Should AT include OC'd Cards in Reviews?

[Madcatatlas]

ye its down alright. Ever since they changed servers, its been a downhill ride on the server/site/forum uptime...

 

[formulav8]

You appear to be for censorship and would like to hide some overclocking variables from readers because they do not appeal to you. Censorship is a mark of a fanboy who lacks ethics and understanding.
- Nvidia did nothing different than what AMD does; they make a full range of products available for reviewing - it is up to the reviewer how they do their own review.

BtW, is the main site down?

Huh? When did I say anything like that? Did you read their review? They plainly said this is not something usually do. It has nothing to do with me disliking anandtech or anything of the sort or liking/disliking a vendor. Its VERY clear I highly value integrity and ethics. Its clear that many people do not.

They broke one of their core principals. I could care less about the review in intself.

 

[apoppin]

Again show me where "not usually" = "breaking core principals"
- it appears that they *added* a feature that you didn't like

.. and it is not clear to me about you

Huh? When did I say anything like that? Did you read their review? They plainly said this is not something usually do. It has nothing to do with me disliking anandtech or anything of the sort or liking/disliking a vendor. Its VERY clear I highly value integrity and ethics. Its clear that many people do not.

They broke one of their core principals. I could care less about the review in intself.

 

[bryanW1995]

I'm surprised AT would review such a highly oc'd card in a launch article. Clearly this was an Nvidia PR move designed to reduce the oomph associated with 6870. for that Ryan gets a big :thumbsdown:

On a good note, however, NV board partners have in the past seemed to be much better about releasing OC variants. So this could encourage AMD to push for more OC card variants in the future.

 

[formulav8]

Again show me where "not usually" = "breaking core principals"
- it appears that they *added* a feature that you didn't like

.. and it is not clear to me about you

I am NOT spelling it out to you. You are trying to twist it into fannyboy trash that I have no desire of doing the fanny dance. You can find plenty of people for that since you appear to like it.

I said what I valued and expected from anandtech. Nice try otherwise.

 

[formulav8]

- it appears that they *added* a feature that you didn't like

No, they Removed a feature I didn't like.

 

[apoppin]

First of all, AMD's partners will be bringing out overclocked Barts video cards shortly

Secondly, you seem to be disagreeing with the amount of overclock that Mr Smith allowed.
:|

Feel free to ignore the results of a card that is the same price as the HD 6870, its direct competitor in price and evidently performance.

i expect that when Nvidia launches the GTX 460+, AMD will send me a highly overclocked HD 6870 .. should i neglect to include it then?

I'm surprised AT would review such a highly oc'd card in a launch article. Clearly this was an Nvidia PR move designed to reduce the oomph associated with 6870. for that Ryan gets a big :thumbsdown:

On a good note, however, NV board partners have in the past seemed to be much better about releasing OC variants. So this could encourage AMD to push for more OC card variants in the future.

 

[apoppin]

Just answer me how in your own words how,

"not usually" = "breaking core principals"

What you expect is a fanboy fantasy. Kudos to Mr Smith for bringing an intelligent well-rounded review to us

I am NOT spelling it out to you. You are trying to twist it into fannyboy trash that I have no desire of doing the fanny dance. You can find plenty of people for that since you appear to like it.

I said what I valued and expected from anandtech. Nice try otherwise.

 

[formulav8]

Just answer me how in your own words how,

"not usually" = "breaking core principals"

What you expect is a fanboy fantasy. Kudos to Mr Smith for bringing an intelligent well-rounded review to us

I already said i'm done with you. I said what was on my mind, you did likewise. Time to move on...

 

[notty22]

Rules , laws, standard operating procedure is something that evolves. The gtx 460 introduced something new , right from launch. These are Nvidia slides

It (clock speed) was used in part imo, for product positioning, and to develop a great reputation of being a good value. Pay for a o/c card or guess what , you can do it yourself -look !

 

[betasub]

What you expect is a fanboy fantasy.

There must be some variant of Godwin's Law that covers this.

 

[formulav8]

Rules , laws, standard operating procedure is something that evolves. The gtx 460 introduced something new , right from launch. These are Nvidia slides

It (clock speed) was used in part imo, for product positioning, and to develop a great reputation and positive reception of great value. Pay for a o/c card or guess what , you can do it yourself -look !

I have the problem of which GTX card to get a customer. Whether to get her a pre-oced card or to save her a few bucks and actually take nvidia's encouragement and try to push it ourselves. That is a pretty good problem to have now that I think of it...

 

[apoppin]

Move on to what? i am writing a second article today that is going to explore HD 5870-CF and scaling with CPU clock speed and cores - Core i7-920 vs Phenom II 945 x4 (vs. X2) from 2.6 to 3.6 GHz. So i won't be back here today as i am making the charts for it now.

My purpose in this thread was to give a bit of insight to what a reviewer does and how he is forced to do it in an extremely limited time. i am not thinking, "aha, this will give Company X an advantage if i include Company Y's product"

Rather, i am thinking how i may best present the new product and also include relevant competing products. Some are simply taking issue with what they consider to be relevant or not. My position obviously that it is relevant and it is the "near future" - when we see both products routinely highly overclocked. My reader can look a few months in the future this way. Nvidia designed the GTX 460 as a superb overclocker, and said so from the very beginning.

i say it is "reviewer's choice" and his integrity is determined in the long run, by consistency and honesty. One of the founding principles of this site and my own.

I already said i'm done with you. I said what was on my mind, you did likewise. Time to move on...

 

[Pantalaimon]

i say it is "reviewer's choice" and his integrity is determined in the long run, by consistency and honesty

Then Anandtech need to change its editorial policy because this is what they say 'As a matter of editorial policy we do not include overclocked cards on general reviews'. It's a pretty flimsy editorial policy if the reviewer can make an exception just like that.

 

[NoQuarter]

Rules , laws, standard operating procedure is something that evolves. The gtx 460 introduced something new , right from launch. These are Nvidia slides

It (clock speed) was used in part imo, for product positioning, and to develop a great reputation of being a good value. Pay for a o/c card or guess what , you can do it yourself -look !

lol, I hate misleading graphs like that. The bars make it look like it's overclocked 250%.

 

[krumme]

First of all, AMD's partners will be bringing out overclocked Barts video cards shortly

Secondly, you seem to be disagreeing with the amount of overclock that Mr Smith allowed.
:|

Feel free to ignore the results of a card that is the same price as the HD 6870, its direct competitor in price and evidently performance.

i expect that when Nvidia launches the GTX 460+, AMD will send me a highly overclocked HD 6870 .. should i neglect to include it then?

Feel free to ignore this card is not sold in measurable quantity.

Fell free to ignore the wider effect of this.

I am not sure AMD needs to bin selected 6870 for reviewers and a few thousands consumers, they have faster cards like fx. Cayman comming, so i wouldnt hope for +20% in your inbox . But if they do, and call you by the phone, as they did for anand !!, it will be a sad day to, confirming this idiotic trend.

 

[bryanW1995]

I can tell you when its NOT fair.

If they were to pit a overclocked gtx460 card with voltage @ 920 core vs a 6870.

Its fair because ANYONE can buy a gtx460 ftw but NOT everyone can overclock a gtx460 to 920 core.

I can

 

[AnandThenMan]

All you have to do is look at the poll. Most people are against what Anandtech did.

And can someone please answer the simple question, will we be seeing overclocked variants as part of every review from now on? Simple question, why so hard to answer?

 

[ShadowOfMyself]

And can someone please answer the simple question, will we be seeing overclocked variants as part of every review from now on? Simple question, why so hard to answer?

This is the only thing that matters... I wanna see an OC AMD card at the new Nvidia launch, or else I call BS

 

[bryanW1995]

i think it's fine to include because the question is: what can i buy with X dollars in the competitive price point bracket?

the evga card in this review fits in nicely here because, well, why would you buy any other gtx460 model after seeing this one at its price?

in any case, stock vs stock comparisons are fine, but honestly, who here in this community ever runs anything at stock? (personally, i'd like it better if the review articles contained the "average" oc for the popular cards in addition to the stock ones) and hell, throw in a factory oc model too if the price is right.

I can think of several reasons:

1. it's a TR edition so just has a 2 year warranty.
2. You can buy a stock or slightly oc'd gtx 460 with lifetime warranty from evga and OC it to ftw levels. evga warranties oc's and mods, so you would still have the lifetime warranty.
3. vast majority of gtx 460's oc to 800+ on stock volts. mine gets to 850 on stock, but I've seen many others higher than that. 900+ at 1.087v might not be the norm but I'll bet at least 1/3 of the gtx 460's available in channel will do that.

 

[deputc26]

I voted "It would be only fair with prominent caveats in the review, and clearly visible differentiations"

I don't see a problem so long as a factory version is also included and it is made clear that the overclocked version is indeed overclocked and thus more expensive.

 

[bryanW1995]

no offense, but the poll sucks on options. i think it should be on a case by case basis. if there is a logical merit (in this case i think there is, there's tons of OC 460s, but the prices are higher, and the 460 OCs like a mother, putting it in a different class from most GPU OCs), then i think they should, but if it clearly reeks of one company or the other trying to load benches to make the other look bad, or there's something else in the works in terms of foul play, then i think the writers and editors should pow wow and decide whats best, like they always have. they need to go about it in a clear manner though, and make sure they list the price difference and different in specs vs stock. also, there should be testing done to verify that all factory overclock models are more or less the same as well. if there is large variance in vcore/power draw for example thats a huge thing to simply leave out, as some users buy based on that metric as well as raw performance. supply is also an issue, if the card is a limited run card i dont think it should be included, but if the card is easily available at retail then its worth a shot. they need to include perf/$ numbers though if they're going to, to figure out if the overclocked card is even worth the price they're charging over the stock version. in this case, it's definitely merited, especially since EVGA for example isnt even selling a stock 675mhz 460 anymore. with the latest bios their stock model is like 715/725 core or something (i forget which), and thats across the board for their "reference design", selling in the same price bracket as every other stock 460.

you have it bracketed, it's 720. mine said 675 on the box but was actually 720 when I booted up for the first and only time @ stock.

 

[toyota]

you have it bracketed, it's 720. mine said 675 on the box but was actually 720 when I booted up for the first and only time @ stock.

yeah the standard EVGA clock is 720 because they even list the FTW model as being 130mhz overclocked.

 

[bryanW1995]

The EVGA FTW has a full warranty from EVGA so your "claim" that it won't last as long is ridiculous. Its fully tested to run safely at that speed. They included the power consumption number.

Anandtech isn't about catering to uninformed people that buy computers or upgrades at Best Buy, its for enthusiasts and hence they handled it properly by giving us more information with plenty of disclaimers.

wrong, it's a TR edition with a 2 year warranty instead of the standard lifetime evga warranty. As I mentioned earlier, an astute buyer would just buy an SC or even stock card, use afterburner to OC the SH** out of it, most likely end up with a HIGHER oc, then rma the card in a few years if he had problems.

 

[bryanW1995]

If nvidia wanted a new version with the higher core, then they should have made them, and be widely available, instead of cherry picking for EVGA a limited amount of cards.

It clearly isn't possible to OC as much as EVGA did on stock 460's.

It is also clear that the nvidia people are very worried, and they tried to shove in cherry picked cards to throw a wrench into AMDs release.

This is all OK as long as it was disclosed fully, and make it well known that it isn't possible to OC the stock 460's as high as these cherry picked EVGA boards. Telling them about increased power draw, and temps, and all that good stuff as well.

The other question is, what happens if the OC card dies, will that ever be reported in a future article ? I have mentioned before that my friend's 460 cards died (stock 460 cards from 2 different companies) after only a few weeks of use, so I am a bit skeptical as to the reliability of stock parts, let alone OC parts.

I'm not saying that I agree with what anandtech did here, but you don't know much about gtx 460 if you think that a stock card won't oc to 850. go buy one off the shelf from BB or someplace, test it, then return it the next day. I'd bet a lot of money that a random sample like that would get to 850+, especially if you could up the voltage a bit in afterburner.

I've bought many other cards and cpus over the years that had a strong OC reputation that didn't live up to expectations for me, but gtx 460 has, if anything, exceeded my already high ones.