look
best (which varies strongly from one week to the next.. my
understanding is that this isn't so much a question of 'bias' as that
Tom has a HUGE ego and he will only promote companies that give him
the full red-carpet treatment). Their benchmarking methodology often
leaves something to be desired, they will usually pick and chose which
benchmark to run depending on which product they want to come out
looking the best (to be fair, pretty much all hardware review sites do
this).
On the more technical side they really just don't have a technical
side. They take a VERY superficial view of running their review but
pretend that they are all super-technical, often drawing conclusions
from extraordinarily limited information (ie something along the lines
of: "If we look at the results of this Quake benchmark we can see that
the P4's memory bandwidth gives it a huge advantage in all OpenGL
gaming", when really all there are hundreds of possible factors
involved). They also tend to make MANY technical errors. This page
from a recent article is classic:
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20040927/opteron_vs_xeon-02.html
They manage to get virtually every fact on this page completely wrong.
All Opterons have 3 hypertransport connections, all running at 16-bits
in either direction (usually called a 32-bit hypertransport link,
though it's really 2 x 16-bits), running at 800MHz DDR for an
effective speed of 1600MHz. The 1xx series of Opterons have no
cache-coherent Hypertransport connections (ie they can only use the
three HT connections for I/O, not for processor-to-processor
connections), the 2xx series Opterons have 1 cache-coherent HT links
(each chip can connect to up to 1 other processor) and the 8xx series
Opterons have 3 cc-HT links. The one thing they managed to get right
on the entire page were the diagrams at the bottom that were done by
AMD and have been shown many times in AMD publicity info for the
Opteron. Careful observers will even note that those diagrams
contradict what the author of the article said about this chip.
Anyway, I suppose I shouldn't be TOO hard on Tom's Hardware, after
all, the vast majority of other technical websites are total crap as
well, not to mention the mainstream print mags. Tom's has also
improved a fair bit in the past two or three years since Tom himself
pretty much just sites back and waits for the checks to role in, other
employees do all the work. Really this site just gets under my skin
more because people quote this site so regularly when the info listed
on the page is often wrong or at least misleading.
).