Wednesday, March 20th 2019
Kyle Bennett of HardOCP Joins Intel as Director of Enthusiast Engagement
Kyle Bennett, owner of tech publication HardOCP that ruled the web for over two decades, has joined Intel in the position of Director of Enthusiast Engagement. Following his departure, HardOCP will "mothballed," in that it will not generate new content, its IP and existing content will be owned by Bennett. HardForum.com, on the other hand, will be sold to a company Bennett is familiar with, demonetized, and run by volunteers and funded by Patreons. At Intel, Bennett will work under Technology Leadership Marketing, and will lead the company's efforts to "reconnect with the top of the high-performance consumer pyramid which contains hardware enthusiasts, overclockers, gamers, and content creators."
Kyle Benett is among a handful superstar tech journalists Intel soaked up in recent times as Raja Koduri and Chris Hook build Intel's Infinity Gauntlet with them. These include Ryan Shrout from PC Perspective, and Damien Triolet from Hardware.fr (albeit via AMD). Anand Lal Shimpi probably was one of the first and most prominent tech press leaders who left his publication for the industry. AMD's arsenal includes Scott Wasson from The TechReport and the famous overclocker Sammi Maekinen. Lars Weinand from RivaStation works for NVIDIA (also via AMD). Kyle Bennett is famous for a mountain of work in the DIY PC sphere, but in recent times is most recently credited for exposing and leading an awareness campaign against NVIDIA's poorly conceived GeForce Partner Program (GPP). We wish Kyle Bennett all the very best in his new endeavor and pray that he doesn't allow DIY PC and overclocking to become as expensive a hobby as fast cars (which unfortunately is the direction in which it's headed).
Personal note from W1zzard: In some ways you have to thank Kyle for TechPowerUp, too. Shortly after getting my feet wet with enthusiast tech, developing a shader unlock on Radeon 9500 non-Pro (around 2002), I became moderator of the HardOCP graphics card subforum. This made me embrace hardware even more, and I found two other enthusiasts who I teamed up with to start "OCFaq", a "Tech Questions and Answers" kind of project, which quickly turned into a more complex site. The other two guys lost interest at some point, so it was just me pushing out content, while all the decisions still had to be made by our trio, which slowed down things a lot. In the end I decided to roll my own and founded TechPowerUp - the very site you are browsing now.
Source:
HardOCP
Kyle Benett is among a handful superstar tech journalists Intel soaked up in recent times as Raja Koduri and Chris Hook build Intel's Infinity Gauntlet with them. These include Ryan Shrout from PC Perspective, and Damien Triolet from Hardware.fr (albeit via AMD). Anand Lal Shimpi probably was one of the first and most prominent tech press leaders who left his publication for the industry. AMD's arsenal includes Scott Wasson from The TechReport and the famous overclocker Sammi Maekinen. Lars Weinand from RivaStation works for NVIDIA (also via AMD). Kyle Bennett is famous for a mountain of work in the DIY PC sphere, but in recent times is most recently credited for exposing and leading an awareness campaign against NVIDIA's poorly conceived GeForce Partner Program (GPP). We wish Kyle Bennett all the very best in his new endeavor and pray that he doesn't allow DIY PC and overclocking to become as expensive a hobby as fast cars (which unfortunately is the direction in which it's headed).
64 Comments on Kyle Bennett of HardOCP Joins Intel as Director of Enthusiast Engagement
Just buy it! Build your PC like this - sounds about right. Right up there with water chillers under the desk.
Quoting:
"Effective April 1, 2019 I will be taking on the position of Director of Enthusiast Engag ..."
Also there is no discussion button that gets you to their forum ...
Is way too much coincidence :)
I mean, looking at you I see someone who has no problem quoting when HardOCP was anti-AMD, but somehow misses how the whole anti-GPP campaign was also started by HardOCP based on little else than "our sources which we can't divulge told us it's bad".
PS Journalism over there can't improve after Kyle, because Kyle takes HardOCP with him.
FYI if you reread my post, anti-GPP campaign was not ignored.
To control the narrative is to remove/discredit or simply buy voices of reason and truth, and continue rewarding the access media, which is now about 98% of the tech sites out there. This is not good news for people with a brain.
In saying this, it's been very obvious that Kyle has been backed into a corner career wise, having been ostracised by the whole tech industry. He hasn't cared about his own site for a few years now. It's mostly a "news" regurgitation site with a few great and honest reviews from time to time, which is why I still go there, but it's lost its way, and it's passion. It's forum is a complete dumpster fire, chock full full of trolls desperate to have a fight if your opinion differs to theirs, and an awful moderation team, hell bent on fuelling the fire to the trolls advantage, and is hardly worth taking the chance to visit it anymore.
There are now only a very small handful of what I would call REAL tech journalists left. I think I can only count about 3 or 4 now. Sad news indeed.
Better yet why don't they simply leave things in place, he quits as a director but still owner, but has the finances frozen, for example all the money he would get from HardOCP would be put on a kinda read-only bank account which would be a special one created between him, the bank and intel, which means he could only access and take out funds after the employment with Intel ends. Come on, this is too of a legacy and it's not hard to come up with some more ideas.
Not saying he must go back to it, but if the whole thing was properly defined and put into contract that the one who will run HardOCP and forum would make sure it provides barebone support so that it wouldn't go offline, and that he would be able to take it back once emplyoment end, there has to be a legal doc on this and then inform the community.
If he sticks to his integrity, then I don't see this working long term. If he ditches his integrity, then he has a future at Intel.Which 3 or 4 do you think are the real tech sites?
You can’t tell anything about a person by the color of their skin or where they live or are from....other than they are a person.You didn’t at least hear about how Nvidia cut him off because he called the GPP thing out as bad? We had news stories and threads on it here.
We have always had the debate of how neutral are media based product reviewers, some of us feel they are too close to the companies who own the products they reviewing. The fact many ex media reviewers are now been recruited by these companies I feel kind of backs that up.
On hardforum today which I thought after their public exposure of nvidia issues was one of the better sites, I posted some concerns about a psu I brought which was previously reviewed on hardocp, and one of the staff members ripped into me, I was only seeking clarification if a bait and switch had occurred, even two other users picked up on it and commented that the staff member's tone was uncalled for, and even then he didnt back off. Seems he was unhappy that I was posting something that could possibly harm the reputation of the PSU vendor. As it turns out there was no bait and switch but instead an issue with the packaging causing the wrong spec to be printed on the box, but the response of that staff member was a real eye opener and sadly looks like I will be cancelling my patreon to hardocp because of it.