I was flabbergasted to read the last paragraph of the review for the Asus Strike II Extreme:
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"Frankly, some of us find all this talk about overly expensive products depressing. What happened to expecting to pay top dollar for premium components? True, there are those out there that are able to buy mainstream products and push them well beyond their rated capabilities for next to nothing. Shoot, that is the very definition of overclocking right there. However, when did we become entitled to low prices when it comes to picking up motherboards claiming to be ultimate overclockers? It is one thing to pay a lot and get a little, but when a product delivers everything it promises and more, complaining does not make sense. We will tell you straight up, the ASUS Striker II Extreme is a serious piece of hardware, and if you want to play with the big boys, you had better be prepared to throw the cash down!"
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This conclusion is reached several paragraphs after the review revealed that:
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"We have lost several drive images during testing. While we expect to corrupt drive images when pushing a system beyond its boundaries, this problem has occurred numerous times with fairly ordinary overclocks."
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1) It boggles the mind to conclude a review of a PRODUCTION motherboard that randomly corrupted several drive images during "fairly ordinary overclocks" - which is presumably what anyone who buys this board would, at minimum, do - by writing "when a product delivers everything it promises and more, complaining [about price] does not make sense." Let me repeat: IT CORRUPTS YOUR HARD DRIVE! To laud a motherboard as "a serious piece of hardware" after revealing such a fundamental defect is like praising a plane for flying swift and sure into the mountaintop. I cannot believe Anandtech could have missed the forest so badly.
2) It is unfair to insinuate that people who are interested in price/performance are cheapskates who want something for nothing. Where is this person who feels it is his moral right to take home a Ferrari for the price of a Corolla? People aren't complaining "when a product delivers everything it promises and more." What people are doing is comparing the performance of a product not only on an absolute scale but relative to other products. Which is what Anandtech is doing, isn't it, when it benchmarks a product against its competition? So why then is it "depressing" to discuss the simple question: is the performance offered by Product A for Price A justified in comparison to the performance delivered by Product B for Price B? Isn't that fundamental to reviewing? Seriously, if having to consider price in a product review is such an existential burden for an Anandtech writer, perhaps he's in the wrong line of work.
3) This "let them eat cake" attitude seems endemic to many Anandtech reviews now. It raises the question: is Anandtech interested anymore in being a site that helps technically-inclined readers make good choices? A paragraph like the one above suggests that Anandtech has become totally disconnected from the reality that its readers don't get free products for testing, don't get quick and high level tech support from the manufacturer when something goes wrong, don't have the time, luxury or inclination to simply swap out a corrupted hard drive or reinstall a drive image multiple times.
No one is suggesting performance should be ignored; on the contrary, everyone cares about performance. But to suggest that performance should be considered in a vacuum, that talk of performance+price is "depressing" and dismissed "complaining"? Anandtech does a disservice to the readers.
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"Frankly, some of us find all this talk about overly expensive products depressing. What happened to expecting to pay top dollar for premium components? True, there are those out there that are able to buy mainstream products and push them well beyond their rated capabilities for next to nothing. Shoot, that is the very definition of overclocking right there. However, when did we become entitled to low prices when it comes to picking up motherboards claiming to be ultimate overclockers? It is one thing to pay a lot and get a little, but when a product delivers everything it promises and more, complaining does not make sense. We will tell you straight up, the ASUS Striker II Extreme is a serious piece of hardware, and if you want to play with the big boys, you had better be prepared to throw the cash down!"
-----
This conclusion is reached several paragraphs after the review revealed that:
-----
"We have lost several drive images during testing. While we expect to corrupt drive images when pushing a system beyond its boundaries, this problem has occurred numerous times with fairly ordinary overclocks."
-----
1) It boggles the mind to conclude a review of a PRODUCTION motherboard that randomly corrupted several drive images during "fairly ordinary overclocks" - which is presumably what anyone who buys this board would, at minimum, do - by writing "when a product delivers everything it promises and more, complaining [about price] does not make sense." Let me repeat: IT CORRUPTS YOUR HARD DRIVE! To laud a motherboard as "a serious piece of hardware" after revealing such a fundamental defect is like praising a plane for flying swift and sure into the mountaintop. I cannot believe Anandtech could have missed the forest so badly.
2) It is unfair to insinuate that people who are interested in price/performance are cheapskates who want something for nothing. Where is this person who feels it is his moral right to take home a Ferrari for the price of a Corolla? People aren't complaining "when a product delivers everything it promises and more." What people are doing is comparing the performance of a product not only on an absolute scale but relative to other products. Which is what Anandtech is doing, isn't it, when it benchmarks a product against its competition? So why then is it "depressing" to discuss the simple question: is the performance offered by Product A for Price A justified in comparison to the performance delivered by Product B for Price B? Isn't that fundamental to reviewing? Seriously, if having to consider price in a product review is such an existential burden for an Anandtech writer, perhaps he's in the wrong line of work.
3) This "let them eat cake" attitude seems endemic to many Anandtech reviews now. It raises the question: is Anandtech interested anymore in being a site that helps technically-inclined readers make good choices? A paragraph like the one above suggests that Anandtech has become totally disconnected from the reality that its readers don't get free products for testing, don't get quick and high level tech support from the manufacturer when something goes wrong, don't have the time, luxury or inclination to simply swap out a corrupted hard drive or reinstall a drive image multiple times.
No one is suggesting performance should be ignored; on the contrary, everyone cares about performance. But to suggest that performance should be considered in a vacuum, that talk of performance+price is "depressing" and dismissed "complaining"? Anandtech does a disservice to the readers.
