Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What Review Sites Do You Consult For IT Equipment?
JackAcme writes "Searching for product reviews via Google mostly turns up sales sites masquerading as review sites. Consumer reviews on Amazon and other big retailers are suspect since so many manufacturers are paying for positive reviews. Where do Slashdotters turn for reliable, informed reviews of new hardware and software?"
Newegg. Usually has the most honest reviews and manufacture responses if it's because of an RMA or a neg review.
http://hardocp.com/ is a good one for reviews on hardware performance and overclocking for gaming.
Ars for computers, GSM Arena for phones.
"expert sex change"!? I don't think that's the kind of equipment the OP was referring to
Tomshardware.com
Anandtech.com
smallnetbuilder.com
And every now and then one of the others, but those are my three go-to sites.
I tend to figure that (so long as I don't cling to the bleeding edge, where even the honest reviews are of inferior gear for high prices, soon to be replaced by more mature gear at lower price), it tends to matter a lot less. Do PR flacks buy good reviews? Yes, it seems likely. Should they be first against the wall when the revolution comes? Well, probably not first; but I'd gladly make room for them in line. Can they crowd out the mass of reviews once the early-adopting suckers pass and an item becomes subject to mass judgement? If so, that's some serious cash being dropped on buying reviews.
All blathering aside, if you aren't trying to ride the bleeding edge, the stakes are lower and the odds of, at very least, ending up with 'good enough, and crazy cheap' are good.
It's the early adopters who really face a difficult problem, when the goods are at their least mature and most expensive, and the flacks outnumber and control the actual buyers and actual reviewers to the greatest extent. Simply practice a little patience and you can easily avoid the greatest trouble. Leading the bleeding-edge by the nose, by controlling who gets per-release and super-early gear just isn't that difficult, and even if the reviews are real, they reflect mostly early-adopter fanboy optimists. Just sit back, fuck around with whatever tech you already have (take comfort, for it is no doubt greater than that which inaugurated the internet) and wait a month or two. Lower prices, greater clarity, and general sanity await you.
Well, it beats Amateur Sex Change.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I honestly trust opinions here more than most other places. Seems to me that most tech sites, though good, are so enthralled with the latest and greatest cool thing that they lose sight of the needs of mere mortals.
Now, my pet peeve isn't with hardware reviews, but with the various App stores. I've pretty much given up trying to judge any app on Google's Play site based on reviews. As often as not they seem to fall into two categories: "Wow! Cool App! Best App Ever!" or "Crap App wouldn't work on my phone."
The former reached a new pinnacle of uselessness when one guy posted "It hasn't finished downloading to my phone yet, but I'm sure this is the coolest thing ever!."
Yeah, most apps only cost a few bucks, but I'd still like to know if the damned things will actually work, without crashing, before I bother downloading it.
Three Squirrels
Be aware of even reputable web sites for hardware reviews because they'll keep recommending the newest and fastest hardware since speed is easily quantifiable and testable but will completely ignore the difficult to quantify things like reliability, customer support, warranty service, etc.
One example that's relevant to recent Slashdot stories is how all the top review web sites raved about OCZ for years and the speed and low price and only paid a little attention to the huge failure rates, terrible customer service, and overall dissatisfaction of the users of the products.
How many years of reading about amazing OCZ Vertex 1, 2, 3, 4 reviews and high recommendations and now we see that OCZ is nearly bankrupt due to the crap they were selling and the review sites were helping them all along just to be on their preferred reviewer lists so that they could get pre-release hardware to test with buggy firmware and crappy chips.
Full disclosure up front: I currently write for ExtremeTech and Hot Hardware. In the past I've written for Ars Technica (2007 - 2009) and briefly Tech Report (2H 2005). Before that, I wrote for a now-defunct site going back to 2001.
Obviously I could be biased and plug the sites I write for. I write for them for a reason, after all. But since no one is going to buy me telling you to read my own work, here's where I go, personally:
For in-depth, excellent analysis (in alphabetical order)
Anandtech (Anandtech.com)
Ars Technica (Arstechnica.com)
Tech Report (techreport.com)
For ultra low-level analysis:
Real World Tech (www.realworldtech.com)
Agner Fog's CPU blog (www.agner.org)
Lost Circuits (www.lostcircuits.com)
All three of these resources update only occasionally. But the information is second to none.
For spot-checking or specific issues:
TechSpot.com does great CPU/GPU scaling articles. LaptopMag or NotebookCheck are great for their particular areas. CPU-World has good general database information, VR-Zone often has interesting scoops, as does wccftech -- if you're willing to filter out a lot of rumor / speculation from the latter. Tom's Hardware has useful dynamic databases for product performance. So does Anandtech.
Don't be afraid to read a review on a site you haven't heard of, or with a layout from 1999. While established names and high-quality writers tend to go together, they are neither exclusively matched nor guaranteed. A good reviewer will document issues, give a thorough discussion of the topic, and won't come off sounding like a marketing employee.
There really aren't any sites that do reviews of Enterprise class hardware. At best you'll find reviews of SMB hardware like what StorageReview does, but that's really about it. The other problem is the reliance on synthetic benchmarks. We've run into a few cases where hardware has performed as expected while doing test runs, but then found bugs and issues when put in a POC lab environment.
I haven't seen StorageReview mentioned. These guys were the first I'd seen who seemed to have a real clue about storage eg. they concentrated on latency rather than sequential transfer back in the day - latency is a much more interesting metric for most use cases. I don't follow their reviews as religiously as I used to, but they are the first guys I turn to when something new happens in storage technology.
You can't even be sure reputable sites won't be gamed, and fall for it. And not just astroturfing either. Been a while since I've seen the old switcheroo, but that's still done. Manufacturers aren't above lying on occasion.
You think you're getting a great product, but what you didn't know was that the manufacturer totally revised it and cheapened quality everywhere. I'm thinking especially of the venerable Linksys WRT54G wireless router. Revision 4 was a great router with a great reputation. When I bought one, unknown to me was that Linksys had just rolled out revision 5 with totally changed insides. They replaced Linux with VXWorks, and cut the RAM in half. It was total crap, and it was so different it should have been given a different model number. As it was, you couldn't tell which revision was in the box until you'd opened it. After struggling with it for a day, I took it back, it was that bad. Couldn't even reliably ping through it. Later, Linksys put the good one back on the shelves under a slightly different model number, the WRT54GL.
There was also a stunt TEAC (think it was them) once pulled with a CD burner. The version they sent out for review was not the version that got put on the shelves, though it had the same model number and specs. They deliberately deceived the reviewers, and gave them a much higher quality version than consumers got. Not surprisingly, it received rave reviews. But it wasn't long before the deception was uncovered.
Whole classes of hardware are pretty junky. For instance, many consumer grade routers fail early because they are so marginally designed they easily overheat and burn out. DVD burners are another troublesome piece of hardware. On both of those on several occasions, I've had to try several brands and models before I found one that would just work adequately. Ink jet printers are of course infamous for being not only high maintenance and expensive to operate, but programmed to give the users FUD as if they weren't troublesome enough without that. There have been many low end economy hardware ideas that were just too cheap, not worth taking home. Pretty much any Intel CPU designated as SX had such reduced performance that they weren't worth the savings over the DX version. Integrated graphics that co-opt some of the main memory became quite notorious for awful performance. Recently, Intel has finally made some decent integrated graphics chipsets, but they have 10 plus years of bad reputation to overcome. Then there was the junk known as the Winmodem.
Even if all that's avoided, can still be caught by systemic defects. Remember the Capacitor Plague? Many devices made in the early 2000s-- motherboards, graphic cards, monitors, even power supplies-- were built with flawed capacitors that failed in under 5 years. Manufacturers were saved from big trouble on that front by the typical rapid obsolescence of technology, though they didn't escape entirely. The poor review site simply has no means of catching a problem like that.
As a rule, mechanical devices simply aren't going to be as reliable no matter what's done to improve their quality. Even when manufacturers aren't trying to pull something, mechanical will never be as good as solid state.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
The day google seemed to demote experts-exchange.com was one of the best days on the internet.
My go-to sites are those which go beyond the benchmark and get real-world data beyond a 3-minute number crunch.
HardOCP had their custom heatsink with the thermo-probe for more reliable temperature measurement.
Techreport has been phenomenal over the years in this. They built a custom PSU tester to test the loads of any or all of the rails at once. Then they had their "inside the second" articles diving in to frame latency, which led to better Radeon drivers. More recently, and still running, is their SSD deep-cycle test, which is already showing blocks beginning to fail on SSDs.
The innovation factor and time taken to really dive in are things I don't see elsewhere.