Why is Toms Hardware supposedly ****e?

Slutmonkey57b

Tom's seems to be the most often criticised tech site out there and recently I've begun to wonder why. Most of it seems to originate around a "selling out" review incident several years ago (before my time) but frankly I've always found it to be one of the most useful sites I read. Its CPU and VGA charts actually provide something practically every buyer wants but no other site offers - real world comparisons of "How does my current rig compare to what I could get now". I honestly can't work out why some other site is not doing this - their CPU chart is a great tool, and if their results are wrong, please redo them and show us the "right" results. Certainly whatever its sins, the other Big Hitters are at least as bad:

Hexus is nothing more than a Press Release aggregator site.
[H] seemingly is desperate to review everything as an exercise in vauge "experiences" rather than providing an "is this any ****ing good and is it good value" review process, and their trusted reviewers regularly override each other (particularly loved Kyle's trampling of the "A month with Vista" reviewer).
Tech Lounge flatly refuses to use anything other than canned benchmarks which irks me no end.
The Inq and the Register are great on news but not so much with the reviewing - probably due to their not playing ball with the NDA crowd.

But by far the most annoying trait of hardware review sites is their tendency to tout their "exclusive" reviews of NDA-laden stuff as though they were the only journos at a conference of 3000. The self-congratulation is just verging on the need for complimentary sick bags.

So what's your take? Am I a total moron for reading THG? Or are the rest just as bad?

DonkeyStyle \o/

Naw, I'm in the same boat myself... I've heard some vague critisism of THG in the past, but I have a read every now and then.
I have those CPU and GPU charts bookmarked too, good resource.

Anti

The main problem with THG is the owner sold the site to make a fortune. And this has happened again. Also it claims to be a true tech site, yet most of the stuff on there is hardly ground breaking. Hardocp, techpowerup, anandtech ect ect have some mad guids to do some pretty mad stuff. Where THG are alot more basic.

I like the site myself, and the cpu/vga charts are good. But all their news is usually on other sites a few days before hand.

8T8

THG started out like most other PC enthusiast sites in the mid/late nineties that it was a few guys or even just one interested in the tech doing the occasional reviews.

What happened to THG guide was mostly behind the scenes and a few public scandals including intimidation of other sites allegations of corruption by former staff, Thomas Pabst rubbing up many other site editors the wrong way along with gaffes like for instance one time I recall he said on the day of the September 11 attacks he critiqued other web sites for over-reacting to the incident - he later apologized.

From what I heard Thomas got on poorly with other site editors publicly & privately from what I can recall a lot of the community built up a hostile reaction to him and his site especially when it became more & more corporate and started doing shady reviews with conclusions that didn't always match up with the general consensuses of other sites that reviewed the same hardware.

Along the way Tom left THG and it became a fully fledged business almost along the lines of ZD-Net which is why the mistrust lingers to a degree, I doubt the THG of today has much in common with the THG of the past but it is not a site I frequent as other places do better evaluations in my own opinion e.g The Tech Report.

As for the Inquirer they are a rumour site with agendas to push and often barely understand the topics they are on about and try to push sensationalism as much as possible that is why Mike Magee (Inquirer founder) I assume left/fired {whatever it was} The Register as the Reg became much more sensible after he left. Always treat with suspicion many of the articles on the Inquirer a lot of people are taken in because of the underdog posturing by the site.

Stephen

The Inquirer is utter trash. What annoys me even more than their mostly crap content is their constant use of stupid nicknames for companies that they mention in pretty much every story, such as "vole" for Microsoft and Chipzilla for Intel.

TerrorFirmer

The Inquirer is like an online version of The Irish Sun.

Slutmonkey57b

Anti wrote:

The main problem with THG is the owner sold the site to make a fortune. And this has happened again. Also it claims to be a true tech site, yet most of the stuff on there is hardly ground breaking. Hardocp, techpowerup, anandtech ect ect have some mad guids to do some pretty mad stuff. Where THG are alot more basic.

I like the site myself, and the cpu/vga charts are good. But all their news is usually on other sites a few days before hand.

This may be true, but all the news on the other sites is only released according to NDA regulations - so there's very little genuine boasting or journalism going on in that sense anyway. "groundbreaking" is definitely not a word to be used with the tech press in general, and TBH I'l take agenda pushing and rumourmongering over bland PR recycling any day of the week. If I want to read what some tech company wants to tell me about their latest marchitecture I can go straight to their website thanks.

Personally I love the nicknames - matter of taste I suppose, but a lot of sites seem to be on bended knee before the big corporations and seem to think they should be grateful that Billion-Dollar-Corporation A is giving them the singular honour of advertising its products for free, which the Inq and the Reg at least don't. "Marchitecture" has to be one of my favourite words for no other reason than it's entirely accurate - half the hardware changes and software changes forced into product revisions are solely to "break" previous generations of product and force upgrades.

8T8

Slutmonkey57b wrote:

This may be true, but all the news on the other sites is only released according to NDA regulations - so there's very little genuine boasting or journalism going on in that sense anyway. "groundbreaking" is definitely not a word to be used with the tech press in general, and TBH I'l take agenda pushing and rumourmongering over bland PR recycling any day of the week. If I want to read what some tech company wants to tell me about their latest marchitecture I can go straight to their website thanks.

Personally I love the nicknames - matter of taste I suppose, but a lot of sites seem to be on bended knee before the big corporations and seem to think they should be grateful that Billion-Dollar-Corporation A is giving them the singular honour of advertising its products for free, which the Inq and the Reg at least don't. "Marchitecture" has to be one of my favourite words for no other reason than it's entirely accurate - half the hardware changes and software changes forced into product revisions are solely to "break" previous generations of product and force upgrades.

Some of the big corporate news sites regurgitate press material but so what only the big sites are like that e.g ZD-Net most other tech sites are not like that at least the ones I read.

Yes the Inquirer comes up with lots of cute names & the occasional "scoop" like a product roadmap but they also post any old rubbish rumour that comes their way, recycles & spins other news stories, deliberately misreports information, bends the truth to fit the personal bias of the writer & distort stories to sensationalise them because the Inq is about "hits" & getting the clueless to go OMG see this on the Inq. The whole posturing and we don't sign NDA's & spill the industry secrets is just an angle to get those who don't know any better to ingratiate you to their website.

Always keep that in the back of your mind the Inquirer is also a business who's job it to get as many page hits as possible, how to do that let's fib a little about product A or B or look lets cherry pick something from a report. I have little doubt Fudo one of their previous tech writers was let go because either he was so stupid at getting caught doing this so many times or it worked too well and that's why he started a site of his own that clones the Inquirer called of all things fudzilla.

Oh yeah the Inq takes money from the big boys just like everyone else something that was not supposed to happen in it's original charter for the site but clearly the revenue isn't a problem now, they take money from Sun, Intel, AMD you name it & there advertisements appear on their site.

If you want good, honest and balanced tech journalism read Ars-technica but the Inq is not gospel & nor it should ever be considered the preferred source for information. {Daily Tech is similar good news site that at least tries to remain impartial & not post total bollocks like the Inq does sometimes}

conzy

They are a very decent site, not really an overclockers site if you know what i mean... They have some great guides, like the projector from an old lcd guide

The GFX comparison chart is a bit all over the place aswell, probably due to different test beds being used over the years..