Greetings From the New Tom's Hardware EIC

[geekinchief]

Greetings,

Today I'm excited to announce that I'll be taking over as editor-in-chief of Tom's Hardware. Some of you know me from my work on Laptop Mag and Tom's Guide, TH's more consumery brother.

I've been in love with PCs ever since I played original Castle Wolfenstein (not the fps one) on an Apple II+ way back in the 1980s. I've built a number of desktops in my personal life and, in my role at Laptop / TG, I have spent the last ten years reviewing laptops, tablets, phones and the occasional robot kit.

At Laptop, I also did a fair amount of coding, programming many of that site's proprietary benchmark tests and, before we were part of a larger company, I built significant chunks of their CMS. At home these days, I'm starting to learn Arduino and Raspberry Pi and really eager to make some cool projects with them.

It's a great honor for me to help this storied, 22-year-old publication become a better resource, both for its current readers and for the next generation of tech enthusiasts who haven't heard of or found us helpful yet.

One thing I want to do is expand our coverage mandate so we're testing more desktops and laptops, offering content for makers and providing resources for parents who want to share their geeky passion with their kids. Of course, PC component coverage will remain at the heart of what we do and we'll continue looking for ways to make our reviews more informative and helpful.

I have a lot of other ideas, but right now I want to hear your thoughts about our content (the ads are not part of my purview). Tom's Hardware has always belonged to its readers. Our goal now and always is to make it a helpful, relevant and fun place for you. How can we serve you better?

 

[Graybush]

Everyone please give a warm welcome to Avram, our new Editor-in-Chief!

 

[jpishgar]

Welcome chief! Super-pumped to have you with us, and very much looking forward to all the new stuff we've got cookin'!
-JP

 

[Hellfire13]

How can we serve you better?

Doing pretty good as it is. Maybe, some accompanying videos with the articles to make it more interesting and also reach out to the visually impaired.
And congratulations on your new role. Am sure you will excel as always. Best wishes.

 

[Jsimenhoff]

It's good to have you here Avram. I'm excited for what we have planned for 2018

 

[Lutfij]

Avram, it's an honor to have you join our prestigious lineup Excited to have you with us and eager to find out what's cooking up in there, :lol: !

Dare I suggest a raspberry pi watercooled project...? For the fun of it actually, I'm not well versed with Arduino but I've read you can do some cool things with it.

 

[geekinchief]

Watercooled Pi? Awesome. I'll have to find out more about that.

 

[Lutfij]

I can help you get a leg on top of that...look for ModMyMods, those guys were the first to bring watercooling blocks to the USA for Pi's. I think they have a build log and they've got some customers rocking the same setup.

I forgot the names of the two guys operating ModMyMods but I'm sure I can help you expand on the idea

Glad you liked my suggestion!

 

[Ralston18]

Welcome.

For kids: Consider Scratch 2 (MIT). Maybe a dedicated forum category.

May attract many younger folks who are learning to code via Scratch or Sphero type robotics.

And the kids may notice and get interested in other things as well.

 

[Karadjgne]

Considering the state of pricing concerning build it yourself pc's vrs custom built vrs prebuilts, maybe look into just how well or not they all stack up now. Are some of the more gaming oriented HP or Dell really worth the money?

Oh, and congrats lol.

 

[geekinchief]

That's a great idea. We definitely want to compare pre-built to custom building.

 

[Darkbreeze]

I'd definitely like to see a more standardized method of hardware testing comparisons including a base of comparison data that includes MORE of the common mainstream options that most of the enthusiast community prefers to gauge against.

For example, the Hyper 212 EVO, Noctua NH-U14S and D15, Cryorig H7, H5 and R1 and Deepcool Gammaxx 400 are very commonly recommended and purchased coolers. It should be a no brainer that these are baseline components to be used for comparative purposes in reviews, but they are not. Most other review sites generally use at least one or more of them as measuring sticks, often several of them, but our reviews pretty much ignore them entirely and instead compare against more obscure models that most users have either never heard of or would be unlikely to purchase since they are almost universally not the best performers in their price ranges.

I think this holds true for a number of categories.

It would also be VERY nice to see an updated version of the "Who's who in power supplies", which I know would be a bit of an undertaking but was one of the most highly referenced articles I've personally seen published by our site. It would also be highly useful and helpful to see somebody in the know at Tom's to arrange for the creation of a Recommended/Not recommended tier list type reference since Dottorent no longer updates the PSU tier list. Again, I realize this would be an undertaking, but since we have maybe the one person on staff who could actually pull this off without everybody screaming that the creator doesn't know what they are talking about, it's certainly worth considering. An Aris created PSU tier list would almost be universally accepted without any doubt, if that were to ever get done.

Additionally, I think the community at large would get involved with, and behind, some kind of monthly feature for the best home mod/build or just full build log with pictures and/or video of the process that would become it's own featured article for each month's winner. Providing recognition and featuring members of our own community, and likely those it might draw into the community, could be a huge draw and/or a good tool towards member retention. Currently we don't have much, if anything, that is geared towards involving the community in a way that incorporates their own systems, which frankly, most of them would prefer to have the ability to show off and which most of them might never have done without the insights they gained from other members of this site. Let's encourage more of that and give them a reason to participate HERE instead of someplace else where they DO feature this sort of thing.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

Welcome.

For kids: Consider Scratch 2 (MIT). Maybe a dedicated forum category.

May attract many younger folks who are learning to code via Scratch or Sphero type robotics.

And the kids may notice and get interested in other things as well.

Funny enough Scratch is where my username comes from - I am turkey3 on the Scratch website. Scratch is fantastic, but I'm a little confused as to what exactly you are suggesting. An article on Scratch? Something else? Could you elaborate a bit?

Welcome geekinchief! I may recommend a profile picture because it's easy for me to relate people to their image rather than their name most of the time. Anyway, I can't think of anything amiss at the moment!

 

[Karadjgne]

Can we start with the obvious? Your name looks rather bland. Could probably use a shiny star if you want the crowd on general to pay any respects.

 

[Ralston18]

@turkey3_scratch

My thought was, at the simplest level, perhaps just a Category to provide assistance to younger or budding coders.

Some tutorials, some stickies etc. that will provide additional help and assistance to anyone going online for help with Scratch or other similar coding apps. All sorts of projects being created nowadays.....

Could become a really full category as people use VR to "drag and drop" the code into place for apps controlling robots, drones, and other devices. E.g., Macrolab for Sphero.

Just might become quite popular especially for kids, hobbyists, and tinkerer's in general.

 

[Onus]

Greetings Avram!
With some component prices still sky-high, I'd like to see some articles on budget-related topics, such as:
1. Extending the useful life of an existing system without spending a lot of money. This might emphasize the acceptability of lowered settings in general (too many people still seem to think they've got to play on UltraMaxOhWOW! settings to enjoy their games) and let people know which settings (or types of settings) make the most performance difference for the least visual impact; or it might address less-expensive hardware choices.
2. Bringing a pre-built (that may include more expensive components) "up to snuff;" what's commonly missing and/or should be upgraded.

 

[geekinchief]

Yes, we plan to do a lot more pre-built system reviews and also stories about how to run games on lower-end systems. I have a great writer who specializes in gaming on low-end hardware.

 

[Karadjgne]

Well since games got brought up, how about some optimization or faqs on popular games. There's tweaks to getting better fps and graphics etc for cs:go, gta:v and others, changing x.ini settings, but mostly those are found on reddit. Would love to be able to send ppl links to read when they wanna know why they are getting fps drops in Overwatch etc.
For lower-end or budget oriented builds anything that drops fps can be brutal.