Bouncing Zabaglione Bros. said:
That doesn't answer the question: is this new stance at [H] of not reviewing a product that is not yet shipping (because it's not yet shipping) going to apply to all future hardware reviews? Or was this just for ATI's benefit?
Your question is a bit different and I will be happy to answer it as well.
First off, on what you are referring to, where exactly is this policy put in place and exactly who executed it? Please link me to what you are looking at in print so I can explain to you what it means as I think you are confused as to what our policy is. That is understandable though as this topic has been approached from any angles, so seriously, it would help me answer your question knowing what exactly you are referring to.
Here is my overall stance on this, since you are interested. Also, and please take this to heart, we generally apply different standards to different areas of the site (Yes, we are expanded to four distinct areas of coverage later this year.) I wish I could rubber stamp one policy to every bit of content that we created, but that simply is not applicable in terms of both coverage and fiscal responsibility. (Yes, HardOCP is a business with currently around 9 editors working for us and that should expand to about 20 by Q2 of next year.) But back on topic and I will get to the simple ones first.
[H] Consumer - Currently covering desktop and laptop computer systems. All of the machines we are evaluating here are being purchased by HardOCP from the company's website or over the phone the same way a normal consumer would. So in this instance, if it is not available in retail, we don’t evaluate it. We have not ruled out the possibility of doing some “just released†boxes, but that will never be the focus of this part of the site.
[H] Enterprise – Same thing as above in terms of evaluation policy, but with a focus on retail server solutions.
[H] Console – Still totally up the air here on policy. We simply do not have enough experience in this market to make a call yet as to how we should handle things.
[H] Enthusiast – This is obviously the one you are interested in….but the rules here sort of change product to product.
*Motherboards / Chipsets – For about two years now I have been of the mindset that we do not evaluate motherboards that are not available in the retail channel, and also we do not eval motherboards that are engineering or pre-retail samples. We just found that too many “review samples†we were covering, either never ended up being sold in North America or the samples we were evaluating in no way shape or form represented what the end user was purchasing off the retail shelf. So for about two years now, we have done our best to only eval motherboards that come from retail stock and are for sale. That is our goal, and I would say that we do a very good job of reaching it although it is tough to be perfect at it. Bottom line is we gave us “doing it first†for “doing it right.†And I think this had made our mobo product category stronger for it.
*CPUs – To put it simply, Intel and AMD keep to the launch dates they set when they provide us with samples for testing, for the most part. Availability is not usually and issue with these guys any more. And just to note, that there have been a few CPUs in the past that we have “skipped†evaluating in the past because we felt they were simply “for show†CPUs that were not widely available and simply being “launched†to one-up the competition. So us not covering a product is nothing new.
*Video Cards – Our policy here is very much like the CPU policy. We evaluate the video cards and usually the companies stick to their “for sale†dates or at least hit a window that is within reason. We will also not include cards, much in the same manner that we might exclude a CPU. The NVIDIA 6800 Extreme Ultra comes to mind ( I think that was the name.) It seemed to be an obvious “one-up†card that would never come to production. You did not see it included in our reviews, but you did see it included on other sites.
I would say that all outlines our policy. I am sure you will have a follow up question or two, so I will make sure to come back and look for those, or feel free to mail them to me.
