The Tech Report

This article is about the website. For the report, see technical report.
The Tech Report
Type of site
 Technology website
Available in English
Created by Scott Wasson and Andy Brown
Slogan(s) "PC Hardware Explored"
Website techreport.com
Alexa rank 18,161 (April 2015)[1]
Commercial Yes
Registration Optional
Launched 1999
Current status Active
IP address 96.126.115.201

The Tech Report is a web site dedicated to covering personal computing technology and culture.[2] The Tech Report specializes in hardware that is most relevant to home users and enthusiasts, and has excelled at analysis with prudent budgets in mind, producing quarterly system build guides[3] at various price points, and occasional price vs. performance scatter plots.[4] Equipment that appeals to "lowest bidder" decision makers, and equipment with obviously poor price to performance ratio are often ignored for reviews and in recommendations. Tech Report also has an active online community and a podcast. The website is also a supporter of Stanford's Folding@home and is currently ranked 23rd in total production points as of June 12th 2016.[5]

History

Tech Report was founded by Scott 'Damage' Wasson, a Harvard Divinity School graduate, and Andy 'Dr. Evil' Brown.[2] Both started by writing at Ars Technica in 1998. The two later decided to launch their own website. The site eventually grew into a business enterprise with multiple full-time staff members, and continues in that form today.

Tech Report was originally located at tech-report.com in 1999. The site was moved to techreport.com in 2003.[6]

On August 20, 2007 a beta for a new site design was posted in the forums for review by the user community. It has since been moved to live.

Launching on January 1, 2011, the new site design, TR 3.0 rolled out. Offering a completely new layout and two user switchable colors, blue and white.

On September 8, 2011 Scott posted an article titled "Inside the second: A new look at game benchmarking".[7] This showed GPU manufactures and gamers that frames per second(FPS) are not the only thing that matters in "smooth" gameplay, but frame latency has a big part. This encouraged the GPU manufactures to focus on keeping frame latency down across game play through heavy edits to their drivers.[8]

On December 2, 2015 Scott Wasson, the founder and Editor-In-Chief stepped down as he accepted a role in AMD's graphics division.[9]

Site Structure

Main Page

A large portion of the main page is dedicated to "News" and "Featured Articles". Among the news entries are daily "Shortbread" posts which offer a summary breakdown of reviews and news offered by other sites. Featured articles are often reviews of newly released PC hardware which has been tested by the site's editors and judged on a number of metrics including performance and value compared to other available hardware. Both the general news posts and the featured articles often feature off-beat humor in the form of wordplay and random pop-culture references, giving evidence to the founders' origins as technology humorists.

Podcast

Adapting to the general trend of more content for digest, The Tech Report launched their own podcast on February 9, 2008 hosted by Jordan Drake. While the schedule has varied it provides a casual but quite in-depth look back at the topics that made news from a panel of the site staff. After a long hiatus, it produced a new episode on February 21, 2016. However, since then the podcast has not been resumed, and it's unknown when or if it will return.[10]

Community and Forum

As with many technology websites, the Tech Report has developed a large user community, in part through a phpBB-styled forum that is unrestricted in read-only form and open to the public for contribution via simple registration. The forum is primarily structured around computer technology and related topics, but debates also range from politics and religion in the "opt-in only" R&P forum to general random chatter in the Back Porch. Contributors to the website also have access to a restricted forum called the Smoky Back Room. Registered users may respond to news topics and other entries posted on the front page in an isolated threaded comments section that automatically attaches to each new entry. Although access to the main page comments is linked into the user database, the discussions are logged separately from the forum area of the site and are not counted toward the user forum statistics.

References

  1. ↑ "The Tech Report Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved April 1, 2015.
  2. 1 2 TechReport's "About Us" page. August 8, 2009.
  3. ↑ TechReport's Summer 2009 System Guide. June 25, 2009.
  4. ↑ The value proposition June 9, 2009
  5. ↑ http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=2630
  6. ↑ , 'Whois.net data for tech-report.com'. September 7, 2008.
  7. ↑ http://techreport.com/review/21516/inside-the-second-a-new-look-at-game-benchmarking
  8. ↑ https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/on-techreports-frame-latency-measurement-and-why-gamers-should-care.53455/#post-1678305
  9. ↑ http://techreport.com/blog/29390/into-a-new-era
  10. ↑ http://techreport.com/archive.x?tags=Podcast
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