3. BUT IS IT ART?
I know I went on about this last time and it’s in the
editorial piece of this issue, but come on. Am I the
only one who believes there should be a competitive
benchmark that uses a Game engine that is in use
commercially? I don’t know maybe UE3 based,
CryEngine or Frostbite? At the very least it would help
avoid the visual tragedy that was Vantage.
4. SUPER VIP
Overclockers should have the option of buying
unlocked cards for an appropriate additional fee.
Realistically, there’s no reason why vendors cannot
add $50 to $100 to the price of a card for you to receive
one that isn’t locked and in need of special software
achieve the results the vendor uses to sell it to you. It is
pointless to set a record for instance using a Lightning,
Classifed, HOF or Toxic card that differs from what
the end user is able to buy. I know you as the vendor
believe your product is special, but I need it to be
special in my hands out here in the wild and not only in
your labs.
5. THIS IS WHY YOU ARE SUCKING!
This is very specific to motherboard vendors who make
high-end or overclocking motherboards (which is every
vendor really). If the competition has a feature that is
genuinely useful to your end users, do by all means
try and have a similar feature if not the exact same
one. To say that it’s not how you do things when you’re
competing for the end users financial commitment is
myopic. That’s saying you don’t want to make what end
users want, but you’d rather make what pleases you. If
that is the case, you should consider buying up all your
motherboards.
6. FALSE DEDUCTION
There’s no such thing as a CPU killing benchmark. A
benchmark that places 100% load on a CPU does not
mean it’s killing the CPU, it’s the settings you need
to apply to your overclocked CPU that cause it to fail.
If said benchmark was a CPU killer, it would lead to
CPU failure at default settings. However that doesn’t
happen does it?
7. INSUFFICIENT DATA
This applies more to “gamers” than overclockers, but
it’s nonsensical to say that you’ll not buy an AMD or
NVIDIA GPU based graphics card because you’ve had
one or several fail before. It could be because you’re
buying a particular vendor’s graphics cards which may
be prone to failure or you could just be unlucky.
8. SPECIAL BUS
Once again specific to gamers, it’s preposterous to say
a keyboard and mouse offer the best input methods for
playing games. There are a great many game genres
and not all of them land themselves well to a keyboard
and mouse. The only reason the keyboard and mouse
combo may seem most natural is simply because most
people’s first introduction to a PC included at least one
of these peripherals. There’s nothing magical about a
keyboard and a mouse combo that makes it inherently
superior to using a game controller.
I’ll stop there for now and resume this whining fest
next issue. This is now a regular feature, so get used
to disagreeing with me (or agreeing) but it’s unlikely
to stop showing up anytime soon unless there are
financial repercussions for it. In which case it’ll be
gone and in fact it may even be removed from previous
issues. (The power of digital publishing right?) See you
all sometime in April (assuming this magazine comes
out on time)
Issue 28| 2014 The OverClocker 39