My mind is blown. This was am incredibly stupid move over such a low volume card
No, it's not. Long-term, it's actually a very good strategy because it undermines the influence of a small but
very vocal minority that does the most damage to your brand. Sites with the most biased forum members that lack objectivity, often do far more long-term damage. Did you ever read comments from forum members of sites like TechReport or HardOCP or ABT? Most of the members on those sites would never have purchased the Nano even if it beat NV in every metric in the world and cost $399. In fact, how many of the people who were bashing AMD's R9 290/Fury series even had any intentions on buying the Nano? Almost none of them did.
Also,
there is a difference between reviewing videogame performance and reviewing videocards when providing purchasing/upgrading recommendations. HardOCP fails to understand this point.
In HardOCP's latest review, they tested just
5 games, while Computerbase tested
18 games, almost 4X as many games.
Since a lot of PC gamers could play a wide variety of games across various game engines, which review do you think is far more representative of the overall performance of a graphics card? During the last console generation, the most demanding games we had were Metro, Crysis, Witcher, Skyrim/GTA IV modded and a couple other games -- that's it. That means if a GPU could play those games well, it could play any game well. Right now we are still only into 1/3 cycle of the PS4/XB1 consoles which means games will continue to get more demanding and that means the review needs to cover a lot of games, not like it was during the last 2-3 years of PS360 generation PC ports. If someone is trying to recommend a graphics card, you want to include as many games as you physically can test to try to get a better overall viewpoint of how the card performs in a variety of games/game engines.
The other major issues is that the owners of TechReport and HardOCP have very strong opinions about AMD cards,
prior to testing them and they both have double standards wrt to price/performance on AMD vs. NV cards. Neither of those sites called NV out on awful launch price/performance of cards like GTX780, Titan or Titan X. Both of those sites failed to do sufficient testing on GTX960 2GB's lack of VRAM as well. In TR's podcasts, there were already major negatives/discussions thrown at Fury X's 4GB VRAM bottleneck, how AMD won't improve the tessellation performance over R9 290X, etc.
Remember how KitGuru speculated about Fury X failing to match NV and so on and they made a video with all the negativity regarding AMD as a company and HBM/Fury X? Imagine if a website like PhoneArena or GSMArena or ArsTechnica or CNET made such a video about the future launch of iPhone 6S, proclaiming how it barely catches up in features to Samsung/Sony/LG phones with 5MP front camera, 4K video, etc. Would that be professional?
Does Samsung or Apple get bashed by reviewers for paper launching Samsung S6, iPhone 6S, iPad Pro? Are you kidding?!
After reading Guru3D, Computerbase, Sweclockers, PCGameshardware, Hardware.fr, AT, TPU for GPU reviews, what extra value do sites like TR or HardOCP actually add for videocard purchase recommendations? Their reviews aren't as extensive as their competitors and their recommendations are often biased. For example, the Nano occupies its own small niche of the world's fastest small-ITX GPU, much like the Titan series occupies its small niche. Did HardOCP respond to Nano's high price the same way it responded to Titan/Titan X's high prices? Not at all -- it's a double standard.
Forget the Nano as <1% of all PC gamers will buy it. Look at their reviews of GTX960 2GB cards as an example of failing to give good advice to consumers. :sneaky:
2. You are saying Tech Report isn't fair. That's flat out wrong.
Oh really? Like when TR ignored frame times issues of Fermi cards despite the data in their own testing showing it, how TR ignored to revisit HD7970/CF series when drivers improved to show that HD7990/7970Ghz CF was a far better solution than GTX690/680 SLI after the drivers were much improved, how TR ignored to discuss 290X CF/Fury X CF XDMA frame times smoothness over 780 SLI and 780Ti SLI? How TR ignored the existence of after-market HD7970Ghz/R9 290/290X cards for basically the entirety of their existence? How TR blatantly came up with ludicrous reasons to do everything possible to recommend GTX960 in their reviews and ignoring all the advantages of R9 280X/after-market 290 cards?
TR and HardOCP lost all credibility
long before the Nano and Fury X came out. Both of those sites were a write-off after their GTX960 reviews. At least TPU showed they are objective:
"NVIDIA simply cannot get the pricing of its sub-$300 lineup right and continues to offer nothing compelling until the $310 GeForce GTX 970.The company may yet make a ton of money with their mid-range line-up, but that's only because of its better sales-force. The Radeon R9 290 TurboDuo from PowerColor is a gem.
At just $249, the Radeon R9 290 TurboDuo offers current-gen tech. Our tests show that the R9 290 is a whopping 52 percent faster than the $50 cheaper GeForce GTX 960 at 1920 x 1080 pixels, our target resolution. It also offers 4 GB of video memory.PowerColor added a factory overclock on top of that. If this doesn't highlight NVIDIA's terrible pricing for the GTX 960, nothing will.
When you're building on a tight budget, brute frame-rates gain much more weight over other factors, like power and noise. The R9 290 certainly won't beat the GTX 960 at the two, which is both slower and $49 cheaper, but that's a small price to pay for 52% more performance, a crucial factor once your machine starts to show its age as newer games get increasingly more taxing. There could be situations where 52% more performance spells the difference between "playable" and "slideshow." ~ TPU
I never read anything of the sort from HardOCP or TR in their GTX960 reviews.
You cannot possibly be an objective '
hardcore/enthusiast hardware' review site and recommend a GTX960 2GB for $200 for
gaming when after-market R9 290 cards are 50% faster, have 50% more VRAM, are cool, quiet and cost $50 more. That's akin to recommending HD7770 over HD6950 2GB/GTX560Ti/6970 because is has superior perf/watt, more advanced feature set/architecture and saves on electricity costs.
Do you remember TR or HardOCP recommending HD7770 over GTX560Ti or HD6950 unlocked? See these sites lack consistency when it comes to what metrics actually matter. Today it's perf/watt, tomorrow it's overclocking, next month it's VRAM, then it's frame latency, then it's GW's performance.
TR does a stand-alone article if 4GB of VRAM is a limitation for gaming but provides little warning to prospective buyers of GTX960 2GB cards about their VRAM limitation issues.
Sorry, these sites claim they try to provide objective advice to gamers but their reviews and data and conclusions they write keep proving otherwise. IMO, the issue for these sites stems far deeper than not getting a Nano review sample. It's about trust and relying on the reviewer to provide a solid review with a lot of data, consistency, and end it with a solid conclusion and possible alternatives.
If certain sites don't call out GTX960/980/Titan X cards for their awful price/performance, but then they have an issue with the Nano's $649 price and yet it's the fastest smallest mini-ITX card, they aren't being consistent. If a site has a heavy focus on price/performance, there is absolutely nothing wrong with not recommending the Nano, but then I would have expected the
same treatment for the GTX980 $550 vs. $280-300 R9 290X and $250-260 R9 290 vs. $200 GTX960 but yet we don't see that....