Anandtech has really stellar reviews, and this review is just one example. I'm sure the number of charts and plots loses the people with shorter attention spans, but the alternative really is a far more vague review. I remember The Verge's video review of the Moto X filled with the phrase "the ___ is awesome", making it borderline useless. Moreover, I actually feel like I am gaining a much deeper understanding of the hardware internals when reading Anandtech reviews. While other reviews would simply say "the processor makes for a very snappy experience", Anandtech explains the new 28nm architecture and thus exactly how much potential it has to be more efficient, the overhead required to deal with 32 vs 64 bit apps, etc. Unless someone can show me otherwise, my tech news reading experience over the last few years leads me to believe that Anantech is in its own class when it comes to consumer technology reviews.
By engineers, for engineers, I might add. No offense, but most writers on tech sites tend to be writers who are interested in technology, whereas AnandTech is full of engineers who are interested in dissecting and explaining technology. Not to pick on anyone, but if you gave the writers at The Verge, for instance, a month to review the iPhone 5S they would not cover the depth that the first page of this review covers.
> The use of actual lab-bench display testing alone puts them in a category of their own.
That and the architectural dissections they do every time a new CPU or GPU is even announced, only through anandtech do I look forward to new Intel or NVidia stuff, even though I'm not a hardware geek at all the reviews are engrossing, interesting and interested and strike a very nice balance of depth and clarity.
They're pretty great at most things. Real World Tech goes into more depth on the architecture side, though they don't really benchmark and they're much less prolific. I like The Tech Report's way of measuring GPU performance more, too. But in general I'll go to Anandtech first.
