Anand Lal Shimpi Retires From AnandTech 152
An anonymous reader writes: If you've built a PC in the past 17.5 years, chances are you read some hardware reviews on AnandTech at some point. The site's creator, Anand Lal Shimpi, has announced that he is retiring from the tech writing business. He said, "AnandTech started as a site that primarily reviewed motherboards, then we added CPUs, video cards, cases, notebooks, Macs, smartphones, tablets and anything else that mattered. The site today is just as strong in coverage of new mobile devices as it is in our traditional PC component coverage ... To the millions of readers who have visited and supported me and the site over the past 17+ years, I owe you my deepest gratitude. You all enabled me to spend over half of my life learning more than I ever could have in any other position. The education I've received doing this job and the ability to serve you all with it is the most amazing gift anyone could ever ask for. You enabled me to get the education of a lifetime and I will never be able to repay you for that. Thank you."
Many a purchase was based on his quality reviews (Score:5, Insightful)
Anands In-depth quality reviews will be missed!
Re: Many a purchase was based on his quality revie (Score:1, Insightful)
There were some of those, and then there was a lot of WinTel shilling
Re: Many a purchase was based on his quality revie (Score:3, Funny)
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The screw is an implementation of the inclined plane.
No, it's an implementation of HR policies.
Impressive (Score:5, Interesting)
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My PC is a gaming PC, OS and applications is about 1.1 TB of storage on it.
Also, here, $50 will not get you an SSD. For around $100 I can get a 80GB one, but anything over 100GB quickly rise to hundreds of dollars+.
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For $113, you can get a Seagate 2 TB Solid State Hybrid Drive:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/... [bhphotovideo.com]
It contains 8GB of SSD and the remaining is normal storage.
8GB should be enough for the boot of your OS.
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Except these drives use the SSD as cache, or at least mine does. In other words, you don't actually install anything on the 8GB, the drive decides what should be there by demand. In my experience, it does speed up most disk operations,but compared to a dedicated solid state drive it is still much slower. Personally, I can live with the slower speed with 2TB solid state drives (non-hybrid) ranging from $2000-7000 right now, at least for any with a reputable brand name. I've seen 1TB drives for about $500 as
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I don't know where you live, but any civilized country has something like the Crucial MX100 128GB available for some 80ish bucks or less.
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http://www.auspcmarket.com.au/... [auspcmarket.com.au]
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http://www.pccasegear.com/inde... [pccasegear.com]
I used to buy from AusPC Market a long time ago. These days I normally use PC Case Gear.
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I think you missed the important part of what the previous poster said. "Here" which presumably means he is not in the USA. If he did try and order a SSD from Amazon chances are that between shipping charges, import taxes and any VAT the price could easily double or more. Otherwise I doubt he would have made the statement.
Not everyone is lucky enough to have cheap hardware readily available.
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GP meant "laudable" in the sense of "undertaken under the influence of laudanum."
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Fans are so retro. My laptop uses ionized air currents for cooling.
It occasionally overheats and the induced currents have wreaked havoc with my data, but there are no moving parts!
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Re:Impressive (Score:5, Insightful)
Because SSDs are literally the best thing you can do for your computer's performance in desktop applications. Most of the time you're nowhere close to CPU limits and these days standard RAM levels are finally high enough that only the cheapest shitboxes hit swap in normal browsing/chatting/office type tasks. Everything is waiting on the slow old hard drive. Make that an order of magnitude faster and it shouldn't be a surprise that you can rejuvenate even an old computer.
My work laptop is a Dell Vostro from 2010 with a sub-2GHz Core 2 Duo processor. It runs circles around most of my customers' computers in day-to-day stuff even when they have Core i-series processors solely because it has enough RAM (8GB) and more importantly a SSD. It's not even a great SSD, just a cheap Kingston, but it makes a huge difference.
The correct answer for any new computer is a reasonable sized SSD for the OS and applications combined with a regular hard disk for larger stuff like media collections where random access time isn't as important. Only gamers really need to compromise, with so many games these days exceeding 10GB it's still too expensive for a lot of us to have our entire game collections on SSD, but in that case it's still not hard to just install whatever you play most to the SSD and put older/less commonly played titles on the HD.
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Since slashdot stupidly still doesn't allow edits, here's the mandatory car analogy:
SSDs are like snow tires in Colorado. Sure you can get along without them but you're losing a lot by doing so.
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That might be a semi-valid comparison if tubes were much cheaper to use for the same number of circuits. $130 for 1.5 TB vs. $800 for 1 TB drive, and very little of my daily use of the computer being storage I/O bound, SSDs are probably the second last hardware (behind graphics card) I should be upgrading for performance. Considering money's tight for me, Apple going all-SSD on the laptops is the last nail in the coffin in me replacing my MacBook for at least another couple of years.
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1 TB SSD costs about $450, not $800. SanDisk's newest 960 GB SSD is launching at $430. That's a launch price, not sale price. No, you don't need that size. You just need 120 GB, maybe 240-256 GB, for OS and applications (desktop user).
If laptop size is a constraint, get a laptop that has a 2.5" drive and can take an mSATA SSD. Get a 64 GB. Should be $50, maybe less.
Your computer is I/O bound. Specifically, it is much slower at random access and booting. Heck, it may even take seconds to start spinning the d
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Yeah, don't read ahead or anything.
I'll reiterate: pair a smaller SSD with a larger HDD. Find a laptop with an mSATA slot.
If you want to save $50 by using only HDDs, go ahead and do that. Just don't feign ignorance about the performance benefits or feel the need to judge the drives on a byte to byte basis, when you can clearly use a smaller SSD for the OS and applications.
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when tubes were the only option, they were much cheaper to use for the same number of circuits than building a factory to churn out affordable spinning platters.
the first spinning platter hard drives on the market came out to about $9,200 per MB.
you're an idiot.
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Spoken like someone who has never witnessed an SSD at work.
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You might consider a 128gb or 256gb SSD (cheap) paired with an HD.
My main system and all programs take up less than 128gb -- it's my data that takes up TB.
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True.. being an asshole is also an option.
I'd missed that option.
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sdrawkcaB (Score:2)
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Yeah YOU can "BE" my STYLIST .
Meds, baby. Take 'em.
Meds. (Score:2)
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Chuck Norris (Score:2)
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Really hope the spirit lives on (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Really hope the spirit lives on (Score:4, Funny)
toms hardware was never the same after he invented myspace
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I don't get the joke.
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Toms Hardware has horribly flawed journalism and testing methods, splits articles into 10 pages for ads when 3 would do (if anand did the same it would be a 100 page review)
AC is equating Tom's Hardware quality with the quality of an average MySpace page.
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AMD fiasco? Could you elaborate?
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I looked into that once years ago, it seemed totally overrated. I scratched my head after that and promptly forgot about HOCP for the 3rd time.
accurate, thorough reporting? (Score:5, Interesting)
So, yeah, Anandtech, while it is not as good as it used to be, it is probably still (one of) the best (although for PSUs and an alternative take on GPUs you should look at HardOCP), but be wary of the Apple bias.
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For example you can read the "android user on an iPhone 5S" article, and he lists all those important limitations of iOS that would definitely turn any Android user away, but says they are "temporary" and inexplicably concludes that iOS is not a worse experience.
"Temporary" because we already know that these are resolved in iOS 8 which is currently in beta. So, yes, you could rightly claim that iOS lacks these features currently- but that would make for an article with a used-by date of a few weeks or months. Like it or loathe it, it's clear that Apple is happy to steal and put their own spin on the major "distinguishing features" from Android-land.
"A worse experience" and "would definitely turn any Android user away" are rather personal judgements. iOS does some t
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Ok, I guess, as long as it is not an Apple product. If it is, then all that is thrown out of the window and the product is deemed "great" and worth the extra cost. This is most obvious in the smartphone sections. For example you can read the "android user on an iPhone 5S" article, and he lists all those important limitations of iOS that would definitely turn any Android user away, but says they are "temporary" and inexplicably concludes that iOS is not a worse experience. Similarly, supposedly they would test all important smartphone releases, however they review each iphone multiple times (seriously, check it out), then some popular Androids and that's it. They missed things like the N9, which was probably the best phone when it came out (as I had an iPhone, an Android and a N9 at the time), and don't try anything that could appear too price competitive to Apple devices (like Xiaomi). The Mac/Macbook etc reviews are similarly biased, the site seems to be in awe of Apple and everything they make. As an owner of a Mac Pro, a Mac Mini, 3 iPhones (all company provided) and the experience with them and all Apple products in our company, I am not similarly awed (I could write long stories here).
So, yeah, Anandtech, while it is not as good as it used to be, it is probably still (one of) the best (although for PSUs and an alternative take on GPUs you should look at HardOCP), but be wary of the Apple bias.
but it -is- worth the extra cost.
I don't care what you think, a $150 billion liquid cash savings account is proof that they're doing something right.
1. marketing
2. flawless design
3. fantastically controlled experience
I don't use one, probably never will, but I'm not an idiot with 1/4" thick bifocals that can't see what makes it a good phone for most of the population. Every time I touch one I'm happy to use it.
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I've mostly been reading Tweaktown, with AnandTech & HotHardware as fallbacks for the past few years.
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[H]ardOCP was also a very good tech site. While AnandTech was good, I thought the [H] community was a bit better. Though I'll admit to checking out chart data at Tom's...
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AnandTech was and is still shills for Intel and Nvidia through out its history. Just shameful untruthful bentmark after bentmark. I would never trust an astroturfing site like AnandTech, they are liars and cons.
Amen to that!
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Not sure what specific issue you have, but usually when I look at comparable sites like Tom's Hardware, they agree with each other. And it isn't like AMD/ATI was much better - they were completely in Microsoft's pocket for years going by driver support, as in they didn't support OpenGL extensions for years forcing the OpenGL group to make more and more frequent releases. I worked on a cross platform graphics engine until about OpenGL 3 and ATI's support was bleak at best.
As for Intel vs AMD, Intel has had t
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From AnandTech, 2001:
AMD's Athlon XP: Great performance, poor marketing [anandtech.com]
Totally shilling, right? Heres the sad truth: Since the Core 2 Duo hit in ~2006, AMD has been getting its rear handed to it. It had a small advantage in memory benchmarks for several years after that due to its integrated memory controller, but after Intel jumped on board with those, the only reasons youd buy AMD these days are core count or cost (you get a lot more CPU features at the low end with AMD).
Performance-wise, and often even
Great Site But Hated the OCZ SSD Recommendations (Score:4, Interesting)
Read the site since the beginning every time I needed an upgrade for components ever since Tom's Hardware sold out to its sponsors.
Anand and his writers were great and they changed the way that computer reviews were done online versus in magazine print in PC Magazine or Boot / Maximum PC.
His recommendation of OCZ products at every revision of the Vertex line of products deserves a black eye on his legacy though since the reports of failures of every Vertex line 1 through 4 were coming out consistently just a few months after release on sites like Newegg, HardOCZ, ExtremeSystems, Amazon, Overclokers, etc. Anand keep awarding Editors Choices to OCZ regardless of the volumes of failures.
He admonished Intel for their firmware bugs correctly but then white washed OCZ failures but back tracked and started mentioning their failures after it became common knowledge in the hardware circles.
Still he leaves a legacy for legitimate and notable online journalism that changed online reviews and reporting by legitimizing it and receiving sponsorship from manufacturers.
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Correction, HardOCP instead of HardOCZ, caught my own error since I was posting about OCZ Vertex product failures.
Also, I am guessing that Anand's "retirement" is more like "cashing-in" on the site. Good time to make money and run!
Commodity hardware reviews are dying out since they are getting less relevant to people. My machine is 5-years old and still going strong after 2-SDD upgrades and 3-video card upgrades. No need to replace the whole thing and upgrade anymore since my computer is running idle the
Re:Great Site But Hated the OCZ SSD Recommendation (Score:4, Informative)
Your memory must be shabby.
He recommended OCZ SSD's when they were SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than the competition. They were the first non premium priced SSD with intel like performance and no huge latency spikes when writing small files.
Yeah look a lot of them failed, I got burnt by many of them - but at the time the failure rate issue wasn't widespread. They were the Celeron 300a of SSD's and so he rightfully pushed them.
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one thing that impresses me is how much aliasing there seems to be between slashdot's and anandtech's viewership
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I have an OCZ Vertex LE, that was purchased and installed in my laptop shortly after they were recommended on Anandtech. Aside from super-shitty v1.0 firmware that would sometimes fail to write what you asked, I've *never* had any issue with it in the twenty-seven-thousand+ hours it's been running. In fact, it's the same drive that's the system drive in the machine that I'm typing this comment from.
(This drive was the drive that taught me to *always* upgrade the firmware in an SSD. There was a firmware upgr
Wow (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess running tech sites ages you because he looks 50.
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Yeah, it should age you 17 years. He doesn't look like any 32 year-olds I know.
Remember his personal video reviews? (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the 90's when places like SharkyExtreme.com, jc-news.com, HardOCP.com and Tomshardware.com were "it", Anand Lai made a name for himself for his more than truthful video reviews. It was a new take on things with this guy Anand, sometimes sitting on a rock outside, chatting about computers.
I still trust much of the content on his site, but worry it'll go the way of sharkyextreme now. Perhaps legitreviews or some other can fill that void without Anand around.
Thank you for helping millions of us make good choices over the years Anand, I wish you the best!
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It won't be going anywhere. They have a warchest of magnificent journalists. 80% of the articles I've read in the last 2 years were not written by Anand. His underlings have the same passion for excellence that made the site great.
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Pfft... Cirrus Logics were horrible! Everyone who was anyone bought Diamond S3 VLB cards. That is, until the Matrox Mystique came out on PCI!
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXDRk9UL3M4
Repay? DF? (Score:2, Interesting)
If anything I owe him for all the help I've received over the years.
Thanks for all the fish (Score:2)
And now will be working for Apple (Score:3, Informative)
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Seems like a good switch.
While this is somewhat of a party pooper, he's been apple-focused for several years now, including a pretty significant and obvious bias towards their products. I'm glad he is finally leaving the reviewing arena because he lost his nonpartisan mindset and I felt his staying on was damaging the reputation of the site and indirectly the other reviewers at the site.
I really enjoyed reading his reviews over the past decade. From 2010 on, not so much, but fortunately the site is well s
So long (Score:3)
Hired by Apple (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Slightly pro-Intel reviews (Score:4, Insightful)
I personally think Anandtech does overtly good reviews of Intel CPUs. I think they never gave AMD a fair shot. Having said that I think it's one of the best resources for computer hardware reviews in addition to tomshardware, overclock.net.
AMD processors are just simply slower and their fastest can *barely* keep up with an i5 . I know the truth hurts, but there you have it.
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Sure, Intel CPUs are bet
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AMD processors are just simply slower and their fastest can *barely* keep up with an i5
While that might be the case today, the person you're responding to is talking about the past 17.5 years. Intel hasn't always had the fastest processors during that time.
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I personally think Anandtech does overtly good reviews of Intel CPUs. I think they never gave AMD a fair shot. Having said that I think it's one of the best resources for computer hardware reviews in addition to tomshardware, overclock.net.
AMD processors are just simply slower and their fastest can *barely* keep up with an i5 . I know the truth hurts, but there you have it.
Spoken like the brainwashed Intel fanboi you are.
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Parent is clueless, if you google "Anandtech Athlon performance" you'll see several articles from 2001+ (you know, the years where AMD was competitive) that appear to be praising AMD.
If a site were telling you that AMD was a good buy for a general purpose computer-- unless they were talking about the A-series-- theyd be a pretty awful source.
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Said it before, saying it again -
AMD is a budget chip for gaming enthusiasts who only want to drop a $200 motherboard + APU upgrade into their tower to play current gen games. I thought it was fairly well understood by now that AMD is marketed to guys living in the midwest running $60 towers with neon accent piping visible through the plexiglas side windows.
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They've actually been one of the fairest reviewers of AMD that I've seen. Consistently choosing non-Intel-optimized benchmarks. It's one of the reasons I kept going to them. I actually think it was a bit unfair to ditch the 640x480 game tests. In 4 years, I want to know how well my game is going to perform when the CPU can't keep up.
Re: Slightly pro-Intel reviews (Score:5, Informative)
Uh......have you not noticed that AT has a full sponsored AMD section? They literally give AMD news special placement. The fact is, and I say this as someone whose only Intel processor is in his laptop, AMD performance sucks.
They're competitive usually on price to performance, but even the absolute top end 200+ watt 5GHz turbo AMD processor gets matched by mid-range i5s and stomped by i7s.
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Try it in Linux, go to phoronix.com and look at the AMD and Intel benchmarks on Linux. Since most Linux apps are not compiled with the sabotaged Intel compiler like windows, the AMD cpu is much more competitive.
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Best not to say "Try it in Linux" on Slashdot, you're a lot more likely to run in to someone who already has. My laptop and server are exclusively Linux and my desktop dual-boots. Ubuntu LTS all around, 14.04.1 on the desktop/laptop and I haven't gotten around to upgrading the server from 12.04.5 yet. AMD even lost performance per clock compared to themselves with their recent chips.
My home server previously ran a Phenom II X4 945, a 3 GHz quad core released in mid-late '09. That motherboard blew up aft