The Mother Board

[ben2207]

I've been pushing Doc that we need to get a LCD monitor with minimum resolution of 1600x1200 for a while now. And today's video cards like the X1800XT and 512MB 7800GTX are becoming more and more CPU limited in the benchmarks we use. It looks like we're on our way to that monitor and a change to our test platform and benchmarks. But what's been bothering me is at times that people reading the site don't necessarily get what they want when reading our reviews.

So to that end I want to hear from you. Let me start:

Ideas:
1. Both an Intel and AMD platform for video card testing
2. FRAPS testing of Battefield 2, Call Of Duty 2, Age of Empires 3, MotoGP2, Flight Simulator (2004 (2006 when available)
3. Timedemo results: Quake4, F.E.A.R, Serious Sam 2
4. Standard benchmarks: 3DMark (latest version), Shadermark
5. 1024-1600 with FSAA testing for all
6. Bit Torrent links to personalized demos so you can see how good/horrible I am at playing the games and can reproduce the benchmark on your own computer.
7. Roll-over image quality comparisons. Roll your mouse over an image from an ATI card or an NVIDIA card to see the difference.
8. Interviews with the companies I review cards for .
9. More time playing the latest games beyond the timedemos. I mean the other day, I was watching Doc play F.E.A.R. on a 4GHz P4, 1GB RAM and a X1800XL and it ran choppy at the resolution and settings he tried it on. I went home fired it up on my X1800XL and found similar problems (1.02 patch), though the benchmarks tend to say that it was "playable" at those settings.

What do you guys think?

[Sabrewings]

I especially like #6 Ben. The rest are some definite requirements to a complete review.

Good stuff.
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[DAVE1]

i like number 8

would be cool to see what the companies have to say
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[EmilyB]

- A more even spread of cards from nVIDIA and ATI: To me it seems pointless having a whole array of nVIDIA cards and just throwing an ATI card "for good measure". Theres a lot of sycophantic nonsense about ATI being rubbish compared to nVIDIA but unless we see an equal and fair comparison then its just meaningless hype.

- More standard benchmarking rather than just games: I noticed in your list the absence of "Aquamark" and I think this is a great tool. We all know although some choose to deny it that games are vendor specific and will run better on some cards than others due to so-called "optimisations", therefore using games as the holy grail of benchmarks is foolish, although obviously we need to see the playability of games so they are crucial to a review, but theyre not the fairest evaluation when trying to give a unbiased review.

[Tulatin]

The mouseovers are a nice touch, and add a second gig of ram for buttery smooth Q4 performance guys.