okaven
join:2001-12-02
New York, NY
| reply to Bobcat
Re: Let's get something straight...
In certain areas of product testing with do double check things like clock-speed and other possible areas of optimization, such as custom written drivers, etc. This mostly applies to newest graphics cards, CPU's, etc. However, there must be room for a little trust here, too. You cannot go out and say by default every vendor tries to cheat. In Network Infrastructure this is not too much of an issue anyway because vendors rarely know what tests we are running exactly. Besides, it would be fairly detrimental for a vendor if we caught them cheating and published this. Although times are bad economically, PC Magazine still reaches about 3-4 million readers out there (which for the vendors translates into customers). So, I don't think that vendors would like to take the risk of cheating and paying for the consequences. Besides that, to accomplish buying all the equipment we would probably have to sell the magazine for $300 an issue.  Especially when you start looking at stories such as the Ethernet switch story with products that are in the thousands of dollars.
Most importantly, most of the products we test are generally not available in stores by the time we start testing. Although most of the products are available when the magazine ships to subscribers, our testing is done way ahead of that date.
Oliver Kaven
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Oliver Kaven
Project Leader, Network Infrastructure
PC Magazine Labs
oliver_kaven@ziffdavis.com
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