SysMark cheating in favor of Intel? Looks like it...

[Dr Mordrid]

BUSTED!!

http://www.vanshardware.com/reviews/2002/08/020822_AthlonXP2600/020822_AthlonXP2600.htm

Dr. Mordrid

[Technoid]

Well,
Is it such a great surprice?

[MultimediaMan]

It shouldn't be hard to get class action status out of that lawsuit now. I may just have to buy a "slow" P4 so I can get in on the remedy.

[Dr Mordrid]

Exactly what I was thinking. Also interesting is this thread on Anandtech's forum;

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=855292

About 3/4 of the way down Anand puts in his 2cents worth...confirming the worst.

Dr. Mordrid

[isochar]

As much as I don't want to say it, read Tom's article on where this entire situation came from:

http://www.tomshardware.com/blurb/02q3/020825/index.html

This story could make him the hero he always wanted to be. Even though Van hasn't even got the facilities to do the testing that is required to generate all the Sysmark 2001/2002 results that are required for an evaluation, he claimed to be the very person who actually found out about the questionable irregularities in Sysmark2002. Unfortunately, Kyle Bennett knew better. He had been contacted by AMD as well and even he hadn't been willing to pick up on it.

[Technoid]

Now Van Smith is a special customer. After all, it's all my fault that anyone is actually listening to him, because I had given him the largest forum in the hardware community, when I employed him as an editor of Tom's Hardware in April 2000. It didn't take long and I noticed that Van is a fanatic, who believes that Intel and Rambus are strongholds of the devil and that AMD, VIA and others are the holy saviors. There are several stories he wrote that I considered un-publishable and they are still in my drawer. These stories were so bluntly anti-Intel that Tom's Hardware would have lost all its credibility if I would have published them.

Tom also used to write these bluntly anti-intel stories when Tomshardware was new....
Most of them has been pulled!

Look at the THG's cpu reviews:
They never consider price,
If a P4 wins 2 out of 4 its the fastest!?!

Not to forget the "running CPU's without heatsinks" they did!

And All the time I thought that It was not really tom but his employes that marked the change in THG.........

[MultimediaMan]

That's the funny thing about Tom....he is like a politician: constantly re-inventing himself.

Read his response carefully; it rambles toward and away from the subject, never really hitting on whether the article is factual or not: I don't give a flip if Tom did quit smoking. (And who cares?) Who cares if Van worked for him or not? (Right There is a clumsy attempt at smearing Van indirectly.) Do you really believe he has articles from Van sitting in a Drawer rather than a Hard Disk? (Seriously: Some Technogeek site, eh? Tom doesn't even have a paperless office.)

The REAL question is: Are the allegations true? At first blush from what we have been presented with, I'd say yes, they are and Intel had better pony up one HELL of a good explanation. It's looking like Tom just wants more free hardware from his sugardaddy. He may not know it, but he just stepped on his weenie wearing golf shoes: if Van's story is even partly true, he will be forever labelled a biased idiot: not that he isn't perilously close now.

The good things that might come out of this could be an Industry Standard CPU rating after the stink fom the shit hitting the fan wafts away.

[Dr Mordrid]

I couldn't agree more. If anyones credibility is being tested here it's Tom Pabst, especially now that AnandTech has suspended use of SysMark 2002 because they were able to confirm some of Van & AMD's complaints.

If Tom P. doesn't watch it he's going to get steamrolled by the backlash.

Dr. Mordrid