Kyle throws a [H]issy fit about CrossFire shipping late

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Actually Kyle you can buy a xfire masters card and xfire mobo today...your right they are late...but a two week window is not a bad start..
 
jb said:
Actually Kyle you can buy a xfire masters card and xfire mobo today...your right they are late...but a two week window is not a bad start..
Show me. And no pre-order stuff, I'm looking for mass availability.
 
bigz said:
I've not seen any CrossFire Edition video cards for sale in the UK yet, though. Only motherboards.

Whoa, didn't realize ati.com doesn't sell outside NA. . .but apparently they don't. I can see that being an ouchie for this gen of CrossFire master cards. At any rate, they claim to have the X850 for sale. . .same price as regular X850 too (at least at their store).
 
bigz said:
Yep, you can't buy from ATI.com in the UK.

I was going to quip about someone needing to tell them about "the special relationship", and then realized they are Canadian and it is supposed to be even specialer! Specialmost? Or something.

I mean, really. . .what is the point of being a company store if not to be the supplier of last resort? They certainly don't --and can't, or their partners would have a hissy-- compete on price!
 
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I've spoken to a couple of retailers and they've heard "next week" for X850 CrossFire Edition cards. They also said words to the effect of "we'll believe it when we see them". X1800 XT CrossFire Edition cards are looking likely to hit on time in the first half of November, though.
 
dizietsma said:
Of course if it had been nvidia who was on the receiving end of Kyles decision on what to review or not we wouldn't be here talking about this because once again it is the latent ATi phanboys on this forum who are causing much of the noise. Same as it was with the Anandtech guy mentioned above.

I don't agree with Kyles decision in this case but as I do not love ATi it doesn't bother me at all. I read the data he did present and used it with data from other sites to get a broad outline of performance, I did not read his article at all for IQ as I am waiting for Dave's.

People are getting upset here not because they think Kyle has done his readers a disservice ( they probably look down their noses at them and think they are ignorant monkeys I'd guess) but because they think Kyle has done a disservice to their beloved ATi.

Wow! Well done. Nice wide-ranging insult to most of the board members.

Personally, I'm not an ATI fboy (although my PC at home uses a Radeon 9600 in *gasp* an nForce motherboard), but I do recognise differences in the way HOCP has treated X1800 as opposed to previous NV paper launches. Have ATI had it coming? After the supply problems with the various PE editions of R420/R480 and then the Crossfire delays, perhaps so, but this isn't anything we haven't seen in the past from NV also. I just find it hard to believe that one well-executed launch from NV (7800GTX) requires a whole change in reviewing practice, (not to mention that the X1600 is reviewed despite the fact it won't be available for a while yet). More pertinently, Kyle's actions actually provide positive PR for NV and calls into question ATI's integrity which is why some are wondering if there is something else behind his stance - it just seems too lopsided to be sincere. This is only amplified by his snarky comments on the news page about ATI's VS3.0 implementation.

If Kyle wanted to make a point, it seems to me that it would just have been more sensible to do the tests but then have a flashing banner saying "FROM PAST EXPERIENCE, WE KNOW THAT THESE CARDS MAY NOT BE AVAILABLE FOR SOME WEEKS".

Just my viewpoint.
 
Mariner said:
Wow! Well done. Nice wide-ranging insult to most of the board members.

Indeed. To support that, you'd have to come up with a situation where NV was treated in a similar matter on something of the same relative importance (I mean, new gens don't come along all that often) by a major site, and then show how the folks here were indifferent to it.

I mean, did *any* of the major sites take a pass on the NV30 preview in November of 2002? I think not, and that was a much more severe case. I just looked at the Anand preview from Nov 18, 2002, which announced availability in Feb. 2003. As I recall, it turned out to actually be early March.

Now, I can hear a greenjeans saying "Oh, there you go bringing up NV30 again". But the point is not to bash NV --the point is the reviewing community still gave them all the breaks on passing on their communications on the matter.
 
Mariner said:
Personally, I'm not an ATI fboy (although my PC at home uses a Radeon 9600 in *gasp* an nForce motherboard), but I do recognise differences in the way HOCP has treated X1800 as opposed to previous NV paper launches. Have ATI had it coming? After the supply problems with the various PE editions of R420/R480 and then the Crossfire delays, perhaps so, but this isn't anything we haven't seen in the past from NV also. I just find it hard to believe that one well-executed launch from NV (7800GTX) requires a whole change in reviewing practice, (not to mention that the X1600 is reviewed despite the fact it won't be available for a while yet). More pertinently, Kyle's actions actually provide positive PR for NV and calls into question ATI's integrity which is why some are wondering if there is something else behind his stance - it just seems too lopsided to be sincere. This is only amplified by his snarky comments on the news page about ATI's VS3.0 implementation.
About sums it up.

Pete said:
As long as I'm nitpicking, tho there never was an official 6800 Ultra Extreme, quite a few 6800Us were sold clocked at those "Extreme" levels, including the BFG cards you seem to favor.
The BFG thing bothers me because last summer when I was shopping for GPUs some of HardOCPs benchmarks were TOTALLY irrelevant because of their reliance on non-stock cards. The BFG cards were, at the time, a bit more expensive and harder to find. So the benchmarks comparing X800Pros to 6800GT OCs were misleading to the actual mainstream products on the market, it was also not in the same price class.

I actually purchased a 6800GT but it always seemed "odd" that HardOCP would use lopsided comparisons like this. "OC" cards were not the norm for the 6800GT series and cost more, so I don't understand how someone can honestly use it in gaming benchmarks against a competitors stock card.

Indeed. To support that, you'd have to come up with a situation where NV was treated in a similar matter on something of the same relative importance (I mean, new gens don't come along all that often) by a major site, and then show how the folks here were indifferent to it.

I mean, did *any* of the major sites take a pass on the NV30 preview in November of 2002? I think not, and that was a much more severe case. I just looked at the Anand preview from Nov 18, 2002, which announced availability in Feb. 2003. As I recall, it turned out to actually be early March.

Now, I can hear a greenjeans saying "Oh, there you go bringing up NV30 again". But the point is not to bash NV --the point is the reviewing community still gave them all the breaks on passing on their communications on the matter.
Indeed. You can add SLI into the mix as well as Kyle admitts. Why was NV given the benefit of the doubt?

Oddly, I was at tomshardware.com this morning and they did a full "preview" on the 65nm Intel P4. What I found odd about this is their preview is basically the same information you get from their reviews. What is odd is that they said they would no longer be reviewing parts they could not buy.

I see nothing wrong with what they did--the clearly say it wont be available for a while--but it begs the question of the rollercoaster, "We wont review this, but we will that".

Which kind of draws back to the Hard[OCP] X1600 review. Why were certain parts not reviewed due to "availability" and yet other parts in the same situation were? On the face there is no easy explaination.

NV30... SLI... BFG OCs... odd flip flops on reviewing unavailable products...

Ps- Not that it is really relevant or matters, but I know people who had the X800XT PE preordered and they received theres last summer. Numerous times it was made available as well. While it surely was a weak SKU I remember the same issue with NV's "Ultra Extreme" which basically, for all practical purposes, never existed. Yet people did not have a problem reviewing it.

This is why I always read what drivers were used in a test, the system configuration, and compare with other sites results. Review sites are *companies* and they recieved advertising and products from the companies they evaluate. Most start off very small. I remember when I was in a very similar situation reviewing games. We learned very quickly that as a small fledgling site that when a publisher or developer passes on review material and you don't give it a good review, well, unless your volume of readers/market impact grows they wont do ANY more favors for you.

It is what it is. Bigger sites can avoid some of this, but there is always those roots. So unless a site buys their own review material from retail and uses puts some control on advertising (e.g. use a thrid party to negotiate) I think these small hardware websites will ALWAYS be under a cloud. It is pretty obvious to me some have ties with NV and others with ATI. Keeping strong ties with a company can be very difficult in a market heavily influenced by consumer perception.
 
IIRC Kyle is good friends with someone at BFG and, IMHO, he has given BFG a disproportionate amount of attention compared to other nV IHVs.
 
Well, he's free to do that, just don't pretend that he's doing his readers a service by comparing OCed NV cards to stock-clocked ATI cards. But I doubt he'd use BFG cards simply b/c he has a friend there. I mean, [H] has a wider readership than him and his buddies.

Yes, I don't think anyone sells OCed ATI cards (well, maybe Sapphire, albeit rarely), and OCed nV cards are a bit more common (at least at the high end), but it's still not a fair representation. Then again, I also take issue with his (and most reviewers') street price vs. MSRP arguement. Surely someone might read the article a week or month after it's been posted, in which case prices should have narrowed, leaving performance as the big differentiator.

BTW, the prices on both XLs have dropped since last night. The ATI at ASS is down to $459 (MSRP + $10), and the C3D at MPC is down to $436. Both prices are before S&H, in which case ASS will take me for an extra $12, while MPC will hit me up for a mere $6.50.
 
According to his "front page news" he suggests that you cannot find any GTOs or GTOs in stock at retail.

http://www.dabs.com/ProductList.aspx?SearchTerms=+x800gto&SearchMode=ALL&SearchKey=All&PageMode=3&NavigationKey=0&SearchType=1

(Nice new site BTW)

and

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/X800PCI_Series.html

and

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Submit=Go&DEPA=0&type=&description=x800gto&Category=0&minPrice=&maxPrice=&Go.x=0&Go.y=0

Maybe he should spend more time investigating his news items rather than trying to work out what ATI stands for.
 
mattredd said:
According to his "front page news" he suggests that you cannot find any GTOs or GTOs in stock at retail.
Oh My Gawd. He really is a [T]ard puppet for Nvidia. The GTOs are supposed to be vendor only products.
 
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