ShaneBaxtor.com

Test

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.

I consider myself lucky that I write for TweakTown; there’s very few websites that people would’ve been able to write for over 7 years, go through a finical crisis and still be working full time for that said site.

I have been speaking to Cameron about the circulation numbers of the Australian magazines and thought it would be worth asking him about TTs unique visitors. I already know that hits are in the millions but I wasn’t going to get into a flame war with people saying that a magazine’s circulation number is a unique reader verse a hit on a website.

Cameron confirmed what I thought…and in a much bigger way then I expected. In a month Australia is seeing 156,000 sales without Atomic. Now let’s be serious with Atomic it’s probably around 185,000. Let’s just say in a magical world where pigs flies and I ride a unicorn down to the shops Atomic is doing 100,000.

Google Analytics puts TweakTowns UNIQUE, yes UNIQUE not hits but unique visitors at over three times that 256k figure. Now I can understand certain companies who want to target Australia only when it comes to advertising and you feel that as big as TT is the fact they’re global doesn’t benefit you a whole lot. TT does and have done for a long time offered Geo Targeted ads though which isn’t just great for Australia but other countries who want to target a certain country.

Geo Targeting is useful to a certain level off customer, when it comes to manufacturers global advertising is the best option but if you’re a retail store based in Australia, America, Europe or any other country then you can still advertise via Geo Targeting.

While it might seem a bit counterproductive promoting advertising on a site other then my own the bottom line is that TweakTown offers a global audience to people. A review on TweakTown is seen by millions of peoples in almost every country. My goal here is to offer news on a global scale and reviews that can be seen on a global scale but is targeted for the smaller but equally important Australian Audience.

Honestly though if you’re a manufacturer advertising in Australian magazines, add what it would cost to advertise in every one. Then go to TweakTown.com and contact Cameron Wilmot; I can almost guarantee you that it will be cheaper to advertise on TweakTown while seeing 3x the audience and opening your product to the world.

Again though; three times the combined figures of Australian Magazines. I’m asking for a pay rise!

The other day I heard that the Eye6 card was going to be delayed from ATI; if you’re not sure what the model is it’s the one that carries with it 6 DisplayPort connectors but more importantly 2GB of GDDR5. The card is essentially a 2GB HD 5870.

Word is though that there seems to be issues with the drivers for 6 monitor setups at the moment. This is actually really surprising considering the card has essentially been floating around now for months, it just never got launched.

As far as I’m concerned ATI are on a deadline for this model, it needs to get released before the GTX 400 series card from NVIDIA. If it doesn’t the card could easily just got thrown into the middle of a huge amount of GTX 400 reviews giving it only a small piece of attention.

Hopefully the delay isn’t far away and we’re sure that the ATI driver team are working their butts off to find the issue and fix them.

I’m going to be really blunt here when I say that most people, and by most I mean probably 95%+ don’t give a crap that the Eyefinity6 card supports six monitors. Most people want the Eyefinity6 card for one reason and one reason only.

Because it carries 2GB of GDDR5.

Do we need to double the RAM on the HD 5870? I don’t know to be honest, come launch day though I’ll have an opinion and you’ll be able to read it in a review on the model. If we need it or not though doesn’t really matter. People buy 1GB HD 5450s; why on earth wouldn’t people buy 2GB HD 5870s.

I only really bring this up for one reason; I emailed ATI the other day just chasing up some info on the model, trying to confirm the NDA date and what not. Anyway this is a bit of the email I got back:

“By the way, do you have the ability to test one of these i.e. 6 DisplayPort monitors or adapters?”

Part of my reply in regards to that statement was:

“No offence but most people don’t give a crap about the 6-DP connectors they just want the 2GB of memory ”

I have DisplayPort monitors so that’s not an issue but the thing is most people don’t really care about the connectors, they care about the memory. I actually want one of these cards for myself and will probably move my HD 5970 over to one simply because I want to have my U2410s all running of DP instead of two DVI and one DP. It’ll depend on performance though and its ability to game at 5760 x 1200.

I’m not saying that no one cares about the 6 DP ports; I’m just saying that majority of people don’t. Saying that though the models going to be popular for the boost in GDDR5. Few people are going to test these cards with six monitors; this shouldn’t be a reason to not push it out there though because honestly at the end of it all let’s not kid ourselves; we want 2GB of GDDR5 more then we want 6 DP connectors.

So CNY is coming to an end and everyone is getting back to work. I know I know it sucks to have to go back to work after a nice week of re-lax-a-tion! Now we’re not sure if our peeps over in Asia have decided to get back to work early to try and get through some of the bulk email they’ve received over the holiday but it’s clear that word is being spread about the NVIDIA announcement.

It looks like come Monday we’re going to hear a launch date from the company? The question though what is that date? We’ll I’m not sure…..just kidding it looks to be the 26th of March. As always though we can’t 100% confirm this but it does kind of line up with everything we’ve heard regarding the end of March release date.

The 26th is the last Friday of March which makes even more sense with a launch time being 12:01am on that day, or early afternoon for the Australians.

We’ll probably know 100% Friday but there’s no doubt that a release date would be a Major Announcement, especially for a model that has been delayed over and over again.

I’ll also keep you in the loop when I hear anything about samples shipping. Oh it’s so exciting

This is a bit of a weird situation and because of Chinese New Year it’s really hard to find out what is actually going on. The other day I wrote about the NDA papers coming through and the week of date being set for the HD 5830. That’s all good and well; we’ve been told our ATI sample of the HD 5830 was shipping Friday or Monday so I’ll have one with plenty of time to spare.

I always have at least another model at launch from one of ATIs partners, it seems that AIBs have been told not to ship retail samples out though. I was also told that they were told not to ship to their distributors yet.

Tracking down a second sample of the model just 2 days before CNY holidays was hard, from most companies I was told “We can’t ship due to our factory already shutting down.” Now this I can understand, and with the NDA date looking to be around the 26th companies will be able to come back from CNY and get a sample out in time.

I’m a bit closer with some manufactures then others though, I had a few actually tell me that ATI had told them they can’t ship out to reviewers and one even told me they weren’t allowed to ship to their distributor.

I’m either thinking that ATI don’t want the cards to arrive over CNY and have companies just start selling them since they will have no contact with the Asian companies that shipped them, or there’s not enough product to get around to everyone at the moment which would also come as no surprise with the way HD 5800 series supply has been like since launch.

While you’ll no doubt see a review of the HD 5830 in the final week of February who knows when retail supply will come. It’s possible that reviews of the product are being pushed forward before mass stock is ready just to make sure people see the model before NVIDIA release its 400 series which still doesn’t have a date. NVIDIA aren’t stupid though, they could come back after the CNY holidays and say we’re shipping samples today NDA is March 1st; while doubtful it wouldn’t come as a surprise to some.