Maybe some of you are interested in a conference I attended about a month ago. The Integrator Forum Europe was held in Monaco and I was invited to hold one of the keynote speeches, right after Microsoft and Intel. Some 200 European OEMs and system integrators and almost 100 vendors attended this 3-day long forum, from Microsoft over most 3D-chip, hard drive and motherboard vendors to AMD and Intel. As the OEMs and system integrators amongst you can imagine, this forum was not supposed to discuss which hardware or software component is the best or nicest or cheapest, what we tried to find was the future direction of PC-systems. We heard a lot about the importance of the Internet (oh, really?), about free PCs and sub-$300-boxes. My keynote speech was very well received and I think it surprised a lot of the 400 people in the auditorium. The presentation will show you that we at Tom's Hardware Guide are not sticking to old paradigms, the PC-industry is changing rapidly and we'll be right there to serve the consumer as well as the OEM's and integrators. You may be surprised to see that nit picking on hardware-components will soon become pretty pointless, the direction of the PC-business is changing significantly right now. For me the most interesting product/technology at the forum was clearly ATi's Set-Top-Wonder II , it is showing the way of the future ...

MetaBytes TNT-SLI Project - Or How Many Lies Can Be Fed To A Reader

Anyone remembering the lovely story about TNT/TNT2-SLI? I can recall it quite well still, when there was this one loud publication claiming that MetaByte is working on a super-technology that would combine the power of two TNT or TNT2-cards. It's the same publication that turned up little later in Intel's roadmap. The story was so beautiful and the most extraordinary claims were made. I can recall reading about a 'life-presentation' of a prototype and more. Well, does anyone wonder why we've never heard about this anymore? Does anyone wonder why nobody else ever wrote about it? Well, I can remember calling NVIDIA right after I saw the article and the response was "We've never heard of it". As a matter of fact nobody had ever heard of it, because this baby was pure fiction . MetaByte's SLI-Project was a lovely idea to make the industry interested into MetaByte and the publication that was used to spread this rumor was so keen on writing about it exclusively, that they would make up about 50% of the story by themselves. So in case that you are still waiting for this great product, please realize that you've been had really badly. MetaByte's SLI-Project never existed, no prototype ever existed and all the companies thrown into this artcicle were never involved with it as well. MetaByte achieved the effect it wanted to achieve, because they were contacted by pretty much every graphics vendor after the publication. MetaByte also proved that the publication they had picked was the perfect one to spread fiction only for getting attention. My source told me "It was great! We only told them about the 'technology'. They came up with all kinds of crazy things by themselves! Many vendors were getting upset because they were mentioned in this article although they had never heard about the SLI-project. The only thing the publication asked for was exclusivity. We didn't have a problem with that, since we didn't think anybody else would believe our fiction as easily as this publication did anyway."

I am still kind of shocked about this issue. I may be an old-fashioned bastard, but is that it what publication is all about - just drawing attention? Even if it involves complete lies? Doesn't a journalist have to check a story before he writes about it? Doesn't he owe this to his reader? Is Internet-publishing indeed completely screwed up? Could it be that readers don't even care? Please let me know if you are one of the people who believed the SLI-story and you feel cheated at. Let me also know if you think that this kind of low-profile-journalism is something you consider as just fine. Maybe all the publications should consider making up stories once in a while. Maybe readers who crave for news several times a day want to be lied at. Maybe this is the way to make a website successful, because once it becomes clear that the story was a lie nobody even remembers it anymore ...

MetaByte And TNT2-SLI

It seems to be necessary that I explain the situation a bit further, since a few people misunderstood it.

Back when this lovely article about TNT-SLI was posted, MetaByte had informed this publication only about a new SLI-technology it's working on. The publication made up the fact that it's a NVIDIA TNT or TNT2-chip, that it's also used by Creative Labs and all the rest that's said in there. I am not at all picking on MetaByte, since they've got the right to tell anyone whatever they like. They also never made up this TNT-SLI product, it was made up by the editor of this website. The whole issue hasn't got anything to do with PGC and to be honest, it's not too hard to understand that. PGC is neither using a NVIDIA-chip, as claimed in the fiction-article and it's no straightforward SLI-technology either.

I was not upset about MetaByte spreading some funny little rumor, I am still upset about an Internet-publication that is simply making up things to beef up a story

Thanks.