Essential Linkage: Seems that there was some truth to the issue after all.
The Inquirer feed we posted last week detailed the lengths that NVIDIA had gone to to prevent reviewers from speaking of their GTS250 negatively - after all, it's just a rebadged 9800GTX+ - by not even giving certain sites review samples at all.
Some people thought this wasn't very believable, which is fair enough, until we noticed that the very popular Anandtech posted a story up about the GTS250 and had this note at the end:
Early last week Charlie over at The Inquirer posted a story saying that a number of reviewers were cut out of the GeForce GTS 250 launch. We felt a bit hurt, by the time the story launched we weren't even asked to be briefed about the GTS 250. Cards had already gone out to other reviewers but we weren't on any lists. Oh, pout. Magically, a couple of days after Charlie's article we got invited to a NVIDIA briefing and we had a GTS 250 to test. Perhaps NVIDIA was simply uncharacteristically late in briefing us about a new GPU launch. Perhaps NVIDIA was afraid we'd point out that it was nothing more than a 9800 GTX+ that ran a little cooler. Or perhaps we haven't been positive enough about CUDA and PhysX and NVIDIA was trying to punish us.
Early last week Charlie over at The Inquirer posted a story saying that a number of reviewers were cut out of the GeForce GTS 250 launch. We felt a bit hurt, by the time the story launched we weren't even asked to be briefed about the GTS 250. Cards had already gone out to other reviewers but we weren't on any lists. Oh, pout.
Magically, a couple of days after Charlie's article we got invited to a NVIDIA briefing and we had a GTS 250 to test. Perhaps NVIDIA was simply uncharacteristically late in briefing us about a new GPU launch. Perhaps NVIDIA was afraid we'd point out that it was nothing more than a 9800 GTX+ that ran a little cooler. Or perhaps we haven't been positive enough about CUDA and PhysX and NVIDIA was trying to punish us.
It seems that Anandtech were deemed to have the nasty habit of calling tech like it is, and were on NVIDIA's list until the blacklisting was uncovered - then NVIDIA 'suddenly' remembered to get a sample to them after others had their chance to look at it.
Read the issue as you will, but we're not very impressed with how this was handled at NVIDIA - if you're going to rebrand a cow, call it a horse, be ready for people who know what it is to call it a cow.
Head over to Anandtech to read the note (at the end of the page), and the rest of the article is worth a read too.
Issue: 109 | February, 2010