Hi Cleeve,
Ahnilated may be charging you with being paid off, but I am not. Yes, my point is that they have been around less than a year, they have no proven track record, no one to back up a history of this company to confirm that yes, they live up to what they state as their goals. even you state that in your article. Yet here you are, willing to passively accept any kit from any start-up and say whether its a diamond in the rough, a polished piece of rock, or a cow pattie. As far as I'm concerned, they lucked out on the fact you liked what was presented overall. If you had decided in your opinion that potential customers, who base their purchasing decisions on sites like Toms, are better off with another company than these guys, they'd suffer in sales.
You exposed something rather interesting though. You just came across as though you don't actively seek out companies and request kit from them, rather you wait for them to come to you. Why is this?
I'm sure there are small-builder companies that may be preying on unsuspecting people that won't submit kit to you, yet we'll never know. There may be kick ass builders out there that may or may not be a deal, but we'll never know, because you wait for these companies to come to you. Whether you want to admit it or not, The kit you wait to be sent to you and other reviewers Have become advertising instruments, whether its for better or for worse. Tomshardware.com revenues come from somewhere, and its not from your readers, the government welfare office, but from companies who pay to put their pretty little flash and linkable ads on your pages.
How IS Solaris PC different than any other 'white-box' OEM builder?? They can acquire and install parts that aren't normally available? I call that Customization - which OEMs I have dealt with (at least in Canada) were/are willing to do. Do they have a lower cost than other white-box companies of an identical or near identical kit builds, even if its only 3%? What about level of warranty service? Did you go through typical channels your readers would have to, or did you have a direct line to a rep? did you personally run the tests, or did you just gather the reults from your techies?
You called a problem with the heatsinks an issue that, from what the article seems to suggest, is S-Pcs responsibility - Intel OEM heatsink assembly on a brandname mobo using a manufacturer-low cost solution; plastic clips. I have seen other PCs that have been shipped with similar problems occur, although not in great numbers, but enough to make me ponder and feel concerned about the design. Several years ago, it was the AGP slot not possessing a method in which to prevent video cards from vibrating loose during shipping. I'm sure Solaris isn't alone in this issue. I am glad the company decided to circumvent the issue in future, but lets not forget that they were responsive because they want to look good in hopes of driving their sales up. I question whether or not they would make that direction call if a customer had the same issue. Usually, the upper management of a company won't hear about those issues unless the problems are significant enough.
Perhaps you may want to investigate the heatsink retention issue problem morseo than a build from a brand new company, that quite frankly, anyone who pays attention to the instructions publicly available how-tos can build. THAT would be an article worth reading on this site. Another article would be to investigate deeper into the smaller OEM-builders and see if they can live up to reputations they state in a blind test.
I and ahnilated never said or hinted you get to keep the tested equipment. Your article, although seemed thorough, is pre-mature imho, as you yourself said they haven't gotten off the ground yet.
At any rate, cleeve, adding
in your post? Not professional.
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