HWbot - E.S. poll

[BenchZowner]

Please take a minute of your time to cast your vote and express your opinion if you like regarding the situation on HWbot with the E.S. CPUs ( and VGA's secondarily )

HWbot - Allow or disallow the E.S.'s

 

[I.M.O.G.]

Bill, I'm going to move this to our benchmarking forum with a redirect lasting a couple weeks - the benching team will probably provide a lot more responses for you. Let me know if you have any concerns with this.

 

[MIAHALLEN]

Thanks for the link Bill

 

[Bobnova]

Already posted and voted, didn't think to post a link though, i feel pretty silly

Thanks!

 

[I.M.O.G.]

voted 1:

The way I see it hwbot.org is the best competition platform there is for the consumer PC hardware industry, despite its shortcomings like this thread highlights.

If you distill all the complaints and compliments, the bottom line is that most everyone competing is doing this for fun - even the people getting the ES chips are doing it because they like playing with hardware. The people complaining are more worried about their boints as they compare to someone else's than they should be, and they are losing sight of the fact this is fun even if the playing field isn't 100% level with scientific accuracy.

I voted for option 1 because in the end the boints are just numbers systematically assigned to give us something to compare eachother with and have more fun. If you want to compete with people at the top, you have to play the game a certain way and position yourselves the way those individuals have, simple as that... If you don't want to play the game that way, there are many other ways you can compete on hwbot and still have a lot of fun.

I definitely see the value in looking at ways to improve and standardize better, but I think massman and richbastard have struck a pretty good balance with the way things currently are. There will always be griefers regarding the details, but the way submissions have grown and subzero has exploded... That's a testament to the fact these guys are doing a lot of things right here and a lot of people are enjoying it. And to the griefers - if you guys motivate people to look for better solutions, in the long run you are helping move things forward too and thats great. Its good to better understand the perceptions people have and find whats important - if hwbot doesn't do it, someone else might. In the end tho, I think the right ingredients are here and they'll keep improving in the future as they have in the past.

So Props from Overclockers.com - I may not be an active bencher, but I have a lot of fun keeping track team OC Forums and watching them compete against the other teams and members around them. Thanks for the great platform to do it upon hwbot!

 

[KonaKona]

I posted,

Now when are we gonna get boints for furmark?

 

[Brolloks]

Voted 1 as well. There seems to be a rather wide spread impression that ES CPU's are great and OC beasts, that is not true...you get more bad ones than good ones, I have had my share of ES chips and can attest to that. The golden ES ones you see breaking records on the bot are binned by people that have access to dozens of them, in that sense it makes it unfair imo, but you cannot ban ES chips just because of those instances.

 

[Gautam]

I'd encourage you to make that same post in the hwbot thread, except it'll just get lost amongst the mob

 

[Brolloks]

I just did

 

[ghost_recon88]

Interesting poll indeed, wonder if whatever the results turn out to be will actually make any impact among the hwbot staff.

Regarding the binning comment above, I agree that more often than not ES chips are not as good as retail (save A0 GT). However if someone is gonna bin 20 or 30 chips, IMO I would rather see retails binned instead of locking oneself into some manufactures testing lab and binning all their ES chips for free for a week straight *cookies anyone *

 

[I.M.O.G.]

Interesting poll indeed, wonder if whatever the results turn out to be will actually make any impact among the hwbot staff.

Reading massman's comments, I don't believe he perceives a viable opportunity for improvement given the state of not being able to accurately detect or police ES chips. They could say what the rules are, but that only affects people who follow the rules. You can make ES look like non-ES, so the current state of affairs with mixing them in with everything else seems to make good sense.

 

[moocow]

hwbot needs to lay down the law with the manufactures. If they say "hey, we wont put up with your bullshit" its less likely that they will break the rules for a little gain. If a company is caught aiding a cheater it could end up being a big PR disaster for them.

 

[I.M.O.G.]

Do you think hwbot has that sort of pull with the big fish? There are a lot of big platforms for showcasing performance other than hwbot...

I see your point, but I just see how its quite possible they wouldn't carry the weight you think they might. Removing ES from general circulation is really what you are getting at, or am I misunderstanding?

 

[Brolloks]

What other point based benching forum is there that ranks benchies and benchers?...everyone in the benching community benches for HWbot points, and hardware is bought for exactly that.... I'd say that gives them a pretty big pull.

 

[I.M.O.G.]

I was thinking a lot of live events, and a lot of websites doing reviews with ES hardware. But...

You guys could be right, it'd be an interesting position to take, and I'd be watching how it develops... As well as ensuring someone is writing about how things develop.

Plus... That poll makes it pretty damn clear what the vocal userbase wants. A poll like that here and we'd be in a tough spot if we didn't give people what they want.

 

[Bobnova]

Yeah, but who pays all the bills for HWBot?
It ain't massman.

It's gigabyte, MSI, and Adata.

That site host a lot of images, it can't be cheap.



Plus, Gigabyte did get caught aiding a cheater in their own contest. Anybody see a PR disaster anywhere? I certainly don't.

 

[moocow]

Maybe because that wasn't being spammed across tons of forums the same way this is being posted. I'm sure that if the information was made known across the hwbot page people would take notice.

 

[I.M.O.G.]

Bandwidth is essentially free, their site could be run with similar performance for $500 a month (12 2Ghz AMD opterons, 16GB ram) and they'd have plenty of room to grow - fairly cheap in the scheme of things. Images would be served from the web front end which is the easy part, the DB side could get demanding and they'd need solid dedicated hosting - that can be had at 1and1 for the price range I threw out. Their advertising system would cover that and more very easily (assuming its priced how it should be for an excellent advertising platform), but other expenses like paying people to work on the site full time are expensive too.

Sorry, don't mean to take it off topic... Just knowing what things cost and what sites require to run well, they should be able to cover the expenses of keeping the lights on with just a banner or two, or even one sponsor out of the 3. The rest of their income just creates opportunity to improve the site further or put in the bank.

Maybe because that wasn't being spammed across tons of forums the same way this is being posted. I'm sure that if the information was made known across the hwbot page people would take notice.

Would be interesting to hear some details about what went down, from someone willing to write that knows what they are talking about - I never heard anything.

 

[MIAHALLEN]

A little off topic, but....

I think a more appropriate poll would be whether or not to create two leagues...ametures & pros (sponsored or not). Or to leave it how it is.

k|ngp|n originally came up with the idea of forgoing the points ranking for those sponsored, but then changed his mind (I guess ). The idea was for him and others with connections to have a platform to show thier stuff, whithout activly competing for rank. This was implemented via the "Do NOT participate in hwbot rankings" option.

This idea was slightly flawed because many of the "pro" guys are still in it for the competition....not just the show. So now if they want to compete, they're forced to compete against "ametures".

IMHO - Having multiple classes gives everyone a more (not perfect) level playing field, and like all other professional sports, it is the way forward.


I know, I know....."how would you enforce it?".....will be the next question.
Obviously it would require the honor system. This is why the "Do NOT participate in hwbot rankings" option is currently optional....becasue enforcing it would be impossible. But like I said before....if you gave the pro league an option to continue competition, I think that would be enough incentive for them to honor the new class rules.

 

[MIAHALLEN]

OK, I posted a new poll....please cast your vote