https://www.rtings.com/monitor/tools/table
They rigorously test their hardware and you can filter/sort by literally hundreds of stats.
I just built a PC and I would have killed for a site that had apples-to-apples benchmarks for SSDs/RAM/etc. Motherboard reviews especially are a huge joke. We're badly missing a site like that for PC components.
Userbenchmark has benchmarks for SSDs[1] and RAM[2]. Can't help you with motherboards though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/dzdacg/userbenchm...
It wasn't one event, more like the ratings for CPUs just became laughably, transparently, utterly worthless, to the point where Intel i3 laptop CPUs were scoring higher than top-end AMD Threadripper CPUs. And they refused to acknowledge any issues.
Within a month or two after AMD started shipping CPUs with more than 8 cores, they tweaked the algorithm to ignore >8 cores. And various other ridiculous changes that hurt AMD's rankings.
Worse yet every time I benchmark one of my machines, I score significantly higher than the average user results for the same hardware. Perhaps the average submitter has crapware/antivirus installed or their machines are misconfigured (e.g. XMP disabled) which makes all their data suspect.
fwiw the best motherboard comparison I found was on overclock.net[1]. It didn't list everything I cared about, but it was a great starting point
[1]: https://www.overclock.net/threads/official-intel-z690-mother...
> apparently WD released an NVMe drive that's faster than Intel Optane
"Faster" is a matter of opinion; it depends on what you're optimizing for. Optane obviously has faster random reads, but it's not so great at sequential writes. The UserBenchmark score tries to take all of that into account: https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-905P-Optane-NVMe...
Regarding influencers: they're being leveraged by companies precisely because they are about "the experience", not actual subjective analysis and testing. 99% of the "influencers" or "digital content creators" don't even pretend to try to do analysis or testing, and those that do generally zero in on one specific, usually irrelevant, thing to test.
How about Tom's Hardware and AnandTech? If they don't count, who does? Years ago, I used to read CDRLabs for optical media drives. Their reviews were very scientific and consistent. (Of course, optical media is all but dead now.)
I think the current industry players have tunnel vision and are too focused on their balance sheets. Things like reputation, trust, and goodwill are crucial to their businesses, but no one is getting a bonus for something that doesn't directly translate into revenue, so those things get ignored. That kind of short sighted thinking has left the whole industry vulnerable to up and coming influencers who have more incentive to care about things like reputation and brand loyalty.
I've been watching LTT with a fair bit of interest to see if they can come up with a winning formula. The biggest problem is that in-depth technical analysis isn't exciting. I remember reading something many years ago, maybe from JonnyGuru, where the person was explaining how most visitors read the intro and conclusion of an article and barely anyone reads the actual review.
Basically you need someone with a long term vision who understands the value you get from in-depth technical analysis and doesn't care if the cost of it looks bad on the balance sheet. Just consider it the cost of revenue for creating content and selling merchandise.
The most interesting thing with LTT is that I think they've got the pieces to make it work. They could put the most relevant / interesting parts of a review on YouTube and skew it towards the entertainment side of things. Videos with in-depth technical analysis could be very formulaic to increase predictability and reduce production costs and could be monetized directly on FloatPlane.
That way they build their own credibility for their shallow / entertaining videos without boring the core audience, but they can get some cost recovery and monetization from people that are willing to pay for in-depth technical analysis.
I also think it could make sense as bait to get bought out. If they start cutting into the traditional review industry someone might come along and offer to buy them as a defensive move. I wonder if Linus could resist the temptation of a large buyout offer. I think that would instantly torpedo their brand, but you never know.