Review sites - what I want to see

[PARANOiA]

I've been thinking about what I am really looking for in a review site. I'm focussing on a few key things:

• Direct comparisons of a large number of cards. Preferably with some sort of "ranking" system at various resolutions with various games. I really dislike sites which only review "this generation" of cards on one chart. If I'm buying a card, I'll want to get the best "bang for my buck", which may mean buying the best of last gen, or maybe the low end this gen, or waiting to see how it goes
• FPS counters for the above so I can identify which card will give me the minimum level of service I expect.
• High resolution reviews. I have a 2405FPW, native at 1920x1200, so there's usually a fairly decent discrepancy between benchmarks at "low resolutions" like 1024x768 and the native res.
• Meat and potato text comparing image quality in a way which doesn't impact the above graphs, but simply says "be aware that card A is cheaper and faster, but card B looks much better". Basically, one that tells me what I need to know since the numbers don't always tell the truth.

Is there any or a combination of sites which are recommended to meet any or all of the above criteria?

Also, is the above available for CPU's too?

 

[duncan36]

Add to that noise readings, and Mp3's of the cards cooling fan in action.

 

[Geo]

I hear somebody around here might be interested in "what I'd like to see" ideas, so keep 'em coming.

 

[Geo]

Well, there's a lot of things I'd like to see that I think would be useful and keep folks coming back on a regular basis.

For instance, I think it would be very gratefully received if a site kept a grid of who was using what games in their current benchmarking suite across all the major sites and a fair sprinkling of the smaller ones. There must be lots of folks who are looking for benchies of a particular game and would appreciate a handy-dandy spot to know where to look. Of course this would not be all that important for the titles that everyone and his brother hits, but would be outside those.

 

[ben6]

I'd really REALLY like manufacturers to give more time between sending a card for review and the NDA lift date. Not mentioning a specific product, cause I've literally had times where the card arrived the afternoon before the NDA lift date from both manufacturers in the past.

Sometimes you're just not given enough time with a card to do it any kind of justice.... Not an excuse, but it DOES happen...

 

[Geo]

Another thing I'd like to see from time to time. . .oh, maybe a once-a-year special?. . .is a round-up of older cards (i.e. not current generation) on the latest cpus tossed at the latest games. Help the poor bloke who's trying to decide if his money is better spent on a new cpu or a new gpu.

Edit: I suppose the reverse of that would be adding older cpus using the latest graphics cards to give the right comparison. Of course, we are right in the middle still of agp-to-pcie transition, so this is a little less relevant right now (because most folks would be stuck doing both), but it will get more relevant again as we go along. . .

 

[volt]

I'd really REALLY like manufacturers to give more time between sending a card for review and the NDA lift date. Not mentioning a specific product, cause I've literally had times where the card arrived the afternoon before the NDA lift date from both manufacturers in the past.

Sometimes you're just not given enough time with a card to do it any kind of justice.... Not an excuse, but it DOES happen...

What Ben said. For round-up that'd be cool, but with new product review must be out fast

 

[^eMpTy^]

This is kinda the direction I'd like to head with my site, just have a massive database of numbers then give people tools to extract the data however they want...the problem is...how do you run dozens of benchmarks on dozens of cards and keep up with the latest drivers for all of them...personally I think the answer is let the users do it...

What I'd like to do is make some timedemos for various games publicly available and encourage people to download the demo, run it, then add the results to an online database...with enough users, you could potentially cover just about every benchmark on every system imaginable...

All kinds of other information could be extracted from this as well...cpu scaling, overclocking statistics...etc...

If I have my way, my site will be doing all of this by the end of next summer.

 

[The_Wolf_Who_Cried_Boy]

I've been thinking about what I am really looking for in a review site. I'm focussing on a few key things:

• Direct comparisons of a large number of cards. Preferably with some sort of "ranking" system at various resolutions with various games. I really dislike sites which only review "this generation" of cards on one chart. If I'm buying a card, I'll want to get the best "bang for my buck", which may mean buying the best of last gen, or maybe the low end this gen, or waiting to see how it goes
• FPS counters for the above so I can identify which card will give me the minimum level of service I expect.
• High resolution reviews. I have a 2405FPW, native at 1920x1200, so there's usually a fairly decent discrepancy between benchmarks at "low resolutions" like 1024x768 and the native res.
• Meat and potato text comparing image quality in a way which doesn't impact the above graphs, but simply says "be aware that card A is cheaper and faster, but card B looks much better". Basically, one that tells me what I need to know since the numbers don't always tell the truth.

Is there any or a combination of sites which are recommended to meet any or all of the above criteria?

Also, is the above available for CPU's too?

You should bookmark Xbit Labs

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/2005-17gpu.html

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/28cpu-games.html