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• someguyinmd2010 - Monday, September 20, 2010 - link

  I'm probably one of the oldest readers of the site. I first started reading back probably around 1997 or 1998 in college. Anand was still in High School i believe. The two best sites back then for cutting edge were anandtech and Tom's Hardware. I remember his first Pentium II reviews influenced my roomate to buy the P2 along with a Voodoo video card for OpenGL quake! I was much poorer so Anand's reviews on the AMD K6 combined with a Riva 128 (memories of bad gamma settings making everything dark) gave me my poor man's gaming rig back in the day. This was also the first computer i built with much help from this site(replacing my AST) and lasted me until until i bought my celeron 300a/Abit BH6 to overclock for my new poor mans rig.
  
  A lot of hardware sites have come and gone, but i don't think any have maintained the quality of reviews that Anandtech has.

• xeopherith - Monday, September 20, 2010 - link

  I work for a school district and some of the reviews that are meant for the average home user can effect our purchases as well. We may be looking for a notebook lab or something and besides trialing a notebook we would want some benchmark comparisons and Anandtech.com provides some of the most thorough reviews out there. One thing that I like about Anand is that power and general efficiency are larger topics than at most sites. That is a very important aspect as knowing the whole truth keeps your trust with the site (even if you don't like the product in the review).
  
  We would be considered a small/medium business by our staff amount but when we are talking technology I would say we are on the smaller side of things. Even still, the articles that apply to small/medium business likely apply to us as well.

• nubie - Monday, September 20, 2010 - link

  I found an excellent article on the FujiFilm FinePix A330.
  
  You reviewed the Macro capabilities and found them excellent (which they are). I promptly purchased one on eBay (even at the time I think that article was more than a couple years old).
  
  It is still going strong, and I am able to get very nice shots of circuit boards, SMD components, and A/V equipment and car parts that I sell online.
  
  I also come to Anandtech when I want any news of Video cards. I have purchased my last 6 video cards based on information on this site. I will not buy a video card without knowing the memory bandwidth and the number processing units and their clocks. I never have any money and the most I have ever spent on a video card is surely under $150, so those reviews are important to me so I can get a card capable of the minimum level of performance for a couple years.
  
  Processor reviews: Anandtech convinced me to try Intel processors again with their in-depth articles on core technology (pun intended). I have since built a few Core PC's, instead of AMD. I am looking forward to trying the new AMD lineup based on Anandtech's reviews of the Athlon II core and the excellent performance it offers.
  
  Memory is another area where fine articles at Anandtech have kept me from jumping on a advertiser's bandwagon. DDR3 was not ready 3 years ago, and your thorough tests showed that there wasn't an advantage over DDR2. And since then there are articles showing that DDR3 is now the RAM to choose.

• KaRRiLLioN - Monday, September 20, 2010 - link

  I'm an IT Director. 90% of the time before I make a decision, I consult Anandtech and a couple of other trusted websites for benchmark information, etc. and then use that information to make a decision.
  
  So this website has played a part in directing where my $200K budget goes each year since circa 2001 or so.
  
  The vast majority of that obviously comes from reading the articles and reviews.

• BrianTho2010 - Monday, September 20, 2010 - link

  Anand,
  
  I have been wanting to purchase an SSD since they first came out, but have been leery of them. There was very little solid information about the different models on the internet, that was until you became the unoficial SSD guru. With the plethora of well organized, informative, and comparative articles on SSD's I was able to safely make the decision to purchase a 160 GB X25-M 34nm. Intel should definetly send some thanks your way, as should OCZ.
  
  A Big Thanks from a long time reader,
  Brian

• Zink - Monday, September 20, 2010 - link

  I am a high school student and I can say that though I read several other hardware review sites AnandTech reviews are a cut above the others in terms of accuracy and detail and I read them word for word.
  I decided to go with an i5 750 and x25-m g1 based on your reviews last year. I also decided to upgrade from my ipod touch 2g to a used ipod touch 3g for my pocketable browser last week instead of going for the newer generation touch or a galaxy s based on your performance reviews and CPU architecture analysis. I'm planing on saving a few hundred dollars this year and waiting for Cotex A9 in tegra 2 or similar soc.
  Keep the smartphone reviews coming, especially the performance and soc information. You guys are the best.

• alpha754293 - Monday, September 20, 2010 - link

  While I can't say that there's any one specific article, my current IT department at work visits Anandtech on a regular basis, as do I.
  
  In fact, the new CAD station that was recently built for me (for CATIA), relied on performance indicators for the selection of the Intel Core i7 980X as the processor to use. I personally, reviewed the article here to find out what it can do in terms of overclocking, which for what I do, is an important consideration moving forward. (CATIA V5R20 is the last release that will support the "big iron" UNIXes such as AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris; and therefore, I needed something that would be able to keep up with the pace that I work at.)
  
  Another system that is currently in the process of being built that also relied heavily on information from Anandtech is our 48-core AMD Opteron-based FEA compute node. We are starting to get into larger scale parallel processing (both shared memory and distributed memory processing), and the benchmark results from Ansys Fluent and LS-DYNA helped us determine which processors to get.
  
  If I had to make one comment, criticism/feedback, would be to do more testing with HPC programs (because there ARE HPC customers or those wanting to get into HPC) where Anandtech is an important source of information. Additionally, running LINPACK (something that was done previously, but doesn't seem to be the case anymore) is also important because I've found that it taxes and tests a system for stability better than any other program out there.
  
  So, I would DEFINITELY like to see more HPC and compute-intensive benchmarks; and I fully understand that those benchmarks typically take a significant amount of time compared to other more "conventional" benchmarks.

• alpha754293 - Monday, September 20, 2010 - link

  I would also like to add that Anandtech is also a source of information pertaining to SSDs as well.
  
  Some/most/nearly all of the new builds at my company's IT department are being built with SSDs in them.
  
  The benchmarks that are often presented include sequential and random reads and writes, but I would like to see more h2benchw results (especially the swap portion, where it mimicks the file/data access pattern of a swap file/drive).
  
  This is important to my line of work because when you're dealing with a 60 GB swap file, and solving an FEA case using a direct sparse solver, the performance of the swap file I/O subsystem becomes critical to the overall performance of the simulation (at least in terms of total run time). Tests conducted in-house have demonstrated that it can vary by nearly a factor of 10(!) (i.e. 10 TIMES as slow WITH a large swap file vs. with the minimum swap file size using an iterative solver); so, more benchmarks for those types of applications would also be beneficial in guiding future IT business decisions looking forward.

• Octoberblue - Monday, September 20, 2010 - link

  I got the courage to do my first PC build from reading Andandtech. Waaaay back in the day, your reviews of the AMD K6-3 got me fired up about the value/performance of that chip. I had by far the best bang-for-your buck desktop possible at that time.
  
  Any long time reader of AT has no doubt about the sites impact. It's clear that the leadership of AT has influenced even Intel, prompting the chip giant to up it's game significantly, while also leading to their abandonment of such hated practices as the notorious paper release.

• Narf23 - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link

  Way back in the day (April 1998) Anand wrote a wonderful review on the ABIT BX6 motherboard and its over clocking functionality. Living in South Africa it was not an easy task to import but I was able to find a company in the States that would export the motherboard to South Africa.
  
  Upon ordering the board and I then purchased the first Intel Celeron (266Mhz with 0k Cache) which waited to be installed until the board arrived (several weeks.) When it arrived and every thing was installed - I was able to over clock the Celeron to 400Mhz with out any extra cooling!
  
  I like to believe that for a short time - I had the fastest home computer in South Africa running at 400Mhz when the fastest CPU then was Pentium II 300Mhz
  
  I am pleased to say the system worked perfectly over clocked for many years.