With the direction motherboard vendors are going these days, performance has been set aside in favor of looks and features and the decreasing number of quality hardware review sites are decreasing with Youtuber taking over as one of the viable sources of hardware information. Jon “Elmor” Sandstrom, world-renowned overclock and ASUS ROG R&D member, recently took to Reddit to voice is opinion on the current state of the PC hardware market.
Sandstrom opens his letter with thoughts of disappointment with MSI and to lesser extent, GIGABYTE and ASRock who he describes as “not even trying anymore.”
I mean fine, you don’t have to do LN2 but please do something more than slap LEDs on it and call it gaming.
Elmor shoots on the fact that most brands are nowadays are not utilizing their resources and are producing products that just don’t provide performance benefits anymore. He goes on the drop the MSI X370 Xpower as an example of the direction that the PC market is heading to alluding to the board’s lack of overclocking feature despite its pedigree and merging it with MSI’s gaming line-up of products.
Sandstrom goes on to drop NVIDIA saying that their reluctance in helping push PC hardware limits and locking things down are unfortunate.
Elmor finally takes it to review sites where he expresses that “If you get more than product spec, pictures, benchmarks stock and overclocked you’re lucky” describing the kind of content he believes are common right now in review sites.
It’s pretty much impossible to get a bad review today, which means that the motherboard vendor thinks they did a great job and will continue on the same path.
Sandstrom touches also on the status of reviews where critique is missing and most, if not all, are positive. He proceeds to urge review sites to review all the features as much as possible and scream if a feature doesn’t work.
He closes his letter by inviting people to discuss further personally during COMPUTEX 2017.
His full letter is below:
Hi guys,
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m an hardware enthusiast who got in too deep with overclocking and ended up an LN2 addict in Taiwan. I’m working for the ROG Motherboard R&D specifically tasked with overclocking and enthusiast development. We have have an awesome team here (Peter, TL, Bing, Jonson, Raja and Adeline. Seriously, you guys rock.) bringing you enthusiast products like the Maximus IX Apex. We’re very aware we’re not perfect though, especially when it comes to customer service and software. Trust me, we’re working on it. I’d like to issue a rant warning at this point.
It saddens me to see that our biggest competitors are not even trying anymore. I mean fine, you don’t have to do LN2 but please do something more than slap LEDs on it and call it gaming. The MSI X370 Xpower paints a pretty good idea of where we’re headed. Gigabyte has hicookie, one of the most seasoned overclockers in the world who’s being outmanaged inside the company. Without him we wouldn’t have products like X58-OC, Z97-SOC, X99-SOC Champion and Z170X-SOC Force. Asrock has Nickshih and his OC Formula boards who are unbeatable in raw DRAM frequency at the moment (we’re coming for you) but didn’t get to do a Z270 update. Vince and Tin still seem to be on top of things in the VGA department, I really hope there will be a 1080Ti Kingpin Edition. Unfortunately I’ll have to put Nvidia in the corner of shame because of their reluctance to help us push the limits of PC hardware and locking things down more and more.
Our biggest supporters, trust me or not, are Intel and AMD. They seriously love overclocking and have excellent people pushing it internally.
My final judgement falls on the majority of review sites. If you get more than product spec, pictures, benchmarks stock and overclocked you’re lucky. Seriously, the boards you’re testing has like 50 different advertised features. Please test them, have an opinion of your own on them, and scream when it doesn’t work. It’s pretty much impossible to get a bad review today, which means that the motherboard vendor thinks they did a great job and will continue on the same path. If you’re a writer and would like to improve, please contact me or any of the other enthusiasts mentioned and we’ll be happy to help with technical knowledge. If you’re going to Computex and stumble into any of us, I’m sure we will all happily discuss this with you.
Honorable mentions go out to Pieter and Tim at Hwbot for their overclocking evangelism, and of course Frank @ GSkill (bottoms up).
TLDR; Call BS when you smell it and vote with your wallet.
Jon Sandström
9 Comments
Pinusuan ko na.
half assed review? parang yung unboxing lang ng processor tapos lagay ng basic information at ni walang benchmark na ginawa? hahahaha
Mga ganung galawan nga
haha like as what I have been saying before “I mean fine, you don’t have to do LN2 but please do something more than slap LEDs on it and call it gaming.”
inemphasize talaga yung half-assed review haha
may point kasi si papa elmor, puro glowing reviews na lang lagi. di sa hugas kamay, fair ako mag-review pero i take time to dismantle brands pag may hindi ako gusto or hindi as advertised na feature
Naglipana kasi RGB at Tempered Glass ngayon
Much more than that is still under the carpet…
Was disappointed with my MSI z270 gaming m5 sagana sa porma, pangit naman ng mga features yung LED app lagi pa nageerror sakin.