5.6 Good Things

I read somewhere that it takes five compliments to balance out every insult in terms of emotional banking. Harvard Business Review, the best thing coming out of Harvard*, suggests the ratio should be a 5.6.

Anyway I was going to complain about how crappy Ars Technica is as a reaction to their panning of Amazon's The Man In the High Castle. But Ars Technica was never good - or at least it hasn't been good since Conde Nast bought them out. But even before then, it tended to distance itself from its amateur enthusiast audience rather than embracing it. Well that's one complaint about a tech site.

So here are five tech sites that are better. The PC enthusiast market is less active so it's a bit of a case of you've seen one tech site, you've seen them all.

[H]ard|OCP
Mad ShrimpsSmallNetBuilder - Network focused
TechPowerUp - Aggregates reviews from enthusiast sites
Xbit labs - Usually only review major hardware releases but they're thorough

And here's the 0.6

SilentPCReview - The site is quieter (pun intended) now that PCs are more energy efficient and quiet components are more normal. The forums are good for specialist knowledge on quiet components just as Guru3Ds forums are good for graphics card minutiae.

It's actually kind of hard to compile good PC enthusiast sites because of the shift in focus to mobile. The thing with the shift to mobile is that the audience and even the very way we interact with the hardware is very different. The correlation between the trendy mobile space and anti-gamer editorial bias isn't coincidental. Also not coincidence? Ars Technica is anti-gamer.

* Do backhanded passive aggressive type compliments count?