Product roundup test equipment selection

[Booti]

Hi
I was wondering what criteria you use to select the 'default' equipment when you are going to do a roundup lab test.
I ask, because when you did this months Z77 shootout, the equipment you have chosen hardly matches the items you have in the ELITE list

For example you used a Corsair RAM, not the Patriot G2 you recommend, you use a Enermax PSU, not the Antec High Current one in the list and you use a Patriot SSD, not a Crucial M4.

[Combatus]

Originally Posted by Booti

Hi
I was wondering what criteria you use to select the 'default' equipment when you are going to do a roundup lab test.
I ask, because when you did this months Z77 shootout, the equipment you have chosen hardly matches the items you have in the ELITE list

For example you used a Corsair RAM, not the Patriot G2 you recommend, you use a Enermax PSU, not the Antec High Current one in the list and you use a Patriot SSD, not a Crucial M4.

Hi Booti. Where we are able, we'll use hardware that we list in our elite list for testing, however a lot of the gear we get in has to go back to the manufacturer and we're only able to hold onto it for so long. CPUs are usually a different story - we'll use the exact same CPU for testing heatsinks etc for the entire life of that particular CPU socket (LGA1155 for example) In the case of the PSUs, they may never have been in our lab at all, instead we only got our mits on them when we travelled to a third party testing facility in Taiwan.

It's also a case of using the right hardware for the job. Some hardware on the elite list may be what you should buy in terms of value and bang per buck, but it's a different situation when it comes to benchmarking. For example, in a previous motherboard group test we used an extremely fast and expensive SSD to test mid-range motherboards' SATA 6Gbps ports. We wouldn't have recommended that you get that SSD in anything but a very premium system, but clearly we wanted to know the maximum speed these motherboards were capable of and the only way to do that was to use an outlandish SSD, rather than one that was a little slower but a lot cheaper and so earned its way into our elite list.