Last year, shortly after September 11, I had posted my last editorial in which I wanted to encourage my American readers, but in which I had also criticized hardware websites who capitalized on the terrible thing that happened by posting pictures of the destruction. In response to this, I was called a coward, a Nazi, an under-privileged 'Non-American', and many other rather unpleasant things. I was so disgusted that I refrained from writing any editorials since and I even kept the numbers of own articles to a minimum. I have proven my courage as well as integrity more often than anyone else in this business (e.g. 1997 Intel strong-arm incident, 2000 causing Intel to recall Pentium 3 1.13 GHz) and I really didn't think that I had to put up with the ridiculous insults that had been thrown at me. I decided to remain silent from that time on.

Today, however, I was informed about a fight that's going on between Kyle Bennett and Van Smith, the two people in this 'PC Hardware World' that I despise most. First I considered this battle quite amusing. It's always nice to watch two of your enemies fighting each other. However, the reason for their fight caught my attention. Late last year there was a situation when something very similar happened the other way around. The parallel between the two issues was one thing - both times I had been involved months before. This may sound like Chinese to you, so I will explain it all, trying to make a gripping story out of this. It will give you a very interesting look behind the scenes of PC hardware reviewing and the dealings of marketing-departments.

August 2001 - NVIDIA Catches ATi Cheating

Quite a few of you will still remember ATi's 'pre-launch' of Radeon 8500 on August 14, 2001 . On the evening of the same day, I received an email from NVIDIA that went like this:

I thought "Aha! ATi is cheating. Let's have a look!" I checked it out and indeed, there was something cheesy going on. However, I did not consider the issue serious enough. In fact, I was a bit irritated by the fact that the information about it had come from NVIDIA. If I picked up on this issue, I had to tell the world that it came from NVIDIA and I would do nothing but NVIDIA's marketing job. I also expected ATi to eventually remove the offending stuff from their drivers. Basically, I considered this material dirty laundry and refrained from picking up on it, even though NVIDIA kept pushing me. By October 2001, NVIDIA had created a little program ("quackifier.exe") that made it pretty easy to see ATi's little Quake3-cheat. Here's an excerpt of the note that I received along with it:

I still didn't change my stance. This was dirty laundry and I didn't want to have anything to do with it.