100% he is. I just realized
he posted a hot deal on the $309 970 in the Hot Deals section where I not only provided him with 3 alternatives from AMD and NV, which were better value to start with. If he thought $309 970 was a hot deal on August 18th, why did he need to start a thread on 970 vs. 290 decision considering at $309 he found the 970 to be a Hot Deal, the very same day when I linked him a $290 970, $220 290 and $260 290X?
It's very easy to see that perf/watt and power usage were never factors that truly mattered because if they did, HD4000/5000/6000 and a lot of HD7000 series (it took NV 6-9 months to do a full Kepler roll-out from 650-660Ti), would already have had 60-70% market share since NV was not competitive in perf/watt for 3.5 generations. And yet, not only did NV users wait for 6 months to buy worse perf/watt Fermi cards, but they also skipped HD4000-6000 series.
Perf/watt is just a random metric that's used to justify their brand preference, like why a
$200 960 is somehow worth buying over a 50% faster $250 R9 290. Similarly to how they taught how 290/290X cards all run hot and loud, always ignoring the existence of after-market solutions. I thought you'd see right through all of that by now.
Did you ever wonder why almost none of them to this day go out of their way to recommend a $250 PowerColor PCS+ 290?
1. It's cool
It's 43% faster than an after-market 960, just 4% behind an after-market 970.
http://www.computerbase.de/2015-08/...#abschnitt_tests_in_1920__1080_und_2560__1440
It costs
$250 and NV has no competition against it unless we consider a b-stock GTX970; and yet this forum will NOT recommend an after-market 290, instead using NV marketing gimmicks like 4K decoding, HDMI 2.0, DX12 feature set, number of DisplayPorts and all kinds of NV marketing bullet-points to downplay a
gigantic 40-50% performance deficit cards like 960 have against similar AMD cards. It's almost as if some posters on here are working for a certain company or are so devoted to the brand, that they downplay traditional metrics like performance and perf/watt in lieu of features that either have no benefit to the majority of PC gamers or may only prove to be beneficial years from now when it's time to upgrade to a new card anyway.
In
Trine 3, a reference R9 290 is 42% faster than a 960 and 91% faster than a $170-180 GTX950. North American review sites get marketing $, free review samples, media perks and so on so a company with more resources is able to provide more of these perks. Similarly, if the GPU market share is nearly 80% in favour of some major player that sends you free review samples, which cards are you more likely to recommend?
That's why today, the PC gamer has to go out of his way to read European, Australian, New Zeland, etc. objective reviews and do proper research as most North American sites (esp. the ones who don't buy their own cards) can hardly be trusted to provide truly objective/BEST advice for a PC gamer. That's why we are starting to see websites create artificial budget ceilings of $170 or something ridiculous to obfuscate themselves of any bias but anyone with experience of following this industry can see through most of this marketing PR. Forums such as ours are supposed to help PC builders/gamers weave through all of the marketing BS/PR because the very existence of these publications rests on the support by the companies that send them samples and marketing $$$. Because of this conflict of interest, it's more or less impossible to expect objectivity in today's hardware reviews in North America. Some sites are so obvious now they hardly even try to hide who supports them.