Keith, Re: The people you´re talking about are trying to downplay benchmark results in advance of having seen the review, without having the slightest idea what has actually been done. It´s so obvious what that is about, it´s not even funny.
I've noticed that some recent posts give that impression, but I'm more concerned about the temptation for Ace's Hardware to treat an Opteron server like an Athlon 64-FX desktop. You are a regular there, so it might come across to you as offensive to question the motives of the board administrator over there. I don't mean to give that impression.
Furthermore, I am well aware that OEMs fine tune their systems for benchmarks as well, but the difference is that they intend to support their configurations as tested. They put in the hours of validation required to test under the conditions. Johan of Ace's Hardware is more likely to use a pre-release whitebox server for testing, and most of the time, end users operate these servers with the default supported settings. The settings should be already optimized if the whitebox maker wants to be successful, so it comes to a surprise that new BIOS updates and "tweaking" can take the performance up another 20-30%. But, as long as Johan documents his procedures well enough, I won't have a problem, in the end.
Re: That´s what it looks like to you? To me, it looks like for each AMD supporting post, there´s a reply from the INTEL supporting posters including yourself, chipguy, Alberto, waitress in gaza etc.
You are mistaken. I haven't posted on Ace's Hardware forum in months, if that. I lurk there occasionally, and also on the RWT forum. Agreed that there are some funny posts from fanatics on both sides, but I would also say that Ace's is significantly more biased towards AMD than Intel. Just my impression, FWIW.
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