At 03:39 PM 4/17/99 , Joan Rapier wrote:
>How do bench mark ratings work?  When I am researching a product's
>reliability and performance, should I take into account certain Bench
>Marks as opposed to others?  I've heard that a certain bench mark (I
>don't recall which one) is "slanted" in favor of Intel products.  Is
>there one bench mark which is more objective and reliable than the
>others? or is that product dependent?

Bench marks typically are about the speed of product.   How fast this
this video card vs. that video card using the same testing methods or
the same software test program.

Reliability is a different matter.   To determine reliablity, the best indictation
is the number of product failures...   reading atricles on the Internet can
help, but often are slanted.   I judge this by asking wholesale venders moving
a great deal of the particular product  and inquiring what sort of return rate
they are experiencing.   Typically, if you have a relationship with a vendor
they will be honest.  Selling you product that has a high failure rate is not
in their best interest and they will be honest.

Sometimes you will just buy a component that came from a bad batch or
production run.  I have at times bought a dozen hard drives and 50%
of the will fail...  that is extremely annoying.   But, it has no bearing on the
overall failure rate of the product...  it just happens.    Typically hard drives,
CPUs, motherboards and CD rom drives have the highest failure rates.
While component cards, such as video cards, modems, sound cards and
the like have a much lower failure rate...

Another excellent standard for reliablity is Brand Name...  generics tend
to fail far more often.   This is often seen in modems most particularly.   A
good brand, such as US Robotics will tend to have less failure than a modem
costing only 30% of a USR modem.  You get what you pay for, after all.

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