Tom's Hardware -- super CPU review

This particular review is neat because they have everything from the Intel 4004 to the latest dual core CPU's:

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20051121/index.html

- Chris

Be careful with any data coming from Tomshardware. They have been caught out multiple times for falsifying data and such.

But it is a cool graph.

It's best not to take any review as 100% accurate or law.

- Chris

Hey, I'm not questioning your statement but can you point out any articles or references stating as such? I really haven't kept track of such things to a high degree in the past couple of years but back when I had the resources to try to keep my pc on the cutting edge, I used Tom's Hardware as a bible. I will admit they certainly are opinionated but I haven't read anything stating that they were actually lying.

Led_Blind said:

Be careful with any data coming from Tomshardware. They have been caught out multiple times for falsifying data and such.

But it is a cool graph.

Click to expand...

Some one was bound to ask for proof. Unfortunately i no longer have the specific details but I am in the same boat where tomshardware was the first place to go for hardware news.

The story
i was in the marked for video cards and started looking at their reviews and discovered inconsistencies in their frame rate numbers. On closer investigation it appeared certain brands had higher rates even when using the exact same VPU.

Strange . . so i went hunting for other reviews and found no less than 3 showing approximately the same rates but all were lower than on tomshardware.
Closer inspection of the article at the time showed a greater of manufacturer specific advertising links in that one article than in others. . . . hmmmmm i smelled something bad.
I attempted to contact them via email several times pointing out inconsistencies and never received a satisfactory answer just denial.

AFIAK being paid by the manufacturer to review their product is the same as advertising and full of extensions of the truth. Since then i have never trusted their reviews.

EDIT: Oh and i have noticed they recently publishing an article describing the testing methodology in detail.. . . I wonder if they were becoming aware of the loss of faith in their reviews. Did this hurt their bottom line? Hmm

I used to read Tom's years ago, along with Anandtech and HardOCP and their posted links to other sites. My problem with Tom is he thinks of himself as the deity of review sites and his reviews started to suffer.

I still go to HardOCP to get their links to other review sites and Anandtech on occasion. Another site I frequent quite often is silentPCreview as their power supply testing, load testing and thermal testing are extensive. Tom's I generally don't go to unless that have something really interesting to read.

Tom's Hardware... boy... I used to go there before they even had a registered domain... It used to be sysdoc.pair.com How do I remember these things? WHY do I remember these things?

Back then, they only really reviewed motherboards and video cards. Then they started getting into memory testing and different CPU testing and testing video cards with different CPUs... I don't know... a bit after that, I sort of lost repsect for them a little.