First off let me begin with saying the post is not inteded to be flame bait (I have no doubt that it will however become flame bait). I'm genuinely interested in seeing any evidence anyone has to offer supporting the theory that THG is biased towards Intel.

Today I was reading a thread and someone said something to the effect that THG's CPU benchmarks cannot be trusted and are Intel biased. To date, I have not seen a single shred of evidence to support this claim. Admittedly however I have not looked very hard. But whenever I confront a THG conspiracy theorist about proof, they often say "well look at HardOCP and Anandtech.com, they're benches are different." This is not proof that THG is biased. And one could argue that those two sites are AMD fanboy sites (especially HardOCP). To date no conspiracy theorist has shown me anything even remotely difinitive on this topic.

So conspiracy theorists, here's your chance to prove your theories. Please post evidence showing that THG is biased towards Intel. I've also heard many theorists claim that THG takes kickbacks from Intel. So if ya'll have an internal memo, definitive article, or anything like that, post it here.

Remember, I want EVIDENCE; not speculation, theories, rumors, or flame posts.

-mpjesse

"Don't ever believe THG benches. They have to be Intel approved."

The remark that lead to this topic. The funny thing is I've been visiting THG since 2000 and I have yet to see ANY benchmark that proves that remark. If you look at the benchmarks for the last year, Intel has been losing to AMD big time in many key areas. So, if the THG benchmarks are Intel approved, why do they hurt Intel then?

I've never heard this issue before, why do you people think that THG is unfair towards INTEL?

I personally do not believe it to be true, however about 25% of the people on these forums and others believe it. Just go over to anandtech's forums or HardOCP's forums... all they do is trash talk THG and talk about how biased they are.

It's even worse in here sometimes...

-mpjesse

To start with, let's look at the most recent cpu review, the FX60. 3 games, and 2 are quake.
Oh sure, there are other games, but who understands those graphs?, and can use them to compare?
Why are they using beta tests?
Wonder why they stopped using office tests?
Benchmarks seem rather heavy in favour of encoding tasks. Mostly ones that favor intel
Futermark- oh yah, i believe the P4EE 3.4 is 10% better than the FX 57

In recent times I would have to say its rather the opposite. Mostly because AMD is winning so much in the benchmarks. Tom's even goes out of its way in the conclusion of a recent artilce to say Intel only won 8 of the benchmarks out of 32 in their recent "Mother of all CPU charts" (i think) with 7 being senthetic and only 1 being a real world test.

disclaimer: some of the facts maybe off a little but they should b close

I do not consider this answer to be proof, but let's look into it further:

I agree they should have benched more games than just Quake 3, 4, and FEAR. But as for the graphics- Quake 3/4 does not have the capability of measuring minimum, average, and max frame rates like FEAR does. (This can be done w/ FRAPS however). At any rate, I'd rather see benches w/ minimum, average, and max frame rates.

Now, I did do a little research. THG benched Quake 4 as being faster on an Intel 955 system while Anandtech benched Quake 4 being faster on an AMD system. Compare for example Anandtech's benches to Tomshardware's in Quake 4. (both sites used the 1.05 beta SMP patch)

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipse [...] i=2668&p=8
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/0 [...] page8.html

Anandtech has Quake 4 being faster on the FX-60 while THG has Quake 4 being faster on the Pentium 955. But if you take the time to look at the test setup, you'll quickly figure out why. Anandtech is using DDR2-667 timed at 5-5-5 while THG is using DDR2-667 timed at 4-4-4. That's a huge difference. And while I'm on the topic, why in god's name is Anandtech using 5-5-5 timings on their Pentium 4 testbed? That hardly seems fair since they're using premium OCZ RAM timed at 2-2-2 on their AMD testbed. If fast timings are good for AMD then they should be good for Intel too. (and it ain't like 4-4-4 timed DDR2 is that hard to find... it ain't that expensive either). Now that's what I call test rigging in AMD's favor.

All hardware reviewing sites are using the beta patch for SMP in Quake 4. If you were refering to the xvid beta codec, everyone i know is using that codec to encode.

Like it or not, a lot of ppl encode video. Xvid, WMP, and Divx are the most popular. Compare the benchmarks shown here for WMV9:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/0 [...] age10.html
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipse [...] i=2668&p=7

They both got the same results. I can't compare any other encoding programs because Anandtech only tested DVD Shrink and Windows Media for encoding.

Now you might be on to something there. They haven't been using office benchmarks- you're right. And AMD wins office benches hands down. This is the first logical example of possible bias.

Unfortunately Xbit Labs and Anandtech chose not to benchmark the FX-60 using 3DMark05 CPU test. But firingsquad.com did. And they got the same results THG did... See here:

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardwar [...] /page7.asp

So... I still don't see any diffinitive proof that THG is biased. What I see is a lot of different system configurations among review sites that lead to different scores based on a number of things such as RAM timings, benchmark apps, etc. The only interesting thing you mentioned was THG isn't using office benchmarks. I guess that <could> be construed at bias. However, I don't see THG's rigging tests like Anandtech is.

-mpjesse

Actually, THG is not bias in my opinion. They are just saying the same thing many reliable sources are saying: AMD is a better chip overall.

The reason they don't use Office for benchmarking is simple:
Office really doesn't push today's processors anyway! Word 2000 is the same speed on my 700Mhz Pentium 3 as it is on my 2.5Ghz Celeron. That's why!

Like it or not, a lot of ppl encode video. Xvid, WMP, and Divx are the most popular. Compare the benchmarks shown here for WMV9:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/0 [...] age10.html
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipse [...] i=2668&p=7

They both got the same results. I can't compare any other encoding programs because Anandtech only tested DVD Shrink and Windows Media for encoding.
More like exceesively used IMO.

Eureka!!!
I know where to find the best prove guys!
It's in the two CPU stress tests especially the 2nd one.

Back to work everyone!

I prefer my overcocking to be with females...

Lol, that stress test thread got way out of hand. No one could believe what they were seeing...and the conclusion to the test. Wow. That was bias.

But saything that, since the revamped site I've found they have becoming increasingly fair with their conclusions and articals concerning AMD chips.

I wouldn't know about that. I haven't read their articles in forever. They were too biased and/or too much just crap. Maybe they are better now. **shrug** But without anything actually interesting going on in the PC industry at the moment, who really cares?

Besides, the new site layout is so bad I doubt I'd be able to find anything even if I did look.

What I really miss are those good overclocking articles. Not what to do with a tank of LN2 and a lot of spare time, but, you know, home achievable regular-use stuff.

Anyone who believes this doesn't actually use Office. I mean really use it.

I'm sorry, but it's true.

I write novels, mostly in Wordpad because it's lightweight and doesn't slow me down. Then when the rough draft is done I fix things up in Word. Let me tell you, you'll notice a difference in performance with different procs when Word starts running a 400 page novel through a spell/grammar check in the background to highlight all of the mistakes. Hell, you'll notice a difference in platforms just opening a document of that size.