Viral marketing for PC hardware?

[Jari]

I'm sure that quite a few of you are familiar with sites such as www.alliwantforxmasisapsp.com and threespeech.com (both registered to Sony's PR company), ilovebees.com for Halo 2, several of Microsoft's viral sites like OurColony and others.

Anyway, while it looks like ATi's R600 will be postponed yet again, rather interesting site seems to have popped up: http://www.level505.com/

Go ahead, read it.

As you can see, only content they have is a R600 review. Of card that they can't post pictures of:

We are not publishing pictures of the card itself right now, as the card contains major ID tags that we can not remove yet for source protection. We will add pictures of the card itself once we can remove these tags.

...obviously they are not familiar with a program called Photoshop, or any of the less expensive alternatives.

The review itself is very positive, with token comments about how nVidia's card seem to have better image quality.


But now we get to important part. Their About-page states this:

Our staff is always committed to serve you with most up-to-date information. Level505(tm) is registered as a trademark of Level505 Tech//News. All rights reserved.

For Comments, Questions, Legal Inquiries or Feedback, please email [email protected].

For Job Inquiries, please email [email protected].

Like I said, only content they have is that one review. In fact, Google reveals no information whatsoever about this "Level505 Tech//News". Yet they claim to have staff - and are hiring more.

Okay, let's check their domain, maybe that would shed some light on who they really are:

whois -h whois.crsnic.net level505.com ...
Redirecting to GO DADDY SOFTWARE, INC.

whois -h whois.godaddy.com level505.com ...

Registrant:

   Domains by Proxy, Inc.

   DomainsByProxy.com

   15111 N. Hayden Rd., Ste 160, PMB 353

   Scottsdale, Arizona 85260

   United States



   Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)

   Domain Name: LEVEL505.COM

      Created on: 28-Dec-06

      Expires on: 28-Dec-07

      Last Updated on:

Interesting. It seems that the domain for our Asian tech news site is registered through a service used to hide the identity of the registrants. I wonder why legitimate news site would want to do that. And, as you might imagine, the site is hosted on GoDaddy's servers. Again I have to wonder; why an Asian site would use American hosting? Also, they seem to have registered the domain on the very same day they posted the review, and haven't posted anything after that. I wonder why?

Hmmm... could it be that ATi has more to do with this site than would seem at first glance?


EDIT: Just in case you are wondering why I call it Asian site... It's not just the name, but also the language. While the English is good, and obviously the writer's vocabulary is very nice, there are some curious features; few rather "interesting" sentence structures and the fact that the writer seems to be stuck on certain words. Just for kicks, count how many paragraphs he opens with "However," - you'd think that at least an experienced writer would seek alternatives after he has used the same opening for half a dozen paragraphs already.

That being said, the writer may very well be native English speaker, but for some reason the text strikes me as written by a non-native writer.

I could be wrong, of course. *shrugs*

[James Pond]

Need that gfx card tbh.

my X800XT wont play UT2007 like I want it to methinks.

[Darkness]

ilovebees was brilliant

[Jari]

James Pond: Awww I'm quite happy with my Ti4400, so methinks that you are just too picky.

Darkness: Heh. Yeah, there's... well, maybe not good viral marketing, but at least viral marketing that doesn't annoy you, or offend your intelligence, and there's bad viral marketing like the PSP site and to some degree threespeech, which has pretend-journalists writing for it. Also, if this is ATi's viral marketing, this is lame too. I do not condone trying to appear as a real news source.

[James Pond]

James Pond: Awww I'm quite happy with my Ti4400, so methinks that you are just too picky.

Heh, Yeah, I guess I am.

I just dont like the fact that my 360 is actually performing better as a games system than my PC...

[RW_66]

The "505Level" site has been debunked on many forums/sites. The 'Daily Inquirer' tech site claimed to have contacted the company, whose owner said they where "AMD contractors" doing Vista testing for various items.

Hmm.. AMD 'contractors'.. AMD owns ATI..

Do you think it COULD be a HOAX?     

[Jari]

Yes, I noticed after posting. However, I don't necessarily buy that story either - it could be merely a cover story used by a PR company. After all, they need some kind of explanation how they'd have a R600. While engineers could be used as marketers, real marketers do usually much better job.

I'm not sure if a hoax is the best possible word, at least personally I think that in viral marketing is something much more clever and insidious than simple 'hoax' would imply. Although not necessarily more honest, of course.

[The Skillster]

I think someone needs to make a stand against such sites, views and opinions can be easily swayed by biased sites like these.
It really does bend the idea of "free information" on the internet so far that companies can use sly tactics to pollute the net with biased views from apparant 3rd parties.

Abit like a few years ago when toms hardware were thought to be biased towards intel, of course if say anandtech had been paid shedloads of money by ATi to write a amazing review about their new card then people would be in an uproar if they found out.

Same thing should apply to thise "3rd party" sites. They should be stamped out!

[Sukaeto]

James Pond: Awww I'm quite happy with my Ti4400, so methinks that you are just too picky.

Damn good card that was . . . hell, still *IS*.

[The Skillster]

I dont remember a Ti4400? Wasn't it Geforce 4, Geforce MX 400/420/440 and Geforce 4 Ultra or something?

[Darkness]

Geforce 4s came in 4 flavors. Ti4200, Ti4400, Ti4600, and later Ti4800.

I had a 4600 myself, and just recently gave up that system. It ran FEAR decently enough.

[Sukaeto]

(Sorry for de-railing your topic, Jari.)

A buddy of mine bought a Ti4800SE (which is just the AGP 8x version of the Ti4400).  He used it for a few years, until he got his Radeon 9800 Pro.  Then he let me borrow it for a few months (I used it in my main box.  I could play Doom 3 on it perfectly fine.  All settings on Medium to high.  This was with an Athlon XP 2200 with 768 Megs of RAM.) until he asked for it back so he could give it to his girlfriend.  As far as I know, she's still using it to this day.  She plays things like HL2 on it with no problem.

[The Skillster]

You have to remember that in newer games the emphesis is on Pixel and Vertex Shaders as well as verious mapping techniques. I know Doom 3 uses alot of lighting effects and an overdose of Bumpmapping.

As with older cards that don't support the required feature set, those features are not present (say pixel shader 1.1/2/2.1/3 for example) and therefore there isn't a speed hit.

Its like running Counter strike Source on my old Geforce 6850 Ultra AGP at 60FPS with all the settings on max.
Now I run it on a Geforce 7600GS PCIxpress at 30 FPS on some maps.

Why? Because there are shader effects and HDR enabled which take massive hits on the GPU and sometimes the CPU.

I could run Counter Strike 1.1 fine on my old Voodoo 5 PCI card (save for the bad drivers) at around 20 FPS. But it should handle Half life 2 and Doom3.

[ChaosControl]

Nicely said, though I do wonder if you can get Doom3 to "run" (as in actually being able to play at a decent level) on a VooDoo 5 (Maybe....big maybe, it could run on low settings on the dual GPU version of the voodoo 5 but wouldnt get high fps).

I still have one (the dual GPU one) so I could test if people really would want to know.

Don't forget, this card had FSAA but lacked T&L. It could go in SLI though!!