Now Bob, I read your article
on the NOSPIN web site and it got me to thinking. This ABIT BE6
motherboard sounds like a great opportunity. You see, I was
asked to show up for a local PC building user group, which
turned out to be eight teen-age boys sitting around slurping up
sodas, discussing PCs. "Okay!", I thought, "so
most of the people today really interested in PCs are a touch
younger than myself!" What an evening. I began to remember
my boyhood in the sixties, yakking it up, lying to my friends
about my expertise with building fast cars.
Then, the discussion went in a
direction that caught my attention, the Hotpoint UDMA66
controller on ABIT motherboards. Here sits a boy beginning to
complain that IDE CD-R drives will not work on this controller.
My first question was not too difficult, "So, how long have
you had this motherboard in your computer and why would you
connect a CD writer to it?" This is when I discovered I was
not wrong with my first opinion, these young fellows were just
pulling each other's chains.
The boy tells me he does not
have an ABIT motherboard and wouldn't consider buy it, after all
his teen idle, Anand, says that it is a trash board. "Trash
board?", I am thinking, "but, you have never even seen
one or thought to try it out? Oh well…"
That got me to thinking and I
decided to check out the web for reviews on the ABIT BE6. WOW!!!
I looked at my buddy Tom
Pabst's site and found next to nothing. Anandtech.com
could only whine about compability and stability problems, yet I
could not find where they had actually installed one or used it.
I checked out the others and for the most part, nobody seemed to
have actually used this motherboard. What is the deal?
Then, of course I noticed that the NOSPIN site had their
fearless leader installing one, in his personal PC no less, and
to a rave review. But, then again Bob, what the crap do you
know? I remember back when Tom Pabst was leading us all down the
path of enlightenment, years ago, on PCBUILD mailing list with
the immortal sage advice to "overclock… overclock…
overclock!" Then, of course you guys booted him off
of PCBUILD, removing the great mind of our time. Okay, so what
if a few dozen newbies burned up their motherboards or CPUs?
After all it did not cost Tom anything and he was breaking new
ground. Did you ever realize that these newbies must go to
Tom's web site now to
learn how to burn up their CPUs?
But, I digress. I did not
notice that NOSPIN seems not to have any great number of
articles about anyone motherboard manufacturer. I thought why is
this? I noticed that Anandtech
is having a love fest with Soyo,
though why anyone would want a motherboard named for a bean curd
is beyond me, and other sites are doing much the same thing.
Then it hit me! Bob, you really are missing the boat. These guys
are schlepping out motherboard reviews for the old payola,
remember the fifties and rock-and-roll payola to diskjockies?
You need to come in out of the cold, you are missing the boat,
pal. You could have super hot web design also if you generated
some cash for reviews. This non-profit, give it away for free
stuff just ain't paying the rent. I think it would be real easy
to make big bucks, hack up a few reviews and rake in the dough.
Come on, Bob! I read dozens of
these reviews. You do not even need to use the motherboard to
write that stuff, just grab the numbers off of other sites or
even make them up. Make it all too technical for normal people
to understand and there you have it. Cool cash… who would know
the difference, certainly not the eight teen-agers at the user
meeting I mentioned earlier?
This is a
new approach from the Mystic Overclocker. We will report any
further emails from him. You should also know that we do not
allow the Mystic Overclocker to post to "our" mailing
lists as his information is outside of our usual quality.
Please
remember not to try this at home as the Mystic Overclocker is a
Professional and trained in the use of computer components and
the Internet, (well, maybe).
