PICKING UP WHERE I LEFT OFF -- ON THE VICISSITUDES OF HARDWARE REVIEWS
[PowerStream versus Turbo Cool]
[December 22, 2004]
What a coincidence. My OCZ PowerStream arrived today on UPS wings, along with my January ?05 Maximum PC issue, which in turn contained a review with torture-test comparisons between the Antec Neo-whatever, the PCP&C Turbo-Cool Dlx, the ULTRA X-Connect, a Vantec Stealth, a CoolerMaster and a DeVanni.
Now a couple of the entrants suffered a crushing score of ?3? or ?4? out of 10 points, and this included the ULTRA and the Vantec. They gave the Antec a 10, the PCP&C a 9, and the CoolerMaster got an 8. The OCZ got a ?7?, ostensibly because the 12V rail?s initial setting came in at 12.27V, which might seem superfluous given the adjustable feature ? a feature which basically got a token acknowledgement. What is even more incredible, was short-shrift given to the OCZ?s efficiency, but emphasis on the ?passive PFC? feature as opposed to some of the others which were ?better-rated?. Also, it seemed strange that so much attention was given to a voltage test which imposes conditions that most people with UPS systems will never see ? reduction of line input voltage to 60V-AC. Under this test, the OCZ?s 12V rail dropped to 9.38V, while the PCP&C held up to 12.08 and the Antec dropped to 11.92. The remainder of the review entries simply shut down.
In Maximum?s final remarks, they beat up both OCZ and PCP&C for lack of ?modular cables?, while noting that the OCZ was quiet, the PCP&C was noisy and expensive, but the PCP&C rated a ?9? while OCZ?s only rated ?7?. Yet PCP&C?s Turbo-Cool ? the model chosen to test ? lacked PCI-X and other special cabling features that were part of the OCZ package. A footnote was added as an afterthought that for $10 extra, you could buy the variant of the TurboCool which offered those features. So much for ?noisy and expensive?: in this economy, $10 is hardly worth a hot-dog.
Compare this review with the web review in which time-series of rail-voltage variability or ?cleanliness? was compared across several entries ? a review in which PCP&C apparently declined participation.
Techreport PSU Playoff
I needed to check again, but I seem to recall that PCP&C advertised full page Turbo-Cool enticements in all the previous issues of the magazine.
At first, I thought I couldn't find a Turbo-Cool ad in the January '05 issue. And if there were suddenly no such ad, it would be a singularity that could only be explained as having an "assignable cause". We of course would not "know" at first what that assignable cause was exactly, but we would be hot with speculation. Even so, thinking about the implications, I scrutinized the issue a second time with greater care. It does, indeed, have a Turbo-Cool ad -- on page 83 -- reams of pages away from the PSU review comparison. This was not the case six months earlier when Maximum PC published a marvelous centerpiece article on the importance of PSU quality, and the page after the article contained the Turbo Cool ad. Perhaps the placement of the ad itself in this current issue has an "assignable cause"!
Unfortunately, where my earlier hypothesis -- now moot -- had between six and ten observations for statistical relevance, this new idea only has enough observations for one degree of freedom.
But even detectives do not deprive themselves of suspicions based on prohibitively small sample sizes. So let's speculate. PCP&C is a longstanding Maximum PC advertising account. Certainly, this would be well-known in the magazine's composition room. I can just imagine the senior editor telling his junior colleague to be more discreet about this month's ad placement:
"Let's not raise suspicions."
There must be a fine line between ad-revenues and payola. Caution dictates that it is best to separate them with a larger number of pages.