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GN Report: CPU Reviews, GPU Reviews, & Skylake

Posted on August 1, 2015

Our publication schedule is constantly littered with research-intensive articles. The workload is split – Michael Kerns heads-up feature posts like keyboard round-ups, Keegan Gallick assists with sustaining news posts and videos, and Patrick Lathan handles social media and some posts. This is done intentionally, as I'm normally pulling my (abundant) hair out trying to devise new testing methodology for upcoming products. It's fun, though, and we do our best to split resources well enough that the site is sustained during times of intense research.

This week has been one of those quiet periods. We're presently working on AMD's new A10-7870K in full gaming review form, followed-up immediately by Intel's new Skylake platform. These will be our first official, in-depth CPU reviews and we're aiming to mirror a similar scope and level of depth to our GPU reviews.

This post is mostly for our returning fans, supporters, and readers seeking journalistic content. Here's some insight to the operation: Big articles and feature posts can easily require twenty hours of reading architecture textbooks and testing and, if it's a new component type we haven't yet reviewed, we've got to factor-in time for methodological advancement. Test methodology under goes several iterations that, over time, weed-out test inconsistencies and points of error on the part of the tester. This is something we place great emphasis on; I will always delay content if I do not feel confident in the testing procedures. As the site continues to mature – which it has done rapidly, now sitting around one million monthly pageviews – we'll have more test methodologies and test cases in place that reduce test time. News posts and smaller content pieces are critical to the site's ability to sustain its new traffic surges; I feel like we do well with news posts, remaining more objective and “here's the facts” wherever possible. That said, it's certainly the long-form journalism that has gotten GN its name. That stuff takes time.

That's just some behind-the-scenes to the operation. I've begun doing small posts like this for our Patreon backers, but figured I'd bring one over to the main site.

Tonight, Keegan's working on editing together the final cuts for our Skyrim mod overhaul video (article is already live, courtesy of Gael Mouren) and I'm working on CPU testing. The Skyrim mod overhaul content was actually part of an internal test run of our full team – it's something we were experimenting with. Gael was brought-on to write the piece, as an expert on Skyrim, and I decided to throw-in my more hardware-oriented abilities to test the result of heavily modded content. Keegan's been doing the video and, as always, Patrick handled the social media. It was a fun experiment that has gone over pretty well in terms of traffic draw, and I think the quality of content is exceedingly high for a piece of its nature.

You can continue to expect content like this. As we've gained traction with traffic, our revenue has grown (and we've even started that Patreon campaign to pick-up additional funding) modestly and I'm able to afford external assistance. I've been doing this full-time – or more than that, really, more like triple full-time – for many years now, but I've never been able to consistently pull-on outside help. That's been slowly changing the last few months, and that's critical to continued emphasis on researched content. This move allows me to read more textbook deep-dives on architecture without sacrificing the immediacy demanded by the content-driven internet.

Things are going well.

Over the next week, we're aiming to publish our 7870K review, Skylake review, review of a system integrator PC with Skylake, 390X review, and a few other content pieces. It's going to be a big week, and that's why this past week has seen more of a focus on assisting content pieces (like our excellent Skyrim overhaul, our ongoing DOTA 2 coverage, and our keyboard round-up).

I'll keep you all posted. I'm considering doing one of these per week -- let me know if there's an interest in that.

- Steve “Lelldorianx” Burke.