No this isn't a complaint about the quality of reviews but a call for reviews to include a standard. Most people don't buy extensive / expensive new kit on a weekly or monthly basis but more likely on an annual or biannual basis so I would suggest that it would be a good idea to include a token benchmark in reviews of an older "classic" piece of kit from 18 months(ish) ago to aid comparisons. For example the Q6600 is/was classed as a top quality, value for money processor. Many people will have bought that processor knowing its many qualities including its overclocking ability. It is now quite antiquated but I would bet that its still at the heart of a lot of machines owned by people on this board. The same, over a period of time would include things like the Nvidia 8800, the graphics card standard for a long time. Each generation of kit brings out its obvious classics (at present an example would be the i5-750) so my suggestion would be to have one of these classics included in hardware reviews so people without bottomless pockets can get an idea of the performance gains available to better gauge if it really is time to upgrade all that expensive kit. Yes if your reviewing intels latest and greatest you have to compare it to AMD's best shot to see what is the better piece of kit but how much better is the new i5-760 than my 6600. I realise there is an argument that by trawling back over dozens of reviews I can find this information but it would be very handy to see at a glance. An alternative method would be to adopt CPC's method of having a baseline of 1000 for a fixed setup and relating the latest piece of kit to this benchmark. The benchmark could be updated every 18/24 months on a fixed date to include the most modern common kit. I'm sorry but seeing comparisons of Nvidia Widget X against ATi (AMD) Widget Y are difficult to relate to what I actually have in my box as all the comparative cards you use are no more than a few months old. Think of us poorer people please and give us a method to easily see if its time to upgrade.
This. BUT tbf the more kit that gets released, the harder it gets to run a comparison because of different M/B performance etc. But still I know what you're getting at, I could compare the new(ish) i7 930 against my Q6600 using my CPC mags but I'd have to look through quite a few back issues.....
