Your Feedback On The Use of EVGA's GeForce GTX 460 FTW in Last Night's Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 22, 2010 5:55 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Last night we published our Radeon HD 6870 and 6850 review. In it we made a decision to include a factory overclocked GeForce GTX 460 from EVGA (the EVGA GeForce GTX 460 FTW). For those who aren't aware, NVIDIA has allowed a number of its partners to ship GTX 460s at higher than stock clock speeds. A practice that has been done in the past. The cards are available in retail with full warranties.
A number of you responded in the comments to the article very upset that we included the EVGA card. Even going as far to accuse us of caving to NVIDIA's pressure and demands. Ryan and I both felt it was necessary to address this front and center rather than keep the discussion in the comments.
Let's start with the obvious. NVIDIA is more aggressive than AMD with trying to get review sites to use certain games and even make certain GPU comparisons. When NVIDIA pushes, we push back. You don't ever see that here on AnandTech simply because I don't believe this is the place for it. Both sides (correction, all companies) have done nasty things in the past but you come here to read about products, not behind the scenes politics so we've mostly left it out of our reviews.
NVIDIA called asking for us to include overclocked GTX 460s in the 6800 series article. I responded by saying that our first priority is to get the standard clocked cards tested and that if NVIDIA wanted to change the specs of the GTX 460 and guarantee no lower clocked versions would be sold, we would gladly only test the factory overclocked parts. NVIDIA of course didn't change the 460's clocks and we ended the conversation at that. We gave NVIDIA no impression that we would include the card despite their insistence. The decision to include the EVGA GeForce GTX 460 FTW was made on our own entirely.
We don't like including factory overclocked parts in our reviews for reasons we've already mentioned in the article itself. This wasn't a one off made for the purpose of reviewing only, it's available from online vendors and a valid option from a price comparison. Furthermore it presented us with an interesting circumstance where the overclock was large enough to make a significant impact - the 26% overclock pushed the card to a performance level that by all rights could have (and should have) been a new product entirely.
From my standpoint, having more information never hurts. This simply provides another data point for you to use. We put hefty disclaimers in the article when talking about the EVGA card, but I don't see not including a publicly available product in a review as a bad thing. It's not something we typically do, but in this case the race was close enough that we wanted to cover all of our bases. At the end of the day I believe our conclusion did just that:
At $179 buy the 6850. At $239 buy the 6870 for best performance/power. If you want the best overall performance, buy the GTX 470. However, as long as they are available the EVGA GeForce GTX 460 FTW is a good alternative. You get the same warranty you would on a standard GTX 460, but you do sacrifice power consumption for the performance advantage over the 6870.
We were honestly afraid that if we didn't include at least a representative of the factory overclocked GTX 460s that we would get accused of being too favorable to AMD. As always, this is your site - you ultimately end up deciding how we do things around here. So I'm asking all of you to chime in with your thoughts - how would you like to handle these types of situations in the future? Do we never make exceptions even in the case of a great number of factory overclocked cards being available on the market? Do we keep the overclocked comparison to a single page in the review? Or does it not matter?
And if you're worried about this being tied to financial gain: I'll point out that we are one of the only sites to have a clear separation of advertising and editorial (AnandTech, Inc. doesn't employ a single ad sales person, and our 3rd party sales team has no stake in AT and vice versa). The one guarantee that I offer all of our writers here at AnandTech is you never have to worry about where your paycheck is coming from, just make sure you do the best job possible and that your conclusions are defensible.
If we've disappointed you in our decision to include the EVGA FTW in last night's review, I sincerely apologize. At the end of the day we have to maintain your trust and keep you all happy, no one else. We believed it was the right thing to do but if the overwhelming majority of you feel otherwise, please let us know. You have the ability to shape how we do things in the future so please let us know.
Whether you thought it was an issue or not, we'd love to hear from you. I do appreciate you reading the site and I want to make it better for you in the future.
GP
Take care,
Anand
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doobydoo - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 - link
So there's now a 'principle' that certain products should be ignored when reviewing others? Why's that then?It's like you genuinely think this is some kind of moral outrage, I mean seriously, how sad could you be?
I think the main principle to any review site like this is to help customers find the best value for money, or best performance, etc, basically the FULL picture.
How can you provide the consumers with a full picture if you don't include a better value proposition from a competitor?
How is it BETTER to hide information from consumers? It isn't.
Touche - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
The fact that you've put a disclaimer in the original article is worthless. You shouldn't have done it, period.And you completely disregarded one important fact: reference cards are available all over the world. EVGA cards are not to be found in my country at all! Let alone these special overclocked ones. And the one you included is the highest OC'd 460 there is, not even close to being a representative of a majority of factory OC'd 460's.
The inclusion is not beneficial to all your readers worldwide, and is least beneficial to the integrity of your site. Bowing to demands of a company in reviews, taking any hints at all even, is below all standards. Anandtech is one of my most frequented sites, and generally highly regarded, but this put a big stain on that.
Tunnah - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
so basically you're saying they should only review stuff available to you ?Touche - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
Your reading comprehension is remarkable.What I am saying is one shouldn't include a niche card (both performance and availability wise) in a new generation graphic card's review.
Tunnah - Saturday, October 23, 2010 - link
why ? are the readers so devoid of comprehension that anything outside the norm would send them into the abyss ?i can't understand this at all, from what i can tell not 1 reader has assumed the OC'ed card to be anything but so..in fact most see it was a good yard stick as an alternative not as a higher model but as a different path; if there's so many OC cards out there than maybe my factory clock can perform just as well..
..to be honest you all seem pissed about information to the masses..let's be overdramatic here and say 1984..but i'm drunk as a skunk so i can be
doobydoo - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 - link
+1 exactly.Who cares if a card is niche? The fact is I could buy one right now, and the majority of the readers on this site could buy one right now. Just because a tiny percentage don't have the ability to buy it, so what?
If you can't buy it, ignore the provided data and move on. Why is it so challenging to NOT buy a card if you know it isn't available to you?
StormyParis - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
The risk is 2-fold:1- nVidia may be trying to use EVGA's specific factory overclocked product to have AT, and us, validate the whole factory overclocked category. As far as I know, specs of individual factory overclocked products may vary even more widely than specs of standards products, and we already know those can vary...
2- nVidia is artificially adding products, and padding their lineup, to drown ATI's. And hijacking review space, again to drown out ATI, by getting reviewers to describe their oddball offering at length.
In the end, I think the proper place for this non-standard product, in this specific review, would have been a sidebar. A specific product from a specific vendor has no place in a reference design shootout, especially when there's a strong risk that other overclocked cards will NOT be the same specs.
You fell for it.
doobydoo - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 - link
1 - Are you saying you lack the intelligence to realise that the EVGA own brand factory overclocked card isn't necessarily the same as other manufacturers? It seems the problem is not with Anand, but with yourself.2 - You mistake the fact that NVidia made a suggestion with that being the reason it was included. Anandtech clearly eluded to the reasons why they chose to include the card, perfectly logical and rational. You describe it as an 'oddball' offering, but it's available, to buy, right now, with a warranty at reviewed speeds. So what's 'odd' about it?
Why do you think that separating the 'non-standard' products would make any difference? The conclusion would still be the same, it would just be spread over 2 reviews, instead of one. Again, we seem to arrive at a point where I simply have to question your intelligence. Are you saying that 1 review is too confusing for you, so you need to have it broken down? Bless.
And we all know that overclocked cards are not the same specs, even a monkey knows that, but they didn't add 'overclocked cards' - they added the EVGA card. There's a difference, and they couldn't have been more clear about it.
Antah Berantah - Monday, November 1, 2010 - link
"especially when there's a strong risk that other overclocked cards will not be the same specs"Do you really mean it?
I have two GTX 460, one from Digital Alliance and another one is MSI, both running at 900 / 1000 and seems that I can push them even higher
fredgiblet - Friday, October 22, 2010 - link
I have no problem with the inclusion of overclocked cards as long as they are clearly labelled as such. I agree completely that nVidia SHOULD simply create a new product line with higher specs (they've done it before after all) but in the meantime I think it's perfectly reasonable for them to push OCed cards and for you to review them.HOWEVER, I would say that you should cease posting OCed cards if they persist in not creating a new product line for some time, give it a month or so, if they haven't responded by then then they probably won't and there's no reason to do their work for them in the long run.