TR Forums

I'm curious what happened. I know the basics, the site was sold. Right. By who? To who?

I'm vaguely aware that the site was started by Scott Wasson who... left? Some time ago, so as best I can tell the site was run by a collective of volunteers or something? Wikipedia mentions Andy Brown but if he's around I don't know what his handle/username is.

If someone could clarify or put together some kind of rough timeline I'd be appreciative.

Scott got a job at AMD helping them reduce micro-stuttering in their video drivers (something he'd been the first to discover, explain, and test for) and sold this site to Adam (the biz guy) so that it could keep its journalistic integrity.

Adam wasn't able to keep the site going; I suspect that Scott's industry connections helped keep TR going as long as it did. He was in a bad position and sold the site (alternative was it shutting down, leaving him in significant debt) to the New Management, who shat the bed by changing the site without warning or engaging with the community, and by making some ill-considered front page posts.

bthylafh wrote:

who shat the bed by changing the site without warning or engaging with the community, and by making some ill-considered front page posts.

...and continue to do so, regardless of the changing winds.

bthylafh wrote:

Adam wasn't able to keep the site going; I suspect that Scott's industry connections helped keep TR going as long as it did.

I suspect they hurt as much as they helped. While Scott was basically "hands off" after the handover to Adam, there was a perception (unfounded) that the site was biased against Nvidia, since Scott went to AMD. I seem to recall hearing that they were unable to get Nvidia review samples any more as a result.

Can confirm. In fact, (and I don't think this is giving away anything drfish didn't already say earlier in the thread) Adam contact Nvidia partners directly to make Zak's Super review happened, more than 3.5 years later, because the new regime was unwilling to make any effort.

derFunkenstein wrote:

because the new regime was unwilling to make any effort.

I still don't understand the new owners. Perhaps they are so wealthy that apathy has no pragmatic consequences to them?

DrCR wrote:

derFunkenstein wrote:

because the new regime was unwilling to make any effort.

I still don't understand the new owners. Perhaps they are so wealthy that apathy has no pragmatic consequences to them?

Or they just don't understand what they bought.

TBH, we do need to keep in mind that the site was losing money, so continuing "business as usual" under new ownership wasn't a winning strategy either. But this is even worse.

I see that the frontpage comment system has changed since I last checked in. Baby steps in the right direction.

I see brave efforts to keep the frontpage changing on a regular basis, press releases, peripheral reviews, opinion pieces. Sadly without the industry providing review samples to test it's going to be an uphill battle. TPU, for example, has posted 121 big-ticket reviews since the 7th July covering every CPU, AIB GPU review, Case, PSU, AAA game launch and plenty of minor peripherals and accessories.

They may not be up to the creative writing standard us gerbils were used to, but compared to not even having a TR review of these things at all....? No contest.

The should probably ditch the link to the System guide as it is just shy of a year old. Unless there are some super-secret secret that someone is keeping about it.

This seems like an exciting time for a system guide update. We’ve got a new GPU architecture and a new desktop CPU architecture with PCIe 4 from AMD, a new fabrication process node from TSMC, generous price cuts from Intel and falling RAM prices. Next month will bring new workstation CPUs from AMD and refreshed higher core counts from Intel for half of their previous pricing. We haven’t had this much processor news in years.

From the first post of this thread....

11) Login required before each front page comment

So it's not really a "login". It's something called "name" and "email". By definition, that is not a login. So is it possible that anybody can post comments as "Just Brew It", "Krogoth", or "BIF", for that matter?

It seems to be not even mildly secure and that doubt is the biggest reason that I don't post many comments on the front page anymore. If they're trying to chase us away by destroying our community, I'd say they're doing a great job of it.

It isn't a login but it's a crude form of authentication at least. It could be (and was!) much worse in the early days of the New Tech Report.

Wirko wrote:

It could be (and was!) much worse in the early days of the New Tech Report.

No it's much worse now. Back then things were fixed daily if not hourly and it wasn't long before it all just worked.

Wirko was talking about The New Tech Report (aka The Cat Report).

Yes, I was talking about a brief period when I (or anyone) could post comments as Dam Age, da Mage, d'Amâge, or any other name.

JustAnEngineer wrote:

This seems like an exciting time for a system guide update. We’ve got a new GPU architecture and a new desktop CPU architecture with PCIe 4 from AMD, a new fabrication process node from TSMC, generous price cuts from Intel and falling RAM prices. Next month will bring new workstation CPUs from AMD and refreshed higher core counts from Intel for half of their previous pricing. We haven’t had this much processor news in years.

One year without an update to the system guide is just a slap in the face.

The only reason I dropped by today was to unsubscribe from a thread.

System Guide hasn't really changed that much though. Zen2 desktop platforms are attractive options for their price points. It is difficult to recommend Intel counterparts unless you absolutely need single-threaded performance no matter the cost or need AVX512 support. Navi caused a little price disruption in the mid-tier section of the GPU market but nothing earth-shattering. RTX 2080 and above are still kings of the hill in the gaming GPU world. 1660 and 1660Ti are the budget-minded powerhouses until AMD RTG releases little Navi. Memory prices are more sane then last year and soild-state media are at bargain basement prices.

That kind of thinking killed the site.

Wrong, it is more like the times have changed.

Being a computer hardware enthusiast isn't really that special anymore. All of the exciting stuff is happening on HPC/enterprise side. There's no killer mainstream application that makes desktop system over a decade ago woefully inadequate. You would be hard-pressed to find a non-professional user case for something beyond a Ryzen 9 3900X/Core i9-9900K rig. You can arguably push that as far as a Ryzen 5 3600/Core i7-9600K rig. In short, desktop/laptop PCs are nothing more than commodity goods.

Desktop PC sales have been on the decline for while now and mainstream laptops are starting to feel it too. Reviewing PC hardware has shifted towards video review(s) instead of breaking down charts and reading through multi-page reviews.

Obvious troll is obvious.

No decade-old desktop PC is adequate for modern games.

But GPUs are doomed! Doomed I say!

The end is nigh!

A new hope: Percentile info spotted in the wild, not just avg fps.

DrCR wrote:

A new hope: Percentile info spotted in the wild, not just avg fps.

Also AnandTech, and it's been there for a while.

JustAnEngineer wrote:

Obvious troll is obvious.

No decade-old desktop PC is adequate for modern games.

Yes, it is unless you are a die-hard videophile or need an insane framerate a.k.a tiny, but vocal minority. The masses and most current gamers play their content whatever the auto-settings chooses for them. The difference between "Ultra" and "High" in most games is subtle at best and "medium" detail isn't really that bad. It is only "low" where loss of graphical fidelity becomes painfully apparent. As long as the framerate sustains ~50-60FPS, most gamers are content with it.

The reason is because gaming consoles have been dictating the baseline for nearly everything out there and there's no economic incentive to create a PC exclusive that pushes the envelope hard. Crysis 1 was the last serious attempt at pushing the evelope and it had mediocre market performance.

A sizeable number of PC enthusiast have already given up chasing the constant upgrading wheel. The returns aren't what they are used to be unless you use your system for real-world work.

FYI, my current 9700K is only sightly faster then my previous 3570K rig at gaming stuff. 9700K only shows it prowess when you throw real-world workloads at it. I suppose that the advent of the PS5 and Next-Generation Xbox will finally raise the bar high enough that quad-core rigs might start becoming inadequate.

A 10 year old GPU is not usable today.

Nothing that's 10 years old is usable today unless all you do is browse the internet.

I remember what my PC was like 10 years ago. I mean, even my PC from just 8 years ago would be unusable today, and a few of the games wouldn't even start up due to not meeting the bare minimum requirements.

Edit: This doesn't necessarily mean you need a new PC every year like you might have done 20 years ago. And that's the problem. "Someone" will need an updated system guide every year, but my guess is the total amount of people has been decreasing, because a given build serves them for 2, 3, sometimes 4 or even 5 years, which results in readers and ad revenue spreading out over time and forcing publications to catch extra attention elsewise.

Krogoth wrote:

There's no killer mainstream application that makes desktop system over a decade ago woefully inadequate.

Meadows wrote:

Nothing that's 10 years old is usable today unless all you do is browse the internet.

The hyperbole from both of you is killing me.

A 10 year old desktop (assuming the HDD and GPU are still original) will be pretty darned painful to use unless you've never known anything better.

But with a SSD and GPU upgrade (and with the RAM maxed out), it'll still be perfectly fine for a wide range of tasks, assuming it was a mid- to high-end system 10 years ago. Will the performance knock your socks off? Of course not. But it'll get the job done.

Krogoth wrote:

A sizeable number of PC enthusiast have already given up chasing the constant upgrading wheel. The returns aren't what they are used to be unless you use your system for real-world work.

I cant argue with that. I remember a time when I upgraded something every six months and tried for full builds every two years. my current CPU is a i7 6700K my GPU is way newer and is a 1080. It's just now 5 years later that I am thinking of doing a full build. It was just nice to see the System guide always be there even if I didnt use it yearly.

10 years ago we're talking the middle to end of the Core 2 era with 45-nm Wolfdale CPUs. A Core 2 Quad 9550 wouldn't be horrible but it's not really a useful system these days. It'd have to be an HEDT system to be at all not painful to use, like a Core i7-920 or better.

The current PC landscape has changed significantly since the last system guide update only partly because of Zen 2. Also don't forget Navi, Super Turing, and the ever-falling price of RAM. To say there's nothing worth writing about is completely moronic. The value has shifted significantly and the current system guide is a sad way to be.

And not everybody upgrades annually. Someone with a 3-5 year old system can realize big gains through faster speeds, more cores, and upgraded graphics.

These days I typically do a minor upgrade (same platform and DRAM tech) every 2-3 years, and a new "from scratch" build every 4-6. Given that I don't game any more, even that is overkill; I could probably just do the 4-6 year cycle and skip the intermediate upgrades.