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Comment by iforgotpassword | Hacker News Reader

I think this is something LTT could handle with their new test lab. They already said they want to set new standards when it comes to hardware testing, so if they can hold up to what they promised and hire enough experts this should be a trivial thing to add to a test Parcours for disk drives.

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LTT's commentary makes it difficult to trust they are objective (even if they are).

I loved seeing how giddy Linus got while testing Valve's Steamdeck, but when it comes to actual benchmarks and testing, I would appreciate if they dropped the entertainment aspect.

GamersNexus seems to really be trying to work on improving and expanding their testing methodology as much as possible.

I feel like they've successfully developed enough clout/trust that they have escaped the hell of having to pull punches in order to assure they get review samples.

They eviscerated AMD for the 6500xt. They called out NZXT repeatedly for a case that was a fire hazard (!). Most recently they've been kicking Newegg in the teeth for trying to scam them over a damaged CPU. They've called out some really overpriced CPU coolers that underperform compared to $25-30 coolers. Etc.

I bet they'd go for testing this sort of thing, if they haven't already started working on it already. They'd test it and then describe for what use cases it would be unlikely to be a problem vs what cases would be fine. For example, a game-file-only drive where if there's an error you can just verify the game files via the store application. Or a laptop that's not overclocked and only is used by someone to surf the web and maybe check their email.

This is a good idea. You should send a suggestion to them!

already already

The forums contain more of the actual stuff. Not necessarily for the steamdeck, but you'll tend to find less entertainment type stuff.

https://linustechtips.com/topic/1410081-valve-left-me-unsupe...

From the most recent WAN show at 2:22:52[0]:

> for starters i think the lab is going to focus on written for its own content and then supporting our other content [mainly their unboxing videos]... or we will create a lab channel that we just don't even worry about any kind of upload frequency optimization and we just have way more basic, less opinionated videos, that are just 'here is everything you need to know about it' in video form if, for whatever reason, you prefer to watch a video compared to reading an article

0: https://youtu.be/rXHSbIS2lLs?t=8572

AFAIK they are under embargo still as far as software and performance, remember the steam deck doesnt launch until the 25th

Ah, I see how my comment was misleading--it really meant to highlight that at times I do appreciate LTT's entertainment aspect, not that I expected there to be a technical review of the steamdeck.

I'd really like to see one of the popular influencers disrupt the review industry by coming up with a way to bring back high quality technical analysis. I'd love to see what the cost of revenue looks like in the review industry. I'm guessing in-depth technical analysis does really bad in the cost of revenue department vs shallow articles with a bunch of ads and affiliate links.

I think the current industry players have tunnel vision and are too focused on their balance sheets. Things like reputation, trust, and goodwill are crucial to their businesses, but no one is getting a bonus for something that doesn't directly translate into revenue, so those things get ignored. That kind of short sighted thinking has left the whole industry vulnerable to up and coming influencers who have more incentive to care about things like reputation and brand loyalty.

I've been watching LTT with a fair bit of interest to see if they can come up with a winning formula. The biggest problem is that in-depth technical analysis isn't exciting. I remember reading something many years ago, maybe from JonnyGuru, where the person was explaining how most visitors read the intro and conclusion of an article and barely anyone reads the actual review.

Basically you need someone with a long term vision who understands the value you get from in-depth technical analysis and doesn't care if the cost of it looks bad on the balance sheet. Just consider it the cost of revenue for creating content and selling merchandise.

The most interesting thing with LTT is that I think they've got the pieces to make it work. They could put the most relevant / interesting parts of a review on YouTube and skew it towards the entertainment side of things. Videos with in-depth technical analysis could be very formulaic to increase predictability and reduce production costs and could be monetized directly on FloatPlane.

That way they build their own credibility for their shallow / entertaining videos without boring the core audience, but they can get some cost recovery and monetization from people that are willing to pay for in-depth technical analysis.

I also think it could make sense as bait to get bought out. If they start cutting into the traditional review industry someone might come along and offer to buy them as a defensive move. I wonder if Linus could resist the temptation of a large buyout offer. I think that would instantly torpedo their brand, but you never know.

I use rtings.com every time I buy a monitor.

https://www.rtings.com/monitor/tools/table

They rigorously test their hardware and you can filter/sort by literally hundreds of stats.

I just built a PC and I would have killed for a site that had apples-to-apples benchmarks for SSDs/RAM/etc. Motherboard reviews especially are a huge joke. We're badly missing a site like that for PC components.

> I just built a PC and I would have killed for a site that had apples-to-apples benchmarks for SSDs/RAM/etc.

Userbenchmark has benchmarks for SSDs[1] and RAM[2]. Can't help you with motherboards though.

[1]: https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/

[2]: https://ram.userbenchmark.com/

I can't take them seriously for anything because of their CPU benchmark debacle.

I never heard about this. Can you share a link? I am interested to learn more.

Just google userbenchmark bias. Basically, when AMD shook things up a few years ago with huge numbers of cores, UserBenchmark responded by weighting down the importance of multithreaded workloads in their scores, so Intel would stay on top. Now their site is banned from most subreddits, including both r/intel and r/amd.

You can get the gist by reading through this thread

https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/dzdacg/userbenchm...

It wasn't one event, more like the ratings for CPUs just became laughably, transparently, utterly worthless, to the point where Intel i3 laptop CPUs were scoring higher than top-end AMD Threadripper CPUs. And they refused to acknowledge any issues.

Within a month or two after AMD started shipping CPUs with more than 8 cores, they tweaked the algorithm to ignore >8 cores. And various other ridiculous changes that hurt AMD's rankings.

Why was this downvoted? It is a useful post!

I appreciate the links. But it's tough to believe stats uploaded by random users, especially when we're only talking a few percent difference. Not to mention, if you sort by "avg bench %", apparently WD released an NVMe drive that's faster than Intel Optane. You'd think that would have made the news.

fwiw the best motherboard comparison I found was on overclock.net[1]. It didn't list everything I cared about, but it was a great starting point

[1]: https://www.overclock.net/threads/official-intel-z690-mother...

Individual benchmarks uploaded by random users would be hard to trust yes, but UserBenchmark collects thousands. If you click through to the page for a given product it'll even show you a distribution graph of the collected scores from different real-world machines.

> apparently WD released an NVMe drive that's faster than Intel Optane

"Faster" is a matter of opinion; it depends on what you're optimizing for. Optane obviously has faster random reads, but it's not so great at sequential writes. The UserBenchmark score tries to take all of that into account: https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-905P-Optane-NVMe...

Unfortunately Userbenchmark is totally useless for comparing components. They don’t even attempt to benchmark one change at a time while keeping all other parts of the testbench identical.

Worse yet every time I benchmark one of my machines, I score significantly higher than the average user results for the same hardware. Perhaps the average submitter has crapware/antivirus installed or their machines are misconfigured (e.g. XMP disabled) which makes all their data suspect.

I mentioned this in another comment, but I think GamersNexus is doing exactly what you want.

Regarding influencers: they're being leveraged by companies precisely because they are about "the experience", not actual subjective analysis and testing. 99% of the "influencers" or "digital content creators" don't even pretend to try to do analysis or testing, and those that do generally zero in on one specific, usually irrelevant, thing to test.

I hope they do a good mix of entertainment and GamersNexus's depth. I'm struggling to watch GN without zoning out after a couple minutes. It's good deep content for sure, but if it was in written form I'd just skim and get the interesting bits.

You wrote: <<bring back high quality technical analysis>>

How about Tom's Hardware and AnandTech? If they don't count, who does? Years ago, I used to read CDRLabs for optical media drives. Their reviews were very scientific and consistent. (Of course, optical media is all but dead now.)

LTT is more focused on entertaining the audience than providing thorough, professional testing.

He’s recently pivoted a ton of his business to proper lab testing, and is hiring for it. It’ll be interesting to see, I think he might strike a better balance for those types of videos (I too am a bit tired of the clickbait nature these days).

So he says; I wish the funding were available to other groups who already have a more proven / technical track record in the area, though.

Like... what if LTT bought out Anandtech instead of trying to spin up a new 'labs' to replicate what has largely been lost (but still exists to an extent) in a few dusty corners of the tech journalism world.

I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt, but there's so far been a lot of "just try me" and "we hired someone amazing" but I'll believe it when I see results!

AnandTech is owned [1] by a media conglomerate with a $4,000,000,000 USD market cap [2]. That's a lot of water bottles.

1. https://www.anandtech.com/show/13092/future-plc-to-acquire-c...

2. https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/quote/FUTR.L?p=FUTR.L&.tsrc=fin...

And Anandtech doesn't allow anyone to reproduce their results, and their readers are their product, so...

But audience is also important. If it is only super-technical sources that are reporting faulty drives then the manufactures won't care much. However if you get a very popular source that has a lot of audience, especially in the high-margin "gamer" vertical then all of a sudden the manufactures will care a lot.

So if LTT does start providing more objective benchmarks and reviews it could be a powerful market force.

I would personally leave this kind of testing to the pros, like Phoronix, Gamers Nexus, etc. LTT is a facade for useful performance testing and understanding of hardware issues.

That's like Ellen DeGeneres declaring a desire to set new standards for film critique.

Gamers Nexus?

Man thats a bit harsh.

How so? What's the problem with LTT? Are you just bothered that they're more than a purely informational source?

I think "the problem with LTT" is that, as time goes on, they've slid off the purely informational stuff and into the whatever-gets-the-most-clicks stuff. I don't mind a little bit of humor or personality (Digital Foundry is great in that regard), but when Linus started uploading videos that defended his use of click-baity thumbnails and the bribes he received from Nvidia/Intel, his credibility fell off a cliff for me. If you're not going to stand for the objective truth, why even bother reviewing hardware? I'd imagine that pressure is what pushed them to invest in this lab, but even then I have a hard time trusting them.

Linus is welcome to chase whatever niche market he wants, but as a "purely informational source" he's got a pretty marred track record these days.

Why do clickbaity thumbnails matter more than the content of the video? Linus has made it clear that he hates using them, but videos with them consistently get way better viewership, which is kinda essential to keep the channel running.

I'm also very curious to see a source on the "bribes he received from Nvidia/Intel", because I'm not finding anything that looks relevant on Google.

I agree. To some extent you have to play the game to win.

If LTT can succeed and provide good information, then what is wrong with their click bait thumbnails (or similar techniques)?

> Why do clickbaity thumbnails matter more than the content of the video?

Take for example this recent video: "We ACTUALLY downloaded more RAM" [1] complete with grinning youtube face holding a stick of RAM marked '10TB' - and it's complete bullshit.

How can I trust the opinion of someone who publishes such embarrassing nonsense?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=minxwFqinpw

I like how you quoted my question and then completely ignored it. The fact that you disliked the title of a video is not in any way a meaningful criticism of its content.

But okay, let's take a closer look at that video. When I saw it in my YouTube recs, I rolled my eyes at the clickbait and skipped over it, but I didn't see how it makes LTT look bad. In fact, I just gave it a fair shot and skimmed through it for myself, and it actually looks like a pretty solid explanation of memory hierarchy and swap space for beginners, packaged in a format that will increase its reach. I don't see what's bullshit about that.

Look, say what you will about clickbait, the unfortunate truth is that it gets views, which channels like LTT need to survive and grow. Linus is on the record saying he hates it, but they've done the tests to confirm that the stupid thumbnails and titles just perform better.

And come on, let's be honest here: How many people are going to click on a video titled "What is swap space?" or "You can use Google Drive for swap space on Linux" or something similarly boring? Even the best explanation in the world isn't going to get traction with a title like that. I looked for comparable videos and it looks like "What is Linux swap?" by Average Linux User (https://youtu.be/0mgefj9ibRE) is the next most-viewed video on the same topic. That video has gotten about 90,000 views since it was posted in 2019. By comparison, the LTT video has averaged about 100,000 views per day in the 16 days since it was posted.

So it looks to me like LTT took a technical topic that most people would never think about, found an angle to make it interesting to random people browsing YouTube, and tricked potentially thousands of people into learning something. What exactly is embarrassing about that?

He talks about the youtube algorithm being the primary driver for the shitty thumbnails https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzRGBAUz5mA vs his traditional one that got buried.

Not sure about his other stuff you claim, I'm not a super big video guy for tech things (just let me skip and search ahead easily) but this came up with my friends a few years ago after people started noticing many videos from various creators going to this format of thumbnail.

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