AnandTech not what it used to be?

[Nnyan]

Good point about moving on and so forth, at least to the point that now that I'm married with two young kids I don't have the time to "play around with tech" the way I used to. I still am very interested in tech since that is the area I work.

I don't mind the enterprise reviews since they are often helpful. And we're in agreement that the reviews they do do are very good, no argument there. My point was that during my early years I could count on at least a decent number of interesting articles and at least a few that taught me something new. Lately it can be weeks between anything that catches my attention. And I don't agree that they industry has slowed down, there are plenty of tech sites I still read that are very active (my Chrome opens up with 26 tabs most of them tech sites).

Anyway not to derail this discussion but as a side note could you name your top 5 or 10 news sites you visit the most often (doesn't have to be tech)?

EDIT: Just noticed I haven't edited my sig in YEARS! lol

 

[evident]

not really AT's fault. im just fed up that there's a new chipset every day.

 

[StrangerGuy]

not really AT's fault. im just fed up that there's a new chipset every day.

Really? I don't remember any high-end chipset that lingered as long as the X58.

 

[KeithTalent]

Anandtech still offers some great in-depth technical analysis, which is what differentiates it from the thousands of other review sites on the net. They put in real effort to give accurate, detailed information. Just look at the Anandtech iPhone 4 antenna review compared to all of the other half-assed attempts at testing the issue.

This is quite true. Even though I do not much care about the products being reviewed, I do read them here and there as they are interesting from an overall technology standpoint.

KT

 

[Modelworks]

I don't think it is the sites fault it is just the internet in general. I remember when usenet was the place to discuss pc hardware and this site barely existed and Anand was in college. The internet has so many places to discuss things that it is hard for anywhere to be the site for hardware, software, or anything. WWW makes the world come together but it also pulls it apart.

 

[theprodigalrebel]

Anandtech is where you go for information on a brand new architecture - CPU/Motherboard or a new GPU series. For everything else, there's always bit-tech (great coverage of just about everything), Xbit Labs (great for displays, motherboards), Tech Report etc.

It's true that Anand has mostly focused on SSDs and smartphones now (seriously, several 20-page reviews of phones almost every other week?). Maybe they are just catering to what brings traffic. Reviews of Yet Another Memory Kit or Yet Another Graphic Card with a 20MHz factory overclock tend to be pretty boring though.

 

[FoBoT]

yes, it is better than ever

 

[rudeguy]

I'm back, that's all that really matters.

Now everyone take off your pants and lets get this party started!!!!

 

[JulesMaximus]

I'm just here because of the lifer bathroom and free ding dongs and yoo hoo.

 

[rudeguy]

I'm just here because of the lifer bathroom and free ding dongs and yoo hoo.

They finally fixed the yoo hoo machine?

 

[FoBoT]

I'm back, that's all that really matters.

Now everyone take off your pants and lets get this party started!!!!

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

I moved here because zdnet got flaky and went commercial. I still like the reviews but most are about tech I'm not particularly interested in. I think there's good info here though and Anandtech remains a good resource. I wish they would continue the low, medium, high end system build articles though.

 

[Kirby]

I'm just here because of the lifer bathroom and free ding dongs and yoo hoo.

if i knew about the ding dongs i would have quit at 9,999.

 

[DominionSeraph]

However, I don't see it as being totally AT's fault. The hardware industry as a whole seems to have slowed down quite a bit in recent years.

This.

We're just not seeing what we had back in '99-01 when the Celery was retardedly good, the Athlon and Pentium III were battling it out, Nvidia was on a 6 month release schedule, 3dfx was in the picture so we had to weigh OpenGL against Glide, and then DirectX came into its own; hard drives quadrupled in capacity and doubled in performance in less than 2 years.

Now what do we have?
What did the 5000 series have over the 4000 series? DirectX 11? Like that makes a substantial difference in anything. Other than that the 5770 was slower than the 4870, so you had to go into the stratosphere to even get a performance increase.
Now it's a year and a month later and we're only coming up on a refresh?

On the processor side the direction is towards integrated graphics on-die. That's exploiting the "computers as an appliance" consumer space - it's not about computers being cool toys to race. But it works because CPU power just isn't as important anymore. More performance just doesn't allow you do do as much more when it comes to everyday tasks as it used to.
I'm rocking an X2 5200+ with 2GB, and am I lusting after a 980X with 24GB? Not at all.

For hard drives, performance is largely maxed. At 10MB/sec STR you spend a lot of time reading compared to seeking. At 130MB/sec, access times predominate. Higher STR doesn't get you much.

So that pretty much just leaves SSDs. And Anandtech's coverage of that has been top notch.
So they're working what the industry gives them. I wish there was more, but there just ain't.

 

[between]

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