Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
With so many alternatives, it's easy to buy the right part from the wrong
source. Accordingly, the last part of this chapter distills what we've learned
about how and where to buy PC hardware components. When you finish read-
ing this chapter, you'll have all the information you need to make the right
buying decisions.
Online Customer Product Reviews
Most online computer product vendors, notably NewEgg, have active user review
sections for the products they carry. We suggest you take those reviews with a grain
of salt, if not a boatload.
Here's the fundamental problem. Say 1,000 people buy a particular product from
NewEgg. Of those 1,000 buyers, 900 are satisfied with the product, 90 are delighted,
and 10 are unhappy. As any marketing executive will tell you, when someone loves
a product, he'll tell a friend; when someone hates a product, he'll tell the whole
Internet.
And that's exactly what happens. All 10 unhappy buyers write one-star reviews.
Maybe a tenth of the delighted buyers write four- or five-star reviews. And maybe
1% of the satisfied buyers write reviews, which are typically three, four, or five stars. A
product that satisfied 99% of buyers ends up with 28 reviews, averaging a mediocre
three stars.
To make matters worse, some or all of those one-star reviews may not be the prod-
uct's fault at all. A rebate company may have been lax in fulfilling rebate requests,
and many of the buyers who didn't get their rebate checks will take it out on the
product. It's also common for buyers to blame a product for their own errors. For
example, probably 99% of the motherboards returned to online vendors as defective
are actually perfectly good. The buyer simply made a mistake such as forgetting to
connect a cable or installing an incompatible processor or memory.
So, our advice about online component reviews is not to take them too seriously. If
a product has hundreds of reviews and a very high average rating, it's probably safe
to assume that it's a good product. Conversely, if a product has hundreds of reviews
and a bad to mediocre rating, it may indeed be a bad product, but it may also be a
good product that's simply suffering from “piling on.” (Believe it or not, many bad
reviews are written by people who've never actually used the product; the same is
true, but to a much lesser extent, for good reviews.) Finally, if a product has rela-
tively few reviews (say, less than 50), the average rating, good or bad, is statistically
meaningless.
Enthusiast Website Product Reviews
Conversely, some of the top-tier enthusiast websites are excellent sources of reliable
product reviews, particularly for gaming-related components such as fast video
adapters, high-end processors, premium memory, solid-state drives, and so on. They
may tell you more than you ever wanted to know about the technical details of a
product, and they may get excited about performance differences that are immate-
rial to you, but their reviews are generally unbiased and reliable.
Two sites we trust are AnandTech (
http://www.anandtech.com
)
and Tom's Hardware
