More HL2 Propaganda from Anand

[3dilettante]

I've got to give Anand some kudos for one thing: he definitely knows how to make a spectacle.
With his latest articles and news posts, he has probably gotten a good number of hits. I'm pretty sure even those who discount the reliability of Anandtech had to check out what was going on at least once, if not more just so they could be sure of what they were seeing.

I know I went back a few times to check on what is going on, so I guess it's all the same to AT regardless if I went there to see their appraisal or just to see how badly things were going.

 

[Sharkfood]

It's of no importance what is found on Anand's site. Anyone that still gifts the site any degree of credibility in the past has hopefully learned their lesson by now.

This is the same kind of thing that was published in Radeon 9700 Pro reviews last year, around August-ish where Anand stated how the NV30 coming out was going to make the choice of buying a 9700 Pro unclear. Anand's site was the #1 site for FUD tactics regarding the NV30 prior to it's release, and did so every time the 9700 Pro was mentioned while also hinted towards "trusted findings" that all turned out to be nonexistent.

 

[WaltC]

It's of no importance what is found on Anand's site. Anyone that still gifts the site any degree of credibility in the past has hopefully learned their lesson by now.

This is the same kind of thing that was published in Radeon 9700 Pro reviews last year, around August-ish where Anand stated how the NV30 coming out was going to make the choice of buying a 9700 Pro unclear. Anand's site was the #1 site for FUD tactics regarding the NV30 prior to it's release, and did so every time the 9700 Pro was mentioned while also hinted towards "trusted findings" that all turned out to be nonexistent.

The odd thing about all this to me was that I thought he hit nV30 precisely on the head--and did an overall competent, professional review of the product nVidia sent him. He was critical when he should have been.

But ever since then none of his reviews has come even close to that level of professionalism. Nowadays he's soft-pedaling everything. The nV30 review was long and complete, and he approached his comparative review by looking at IQ and attempting to draw meaningful conclusions. Now, he's publishing mystery benchmarks from mystery sources he had nothing to do with and admits it--he's publishing "multipart" comparative reviews including upcoming, non-shipping products still under NDA, which are using drivers not yet available to the public--AND he adds insult to injury by publishing frame-rate bar charts in PART ONE, and saving the image quality comparisons for PART TWO, which will be published at some later date YTB. Can we conclude he doesn't understand that without IQ comparisons, frame-rate bar charts are meaningless? I think his nV30 review proves he understands the importance of covering those aspects simultaneously.

If not for the credible job he did with nv30 I'd have to put him in the same category as Pabst and Bennett and say he should stay with motherboard and chipset reviews, since they are his obvious forte. But he proved in that NV30 review that he does understand the basic principles behind authoring a decent 3d-card hardware review.

It's too bad web sites aren't required to list financial arrangements with hardware manufacturers somewhere on their sites. For one thing, sites that are accused of having these kinds of deals but actually don't have them would be served by it, I think. And on the other hand, the information would serve the public interest if it's known a certain site is being paid by an IHV.

Ah, well, it's a caveat emptor economy.

 

[Sharkfood]

The odd thing about all this to me was that I thought he hit nV30 precisely on the head--and did an overall competent, professional review of the product nVidia sent him. He was critical when he should have been.

Oh, he absolutely HAD to. He had spent the previous 8-10 months blowing so much smoke and causing so many folks to wait that once the NV30 finally DID come out, he had to duck into serious damage control.

It's like touting this ultimate cheeseburger for a burger shop that hasn't even opened up yet.. while people are standing around hungry next to Wendy's. All the while making references and hints that your information is "inside" and you've truly already sampled the goods and they are worth waiting for. Then suddenly, the burger joint opens up and they are selling these soy burgers on stale buns, taste like motor oil and overpriced. The only thing you can do then is point your line of hungry sheep back over to Wendy's.

 

[cthellis42]

As far as I remember for Anand's 9700 review, he said a lot of "one could expect"s of what NV30 should have, not really making claims. Granted that's still soft-pedalling, but most reviewers do conjecture as well. Who WOULD have expected nVidia to have a 128-bit memory bus when even Matrox had gone to 256? Even if that was the only difference the NV30 had at launch, it likely would have compared a LOT more favorably to the 9700 than it did. (The pipelines, of course, have always been under contention. Hehe... And still are, considering all the guesswork going into what R420/NV40 will show up as.)

 

[CorwinB]

Well, in this business, there's always something better around the corner. So in my humble opinion, if a famous reviewer says "I can't recommand product XXX because product YYY will soon be there", then it's not a case of saying "something better will be available one day", which is a given, but it's actually endorsing with your own credibility that product YYY will really come soon, and will really be better than product XXX.

If you are not sure of that, then you are spreading FUD and/or are being used for that purpose, and you completely deserve getting creamed for it when product YYY turns out to be a late, overhyped, overheating, overnoisy (???) and underperforming piece of hardware.

 

[cthellis42]

Also true.

Of course most of the 5800 reviews were both properly critical as well as saying "and since the 9800 is coming just around the corner..."

It was a needless tone-shifting add, but I don't think I noticed it much even at the time (and at the time I was mainly just reading Anand and Tom's for review stuff ) as I was too busy being blown away by the 9700 seeing just how MUCH they they lept into 1st by. (Something they had never been able to do before.) Judging by nVidia's usual track record with architecture changes I figured it'd still be pretty close in general--and since it wasn't showing up for months still ANYway...