Choosing the right technology and keeping up with the market requires expert advice based on solid evidence and extensive experience. Indeed, when you read a spec sheet and a company says the laptop offers “all-day” battery life, or the GPU delivers excellent 4K gaming, you can assume that must be true. Alternatively, you can comb through hundreds of user reviews to see what previous buyers say. but, tom’s hardwarebelieve that rigorous testing is the key to understanding modern gear.
As the leading PC hardware and enthusiast technology site founded in the mid-1990s, tom’s hardware has been evaluating the latest and greatest CPUs, graphics cards, motherboards and more for over 25 years. From Raspberry Pi accessories to SSDs, 3D printers, and power supplies, he uses software, sensors, and anecdotal tests to benchmark everything once he’s got his hands on it.of Tom’s Hardware staff Freelancers have more than a century of experience pushing technology to its limits, sometimes even breaking them.
Tom’s Hardware Promise: Telling the truth
Our recommendations are not available for purchase. In an ideal world, every user would have the time, equipment, expertise, and access to the products necessary to conduct their own tests and draw their own conclusions on an entire category of hardware. But in the real world, we have the rare privilege of doing this professionally and standing in for our readers. It’s about providing the bare truth about what we’ve experienced when using and benchmarking the product.
Tom’s Hardware Test Method
Transparency is key. You should be able to reproduce the experience if you run a test. Each review describes how we tested that particular product, including both synthetic benchmarks and anecdotal use. Although we use scientific methods, product categories such as gaming chairs can only be rated based on the experience of our reviewers.
We have tested too many different types of technology to list them all here. The list delves into new territory in consumer and enthusiast hardware, once-popular product categories (remember dedicated sound cards and netbooks?) or stagnates.
But to give you an idea of what we test and how we test it, below we list some major categories and give you a basic idea of how we test their products. Also, if there is a page dedicated to how to test that product, link to the category for more information.
- CPU: We use 8 real-world gaming benchmarks at 2 resolutions, 6 synthetic gaming benchmarks, 50 desktop PC applications, and a demanding suite of thermal, power, and efficiency tests. It also measures the overclocking performance of unlocked chips. We use carefully curated test images combined with the best GPUs, motherboards, RAM, SSDs, cooling and power supplies to ensure a level playing field and avoid bottlenecks from other components .
- Graphics card: Test with a collection of recent games. For each game, run once to “warm up” the GPU, then run at least two passes at each setting/resolution combination. Check for anomalies and retest if necessary to get the most accurate data possible. We also periodically retest cards with the latest updated drivers and may add new games to our test suite as suitable candidates are released.
- Laptop: Laptops are benchmarked in the lab before reviewers use them in the wild, and lab staff test the display with a colorimeter/luminometer to determine vividness and brightness. They undergo custom battery tests that include web surfing over Wi-Fi, and a series of synthetic and real-world tests that measure processing power, storage speed, and, in the case of gaming laptops, gaming frame rate. Our reviewers try to open each laptop to see if it can be upgraded and if it can be easily repaired. All of these tests are combined with the system’s usability, design, and real-world impressions of input devices.
- Desktop PC: Pre-built desktops undergo pretty much the same tests as laptops, except there’s no screen quality, skin temperature, or battery life to test. possibilities, and cable management. These are all long-term features that will increase the usefulness of the system in the future.
- Game monitor: As detailed in the article on How to test your gaming monitor, using a variety of high-end instruments such as spectrophotometers and colorimeters. We also use the DVDO generator to create an accurate test pattern. Test brightness and contrast, grayscale tracking to ensure white is neutral at all brightness levels, gamut accuracy and volume for sRGB and DCI-P3 gamuts, viewing angle, and response time. We also show the results before and after calibration.
- SSDs: We use balanced tests that include real file transfers, gaming workloads, synthetic benchmarks, power and thermal tests. Each SSD is pre-filled to 50% capacity to simulate long-term use (empty drives run faster), and interference from the operating system and other programs running in the background Tested as a secondary device to avoid
- 3D printer: Each printer is set up and used for several prints depending on its capabilities and the models included, but typically includes a Benchy, a common test print. Try the printer with both the software it comes with and, if possible, a common slicer like Cura.
- keyboard and mouse: The best way to test your input device is to use it in a variety of common situations, preferably for a few days. Install relevant software and tweak options. If your device is for gaming, use it to play games. If it’s meant for productivity, use it for work.
Meaning of evaluation
All products reviewed were rated on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the best. Each product may also carry an Editor’s Choice badge that designates it as the best product within its niche. The meaning of the rating is as follows.
Five = near perfect
4.5 = Superior
Four = worth it
3.5 = very good
3 = worth considering
2.5 =well
2 = not worth the money
1.5 = buy for the enemy
1 = fail badly
0.5 = laughably bad
How to select and obtain products for review
From the thousands of popular cables sold on Amazon to the 20 different PC processors manufactured by Intel and AMD, there is an almost endless world of technology products. I want to thoroughly benchmark and evaluate all of them, but I have to choose. Our editors decide which products are of most interest to our audience and ask companies to lend samples for testing purposes. If you don’t want or can’t send it to us, we use our budget to buy from retailers like Amazon and Best Buy.
Companies often pitch us which products to review, but deciding which products to review or cover is based exclusively on what we think our readers need to know. Decision. We do not accept payments of any kind for reviews and do not give manufacturers preferential treatment for being advertisers. We also do not show reviews to manufacturers prior to publication.
