Hardware Review Sites and Vendor Relationships

VL writes "Manufacturers demanding content changes is nothing new in the tech site community. We take a look at this topic, including one very public example that started in the past three weeks."

Comments

One of the first cases

[Joceyln Parfitt]

One of the first cases of this was when Tom's Hardware (then only a startup site) reviewed a Riva TNT and said it was twice as fast as 3DFX voodoo (obviously untrue, but it's unknown if Nvidia paid him anything to say this). Eventually 3DFX picked up on this and demanded that Tom changes it, which he did.

But the damage was already done.

Re:One of the first cases

[oferic]

One of the first cases of this was when Tom's Hardware (then only a startup site) reviewed a Riva TNT and said it was twice as fast as 3DFX voodoo (obviously untrue, but it's unknown if Nvidia paid him anything to say this). Eventually 3DFX picked up on this and demanded that Tom changes it, which he did.

Here are the reviews from Tom's site:

Comparison of Graphics Cards with NVIDIA's RIVA TNT Chip
Addendum to Banshee, Savage3D and TNT Preview
New 3D Chips - Banshee, G200, RIVA TNT And Savage3D
Preview of 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee, S3 Savage3D and NVIDIA RIVA TNT

I only skimmed the articles, but he doesn't seem to be saying that the TNT is twice as fast. The last article concludes:

"NVIDIA's RIVA TNT is not the new wonder chip as some people may have expected. However it is sticking up very well against its toughest competitors from 3Dfx. 3Dfx has still got an edge in applications that are available in a Glide version and in games that don't strain the CPU as much, thus giving a dual Voodoo2 configuration the chance to show its power. However, there are many occasions where TNT is at least as good as single Voodoo2, dual Voodoo2 and certainly better than Voodoo Banshee."

Seems fairly objective to me. Did I miss something? Maybe the articles have been edited?

not only hardware...

[ricochet81]

How about Oracle asking for MySQL to remove their stats from the benchmark table

"Note that Oracle is not included because they asked to be removed. All Oracle benchmarks have to be passed by Oracle! We believe that makes Oracle benchmarks very biased because the above benchmarks are supposed to show what a standard installation can do for a single client."