What I miss about Anandtech motherboard reviews

[Zap]

Let me precede all this by saying I've been a loyal reader of Anandtech motherboard reviews since the Shuttle HOT-557 motherboard review that Anand posted on his little web site way back (lost in time). I still read every motherboard article posted at Anandtech, however I find myself more and more just skimming the article. I know the task of reviewing may be daunting with the huge number of available boards, seemingly ever increasing pace of new chipset releases and of course the endless BIOS revisions. Still, I do miss a few things.

What I miss about Anandtech motherboard reviews...

FULL REVIEWS

Seems as if I'm seeing more "first looks" and blog posts than full reviews. Add the "follow ups" and "quick overclocking" for a bunch of... not full reviews.

TIMELY REVIEWS

How many slipped dates have we seen posted here for announced reviews? Posting about an upcoming review creates anticipation... and expectation. Either get the review done, or stop the vapor.

WARRANTY/RMA INFO

Alright, this was the real reason I started typing this message. What ever happened to this feature? AFAIK it was unique to Anandtech articles for a period of time and I've never seen anything like it before or since. I give you as an example this article from 2004.

The way our Tech Support evaluation works is first, we anonymously email the manufacturer's tech support address(es), obviously not using our AnandTech mail server in order to avoid any sort of preferential treatment. Our emails (we can and will send more than one just to make sure that we're not getting the staff on an "off" day) all contain fixable problems that we've had with our motherboard. We allow the manufacturer up to 3 (business) days to respond, and then we will report whether or not they responded within the time allotted, and if they were successful in fixing our problems. In case we don't receive a response before the review is published, any future responses will be added to the review, including the total time it took for the manufacturer to respond to our requests.

AOpen AK86-L: Tech Support and RMA

Our last experience with AOpen technical support was impressive. This time, we received a response from their tech support staff exactly 7 hours after we sent our email, which is an incredible response time. The answer we got was helpful and had correctly diagnosed our problem...did a great job of keeping us informed and making us feel that our problem was important - something very few other motherboard manufacturers have yet learned about Technical Support.

If you still have a problem and need to RMA your board, AOpen has on-line RMA Procedures, including tracking of RMA requests... This is an outstanding RMA procedure and most users will find the whole AOpen Tech Support and RMA process to be easy to use and responsive.

AOpen's RMA policies and procedures are outstanding and are very rarely seen in the computer industry.

ECS 755-A2: Tech Support and RMA

The ECS RMA policy is clear and easy to follow, but ECS' RMA policy is pretty restrictive compared to other motherboard manufacturers. Basically, ECS only offers Warranty Repair to the Company that purchased the board from ECS, since an original ECS invoice is required... Since you are only allowed to RMA a board if you purchase directly from ECS, you need to be careful to ask the vendor who sells you the ECS board how they handle warranty repairs and replacement.

Am I the only one who found the Tech Support and RMA section of a review to be of great interest?

 

[imported_Scoop]

I don't know man.. I've been more than satisfied with couple of the latest motherboard articles, especially the ASUS ROG Rampage Formula was some very intresting stuff. As I don't live in the US, the RMA and warranty doesn't concern me the same way I guess so I don't care. Or even if it does, I still don't care No complaints here.

 

[Gillbot]

It seems like more and more "reviewers" are going away from the full reviews and getting into more of a features and overview scenario. I guess people just don't have the time anymore.

 

[Johnbear007]

I agree... I dont care for the blog thing, although I could easily forgive that if it were MUCH more timeley and frequent.

I often feel like I'm reading a site that no one has really bothered to update seriously for a week or more... the site just "feels" slow latley....... like it's edge is gone.

The articles aren't very distilled either, just kinda of throwing features and synthetics at you without any real meat or PERSONALITY to the writing.... I know it's a tech site but does need to read like an algebra text book?

 

[Mondoman]

It may be past its peak, but at least it hasn't been reduced to the sad level of today's Tom's Hardware where, for example, even so-called tech editors don't know the difference between +12V1 and +12V2 on power supplies.

 

[Skott]

After the matx fiasco AT has lost credibility IMHO. Wether AT can get that back or not remains to be seen. I hope they can but we'll see what happens...

 

[Johnbear007]

Originally posted by: Skott
After the matx fiasco AT has lost credibility IMHO. Wether AT can get that back or not remains to be seen. I hope they can but we'll see what happens...

What MATX fiasco?

 

[JKing76]

Originally posted by: Gary Key back in MARCH 2007
We are in the final phases of the mATX roundup.

Then about every three weeks when someone asked "Where's the mATX roundup?" we'd get back a "Next week". Now it's February 2008.

 

[JSt0rm]

I think individual motherboard performance is pretty flat among each other within the same chipset. it didn't use to be this way so I think it was a more exciting sector to review and read.