Help us improve 3DTested Premium

Not interested in Premium content.
If it costs extra, then don't need it.

Sorry, not bothering with one of those stupid surveys that only lets you see one question at a time and doesn't give you any idea how much more there are left.

But the key thing is this: If I hit a paywall and can't read the rest of an article without subscribing, I'm never going to subscribe because I have no way of knowing what I'm even paying for. How about getting together with a few like-minded news sites and figuring out how to charge users a reasonable fee on a per-article basis?

Excessive advertising and annoying autoplay overlay videos in the comments are also a gigantic disincentive to pay anything for the site.

Another failed survey:
"Which of the following best describes the value of Premium to you?"

If i'm not a subscriber, how can it have value for me?
Fail.

I won't pay for Tom's Premium because many of the people Tom's employs are not capable of producing content worth paying for.

Let me give one concrete example:

Your CPU cooler reviewer doesn't understand what he's actually measuring.

He claims his in-case testing is more representative of real-world use than open-bench testing. This is categorically incorrect. By coupling the cooler to his specific case, fan configuration, and internal ambient temperature, he's produced results that are referenced entirely to his setup and don't generalize to anyone else's.

The job of a cooler review is to characterize the cooler—ideally its thermal resistance given a known heat source at a known power and power density. That's a property of the product. A reader can take that number and apply it to their own system. An open bench with controlled ambient and a fixed heat load isolates the cooler and produces exactly that kind of transferable data.

Thomas's method does the opposite. His in-case ambient temperature is a function of his case airflow, his GPU's heat output, his fan curves, his room temperature—none of which correlate with my build or anyone else's.

Worse, the ranking he produces may not even be ordinally stable across different cases, because coolers with different fin geometries and fan characteristics will respond differently to different airflow environments. His results might seem more realistic, but because of the confounding variables he's introduced, they land somewhere between marginally useful and completely worthless.

And the irony of the whole thing is that he criticizes open-bench testing for being unrealistic, because he (observably, by his own words) has absolutely no concept of any of this:

My results may differ from other reviewers because I emphasize results that are comparable to real-world use. This means I test CPU coolers inside of a closed desktop case, which increases cooling difficulty compared to other testing methods.

Many sites test CPU coolers outside of a case, on an open test bench. Open benches have lowered ambient temperatures, which in turn makes weak coolers appear stronger than they really are.

Some publications have used generic thermal plates to test cooling solutions. I reject both of these methods because they don’t accurately reflect the real-world conditions where a CPU cooler is used.

The point of controlled testing is to isolate the variable you're trying to measure.

If you want to be paid like professionals, hire people who understand experimental design.