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• Collie147 - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link

  I find the Bench facility is of HUGE relevance for purchasing, especially for purchasing for the office, the sysmark scores are invaluable, especially when they're there and you can compare them on a single page and send a screen shot to my manager about why this one should be purchased over that one.
  
  I would however love to see some server CPUs included on the Bench though, it would make my job a hell of a lot easier!
  
  Fair play Anand, keep up the fantastic work.

• dubyadubya - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link

  I found Anandtech so long ago it seems near forever, 10 years+? I have based all my PC builds around knowledge I gained here. Sure I visit other tech sites, you know the ones but none even come close to Anandtech. Anandtech is unbiased and thorough, what more can you ask for. Hell my home page has been Anandtech nearly forever and I do not see it changing any time soon.
  
  Bill

• Jeffg010 - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link

  The very first article I ever read on anandtech was the most profound. Someone had linked a review about power supplies to this website. The article showed how they were not all created equal. This was a real eye opener because when Anand put each one in a high end system they each had a different level of being stable. What I think he did at the time was over clock the test system to see how stable it would last. Some of the 200 watts power supplies were more stable then a 300 watt. No one did anything like this back in the day. This was a real eye opener for noob that was just starting out in the tech field; I started out testing for Y2K. Ever since that review Anandtech has been my source for hardware reviews and helps make the best choices when it come to hardware.

• Uyukio - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link

  I have been a reader of Anandtech for going on 8 years now and while I don't make a large number of posts the information that I get from Anandtech is invaluable.
  
  I am the Senior Network Engineer for the Research, Development, Testing and Evaluation arm of a large computer forensics lab in the United States. I have many stories about Anandtech influencing my outlook on things by providing me with good, scientific data that I can present to my peers and my director however I'm just going to touch on two of them.
  
  We are presently outfitting to move a part of our operations to a new space and as a result needed to acquire a number of servers to support the increase in infrastructure and still have a few around for the inevitable short notice requirement that will crop up in the future. As soon as I found out that I was going to have to make a purchase order to supply this need I came here and re-read all of the recent server articles, especially those dealing with using higher powered servers to virtualize existing servers. The information that I got from reading the articles about the servers, as well as the recent "ask the experts" features on virtualization I was able to make a well informed decision on a set of HP servers that should meet our needs for some time to come. This happened in spite of the fact that some of my older colleagues still subscribe to the philosophy that "virtualization is evil" because physical servers do a better job thanks to the hard data and expert opinions that I found here.
  
  Secondly, one of the current hot topics here is how much the use of solid state drives could reduce our caseload (by increasing throughput if you'll pardon the computer metaphor). A large part of my contributions to our meetings on the subject has come from Anand's SSD reviews in regards to expected performance increase, particular brands that we should look into, reliability and more. My director was so impressed with the information that I was able to supply that I have been given authorization to do the use case testing for the software that is commonly used in our lab so that we can justify the purchase of new SSDs and which SSDs we ultimately purchase will have been influenced in no small part by Anand's dedication to accuracy.
  
  While many people may not be as interested in some of the technical details that you go through when you do an in-depth examination of a product, in my line of work questions about architecture and the exact nature of where data resides and how it gets there come up quite often. Thank you again for providing detailed, accurate information in as concise a format as possible.

• Zanfib - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link

  Nearly every purchase I have made has been influenced by an article I have read on AnandTech. I consider the site to be the definitive voice on SSDs, video cards, motherboards and processors (and more, but those are the products I buy most frequently). I have also purchased a power supply on a review recommendation. The site is fair and balanced and has unprecedented access to the companies and products they review.
  
  I check AnandTech daily, sometimes several times a day; the only other site with that much influence over me is (unfortunately) my Facebook page. The funny thing is, my IT manager told me the same...
  
  Thanks Anand, keep up the good work.

• Chernobyl68 - Wednesday, September 22, 2010 - link

  I'm building a new system based largely on recommendations and articles from this site. I've been reading this site for years and it was from reviews here that I chose my first motherboard; a FIC model for an AMD K6-233 way back in the day. I basically learned to build my systems by reading this site.
  
  My new computer is eventually destined to be a HTPC.
  Lian Li PC-C33 Case
  ASUS Crossfire IV motherboard
  8GB Gskill DDR3 memory
  Crucial C300 128GB SSD
  WD 2TB HDD
  AMD Phenom II 6-core 2.8 Ghz CPU
  2x ATI 5850 Video cards
  Windows 7 64bit Home Premium
  
  Between this site and Newegg its just about all you need to build a machine. Maybe a trip to the local Fry's for things that slip between the cracks. :)

• vladimir_atehortua - Wednesday, September 22, 2010 - link

  The company I work for sells solutions to telcos. One of our solutions is a billing system that takes call detail records from phone switches, and performs the entire billing process applying tons of logic and tons of information relative to suscriptors, countries, plans, promotions, etc. One of the strengths of this solution is that it's made to scale horizontally, and was proven in 2007 to process over a hundred million call records in 11 hours, using 8 dual core machines. The main Oracle database is relaxed because all calculation are done in the commodity boxes (using local, embedded databases).
  
  Back in 2007 a large and well known Mexican telco entered our local market (Colombia), purchasing many small cable providers, investing many millions, and eventually becoming one of the major broadband and TV providers in the country.
  
  By the second half of 2008 they purchased a gvmt license to become a carrier of long distance voice calls in our country, and also begun selling (voip) phone lines. They chose my company's solution for billing of phone calls.
  
  When the project begun I was to provide hardware specifications for the platform, which I did (modest 4 quad core servers). It was december 2008, and their IT staff was all sold up into the virtualization hype of the day, which if you remember were times of was first-era virtualization with vendors saying "performance is near to native" but reality being much, MUCH worse.
  
  I tried to explain to their IT staff that the CPU consumption profile of our app would not virtualize well. I tried to tell them that those lines like "performance is almost as good as native" were vendor crap. I was not successful to convince them on my own, those guys were deeply entrenched in all the hype, and the vendors had dthem convinced that everything could be virtualized, and should be, to leverage consolidation.
  
  To my rescue came an artilce here on anandtech (I tried to find it for you just now but couldn't, sorry) that performed a benchmark, a performance comparison of native vs virtualized, betwen 4 different loads: idle, kernel compilation, some sort of website app, and an OLTP database. The performance loss was considerable in the web app and specially in the OLTP scenario. I forwarded their IT staff this article and explained to them that the nature of our app was very OLTP and CPU intensive and that if they insisted in virtualziing they would expect that kind of performance drop. They were mute for a couple days. Later I found the areticle got them scared, because they were in the middle of a massive corporate-wide effort on "virtualizing everything", and until then had believed that performance was just as good as netive (remember, we are talking 2008).
  
  So they agreed to not use virtualized servers for our app, and went back with some serious questions to their virtualization vendor regarding their project. Hopefully they had more success in consolidating their IT because of this.
  
  It was under the guidance of Anandtech that back in the era of intel's Prescott Pentium 4, all the hardware configurations i set up were Opterons, given the horrible performance hole intel got itself back then. The afforementioned 8 dual core machines setup had a contractual requirement of billing 104 million calls in less than 12 hours). It was done in just 11 hours, and I believe had they not been Opterons but Xeons, we could have been in trouble.
  
  On the less corporate side, me living in south america means I have to import stuff like high end video cards and the like, which makes them even more expensive (due to import fees and exchange rate), which makes the purchase decisions ever more paramount.
  
  Anandtech has helped me with every single purchase for like 5 years, however, not everything is a happy story. Since those first couple articles about SSDs, I've known that would be the best possible upgrade for my computer, I've known there's an order of magnitud in disk peformance, to a point Anand's personal coumputer will never again be without an SSD, and yet, given the cost of SSDs, exchange rate, and import fees, I've had to endure almost two years now, knowing that theres SSD paradice but that I cannot enjoy it. Had I not known perhaps I'd have been a little happier =P
  All I can do is wait for that new generation of intel's higher density nand chips to go mainstream and lower everybody's prices. Or perhaps the generation after that... maybe, someday.
  
  Vladimir Atehortúa
  IPTotal Software S.A.
  Colombia

• Exirtis - Wednesday, September 22, 2010 - link

  Wow, over the years (2000 until now)...
  
  Items that I would not have bought were it not for AnandTech reviews:
  -ASUS A7N8X Deluxe
  -SAPPHIRE RADEON 9500 128MB
  -AMD K6-2 Chomper 500MHz Socket 7 Processor
  -Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JB
  -Linksys WMP54G
  -AMD Athlon XP 3200+ Barton 2.2GHz
  -Two computer cases
  -Several different CPU coolers
  
  Items where AnandTech played a part of my purchase decision (through review or competitive assessments):
  -ViewSonic P95F+B
  -Linksys WRT54G
  -CORSAIR 512MB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM (3x)
  -Logitech MX1000
  -LITE-ON 18X DVD±R Model LH-18A1P-184
  -ECS N6200A-256DZ GeForce 6200
  -SAMSUNG STORY Station 1TB
  -Logitech MX Revolution
  -Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 500 GB
  -Logitech Z-5500
  -Logitech Harmony 900 Remote Control (Black)
  -Logitech Performance Mouse MX
  -Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB (2x)
  -Linksys WMP55AG PCI
  -Logitech MX900
  
  Other than the above, whenever I'm in the market for a video card, a motherboard, anything storage related (HD, flash mem, etc.), a computer case, CPU cooler, computer monitor, or computer peripheral I often check AnandTech first before going elsewhere. Additionally, computer purchases by friends and companies I have worked for (including a whole host of computers at one college, for their PC labs) have been influenced by what I read on AnandTech.

• duveit - Thursday, September 23, 2010 - link

  Ended up buying the intel GEN 2 160GB SSD after reading the articles on the topic, and the tests themselves obviously. And my system is running smoother than any system I have ever built and owned previously! (i7 920 setup)
  
  So, I think Intel owes you a lot of money :-)
  
  PS: Current computer acctually hinders me as I type this post, the HDD is going mad with something, I dont know what it could possibly be, but it is a good example for why I now find such discomfort using computers that lacks SSD

• faster - Thursday, September 23, 2010 - link

  I own a small business and manage another with a combined 15 employees in the legal field. We started small and grew over time. Computers have been my hobby since a child, and I built all of the computers and servers in my office. Whenever, over the course of time, we built or upgraded computers, I would always check Anand Tech for reviews on components in order to make intelligent informed purchasing decisions. In my opinion, compared to other tech sites, Anand Tech seemed the most credible becasue they explained their testing methodologies and utilized them as long as practicable to compare component development over time. Many other web sites seem like nothing more than paid mouthpieces of the manufacturer so I coudn't trust a word they said. Credibility is paramount in evaluating a source of information and Anand Tech has felt credible to me as a reader for years. I only built file servers with RAID and destop computers, not really "enterprise" solutions. We were a small business trying to save money. We needed value and reliability. Anand Tech provided the analysis I needed in order to make intelligent purchasing decisions. I must have spent $30,000 or more on computer parts and software over the last 5 years and Anand Tech certainly influenced how I spent that money.
  
  I'm for real. You have my contact info in my profile. Feel free to contact me for further information.