YouTube is almost completely useless for reviews. You can't scroll the video, meaning you have to watch almost all of it to realize they're actually not evaluating the metrics you are interested in. One would think a video would make it harder for a reviewer to just parrot official PR, but alas...
The only time I ever find a YouTube review of interest is when e.g you are actually showing some physical characteristic of the product, which is almost never the case for PC components, but maybe the case in some portable devices (tablet PCs come to mind). Notice that on these types of physical aspect reviews the reviewer himself doesn't appear at all on the video. In most PC components "video reviews" you are simply staring at the face of the reviewer. They could literally do without the video at all (save for a couple of still images where tables are presented) and would still be as informative, if not more. Some could even do without the audio...
Have you actually looked at the GN reviews or are you just assuming this...
I agree that text would be nicer to have but man. Also there's chapters now at least, so if you don't care about the analysis you can just jump to the numbers.
> so if you don't care about the analysis you can just jump to the numbers.
I really disagree. See for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtVowYykviM . Does he measure idle power consumption ? It's impossible to tell from the chapter names. (Spoiler: he doesn't). Also whether he compares the performance of the 7900 sans X with the 7900X at similar power levels (Spoiler: he does, albeit only for 7950X and a minority of the benchmarks.) This is a video which is supposed to be about power efficiency, so it catches my attention; but most of it is about runtime benchmarks with only a couple power/efficiency comparisons early on. And after watching the full video, I cannot think of anything about the visuals that helped made his point clearer. A simple plain page with a couple of tables would have been at least as much helpful, or even more helpful, since it would have been searchable. If you disagree, can you elaborate what did you feel the video/audio provided over a static HTML page ?
No you're right that text would be better, especially when you're looking for specific things. I have a feeling though that we're in the minority with that unfortunately. What's sad, and what I had assumed was still the case, is that GN no longer uploads transcripts to their website.
I had the same gripe learning firebase with pretty great official tutorials, which would have taken half the time if I could just read them.
The automatic transcripts work fairly well which is how I cope with it.
I can think of a few others, including an offshoot of [H] called thefpsreviews.com but I've seen a lot of crappy, low effort "reviews" just in time for the "video cards are finally cheap" manufactured craze last year, which was last straw for me.
They have degraded significantly over the last few years. Up to around 2015 it was about my #1 reference source. It's how I found out about the fact many GPUs used to triple or quadruple their power consumption just because of an extra monitor being connected, and that AMD's HBM-based GPUs were at that point a surprising exception (when otherwise AMDs GPUs are usually the worst at it). These days however I have to take everything they measure with a grain of salt, and at some point I even had a discussion with a member of staff on the merits of having idle power consumption measurements at all. Something has definitely changed on their side.
Now, these guys used to deliver some quality stuff, including the big frame pacing thing that finally convinced the masses that no, fps number is not everything. One of the owners joined AMD and yeah, it's been dead for several years.
