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Edit: With a bit of research and time I’ve manage to get the advertised circulation numbers from all the below magazines from Media kits after someone wasn’t too happy with the original numbers we posted. Unfortunately the numbers are worse than the ones below; oh well you can read it here. No other information in the below post has been adjusted.

Today I saw the latest audited circulation numbers for Australia’s top tech magazines. For the most part there’s no real surprises, PC User for a long time has sat in no.1 spot followed by APC, after that we see a couple of other magazines battle it out.

What made me laugh though was Atomic, oh and how it made me laugh. Clearly not wanting to be audited they did the honest thing and just gave there Circulation numbers out.

PC User Australia 55,000 circulation
APC 36,000
PC Authority 30,000
PC Power play 25,000
ARN 10,000
Atomic (unaudited) 100,000

If Atomic was Pinocchio I wouldn’t want to be looking at their nose right now. It’s been common knowledge for a long time that PC User and APC have held top two spots; the fact that Atomic have come in and said there Circulation is 2x better then the no.1 magazine and 3x better then the no.2 one is just unbelievable. The least they could have done is made it look half believable by saying they had like 38,000.

Magazine advertising is the only thing keeping these magazines alive, here you’ve got audited circulation numbers. If you want to advertise make sure you go off these numbers and not unaudited ones that a sales guy is pitching at you.

Long gone are the days where you should be paying $1,000s for a full page colour ad, most of these guys are desperate for your ad so squeeze them for everything there worth and don’t lock yourself into hugely long contracts.

I understands it’s going to take time for the Australian wholesale and retail channel to acknowledge that the magazine is no longer the way to deliver tech information, for now though I can at least give you an idea of what’s going on.

I try to be careful when I organise my video card samples, it’s hopeless getting in a bunch of cards that carry with it the same clocks and all that changes is the cooler. For the most part why should I waste my time benching a card that is going to give the same results, waste your time with results that are going to be similar and TweakTowns money with a review that’s not going to bring traffic.

Now there are some exceptions to this rule, if that model is part of a higher profile series like IceQ and iCooler from HIS or Vapor-X from Sapphire; due to the nature of these cards they get happily tested across all games even though they may carry with it the same or similar results in FPS related tests. People will Google these particular variations of models though and they shouldn’t have to look at a standalone review on a reference card just to know the performance.

On the other hand if Sapphire and HIS send two cards in at launch, slightly different coolers but both don’t slot into one of the aforementioned categories the excitement level isn’t high for card number two. So we do two reviews with these cards, the first is a standard single card review with card one. Who is card one? Well it’s generally the person who arrives first, in the case they both arrive at the same time it’s the person that told me they were sending it first.

For card number two though since it’s reference clocks and follows the reference PCB design to mix it up a bit I’ll make that second article a CrossFire or SLI one. This does a few things, one it makes the review different from the first, second we still get cooling numbers and noise levels off the card and finally it’s something a bit more interesting for you to read.

Recently though I had a company complain to me that the review looked like it was a CrossFire one and not on their card, to be honest I must’ve missed the part where I wrote about their package, card, cooler, included their names in all the graphs, wrote about the temperature and heat difference and wrapped it all up in a conclusion which covered both the technology and the card.

This company will now have a few options, the first is, unless they can be the first company to send a card before NDA they won’t get a standalone review, secondly they can just not send a card that has reference clocks if they’re not interested in being tested in a different fashion, instead they can just wait till OC models come out. Thirdly they can step back a second and realize I know what I’m doing after seven years when making sure that I give each company as much exposure as possible.

If the company doesn’t want to be included in a CF article many other companies will, after I have two reference cards I ultimately stop trying to organise any more until OC ones are available. Sure they can send an OC model which will get a standalone review but that company now misses out on a review on TweakTown, instead of getting two they now only have one. Since I make sure I don’t organise crap that also means the company will more then likely miss out on an award, that’s fine for me someone else can pick it up instead.

I’ve been doing TweakTown for over 7 years and this writing gig for even longer. These companies need to know that how I represent their product in a review is the best way for them. CrossFire and SLI articles are a way to mix it up a bit, it means I learn more about the performance and you do as well. It means that if someone on a forum goes, I’m thinking about having CF or SLI *insert mid range model* that forum goers can link to the article and say this is what you can expect.

After reading this I hope the company realizes that I do what I feel is the best for them. If they don’t though there’s someone else who is always happy to take the spot and get the exposure. As for other readers of my blog, this just gives you a bit of an idea of what we deal with behind the scenes, it’s one thing whinging because they don’t like the score, but to get an award, a high score and then complain that they don’t like how it’s tested; come on!

Let me paint a picture, you’ve read my HD 5970 overclocking guide here at TweakTown and you can’t help but feel excited about the potential power that you’re able to achieve from it. So you  start going around and hunting one down, wondering which is the best to buy. So you go over to Newegg and find this. The XFX HD 5970 Black Edition, not only does it sound fancy but the price tag of $709.99 and the specification saying Core Clock 725 MHz (up to +30% with OverVolt Tool) and Memory Clock 4GHz (up to +20% with OverVolt Tool) make the whole product sound very exciting.

So everything looking good, the card arrives (probably after a month due to stock issues) you throw it in your system and figure since you’ve just thrown together a nice X58 testbed with 6GB of memory it’s time to install Windows 7 64-Bit and get into some serious gaming action over the holidays. So everything installed, drivers done, thrown on some games, ran a 3DMark to make sure everything’s where it should be and you say “Ok, I don’t need any more power, so let’s fire up the Special XFX Overvolt tool and overclock this sucka.” Because while you don’t need more power you want it.

Opening up the XFX Overvolt program you find yourself denied! Hmm this is weird you think, so you get in contact with XFX and the conversation goes a little like this. (This conversation involves Australian Dollars)

 [ 11/27/2009 7:11:49 AM] Registered my card, downloaded the overvolt tool, installed, .exe will only run under administrator, but it says “Sorry this tool does not support your video card” WTF $1200 video card and your software doesnt work?

[JEDY 11/27/2009 11:42:03 AM] Hi, thanks for your message,it is strange. could you tell us what bios version your card? thanks Jedy

[ 11/27/2009 11:46:25 AM] How can I tell that, would GPU-Z show that info? I have 2 more cards here from the same batch but they are for my customers, I hope they don`t have the same grief that I have had.

[JEDY 11/27/2009 11:52:53 AM] Hi,Thanks for the update.you can find the bios information from CCC. thanks Jedy

[ 11/30/2009 8:50:33 AM] Sorry for not replying over the weekend, we had other machines on the test bench, Bios Version 012.013.000.002 Bios Part Number 113-HD58-970-102 Bios Date 2009/11/11

[ 12/2/2009 7:29:12 AM] Its been a few days since I replied, any update on this?

[JEDY 12/3/2009 9:17:09 AM] Hi,Thanks for the update. this software can`t run under 64bit OS. thanks Jedy

[ 12/3/2009 10:11:32 AM] Why didnt you tell me this back in November, as if any power user would use 32bit OS these days. is the program from ATI written in 16bit, thats very old-school. Au$1200 Epic fail…

Epic Fail…..I don’t think I could put it better myself.

So if you’re hunting down a HD 5970 and you want to do some real overclocking with the assistance of the Overvolt tool, the HD 5970 from XFX might be worth avoiding for the moment. Not only is it overly expensive at  $709.99 but technically you could go as far to say it’s falsely advertised. Considering XFX consider themselves a bit of a performance company it’s disappointing, or as our friend so delicately put it, an Epic Fail.

It’s something worth noting as the last thing you want to do is get home and find that the software you need to really get full advantage of the model isn’t going to work on your computer. Apart from the ATI branded HD 5970 I’ve tested a Sapphire one and Gigabyte one, both worked with the readily available ATI branded Overvolt program.