Steve and Tim can only work with what they have and what can be achieved within publication schedules. Hardware vendors are unlikely to provide a sample that’s not going to receive a full review within a reasonable timeframe, and while going out and buying a motherboard or two as an addition for a comparison article is a viable option, shelling out $1500 or more for a laptop is another matter entirely.
Benchmarking also takes a huge amount of time - tests are run multiple times to produce a more useful data sample, and each of these runs vary a lot in time too. As an example, it took almost 20 hours of testing just to collate all of the data required for this article:
Take the computer know-how, the love of games, and the interest in components, and mix them all together. It's a perfect recipe for diving into benchmarking. In...
www.techspot.com
Then there’s the images to produce, text and videos to write/script, and edit. As much as we’d all like every review and article to cover every possible combination of available hardware, there’s always some constraints that prevent this.