Question so long and thanks for all the fish

[Thibsie]

Eww not gonna take myself over there. No offense to the Tom's regulars, it's just . . . meh no thanks.

Tom's-paid-by-Intel ?
No way !

 

[marees]

Tom's-paid-by-Intel ?
No way !

More like Nvidia 😉

 

[zir_blazer]

Tom's-paid-by-Intel ?
No way !

Flashbacks to Tom's Hardware reputation during the early 2000's...

 

[CakeMonster]

I learned about overclocking via jumpers from a Tom's Hardware article. Kind of crazy that they're still around, although I rarely visit, I some times stumble on their forums from search results, and I some times listen to one of their journalists (forget the name) when he's on the PCWorld podcast.

 

[AdamK47]

The worst thing about Tom's Hardware forum is the absolute dumbest uninformed unhelpful responses to hardware questions. Every time I search for something hardware related through Google, I actively avoid clicking on anything from Tom's Hardware forum. I can almost guarantee the responses will not be anywhere near the correct ones.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Flashbacks to Tom's Hardware reputation during the early 2000's...

The reputation never recovered. They have contributors that shill shamelessly year after year.

One of the most shameless -

"Just buy it!" "When you die and your whole life flashes before your eyes, how much of it do you want to not have ray tracing?" -Avram Piltch (TH's Editor-In-Chief)

 

[AdamK47]

The reputation never recovered. They have contributors that shill shamelessly year after year.

One of the most shameless -

That's one of the reasons they are still around and AnandTech isn't.

They play the dirty games their corporate overlords want of them.

 

[Thunder 57]

The reputation never recovered. They have contributors that shill shamelessly year after year.

One of the most shameless -

That guy wasn't in charge long but I still don't like him for shutting down conversation. Paul has been a bit of an Intel shill. AT's own Jarred is mixed but can at least make an argument.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Tom's-paid-by-Intel ?
No way !

More like Nvidia 😉

Doesn't matter who is the marketer-of-the-week, it significantly dampens the value of discourse when someone is being paid to have an opinion (or acts like they want to be paid). We had our own issues with that around here. Thankfully those problems were expunged.

 

[zir_blazer]

The reputation never recovered. They have contributors that shill shamelessly year after year.

History lessons: Tom's Hardware used to have a Senior Editor (Albeit I recall Editor-in-Chief) called Van Smith, which was one of the three responsible along with AnandTech and HardOcp to force Intel to recall the infamous Pentium 3 Coppermine 1.13 GHz. Soon afterwards he either left or was fired, whatever. Whoever replaced him at Tom's Hardware was extremely Intel biased, supposedly because Intel began buying ads there, and Tom's Hardware reputation began to take a hit in educated Hardware circles. However, at that time they did made some extreme branding damage to AMD due to the infamous video of an Athlon smoking when its heatsink was removed (Actually, I think they were two videos, one of an Athlon Thunderbird and a later one of the Athlon XP Palomino), which caused a lasting impact because I still remember than even by 2005-2006 you ocassionally had forum n00bs claiming that AMD was bad because their processors overheated and burned themselves, idea that they got due to that damn video (And ironically accusing AMD for overheating deep in Prescott furnace era. Oh, the irony).

Sadly, doing digital archaeology is becoming harder and harder due to the amount of forums that already closed, but I remember doing exactly that in the early 2010's when things were still available, which is where I got the details I recall from that entire drama. For one, the link from Van's Hardware I posted above was talking about an AMD made video, whereas I recall than the AXP Palomino one was a Tom's Hardware made video involving NOT using Motherboards that had working thermal shutdown protection (I recall that the only one available was a Fujitsu-Siemens board at release, which they didn't use. That is the most useful keyword for looking at things from this specific incident). They also did the same thing with a Pentium 4, where they removed the heatsink while playing Quake 3, it throttled like a slug, then put the heatsink on again and game resumen at normal speed. The suspicious thing is that when the P4 was without heatsink they used a thermomether to measure and it was at like 30°C or so, which was impossible because Willamate throttled at 100-110°C or so, and it would have most likely shut down.