Oppertweaker Tom heeft een artikeltje in elkaar geblurbt over de geschiedenis van z'n website. Zelf volg ik Tom's Hardware Guide sinds mei 1997 en heb ik de ontwikkeling van THG redelijk mee mogen maken. Destijds behoorde het samen met o.a. SysOpt.com tot de eerste hardware sites. Hier een stukje over de opkomst van het fenomeen overclocking:
The next milestone in the history of Tom's Hardware Guide was my first motherboard review in October 1996. It was the first hands-on motherboard-review published on the Internet altogether, and the tested board was the Asus P55T2P4 that I had bought and then reviewed. This motherboard was the first Pentium-motherboard that would let you alter the bus-speed from the Intel-default 66 MHz up to 83MHz. The review was a huge success and was followed in November 1996 by the '75/83 MHz Bus Speed Project' that for the first time showed the advantage of the faster bus and thus L2-cache speed over pure processor core clock. This article received a lot of attention worldwide and many print-publications made own articles out of it. The result was also that many motherboard-makers suddenly included several bus clock settings and Abit introduced their first SoftMenu, which was heavily promoted by me, due to the easiness it offered to overclockers. Abit was actually the first company that jumped on the Internet-bandwagon. They saw the huge marketing potential of websites and half a year later they did whatever they could to supply any of the suddenly new upcoming hardware websites with their products, regardless how small the site was. Today motherboard companies couldn't really do without websites anymore, because it's the cheapest and easiest marketing tool there is and websites still consider it as a favor to receive review-units and tend to give good reviews in return.
